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  • I never gave credit to my electricity company for delivering electricity to me. I only get mad when there is an outage.
    by whatever1
  • I think of electric vehicle fires and jet airliner crashes.

    Also, telsa self-driving. yes, we know about the greatly publicized accidents, or the tweets of the founder, but the avoided incidents not so much.

    by m463
  • Just remember, the power grid fails in theory but works in practice.
    by HerbManic
  • Well in a way you do. They send you a fine bill every month and you do credit some of your allegedly hard earned bucks.
    by jesterson
  • Counterpoint: I absolutely give credit to Sonic for being a great ISP and recommend them to everyone. I got my parents to switch when Sonic finally rolled out to their neighborhood.

    If online comments are anything to go by, I'm not alone.

    If you're in the Bay Area and you can get a Sonic fiber connection, I would highly recommend them over AT&T/Comcast/etc.

    by tikhonj
  • > I never gave credit to my electricity company

    That's what the moneys for ...

    by blitzar
  • There is something I saw on a reddit post of all places, about how every manager who doesn't predict a baseline of "3 annoying problems every month, 1 awful problem every 3 months" is essentially a bad manager. The reasoning being that, if your number of problems is under that threshold, then someone is doing a 'good job'.
    by mdmabatj
  • My time in IT has really oscillated between these two extremes:

    - "Everything around is working just fine. What are we paying IT for?"

    - "Everything is broken. What are we even paying IT for?"

    Personally, I strive for the former rather than the latter; I like to say "If I do my job right, you never know I'm here." But that's what got me let go.

    (and for karma's sake, I keep in touch with folks at the old company; it's an absolute crapshow. So I got that going for me; which is nice)

    by -warren
  • You'll see capability traps everywhere once you learn about them.

    Sterman, Repenning and other collaborators wrote several papers after this one. All fascinating and almost entirely depressing.

    Especially since MIT's Sloan school, where system dynamics first became a discipline, is just around the bend from Harvard Business school, where system dynamics first became ignored.

    by jacques_chester
  • One thing I don't get about the concept of capability traps is why is it expected that a company which is good at one thing would be capable at the new thing? What exactly makes a capability trap a trap?
    by macrocosmos
  • We all learned this back in first grade. The kids that behaved in class and did their homework did not command most of the teacher's time and effort. It was the problem children who refused to follow the rules and needed constant praise for every bit of actual effort that they put into their studies; that got the teacher's attention.
    by didgetmaster
  • The squeaky wheel gets the grease, is how I always heard it phrased.
    by hattmall
  • This is how people get promoted at work. They break something, it escalates and gets visibility, emails sent to executives. Now, they 'fix' it, many thank yous from everyone for a job well done. Another version of this is delay the work you are supposed to do a long time back and let it gain visibility. Executives are blind, they can't see work being done by people who take ownership and get shit done before it becomes a problem. However, executive will remember the name of the person who breaks shit and 'saves' the day.
    by thelastgallon
  • The sociopathic backhand. Someone breaks it, blames you, drags your name through the mud exacerbating the issue, goes to "fix it" yet makes it worse because of their incompetence. They continue to cuss you out for it all while licking the arse of the executive. "No, we better not let doublerabbit touch that", "I don't think they're a team player". All while it was my infrastructure.

    And people ask why I hate humans.

    by doublerabbit
  • Ian Rush said it best: "It's best being a striker. Miss five, score the winner, you're a hero. The goalkeeper plays a blinder, lets one in, and he's a villain."

    Every place I've worked rewards the firefighter over the person who made sure nothing ever caught fire. And the worst part is the math is obvious to everyone except the people who set the incentives.

    by Tsarp
  • I dont think this comparison really works. Firefighter would be goalie or a defender and like you said in sports they are less appreciated/compensated for a simple reason - usually they don’t bring in views. There are exceptions ofc like Pippen or Seaman
    by dilyevsky
  • How would you set the incentives, though? Almost by definition, it's hard to reward things that aren't visible.

    Note that there is also the flip side of the coin, people who spend all their time worrying about things that never happen, so it's not like you can just reward a defensive attitude things are more complicated than that.

    by joelthelion
  • I had this problem at a previous job. I spent almost all of my time taking care of the behind the scenes administrative work (scheduling meetings, making sure that people had the information they needed to come into the meetings prepared, etc.). However, when performance review came around I was told that the only thing that they cared about was that I hadn't completed many story points because I was too busy keeping things from falling apart.

    So I stopped doing all the administrative work and focused on just completing story points. A week or two later my manager asks the team "how come all of our meetings are falling apart now? We get into a meeting and no one knows what's going on."

    by harimau777
  • Like what would have happened to the 4077th MASH if Radar O'Reilly had been reassigned.
    by projektfu
  • I began migrating from network/hardware/IT work and into marketing after nearly 2 years of heavy lifting getting ready for Y2K. In the end, "nothing happened," so all that time and money was wasted, according to nearly every company I worked with. Even had one demand a full refund. I agreed as long as I could revert all the work that I had done. They agreed, and the next day after that their entire system collapsed.

