Similar to efforts to reduce methane from cows instead of actually facing the fact that industrialized meat production is, y'know, really wasteful and bad for the environment (and us, given how bad eating too much red meat is)
"25% of the persons recurring revenue" must be all the referrals of that referral and all the way down.
I don't like it because it introduces difficult to understand incentives that may be different than "make good product" and difficult to understand.
Maybe the most obvious wrong incentive is "make product that is easy to get your friends to start and keep using". A product like that would benefit from network effects and social contagion and no interoperation with other products, and build features correspondingly. (cf Facebook)
Jidoka[1] is a key feature of Toyota's manufacturing process that emphasizes detecting defects before they make it out the door and empowering workers to stop the line and get to the root of the problem. It's weird that this isn't a no-brainer for most orgs but I guess there's enough profit incentive in shipping faster at the cost of quality.
I worked for a company that swallowed the (so-called) Toyota schtick hook, line, and sinker. About 14 years ago I tolerated some Toyota UK fossil coming in and berating me, in front of my entire team, for being a crap project manager, in spite of I was the most reliable and accurate product manager said (very successful and healthily growing) company had at the time. Seriously, still, fuck that guy with a nail-festooned cricket bat. I fucking shipped everything within the constraints I'd descrived at the beginning of the project, and it did great in the market. Anyone who doesn't like it is welcome to kiss my ass. But whatever.
Toyota or, more accurately, consultants who like to hawk the Toyota Production System (TPS), talk a good game, but the reality isn't always aligned with the ideals. Jidoka is evidently not a reality at Toyota, and they aren't much more enlightened than other orgs when it comes to pointing out problems, despite their A3 reports and multicoloured boards.
The Reckoning, by David Halberstam, makes it clear that "Toyota-like" practices aren't unique to Toyota amongst Japanese auto manufacturers. It also makes clear that these practices primarily exist to keep workers engaged and morale high (because, for those of you who've never worked on a production line [I have], in case there's any doubt in your minds, yes, it's boring as fuck).
The reason Toyota was much more successful than other Japanese auto makers in the second half of the 20th century is bugger all to do with their production process, and is instead the result of them being more aggressive and decisive in the wake of WWII: they simply opened a bigger factory sooner than their competitors and were therefore able to meet demand better. This gave them a trading advantage that lasted decades. The TPS didn't hinder their advantage, but it's absolutely disingenuous to claim it as the root cause.
Do NOT drink this koolaid about the TPS. I'm not saying there's nothing of value in it (I like genchi genbutsu, for example), but take it all with a pinch of salt. The value depends on who you are, who your team is, and how as a group you best operate. Fork-lifting business practices thoughtlessly from one organisation to another often doesn't work that well and TPS is no exception. It's no better than Agile cargo-culting but, because TPS is less mainstream, perhaps hasn't come under the same critical scrutiny.
Plus TPS's penchant for fault finding and negative culture overall just pisses people off and drags them down when they are (or should be) engaged in more creative problem solving. So something didn't work out: get over it, move on, and find another solution. Don't spend ages navel gazing about it. WTF? Seriously, if you think nitpicking everything and everybody makes you a good manager, you're an idiot and you should find another vocation. Fuck the fuck off. You're a tedious oxygen thief who's boring everyone.
Maybe it makes sense when you build the same thing over and over and over again, but we don't do that and we never did so it was always ridiculous to expect this to work well (and I say this as someone who, good faith, gave it a go, but the problem is that perhaps all the people pushing it at the time weren't acting in good faith).
As soon as something becomes a religion it loses most of its value.
To me the 'Toyota way' was more of an illustration than an exact guideline to follow and I've found this to be true for most of these things that tend to become a religion. Scrum, TDD etc all have this potential to become fodder for consultants that essentially sell a dream that they can not deliver on. But that doesn't mean there isn't a kernel of truth in there.
Form over substance. Toyota, and other Japanese companies, are living the substance of Lean and TPS. Most other companies implement the form and hope they magically get where Toyota is without any additional effort. Same goes for Agile and any other management "philosophy".
Yes, it's the essence of cargo culting. The tech world is also full of this stuff. The number of small companies that I've seen that implement the Spotify development team structure is pretty tragic.
People are always looking for silver bullets and the industry is rife with examples of this kind of thing.
Even better, "we're like Google" except they give you a blank stare where you ask about the 20% time, free food, compensation or where they hire from. Turns out it's all bootcamp/local wages no stock, no 20% time. But hey, they have beanbag chairs!
