It's not that these things aren't annoying—it's that they are annoying, and that drives tons of dyspeptic discussion that in the end drowns out anything that's actually interesting. Since that's a bad outcome, we need to refrain from driving the thread there. (I've moved these complaints to a stubthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45389100 - if anyone has an urge to reply, it would be fine to do so there)
(p.s. what look like chapter headings in the OP are in fact hyperlinks)
e.g.
- Critical path/flow diagrams [0] are incredibly useful for both laying out what has to happen in serial vs what can be parallelized. That being said, I've almost NEVER seen them used and 90% of the time they are used it's b/c I made one
- SO many important processes are not documented so people can't even opine about how to fix them. I once documented a process and everyone agreed step 4 was wrong. What was amazing is no one agreed on what step 4 actually was.
- Most of the big arguments I've seen about projects are less "what should we do" but more "when do we want it" e.g. one party want's it next week but another one wants to have more features so it will take longer. [1] I've often dealt with this by using the following metaphor:
"Oh, so you want to move house every two weeks?
If you give me six months I'll build you the world's most amazing Winnebago/RV with a hot tub, satellite TV, queen size bed and A/C.
If you want it tomorrow I'm going to give you a wheelbarrow, pillow and an iPad."
0 - https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter3/67/2-flow-d... and https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter3/71/6-swim-l...
1- https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter3/51/reality-...
Making technically good decisions is one of a distressing number of domains where making any attempt at all will put someone a long way ahead of the game vs most people who wield power. Several advanced techniques that nearly nobody seems to do:
"Do we have evidence that this is a good idea?"
"What if we assume that we achieve the most likely outcome of this action, based on past experience and checking what happened when other people tried doing it? Is it a good idea?" [0]
"Assuming we just keep doing what we're doing, where will we be in 12 months?"
[0] Please someone get this one into the mainstream US debate next time they're trying to start a war.
Speaking as someone with 20 years in uniform and as a War College grad (if only by correspondence) . . . the military ironically has this wired more than any other institution in the Federal government. The reason the military gets drawn into so much of US foreign policy is not because of a fetish for blowing things up. It's because it's the only institution where formalized planning is a thing, the only one where feats of large-scale logistics are par for the course, and the only one where "I'm not going there because I might get hurt" isn't a valid excuse.
As an example, one of the best ways for distributing aid after a natural disaster is an amphibious task force, because you can send the same Marines in to distribute aid that you would to take territory. And going into relatively unprepared areas and setting up infrastructure for follow-on forces is basically their bit either way.
The problem comes in because military force is never the complete solution in and of itself outside of something like what's currently happening in Ukraine. And when you involve all the other agencies plus scads of glory-seeking politicians, it's hard to keep things from becoming a shitshow.
Declaring victory and running way is the common theme of US foreign policy.
Typical slippery slope. "The problem comes in because military force is never the complete solution in and of itself outside of something like <insert any use of army>"
Who gets what land? What happens to the people whose houses are destroyed? What happens to those whose farms are litered with landmines?
This is the posters point. The military can execute on a lot of things effectively but in order to go from 80% to 100% you need more than just them.
Novorossiya is the name for the southern mainland of The Ukraine. The name dates back to the late 18th century, there’s nothing really “new” about it. Do you consider the name America to be old? Novorossiya is as old.
I suggest you find out how these lands were merged into The Ukraine during the Soviet era.
What alternatives would be more fair, from your perspective?
It would be more fair for the Americans to first return to Europe and only then voice their valuable opinions about fairness.
Whatabout
Whatabout
What about taking arguments of this quality back to Reddit, where they belong?
What do you call African Americans and Asians? Just curious.
That being said, we're not the orcs this time, so your point is tangential at best.
I do love the smell of racism and hypocrisy in the morning.
Unless you think the resources of the clearly guilty are limitless, this sounds like Versailles-type collective punishment that may be satisfying, and maybe even moral, but is counter-productive long-term.
Ie, the US identifies very strongly with three wars (revolutionary, civil, and ww2) where military force was a necessary but not sufficient condition. Ie, the US lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan despite having a far more favorable balance of military forces because they could never find a political solution. If you were taught that wars are won by force alone, you were miseducated.
- (pre-Covid) No working from home, face-to-face time is essential for innovation and collaboration.
- (during Covid) We are doing a great job WFH. Our productivity did not decline.
- (after Covid) Return to the office. Face-to-face time is essential for innovation and collaboration.
And always supported with "data".
