Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

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Long ago I worked tech support for a company that supported some mainframe equipment.

Eventually after some incidents they introduced “special instructions” for customers who we had to gather extra troubleshooting data for because of some complex issues they had.

Then a few more customers had special instructions… and a few more.

Eventually these involved things like “Send the account manager an email for each call, this customer is very sensitive.”

After just a year EVERY account had special instructions.

Many people oriented instructions were impossible to follow “Page Jim.” Jim didn’t carry a pager anymore and when he did he would never respond so you couldn’t do step 2.

Some involved gathering loads of memory dumps for issues long solved. Others would have you follow program pointers to memory that didn’t exist so you would start over and over until you gave up and decided failing to do your job was preferable to losing your mind at 4am….

Some instructions were multi page word documents expected to be read every time the customer called. After reading it a dozen times a week it almost became impossible to notice if it had a slight change or not.

One clever account manager trying to make sure tech support “noticed” his special instructions tried using a <blink> tag… entirely ignoring the issue that upon noticing the instructions they would be hard to read. Thankfully the tag failed to work.

As you can imagine eventually there were exasperated executive meetings about how nobody follows the special instructions.

This is the world of protecting against corner cases.

Ouch. That's the worst example of "Befehlstaktik" I've read so far.

Try Auftragstaktik instead:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics

Learned some interesting words today, thanks.

sounds like the difference between utilitarianism and deontology - focused on outcome versus focused on process.

Reminds me of "declarative" versus "imperative".

Human systems are not computer systems. In computer systems, edge cases are usually worthy of investigation and rethinking. In human systems, edge cases are to be dealt with when they appear

Those disagreeing with your comment might want to consider that it's very close in spirit and meaning to what JKM wrote in TFA:

Computers don’t have emotions; I don’t need to worry insulting the vast majority of S3 objects when I defensively check integrity every time. But humans are different; when we design a human system around uncommon cases, we do need to consider the ramifications on the majority.

  > when we design a human system around uncommon cases, we do need to consider the ramifications on the majority

This is how I feel every time some new service asks me which pronouns I prefer. I'm happy that some people get to choose the pronouns they feel represent them (or avoid the pronouns they feel disservice them), but it seems like it is both pushing an agenda and adding additional friction to the process. Just leave the option setCustomerPronoun() available without making it a necessary step.

I've chosen a contentious example, but there are dozens of others. Just for another example, if I was born in 1977 (above age of consent), what does the forum software care my exact date of birth and err when I don't want to provide it?

An issue is that many systems presume pronouns, and for some people, this is decidedly uncomfortable and significant. For others ... not so much.

There's virtually always the option to leave the option blank, or to make up a garbage or meaningless value. The first system on which I recall the option being offered was Google+. My response was "trans-krell", playing of my pseudonym's character.

For age, I usually try to find the earliest possible birth year acceptable to the system. For Google this seems to be about 140 years prior to the present date. Again, I avoid providing this information if possilbe (most of my various little-used Google accounts have either no value provided or a ridiculously early age).

I'm of the view that we don't need to be formulated, sprawling on a pin, within some global surveillance database(s). If I can evade classification and feed garbage to the system, I will, for as long as that is viable, and probably for some time after that point.

The gendering or nongendering agenda concerns me far less than the Total Information Awareness agenda. Services demanding anything from me other than some random username and password (I tend to use password generators to create both values), and possibly a contact email address ... tend not to get used.

As I just commented to a friend a few days ago, I can't remember the last time I did create an account, with the exception of some recent Mastodon and Diaspora* migrations in the past year or two.

For my most recent Android device (the Android aspect of it being among the least attractive characteristics), I bailed out of Google Play Store registration, which requires creating a Google account. (Even if not formally associated with other identities I have, those could all but certainly be trivially linked.) Instead I'm relying on F-Droid, APK-Mirror, and the Aurora Store. I've kept actual app installations to a bare minimum, and most of those through F-Droid. There are I think three apps with actual accounts associated to them, though only one has been so configured.

My use of the Internet dates to the 1980s. I've seen a lot. And am disliking increasing amounts of it. Read Dan Geer if you haven't recently.

  > There's virtually always the option to leave the option blank, or to make up a garbage or meaningless value.