I'd like to apologise for the overly aggressive tone of this comment: I was drunk when I posted it. I have long since learned that drunk posting is a bad idea and yet, sometimes, I still am unable to resist that temptation. Anyway, this post isn't kind, and whilst I do have some issues with the TPS and think Toyota's history is often misrepresented, nobody needs to read a frothy mouthed rant about it.
First off, name a single auto company that hasn't had a recall in its history. I think it's a bit unfair to point at a recall and imply that the systems they employ are bad because of it.
Secondly, more to your point, I'm certainly not trying to defend the whole system or even imply that it's effective at accomplishing its stated goals. I'm merely saying that the concept of encouraging employees working with/creating/designing a product to point out flaws and making a point of digging into where defects are introduced is a good idea. I definitely can't speak to how well that philosophy is applied at Toyota but I think that's moot regardless.
I don't dispute this, but at the same time, the cars from Toyota and Honda during the 1980s were vastly higher quality than their American and European counterparts. This could have contributed to the desire to emulate TPS.
Could it be an example of... well not survivorship bias, but, TPS gave them a competitive advantage in the 80's, and since then, other car companies have adopted it or something similar and upped their game, normalizing it to the point where people don't care about it anymore?
That is, once something is normalized you don't notice it anymore. Like how people that saw the 'rona epidemic was under control (ish) thought the measures were no longer needed.
I do think that people have much higher expectations today. Getting an engine rebuilt is mostly no longer a thing. The US mostly caught up, then Europe.
That depends on the car brand. Mercedes' don't require engine rebuilds because the engines outlast the body they are in. Most cheaper brands don't require engine rebuilds because it isn't economical to do so, by the time the car clocks over 250K its book value is way higher than an engine rebuild.
But for classic sports cars they're fairly normal, those engines were not made to last forever, tend to be fairly high power for their displacement and the book value of the cars is high enough that rebuilding an engine can make sense.
Same for their JIT supply management. The attitude I have a hard time mitigating with manufacturing contractors years after the global supply chain have deteriorated.
Those things work well when you're the only one doing them to gain an advantage over your competitors. But as soon as everybody starts doing it that means that the whole chain will adapt and suddenly all that stock that allowed you to do JIT and offload the costs of keeping that stock onto your suppliers evaporates which takes all of the slack out of the system. Now everybody has to perform and that will work right up to the first crisis and then the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
It is always important to know what the underlying assumptions of your strategic advantages are. Going 'countercurrent' can work, but then if the tide turns you need to be aware that your previous advantage is now a risk.
Toyotas DO break less. But their designs are stodgy, very slowly updated, and generally draw premium prices. So customers keep flashier makes in business.
Most of the noise I hear from my apartment in a medium-density neighborhood, like 95% of it, is just car traffic. Big noisy trucks and people on Harleys, people honking at each other as they try to leave a parking lot, all that. Building spread out unwalkable areas creates way more noise than the opposite. What is true, however, is that this design was mostly created for the benefit of suburbanites who live in isolated communities with no readily accessible amenities besides a road into the city. Their peace and quiet comes at the expense of mine, and especially at the expense of lower income communities which often exist in the noisiest, most car-heavy parts of the city.
Nothing about cars specifically enables this. Building cities so that you have to drive to travel any significant distance, however, guarantees that you need a car to take advantage of competitive pricing. But that's self-apparent... Building dense cities that can be accessed by bike and on foot would have the same effect. Spreading out your city so that what could be a 15 minute walk is now a 15 minute drive isn't an improvement.
> Building dense cities that can be accessed by bike and on foot would have the same effect.
I love density, but, in my experience this is not true. London doesn't have a large competitive market of grocery stores. Neither does Boston or New York City.
Density means higher real estate prices, that means grocery store sizes go down, and the barrier to entry goes up. Yes you can get more small specialty shops (which is great!) but I've had times where I've had to go to 3 different large supermarkets to find some oddball item I needed, and density would make that even harder on me since stores would have a smaller variety of stock.
Of course the 2 largest grocery store chains in America are trying to merge, so very soon American cities won't have much competition either.
I'm not saying density isn't good, it is, and it makes lots of shopping easier, but certain types of (uniquely) American retail experiences fall apart when cities become more dense.
Heck Seattle already is dense enough that there is only 1 Costco within the city limits, the density of Costco's in the suburbs surrounding Seattle is actually quite high! Prior to living in the city proper, I was a 15 minute drive from two Costcos! Now I am a 30 minute drive from one Costco. Since I don't have the time to go that far on a frequent basis for groceries, I am paying more for food living in a city that has more grocery stores around me, than I was when I lived in the suburbs.
The Costco's are a result of bulk buying, which relies on motorized transport and easy at-home refrigeration, both very American things. The more European tradition of buying food multiple times per week is odd in America outside of a few downtown cores.