The problems started mostly with cohorts hired remote during COVD. Something about COVID wfh attracted a lot of remote candidates with not so great intent: The overemployed people getting multiple jobs, the side hustle bros who needed a paycheck and healthcare while they worked on their startup idea, the 4 Hour Workweek people who tried to travel the world and answer Slack once a day or other people who generally just weren’t interested in actually doing work while remote. It started to add up over time. There were also the people who cancelled daycare and tried to watch kids while they worked, people who were never at their keyboard for some reason, a guy who was always catching COVID or going to a funeral whenever you needed to schedule a meeting. It really wore everyone down. I wished we could have stuck with the pre-COVID remote crew because for some reason everything changed when everyone started WFH.
Edit: changed question mark to period to clarify.
This caveat pretty much defines reality.
1. Some subconscious process makes a cynical decision about what course of action is most beneficial for you.
2. Another part, known as the "Press Secretary" comes up with a good sounding motivation for why this is the morally right thing to do.
3. You now genuinely believe you're doing the right thing, and can execute your cynical plan, full of righteous zeal!
I'm as autism-brained as anyone, and would probably prefer brutal honesty in all communications, but I also think you have to accept that well functioning human organizations don't operate like that, and if you want to be part of such organizations it's best for everyone to accept how they work.
The trouble is that you have to consciously shift to Type 2 thinking, it takes longer, and it's tiring. Dave Snowden of Cynefin fame has a great bit (paraphrasing here) about the purely Type 2 thinker in ancient days on the African savannah getting eaten by a lion. Because he or she sits there doing a complex analysis of "OK, felid, yellow fur, moving towards me, etc. etc." while the Type 1 thinker goes "Oh shit! Lion!" and runs away.
Type 1 thinking has a role. You just have to be mindful about when you're misusing it.
Re the unavailable data: Smart people ask before a big change, get told what devs are missing and need to instrument/record and then leverage those new metrics for the before/after comparison. Not-smart people yolo the changes, ask for the metrics after and go whoops it's too hard or impossible to check.
I find this one interesting, a business youtuber I follow said he finally realized that his teams all got ~5% better every year if he just left them alone and changed nothing. He said he used to have all these ideas he wanted to implement, but that if they didn’t have a lot of potential upside, they weren’t worth the short term drops associated with reimplementing, retraining and the teams having to relearn and explore their new problem space.
I’ve tried exactly this and it was shocking to me that even when faced with examples of themselves failing to do something, people would just willingly go on the record with this:
Lindsay: Well, did it work for [us last time]? Tobias: No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but ... But it might work [this time].
One of the first big problems I solved was almost by accident. We had a backend and a frontend team and we kept missing deadlines because they would work separately on features and the two wouldn’t mate up so we’d have to do another couple iterations to make everything work and “work” belonged in air quotes because things were hammered to fit.
The biggest of the problems encountered here was data dependencies in the inputs resulting in loops in the APIs where you couldn’t get one piece of data without another, and vice versa. So we started drawing data dependency diagrams during the planning meetings as an experiment, instead of diagramming the data structures, and the problem went away basically overnight.
Oddly enough, these same people would be the ones pushing for documentation and trying to stonewall other teams’ work for not being documented enough. It was like they knew the game they were playing but wanted to project an image of being the people against the issue, not the ones causing the problem. Also, forcing other teams to document their work makes it easy for you to heroically come in and save the day.
There needs to be a person who will take charge and learn/document the whole system, except people who work on it are overloaded and too exhausted to take this on. And management doesn't necessarily have the insight or incentive to make this happen. It's an interesting phenomenon.
I've had countless conversations about this with examples. Still, tickets remain some variation of "called, did some troubleshooting, fixed it".
Mermaid has its place, but Draw.io is so much more flexible.
And this usually ends bad. Yet it keeps repeating because there are no lessons learned (but learnings /s).
The powers that be keep calling everything a success until the next reshuffle.
Then it all repeats all over again (I'm clearly jaded by my recent experiences).
- Situation: The pilot is required to recognize the current situation and identify the possible dangers. This is the most important step of the decision-making process since detecting the situation accurately gives the critical information to start the process correctly and produce a feasible resolution to the impending situation.
- Options: Generate any possible option regardless of the feasibility of success. It is most important to create as many options as possible since there will be a larger pool of options to choose the most appropriate solution to the situation.
- Choose: From the options generated, the pilot is required to choose a course of action assessing the risks and viability. Act: Act upon the plan while flying in accordance with safety and time availability. The most important step of this process is time, as the pilot is challenged against time to fix the problem before the situation further deteriorates.
- Evaluate: Ask the question, "Has the selected action been successful?" and evaluate your plan to prepare for future occurrences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_decision_making#Decision...
