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Comment by polishdude20 | Hacker News Reader

Last place I worked was like that. "Just embrace the chaos" but also "your new ideas aren't welcome here"

Unfortunately when you go to a party, you can’t change the music until you’ve told a few jokes that everyone laughed at.

So fun is proportional to the extent to which the punch bowl has been spiked? Seriously asking.

There's a very delicate balance to walk between chaos that works and a new idea that might be better or it might be worse or bring it's own type of chaos.

One of my coworkers told me (mostly joking) I wasn't allowed to talk to any more of his team because every person I talked to left.

I was trying to recruit people to help me fix the chaos. It's not my fault they decided it would be easier to start over somewhere else once they agreed about all the things that pissed me off.

Often times your new ideas aren’t new after all. Been there done that, only realized my stupidity as I grew more experienced.

That's the young kids. Most of us are trying to bring in solutions we already tested elsewhere, so we don't have to regress just because we got a new job. Or get rid of new things that YOU PEOPLE invented when there's a perfectly workable industry standard that isn't festooned with corner cases and no documentation.

That is incidentally one of the advantages of contributing fixes back to OSS. At least you don't have to fix the same bugs in your tools again at every job. After a few years you start to forget how you did it.

And you’re usually not the first one to have brought it up, even though you think you are. So people are wasting time shooting down what they have shot down before, not a great way to introduce yourself.

Not necessarily. Recalcitrance is the flip side of this coin. But it tends to break down when five different people are telling you in five different ways how you’re fucking things up for everybody by being stubborn.

I’ve learned to send the new guy to ask instead of parroting back why we aren’t going to be allowed to change something stupid. Because once in a while they disappear for an hour and then come back with news that we’re finally going to fix it.

We all have to look at the same code. The person who writes it specifically for their own tastes has an undue advantage over everyone else because the code exactly matches their crazy. But if you write code everyone else can also read, you only slow yourself down a little and double or triple everyone else’s productivity. Or you can keep being the selfish asshole who uses appeals to authority. Don’t be surprised if you start encountering coup attempts.

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