When I was doing AirBnB[1] in London, I noticed that the vast majority of London's grocery stores were quite small compared to the stores in America. The small co-op near me is about the size of an average London grocery store, and the selection of stock is poor enough that I really can't get much shopping done there.
London does have larger stores, but it isn't like in America where the average grocery store is, well, huge.
(Obviously some chains such as Asda have larger stores!)
On the west coast at least, American grocery stores are either small like Trader Joe's (Aldi sized I believe), tiny local ethnic stores, or you start getting into larger and larger categories that start at "really damn big" and end up at "you can get lost here".
The "you can get lost here" sized stores typically have much cheaper prices, and families go there on weekends to buy essentials (meat, veggies) to stay on budget.
All in all I'm not saying it is a bad thing, having a higher density of grocery stores is nice, it means going to the grocery store isn't a dedicated trip, but those cheap huge discount stores are very nice to have around.
[1] I like to stay for awhile in the middle of cities so I can actually shop at local stores, cook some food myself, etc.
Multiple neighborhoods I lived in had walking access to Stop & Shop, Star Market, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Target, bfresh, cheap overstock/clearance stores, a farmers market, and other independent grocers, many catering to nationalities/ethnicities with large subcommunities in the area. Just a train or bus ride away I could go to Market Basket, Roche Brothers, Wegmans, a worker owned-co-op, and more farmers markets and independent grocers.
Costco was a longer train ride away, but accessible if you wanted something specifically from there. Delivery is more economical because of the shorter distances involved.
You can see this yourself by doing a map search.
In rural areas I've lived, one is common, sometimes zero within a fifteen minute drive. Suburban areas might have two or three regional supermarkets, plus Walmart, Target, Costco and/or Sam's, but always way fewer within the area covered by the same travel time.
May depend on the part of Boston, my wife used to live there and her area didn't have much, she was either walking a mile or taking the train to a different area.
Different parts of Boston is incredibly varied though, I shouldn't have made a general statement.
- 2-3 specialty grocers (think italian importers, etc.)
- gourmet grocer
- two butcher shops and a fresh fish shop
- CVS (yes, they sell groceries! spooky)
- 2-3 bodegas that sell shelf-stable goods, as well as a small collection of fruit and vegetables
If you go expand it to 15 minute bike, the world is truly your oyster, but the primary one that pops up is Trader Joe's.
The most remarkable part of this description, is that it identifies at least 4 or 5 different neighborhoods in NYC, those are only the ones I can think of off the top of my head, and I haven't been close to everywhere.
There's a lot of things to knock about NYC, but it's easily the most walkable city in the US, that I've seen.
Sure but everyone would expect that in New York but people on here tend to miss that suburbs can be walkable too. I live in the most suburban neighborhood 25 miles away from central Phoenix that you could possibly imagine and have a 15 minute walk to 2 full size grocery stores, several bars, a wide variety of restaurants, plenty (an understatement) of medical offices, coffee shops etc. 20 minutes gets me to Walmart, a movie theater, and tons more. Having been to New York many times I strongly prefer the walk through tree lined, low traffic and noise streets that I have here.
But where is the calculation for all the effort to distribute food to all those tiny shops? It is comes in via truck/van often at night. Central large stores, with customers buying in bulk, means fewer trips. The total carbon/energy in the system isn't as simple as saying "walking is better". It may be that a monthly trip to fill a pickup with food is more green than thirty daily trips to the corner shop by foot. Environmental concerns and modern lifestyle trends don't always line up nicely.
I Costco baker told me once that they used less preservative in bread than small bakers. Costco has such a high turnover that they don't need bread that can survive a whole day on the shelf. Same too with their vegetables that spend far less time in transit than they would getting to a tiny farmers market.
100s of people driving individual cars to get to a grocery store is absolutely less efficient than a couple dozen box trucks delivering food to smaller localized stores. Not to mention, we can electrify those delivery trucks and negate a lot of the carbon emissions. Even if you electrify all of those cars you still have the massive environmental impact of building and maintaining the roads and parking lots they have to use. Individualized auto transit is a blight. "Modern lifestyle trends" not lining up with environmental concerns is usually more of an issue of modern lifestyle trends being unsustainable.
I find it interesting that whenever socialized healthcare in the US is mentioned, there's always someone eager to point out the failings of Canada's and the UK's systems, yet I never hear mention of any of the other socialized healthcare systems that basically every highly developed nation maintains. I truthfully don't know any statistics on this sort of thing, so I couldn't tell you how good Finland or Greece or Spain are when it comes to healthcare. You'd think there would be relevant criticism to bring up elsewhere if the whole idea is flawed at it's core - otherwise, who cares if Canada's implementation of the concept sucks? Let's learn from their mistakes and others' successes.