However, Body was real time combat, and I think the FAA is supposed to be beyond a cockpit crisis, and maybe another framework is Demings PDCA framework, which looks like you could roughly match the pieces.
Both yuml and mermaid don't get you control over layout. I think that's a feature. If the layout engine can make a pretty picture that means your dependencies aren't too complex, but if the graph looks terrible and complicated, that means you're system is also probably terrible and complicated.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vstirbu....
If you manage to improve the signal to noise ratio it feels a lot more manageable and understandable.
Worked with an enterprise architect once who couldn't say anything that didn't start with "in this complex and ever changing information landscape". You built this complex and ever changing information landscape, sir. It consists of your hexagonal architecture, your microservices, your kubernetes cluster.
I've never heard of it, but I'm impressed by OP's website and I'm interested in learning more.
edit: There's a whole list in the website.
edit (pt. 2): How would you compare the Information Architecture scene to the Effective Altruism scene? Are these scenes linked/overlapping in any particular way?
System A is the highest priority fix and we want to incorporate parts of system B into system A (they never should have been in B) but if we move them to system A, the other parts of system B will break (so we need to fix those) and then additionally system C will no longer work so we need to fix that, and on and on…
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Working on a legacy codebase last year I kept repeating to myself: They made it work, they didn't make it sensible.
I once worked in a department that was a dumping ground for failed projects. A 10 year long mess; it was both constant garbage and an essential scapegoat. A mess that everyone can blame, from the C-suite, to peer organizations, to even the people who worked inside the org.
Wikipedia has a great primer on the topic, which I think is more incisive than the OP's holistic framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_can_model
I also want to add another thought to that: I’m so glad howtomakesenseofanymess.com exists, warts and all. I’d much rather it exist in some imperfect form than not exist at all.
We ought to be more accepting of good and imperfect creations, because that encourages creativity. We need more of this!
Not quite the same as this submission, but a better place to start for most people.
All: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
It's not that these things aren't annoying—it's that they are annoying, and that drives tons of dyspeptic, offtopic discussion that in the end drowns out anything that's actually interesting. Since that's a bad outcome, we need to refrain from driving the thread there.
What I mean is that I think this website (at least from my perspective) has a successful, novel approach to representing books on the web.
I don't mean to discount your point. UX issues are very serious and can ruin an otherwise carefully presented work. My point is that despite these issues, I am impressed by the creator's approach to the website.
"Each time you see a word that is highlighted, [...] it means that this term is a lexicon enabled term. By clicking on that term, you will see a page listing all other uses of that term within the book."
a { background-color: transparent; }
javascript:document.querySelectorAll('a').forEach(el => el.style.backgroundColor = 'transparent')If this bothers people, it can also be changed with Stylebot or the like, using a rule like this to change the max-width, which is set to 400px, to a larger value:
p, ul, li { max-width: 800px; }
Seriously, a paginated interface for longtext? Hyperlinks not styled as hyperlinks? Text with random highlights? And most of the short blurbs really just more words without any additional clarification?
You make sense of a mess by having the ability to organize thought & data, and I am 100% convinced that the author does not have that ability.
I suspect it’s intentionally designed to be unpleasant to encourage book sales.
If you’re reading a book preview and have an awful time of it, why would that encourage you to buy the book? You’re more likely to close the site and move away.
The highlighted links are incredibly off-putting, like buying a second-hand book that someone has already highlighted. The readable text is so narrow and small, but the sections are so short that you immediately hit the massive "Buy a Book" upsell banner at the bottom, which distracts you. All of this makes it hard to focus on the text itself.
I'll never understand sites that have way too many links in their articles. Am I mean to click away as I'm reading a paragraph? Do you want me to stay on the article or do you want me to be distracted and go somewhere else?
Probably a mix of a style choice that didn't hit, and how pages were split up so it isn't as convenient as reading the book.
And the columns are painfully narrow which impedes readability. Overly wide body text is often a problem people recognize, but overly narrow is equally problematic.
It's a very strange experience to have to scroll to read all the text, even when there's barely any text to begin with.
If it works, they'd be dumb not to. (For the record, I don't think it works, and I don't think that was their intent.)
Commenters are correct that the whole thing reads like a meta joke, where the site itself is a mess. We have to at least consider the possibility that the author is in on the joke.
Petition to eliminate this stub, and merge this discussion of *the website's primary distinguishing feature* into the main conversation.
https://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/chapter1/19/every-th...
I think most people can't write nothingness like this even if they try very hard. And if they achieve that they can't make the emphasis this ugly.