Right, but it's an uncommon option that relates to a controversial subject. That's why I mentioned to leave the option setCustomerPronoun() available without making it a necessary step: show it in the UI options but it doesn't have to be front and center in the sign-up form.

  > The gendering or nongendering agenda concerns me far less than the Total Information Awareness agenda.

Sure, without a doubt. I may have inadvertently picked a flamebait example!

  > Read Dan Geer if you haven't recently.

Thanks, added to the list.

What sort of agenda was selecting Mr./Mrs. from the drop down pushing?

For me - it becomes an agenda when they’re collecting the information for no other reason than to collect the information - or - they’re using the field to show how progressive they are. Unless gendering language is somehow critical to the operation of the software - why collect it at all? I have the same feeling about birthdays - I’m automatically assuming it’s because you have “sell customer data” on the 5-year business plan.

Some of us are still old enough to remember when "Ms." was a contentious or at least novel title, though few are old enough to have seen its original proposal in 1901.

The New York Times formally adopted use of "Ms." as a title, distinct from "Mrs." (a married woman, often referred to by her husband's full name, e.g., "Mrs. John Q. Smith"), or "Miss" (an unmarried woman or girl, addressed by her given and maiden names, "Miss Jane Q. Jones"). Ms. Magazine was a direct and deliberate challenge to that practice, and was launched in 1971 by Gloria Steinem. Interestingly, all three words, "miss, "missus", and "mizz" originate from "mistress", which was at one time the single title applied to any woman, adult or child, married or not.

(For men, the terms "Master" (unmarried child) and "Mister" were both represented as "Mr.".)

And then as now, "Ms." resulted in much gnashing of teeth, changing of forms, and updating of databases.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/magazine/25FOB-onlanguage...

I mean pronouns of type VARCHAR, not ENUM.

It's not really an agenda to leave the option open - people not identifying with male or female (or fluidly between the two) doesn't harm anybody. Surely for it to be an agenda, it has to be putting somebody else out?

Sure, present the option in the UI options. But it doesn't have to be front and center in the sign-up form.

I don't get the issue. Making gender-nonconforming people's options the same level in the UI as male and female is a bad thing? Seems like pretty standard egalitarian design to me.

I don't celebrate Christmas, why not ask me my religion in the sign up form? I certainly don't want to see the Christmas themed website or get the "holiday greetings" newsletter. Is making non-Christian people's options the same level in the UI as Christians a bad thing?

Same with the Last Name field. I happen to know someone who doesn't have one. Why isn't he accommodated?

How about colour blindness? Why isn't there a colour-blind accessibility option in the sign up form? Is making colour-blind people's options the same level in the UI as regularly-sighted people a bad thing?

I think that my point is made.

There was a time when asking for religous affiliation was fairly standard, though also often associated with prejudicial practice.

Forms of address --- Mr., Mrs., Miss., Ms., and often professional titles (Dr., in German Ing. (engineer), esquire (lawyers), Reverand, etc.) is at least fairly common if not entirely standard practice.

I suspect, again, some motivation on the part of a requestor. A magazine's circulation department, for example, might want to know the number of lawyers and doctors among its subscribers as a proxy for advertising value.

Many business information request forms provide detailed rosters of who you are, what you do, and your company title. For similar reasons, I suspect.

(I also feed those bogus information as a matter of course.)

Wait, so because other people aren't accommodated, we also shouldn't accommodate gender non-conforming people?

Having a separate first-last name is often brought up as a UX failure for exactly this reason, and UX designers often design websites so that colourblindness doesn't hamper usability (in my experience working with designers at big companies). The Christmas one isn't as much of an issue because AFAIK very few people are meaningfully put out by seeing Christmas decorations on websites from majority-Christian countries. In other countries these things often /are/ turned off depending on cultural sensitivities.

We should be trying to design our processes to fit the world around us, not rejecting the parts of the world we don't like.

To be fair, the equivalent solution for the name field example would be solving it by insisting everyone specify how many names they have before letting them enter their name - there's a reason that isn't the recommended solution, people don't want to deal with minutia that doesn't matter to them, one field works fine for everyone.

The obvious solution is to just not use pronouns - it's a messy part of the language that is currently in flux, so why wade in?

Obviously, some sites are dedicated to these issues, so they can justifiably ask on sign up, but if you don't _need_ to care about people's personal details, better not to ask at all.

