<story><title>Coding, Fast and Slow: Developers and the Psychology of Overconfidence (2013)</title><url>http://blog.hut8labs.com/coding-fast-and-slow.html?reddit</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gfodor</author><text>Just to play devil&amp;#x27;s advocate, there is also the type of person who tends to get stuck down rabbit holes more than they should. There&amp;#x27;s a skill not just to solving problems but avoiding them in the first place. Usually this requires not just engineering talent but the ability to see the bigger picture, in terms of product and business goals. If someone is banging their head against the wall, it may be because they are trying to solve a necessary difficult problem and are discovering valuable knowledge, or it could be because they are foolishing running into a wall that they could easily go around if they stepped back for a second and considered what they had set out to do in the first place.&lt;p&gt;In your race condition example, it would be the difference between an engineer debugging a race condition in mission critical code, and debugging one that is incidental complexity in a unit test or ancillary tool that could be refactored to be single threaded, or just omitted altogether. Heck, even in the mission critical code case, it&amp;#x27;s worth considering how many users it effects, how it effects them, and at every moment considering if the time spent so far on the problem (and its associated opportunity cost) is still justified. (Taking into account the fixed costs of switching context into the problem again.) It&amp;#x27;s very easy to get wrapped up in an interesting problem and forget about the eject button.</text></item><item><author>rayiner</author><text>One of the best things you can do in your organization is create a culture that treats obstacle discovery as forward progress. There is nothing more disheartening for an engineer than banging her head against the wall trying to debug some race condition only to get flak from management about why it isn&amp;#x27;t fixed and why it&amp;#x27;s holding up some milestone. The root of this problem is management that doesn&amp;#x27;t understand the problem domain, and is suspicious about whether the engineers are really working diligently. The proper response to obstacle discovery is to treat it as forward progress. Firing off an email to a superior saying: &amp;quot;I discovered an unknown race condition, let&amp;#x27;s see what we need to do to fix it,&amp;quot; should be treated no differently than &amp;quot;I finished this feature.&amp;quot; The presumption should be that the engineer used due diligence and the situation was unforeseen. Now, that doesn&amp;#x27;t preclude separate improvements to diligence procedures to provide better foresight in the, future but under no circumstances should anyone be blamed for discovering obstacles or defects and raising them. When your culture does that, all you&amp;#x27;ll get is shitty product.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zenogais</author><text>This is where &amp;quot;The presumption should be that the engineer used due diligence and the situation was unforeseen&amp;quot; clause enters into play.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve seen many folks in management just always assume incompetence or rabbit holing on the part of engineers. It&amp;#x27;s good to ask clarifying questions. But as a manager you should be aware that adopting a style of second guessing and interrogating everything your reports do comes off as insulting - after all, you likely hired them, so why don&amp;#x27;t you trust them?&lt;p&gt;That being said there are no hard and fast rules here, and being aware of the different histories of different folks is important, but defaulting to a critical attitude is likely to lead to all types of efforts to hide things from you just to avoid questioning, feeling insulted, having their time wasted, etc.</text></comment>
<story><title>Coding, Fast and Slow: Developers and the Psychology of Overconfidence (2013)</title><url>http://blog.hut8labs.com/coding-fast-and-slow.html?reddit</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gfodor</author><text>Just to play devil&amp;#x27;s advocate, there is also the type of person who tends to get stuck down rabbit holes more than they should. There&amp;#x27;s a skill not just to solving problems but avoiding them in the first place. Usually this requires not just engineering talent but the ability to see the bigger picture, in terms of product and business goals. If someone is banging their head against the wall, it may be because they are trying to solve a necessary difficult problem and are discovering valuable knowledge, or it could be because they are foolishing running into a wall that they could easily go around if they stepped back for a second and considered what they had set out to do in the first place.&lt;p&gt;In your race condition example, it would be the difference between an engineer debugging a race condition in mission critical code, and debugging one that is incidental complexity in a unit test or ancillary tool that could be refactored to be single threaded, or just omitted altogether. Heck, even in the mission critical code case, it&amp;#x27;s worth considering how many users it effects, how it effects them, and at every moment considering if the time spent so far on the problem (and its associated opportunity cost) is still justified. (Taking into account the fixed costs of switching context into the problem again.) It&amp;#x27;s very easy to get wrapped up in an interesting problem and forget about the eject button.</text></item><item><author>rayiner</author><text>One of the best things you can do in your organization is create a culture that treats obstacle discovery as forward progress. There is nothing more disheartening for an engineer than banging her head against the wall trying to debug some race condition only to get flak from management about why it isn&amp;#x27;t fixed and why it&amp;#x27;s holding up some milestone. The root of this problem is management that doesn&amp;#x27;t understand the problem domain, and is suspicious about whether the engineers are really working diligently. The proper response to obstacle discovery is to treat it as forward progress. Firing off an email to a superior saying: &amp;quot;I discovered an unknown race condition, let&amp;#x27;s see what we need to do to fix it,&amp;quot; should be treated no differently than &amp;quot;I finished this feature.&amp;quot; The presumption should be that the engineer used due diligence and the situation was unforeseen. Now, that doesn&amp;#x27;t preclude separate improvements to diligence procedures to provide better foresight in the, future but under no circumstances should anyone be blamed for discovering obstacles or defects and raising them. When your culture does that, all you&amp;#x27;ll get is shitty product.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aangjie</author><text>&amp;gt; it could be because they are foolishing running into a wall that they could easily go around if they stepped back for a second and considered what they had set out to do in the first place.&lt;p&gt;Note to self: Remember this, whenever you feel stuck and look at the problem in perspective.&lt;p&gt;My experience, tells me this is one of the biggest guidance a technical&amp;#x2F;engineering manager must be able to provide to his team. I am not sure how hard or easy or for that matter even makes sense from the manager&amp;#x2F;lead&amp;#x27;s perspective, it is to provide this, but have found that whenever my manager is asking me to speed-up i run into these problems and lose the ability to judge whether i&amp;#x27;m running against a wall or not.</text></comment>