    I couldn't even get my own dad to pay for network support for his company since he would never pay my rate for anyone no matter what. After 2 other people failed to solve his problem I fixed it in 15 minutes and then he "really" didn't want to pay because it only took 15 minutes.

    I was very good at what I did but got no appreciation for keeping things from breaking, only for fixing things after they broke. Marketing paid better, and I could point at real world numbers daily and justify my pay. I don't like it anywhere near as much, but at least it gets more respect than any other IT work I did.

    by SteveGerencser
  • Idk I joined the field only like 5 years ago. Prior to knowing about programming I had a lot of respect for programmers and tech as it was this magic world to me. After having joined the field the magic is completely gone and I don't want to talk to programmers irl anymore because of how many insufferable people I've met so far. The parts where I've got credit are the simple things, fix printer, fix computer issue A,B and C or small apps like an ad free Sudoku for android which I have built for my friends. The parts I don't get credit for are the parts I get paid for. But I can see that in many industries, as soon as money is involved people are less thankful because they expect you to fulfill your part of the contract. Generally people not knowing shit about tech think that devs sit in HO all day working only 30 minutes. AI didn't help that image.
    by sevenzero
  • I'm sorry your dad didn't respect your IT work...
    by pulse7
  • On your dad:

    "This is what my regular customers pay me. If I hired one of my friends or relatives I see it as my duty to pay them at least what they are worth, this is the way you raised me."

    I believe this to be true btw. If someone is really your friend, you want them to do well and that means you pay what they usually get or you don't bother them and get someone else.

    by atoav
  • There are a lot of things like this.

    My favorite is how elegant solutions often look simple in retrospect. So if you noodle on a problem for a while and then come up with a clever solution: once you explain it to someone they'll be like, "yeah, of course."

    Meanwhile the guy next to you that overcomplicates the problem ends up getting kudos for building something so difficult :D

    by timmg
  • Every company where I've worked at as a SWE openly rewarded "engineering complexity" as a criteria for getting promoted, which I've always found to be absurd because complexity can always be manufactured (both of the problem and the solution).
    by roncesvalles
  • Yeap. Managers perceive complexity by how personally confused they are. I'm late in my career, and I'm realizing I wasted so many man years trying to make code clean, user friendly, and maintainable, when that code was never read by another person again and forgotten 15 minutes after it was released, then used for years. This is why I think AI is coming for our jobs much sooner than many people think: clean code, separation of concerns, maintainability, etc, all the things we spend the most time on, have never actually been valued. "Good enough" is fine, and keeps management happy. And, if something does pop up, AI can patch it, even if with spaghetti, just like fucking that ass at work.
    by nomel
  • The passage that comes to mind for me whenever this idea comes up, from the Brett version of the Holmes story "The Dancing Men":

      H: So, Watson.
  W: Hmm.
  H: You do not propose to invest in South African securities?
  W: How on earth do you know that?
  H: Now, confess, you are utterly taken aback.
  W: I am!
  H: I should make you sign a paper to that effect.
  W: Why?
  H: Because in a few minutes you will say it is all so absurdly simple.
  W: I should say nothing of the kind!
  H: You see, my dear Watson, it is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect.
  H: I can tell by an inspection of the groove between your left forefinger and thumb, that you have decided not to invest your small capital in the gold fields.
  W: I can see no connection.
  H: Very likely not; but I can quickly give you a close connection.
  H: Here are the missing links in the very simple chain: You had chalk between your forefinger and thumb when you returned from the club last night. You put chalk there when you play billiards, to ease the cue. You never play billiards except with Thurston. Now, Thurston, you told me, four weeks ago, had an option on some South African security which expired in a month, and which he desired you to share with him. Your checkbook is locked in my drawer, and you have not asked for the key. So, you do not propose to invest your money in that manner.
  W: How absurdly simple!
  H: Quite so. Every problem is absurdly simple when it is explained to you.
    by nullhole
  • On the other hand, I don't help people with their computer problems anymore because I've found that the more difficult the problem, the longer it takes me to rescue their data or whatever the less impressed they are. The more miraculous the save the more likely they are to tell me the story about their nephew who solved a trivial issue instantly as if to point out that I didn't.
    by t43562
  • I have said it for decades - Basic is easy, Simple is hard.

    But when someone comes up with something simple but effective, it always looks so obvious in retrospect.

    by HerbManic
  • There was a thread recently on HN about Claude Shannon and how his papers were filled with clear descriptions and explanations. Then someone commented how they had found an elegant solution to a problem that either could be described shortly and beautifully so that a high schooler could understand or take the long and tedious path of a convoluted explanation.

    The director then clearly advised that they should use the complicated way because that's how you get published: not because you're clever, but because your solutions sound complicated.

    It resonates perfectly with your comment and it's an unfortunate reality that most people don't bother for beautiful solutions and praise complicated processes. That's how we neded up with bureaucracy, probably :D

    by ocimbote