Comment by frollo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frollo | Hacker News Reader

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Malicious compliance is exactly what you get when people think your target is stupid and you put some automated, non-negotiable measurement in place.

If I was a developer there, I'd totally started adding those generated tests. I have a job to do (ship products) and you put in some stupid requirements which actually interfere with it (since my time is limited I can either work on tests or my daily tasks like developing new features or fixing bugs), but we both know that if my primary job suffers, I'll pay for it. So the best solution, from my point of view, is the one that takes that requirement away and lets me go on actually working.

When we had a similar problem in a previous company, we just created an epic, assigned a couple of people to it and have them churning out tickets for specific improvements, like "Class X has a coverage of Y on this method, add tests for the missing execution branches", which were clear, non-generic and fully integrated in our flow. If anybody complained about our velocity or whatever, we could show them the full trail which lead us to choose to work on that ticket and how much we spent on it. The coverage issue got solved in less than a month.

>If I was a developer there, I'd totally started adding those generated tests.

If I were a manager there, I probably wouldn’t hire you. You want people who are actively solving problems that matter, not just automatons beating their chest about how stupid everyone else is while they add to existing problems.

If I was a dev there, I certainly wouldn't be approving those PRs either.

But if the devs at the org all (or even substantially) tend towards malicious compliance, that's a sign that something has gone wrong, relations-wise

Agree. That’s what I mean when I say it’s more indicative of cultural issues.

I you were a manager there and would approve that metric, no worries, I'd manage to fly it past you.

Any smart manager, having to deal with this kind of policy, would either push back or approve any way to game it and then get the work done. But I doubt that a company which allows this kind of BS can retain smart managers for more than a couple of months.

If you read any of my posts on this thread, it’s pretty obvious I don’t agree with the managers approach. But I also don’t agree that the devs are doing the right thing either.

It’s telling that you show such dichotomous and defensive thinking.

So you disapprove of the decision, but would have enforced it in the most asinine way at the expense of actual productivity.

I just hope to never work with you and, especially, never use anything you helped building.

What made you draw that conclusion?

I made the point that the metric used (raw number of tests) is a bad way to enforce a good goal (higher code quality). I also made the point that metrics aren’t inherently bad, but they have to be chosen judiciously.

You seemed to take those two points and extrapolate an entirely different story as a personal affront and apply motives that, frankly, reads as a bit unhinged. So i also hope we don’t cross paths, because in safety critical code development where I come from where bad practices and toxic teammates can kill people.

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