Canada is almost unique among developed countries with government healthcare in that it doesn't also have a parallel private medical system for those who can afford to pay for it. So naturally rich Canadians will often pay for private healthcare in the US.
I'm originally Canadian but have lived in Australia for the past 10+ years (in Melbourne). We've never had any issues getting medical appointments with local doctors (usually "bulk billed" so we pay nothing or a very nominal amount for the appointment). But we also have private medical insurance, which is required above a certain age (30 something), that we use occasionally for specialist appointments. But even then the out-of-pocket fee is something like $70 which is fine.
Unlike Canada, AFAIK most countries in Europe (e.g., Sweden, France, Spain, Germany) have parallel private medical care, so Canada really is unusual in that respect.
I've always had a pretty positive attitude towards code reviews (still a junior dev), because I know there's probably something I missed or a technique I'm not familiar with or some language quirk I didn't know about. If I submit a PR with a bunch of new functionality, I'm going to be way more concerned if I don't get a handful of comments on it than if I do.
Frankly I think everyone should have this attitude, seniors as well. (I try to) I am experienced but I know I write bugs and code that may be not as clear as it could be. We all do: we're only human.
Also depending on the codebase (and language to some degree), if someone senior writes a lot of overcomplex or abstract code that the rest of the team can't understand/maintain, that's just as much a problem as anything else.
> if someone senior writes a lot of overcomplex or abstract code
For me this is a much bigger concern than subtle changes to method names. My biggest headache digging into new codebases is when I run into layers and layers of abstraction that save 3 lines of code but force me to construct an entire mental map of the codebase before I can understand how anything works.
Any tips for giving feedback to senior people here? A lot of the complexity from abstraction is very hard to quantify and experienced people can have arguments that sound reasonable.
> Any tips for giving feedback to senior people here? A lot of the complexity from abstraction is very hard to quantify and experienced people can have arguments that sound reasonable.
Perhaps a starting point for this discussion is to point out that the DRY principle is nice and all, but there is also WET. Premature abstractions are bad code, a liability and hinder development. It's always better to have two independent but mostly similar codepaths than a strategy pattern with two concrete implementations. If it's cleaner to copy/paste a method and do some tweaks, do that instead. It's not like you can't refactor it when additional use cases emerge, and if they don't emerge then the abstraction wasn't needed to begin with.
Plenty of people believe that being senior is being clever with complex stuff. It isn't. Being senior is to know you don't need complex stuff, and be able to keep as simple as possible. Abstractions go against that.
Is the abstraction so that they can easily swap out pieces of the system without a single headache, or write effective tests, or to make it easy to operate in a soup of services? Because then it makes complete sense.
Like dependency injection is something that a lot of juniors struggle to understand. Or in larger applications DDD and all the crap that goes along with it.
There's a long list of things that I think are abused in an effort to save on some vaguely defined future cost that never seems to materialize. Some things off the top of my head:
* Interfaces(particularly in java) that have 1 implementation.
* Interfaces with many implementations but where each implementation is used in exactly 1 place.
* large inheritance hierarchies with generic type parameters. I'm sure there's a good use case for this but
it's usually a pain.
* Writing "generic" code in an effort to make something re-usable when in reality the code has knowledge of every location it is used in and tightly couples all implementations
I actually like the “one interface with one implementation” as it makes for less surprises.
With an interface I know that only that method can be called. If a class is passed in i have no idea what methods going to be used. It also gives me a better feeling that the coder has in mind what they need a parameter to do without worrying that they are going to rely on a couple of othogonal methods to be called.
The "death by a thousand abstractions" problem must be one of the most difficult ones to solve. Each abstraction in isolation makes sense and looks like an improvement, but given a few years, the overall code becomes an inscrutable mess of layers upon layers of complexity, hiding away what it actually does.
As a more senior dev who reviews junior prs all the time I hope they have the same view. I work with a lot of great people who seem to always want to get better, so I think they do. I only wish I had the same level of scrutiny when I was a junior!
I haven't looked in a while but I could never find an easy way to mimic macOS's cmd/ctrl behavior in Linux. Being able to cmd+c to copy from a terminal window comes in clutch.
Not saying it's what's keeping me from using Linux for everything or anything, but that's a more annoying shortcut and also requires me to not accidently do the same key combo that gets used in every other application. It's nice that I can muscle-memory cmd+c on my Mac and not have to think about it when I'm using the terminal specifically
Eh, I might complain about the hardware sometimes but it's not like I can get a Linux laptop that's anywhere near as good in terms of build quality... Well. Unless I just install Linux on my MacBook of course...
