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Comment by Celeo | Hacker News Reader

Depending on the size of the team/org/company, working on anything other than the next feature is a hard sell to PM/PO/PgM/management.

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I've had to inform leadership that stability is a feature, just like anything else, and that you can't just expect it to happen without giving it time.

One leader kind of listened. Sort of. I'm pretty sure I was lucky.

Ask them if they're into pro sports. If so (and most men outside of tech are in some way), they'll probably know the phrase "availability is the best ability".

Or just look at your car. Heated seats are sexy in the short term, but boring old reliability and predictability win out long term.

i got lucky at my last shop. b2b place for like 2x other customer companies. eng manager person (who was also like 3x other managers :/ ) let everything get super broken and unstable.

when i took lead of eng it was quite an easy path to making it clear stability was critical. slow everything down and actually do QA. customer became super happy because basically 3x releases went out with minimal bugs/tweaks required. “users don’t want broken changes immediately, they want working changes every so often” was my spiel etc etc.

unfortunately it was impossible to convince people about that until they screwed it all up. i still struggle to let things “get bad so they can get good”, but am aware of the lesson today at least.

tl;dr sometimes you gotta let people break things so badly that they become open to another way

It's interesting how misaligned your effort is.

You put effort into writing an unnecessary tldr on a short post, but couldn't be bothered to properly Capitalize your sentences in order to ensure the readability.

Weird.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Edit out swipes [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't post shallow dismissals"

Same source.

Don't trivialize my useful feedback.

If a person tries to communicate, but his stylistic choice of laziness (his own admission!) gets in the way of delivering his message, it is very tangibly useful information to tell, so that the writing effort could be better optimized for effect.

I wasn't even demanding/telling him what to do. I simply shared my observation, but it's up to him to decide if he wants to communicate better. Information and understanding is power.

> appearing or claiming to be one thing when it is really something else

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ostensib...

ostensible laziness => not actually laziness.

although yes it is a stylistic choice (which i wont be changing as the result of our interaction).

Your choice. The worst thing is not knowing ("Why are not posts with reasonable opinions are being downvoted and not engaged with?"). Now you know (you are welcome) and it's your choice what to do with that information.

> couldn't be bothered to properly Capitalize your sentences

i changed my iphone settings to not auto-capitalise words

i put effort into my ostensible laziness

That's what I hear.

I've had some mix of luck and skill in finding these jobs. Working with people you've worked with before helps with knowing what you're in for.

I also don't really ask anyone, I just fix any bugs I find. That may not work in all organizations :)

micro-managing middle manager: "Are all your other sprint tasks finished?"

code reviewing coworker: "This shouldn't be done on this branch!" (OK, at least this is easy to fix by doing it on a separate branch.)

I can guarantee you this doesn't work in our team! you didn't make a ticket, so the PM has no idea what you're doing!

Yes, a ticket takes 2 seconds. it also puts me off my focus :P but i guess measuring is more important than achieving

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