Complexity is a much larger issue in human centric systems than it is in computers.

We can hide the complexity in computer systems even engineer the risks of it out, this is not the case in human centric systems. That complexity will endanger everyone involved.

KISS is a good principle generally, but it's the most important principle in humans systems, sometimes even ahead of completeness.

> JKM wrote in TFA

As a human, can you please tell all of us what these abbreviations are?!

JKM: Jacob Kaplan-Moss, the name of he author, featured in header and footer of...

...TFA: The Featured Article

a.k.a. (also known as) OP (original post(er))

For some reason I'd always been under the impression that the 'F' in 'TFA' was a different word. This makes so many exchanges less hostile in retrospect. Oops.

Featured, Fine, Fu… could be any of those. Deliberate ambiguity is fun for a lot of humans

This, right here, is why I never use acronyms with the sixth letter of the English alphabet anywhere in them. Heck, as you might already have noticed, I don’t use said letter at all, unless it is part of a word.

This is one “human corner case” I have no shame working around. Wouldn’t want to convey hostility where none exists.

The F-word (I'll spare your virgin eyes), or even the letter F, is not capable of conveying hostility on it's own, so there is no sense in omitting it.

The acronym was coined with the non "fine" meaning for that letter. It was much later that internet culture got more polite and people retroactively replaced the meaning on RTFM and RTFA.

I'm almost certain what you're thinking is the original usage. TFA (disparaging, implying the person you are responding hasn't read it) was co-opted as TFA (neutral)

"Fabulous!!!"

Correct.

I prefer "TFA" to "OP" as the latter may be ambiguous as to whether it refers to the article or, more typically in my experience, commentary on it. Even here, "OP" might reference either a thread root or the parent of the post immediately being replied to.

In the second case, if I were to say "OP" here, I'd be referring to your comments parent, by tchalla, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30345056

Would it be so difficult to just write "the article?"

"TFA" is a well-known and long-standing usage within the hacker community. It came to prominance at Slashdot, which I'd read back in the day, and is at least some decades old.

It refers specifically to the submitted article, and carries an overtone, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes subtle, sometimes more blunt, that the person being referred to ought to read the specific submitted work more closely. Perhaps at all. And without crossing HN's guidelines against specific accusations.

That is, the meanings are similar but different. "TFA" is more concise and specific. All of which make it the more fabulous ;-)

It turns out I do use both terms fairly frequently, as my comment history shows. The distinction is largely as I've described above. "The article" usually refers to some additional or other reference rather than the HN submission. "TFA" in the context if "you/I should have read that closely".

TFA: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=true&que...

"the article" https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=true&que...

Re: "Edge cases" - Reminds me of where today's legal systems appear to be directed.

Which is why crypto cannot work for the general public. It pretends otherwise in spite of overwhelming evidence.

I'm curious to understand what exactly you mean by that statement

I presume they mean that out in the real world, there are lots of edge cases where reversing a transaction is a better outcome than chest-thumping about "Code is Law".

That was a solved problem long before computers came about. If a transaction is wrong, don’t change it, add another that compensates for the error.

The real problem with crypto is that usually what is asked for is a ledger, and the crypto and distributed parts are just bloat.

Yeah and the way I described it every "skeptical instructions" was a catch ... that triggered on every call.

Unlike code that triggers (hopefully) only when something weird happens, the cost of the special instructions and the dysfunction that followed was ultra high.

Seriously...what?

This sounds insane and I genuinely don't understand why anyone would work here or put up with this.

I understand the main point, I think, of 'make sure that people read instructions instead of ignoring them', but this is taken to bizarro levels which I don't understand why anyone would tolerate. The 'account managers' designing these 'special instructions' are either sadists or just assholes, and if management is not willing to protect its own staff from this bullshit, I see no reason for anyone to continue to work there. I don't really understand people staying in abusive job situations like this. There are many other job opportunities out there.

> I don't really understand people staying in abusive job situations like this.

I'm working to get out of a job that turned into this once our (lovely) manager bailed and exposed our team to the incompetence of our current leadership.

I'm having to HEAVILY fight my gut instinct by leaving, because I was raised in poverty and grew up as a disabled lesbian back when those things created more issues than they do now. I'm also from a rural area and neither of my parents have college degrees.

I may logically know that I (as someone with credentials and a decent skill set) have every right to leave and it's in my best interest to do so, but it conflicts with literally decades of messaging I've got telling me I'm lucky to be allowed where I am at all and seeing those around me be punished for standing up for themselves.

I was also abused by my parents, and that's another angle: People who are used to abuse don't think it's that bad, and I'd wager there's a fair number of people who have just never had a decent work situation. If you're going to be abused, at least pick an abuser you know and can work around.

Humans are pattern recognition/social machines, and if you only expose humans to dysfunctional patterns, they'll assume the problem is them. If you design a society, it's pretty easy to get yourself a group of people who are open to being exploited.

I can relate to this. Neither of my parents have college degrees and we were poor growing up. For a while they just pushed me to get any job I could. I worked in a call centre (horrible), door to door sales (more horrible), a butcher in supermarket (slightly horrible), working in the NHS (terrible pay, lovely people).

I've had a lot problems myself struggling around guilt about the pay and general lifestyle in tech. But I'm now working in a tech company with lovely people, doing interesting work. For what it's worth from a stranger: I wish you luck in overcoming your inner critic and that you are worthy and deserving to get a job with people you like at a job you enjoy.

> For a while they just pushed me to get any job I could. I worked in a call centre (horrible), door to door sales (more horrible), a butcher in supermarket (slightly horrible), working in the NHS (terrible pay, lovely people).

This is a large part of it, especially as someone whose community is likely to have those sorts of jobs. If everybody around you hates their job and you grow up in a culture where people actively despise their workplaces/management, you assume that's just how jobs are.

EVERYBODY I grew up around hated their jobs, so it's really hard for me to know what to put up with. To people like my stepdad, my displeasure at how I'm treated by leadership is complete stuck up whining: I personally make more than him + my mother and their households ever have, I'm not in physical danger (unlike him doing HVAC work, my mom doing warehouse work, my siblings' SOs who work landscaping, etc), etc. I was taught growing up that basically unless your boss put you in the hospital, you were lucky to not be homeless or starving and work just sucks.

This is a particularly hard mindset to get out of because in white-collar environments, you can't talk about how growing up blue collar or working class makes you anxious because a lot of 'professionalism' boils down to 'don't let the nice people know you're a peasant or you'll be kicked out for not being a culture fit'.

The pandemic has been very helpful, ironically! I'm more than willing to blame myself for all my life problems, but when I see OTHER people being treated like I was, it raises my heckles and pisses me off.

I'm so glad to hear that you found a job you like. I'm hoping to move from a small-shop/journeyman dev to working in a dev team and I'm trying to maintain optimism, so stories like that help!

It's scary how two different people can have such similar backgrounds (minus the lesbian part, that's playing the rural dating game on hard mode for sure). For me I just kept living like a college student and saved most of my paycheck until the adult part of me was able to convince my inner child we were, in fact, safe.

Feeling safe let me leave bad employers in the past. Thankfully my current one is pretty awesome.

Yeah, I was on the track to do what you did, and then I got multiple sclerosis during my last semester of graduate school. Disability is a major player in my own personal negative patterns: My MS came out of nowhere, I can't make good choices to make it go away, and I can't just ignore it. I also was fucked over when I tried to plan for things like student loans: Over half my undergrad debt is from my last year because my dad lost all the money he was using to help me in 08.

My personal experiences, outliers though they are, tell me that change is likely to screw me over. I would love to save my paychecks but when your meds cost 300k+ a year for your entire life, your life is dictated by health insurance and care. I lived like a college student and saved and was STILL fucked by change, so I'm very change and risk averse.

>I genuinely don't understand why anyone would work here or put up with this.

While the special instructions incidents were horrific, particularly to someone like me who wants to do the right thing and their brain seizes up with such insanity, they were eventually resolved.

Finally they instituted a policy where instructions were reviewed by a group of senior account managers every 90 days. Whomever wrote them had to justify them, or they were simply deleted. That actually turned out to be a great process as many out of date instructions were auto deleted without anyone doing anything.

As for the job, it was actually a great job. The support team was amazing, supportive, it paid great, and the company weathered a lot of economic downturns easily. If anything the special instructions incident demonstrated how even a great organization can go bonkers insane.

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