Critic calls the essay's premise flawed
4 Yesterday 11:49 AM · 13h ago · 4 comments · 1 source · development 4 of 4
A commenter rejects the essay outright, arguing that understanding the full 'why' is a precondition for correctly fixing problems and that skipping it risks bandaid solutions.
“Understanding the complete "why" is a precondition for that. Not bothering to hear a complete explanation because you trust your people to do the right thing is fine, but then why were you on that call in the first place?”
f33d5173Michael Heap Author of the essaySVP of engineering (unnamed) Subject of the essay
The whole story articlespostscomments the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
What people said 24 voices · best of 31 · verbatim
-
"Okay, then I'm going to rewomble the dinglehop, which should un-galvatrate the percapitator." Why is the SVP in the meeting at all? If they don't want the details, they can't contribute to the change, or even evaluate whether the change makes sense at all. The SVP could be completely removed from this situation and the outcome would be exactly…
-
N
I don't want the details: https:// michaelheap.com/i-dont-want-th e-details/ Discussion: http:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9815466
-
Lots of folks are commenting on the internal dynamics, but the other part that didn't resonate with me was actually the what happens next part. This may be an overreaction on my part, stemming from watching lots of engineers suggest expensive solutions to relatively minor issues. And it's a mistake I've made myself before as well, I started in…
-
> "What happens when requirements change inside the launch window?" > "The alert fired but..."In the running example I think it is clear that you could stop at any point and address the problem from that point rather than continuing. Questions such as "Why do we permit last minute changes at all?" are given no space.In a complex system sometimes…
-
I sympathise with this, and a lot of teams do operate that way, but I fundamentally disagree with it.Part of the reason Amazon's CoE-driven engineer culture had such operation excellence is that the responsibility was driven the whole way up the management chain. If your manager didn't dig down to the root cause of a sev2, the director was damn…
-
Asking what the OP was going to change is not an automatic nod of approval for his approach. I’ve been part of some large interventions spanning multiple quarters, that started from a simple conversation with an exec just like this. There are downstream effects to these decisions that affect many stakeholders and departments - so they cannot be…
-
> If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.There are many reasons an executive needs to know what’s happening even if they’ve delegated the decision making authority.Nobody can go to their boss and say “I don’t know what’s being done. I let…
-
Strongly disagree with this.In order to figure out a good solution, you have to have mastery over the problem. That takes a bunch of work.> Understanding an issue is not the same as fixing it. A good explanation can make things worse. Once everyone agrees that the behaviour was reasonable, the urgency to change anything disappears.This is a…
-
A good explanation is not a fix but is a good starting point to a good diagnosis which is the foundation of a good fix.The issue is when the calls and urgency are raised before making some mental space to even verify that there is enough clarity on what happen and these interrupt the clarification and remediation planning process.Saying you…
-
> "I don't want the details. I want to know what we're changing."This really feels like the sort of senior manager who would say "oh, this/these team/s screwed up, so here's the plan they came up with", talking about their team/s.Speaking as a C-suite guy, "they" is about as contrary as I can think of what I expect a leader to do: it's "we", and…
-
The post-mortem process can cover all of these things: - what happened - impact - root causes - what will be changed (commitments) You can't really talk about what to change w/o talking about root causes, and you can't talk about that without talking about what happened. You also can't consider the costs of commitments to be made w/o discussing…
-
I think that's overthinking it.First of all, he didn't say the executive "trusted them completely". Those are your words.He said "The executive assumed that we were competent, and was saying "I already believe you. Now let's talk about what happens next".".That can be true even if they don't trust them completely. Let's say he trusted them 80% and…
-
Idiotic article. Nobody collects "why"s so they can not change anything. Not changing anything is never the failure mode. The failure mode is changing the wrong thing. If you are a leader, and something egregious goes wrong, it is your job to ensure that your people don't just put some bandaid fix on it that will keep causing issues indefinitely…
-
This is a very long winded way of saying, "I don't care how it happened, tell me what you are going to do about it."There's something about the way this is drafted that irks me. It reads like AI, but not floridly so. Mostly, it's the optimistic assumptions layered throughout. That management care about reasonableness, that the reasons it actually…
-
I agree with the gist of the author's point, but often when managers say they don't want the details, they really meant that they do want the details, just to some unspecified level, that you must divine. Give them less, and they aren't satisfied, and you risk damaging their trust in your expertise. So I've learned to give enough details until…
-
There's a reason 5 Why's Analysis is a thing. If you just say "here's a bunch of stuff we're changing," but you haven't said enough about the root cause, then no one will understand whether we're doing enough (or too much; or the wrong things). I like the framing of being empathetic - everyone is smart, doing the best they can with their knowledge…
-
I would agree with you, this just sets up a scenario where the SVP positions themselves as a leader, without having to understand something technical, and without making the decisions on how to change things. It isnt about trust, it is about performing accountability so the SVP can say they did their job.I think the author of the article is going…
-
I've never seen an incident report or postmortem that didn't include action items to cover the core issue noted in this writing: "can we / how do we prevent this failure mode from recurring?"I'm not saying these moments of discovery / epiphany aren't valuable, they are and this retelling is enjoyably written.I am saying that action items borne of…
-
I can't help but notice that a climate of fear around being deemed non-essential or otherwise getting on an authority figure's bad side tends to create significant mismatches in priorities and breakdowns of trust that could be upstream of significant organizational inefficiency in a variety of situations. Perhaps solutions to meta-problems of this…
-
I thought keeping details away from c-suit regardless of how technical these people are was the standard thing to do. Your job is to make these guys work the minimum. We fucked up, we fixed it and it won’t happen again. They don’t need to know anything else. You could upload the forensics report to a share drive and make the link available if they…
-
> The executive assumed that we were competent, and was saying "I already believe you. Now let's talk about what happens next".Apropos, I was once told a Japanese saying: "Fix the problem, not the blame."I must have repeated this charming story a dozen times before realizing it makes no sense in Japanese -- it relies entirely on English idioms.
-
> To drive change in your organization, don't ask "why did this happen?". Instead, ask: What are we changing so that the same class of failure is less likely next time?I don't understand. The implication of "don't" and "instead" is that we should somehow be able to figure out what to change, without understanding the problem.
-
Some of the best life advice I learned during conscription as a squad leader: do not explain if an explanation is not asked for. If you (or, importantly, your subordinates!) mess something up and are confronted by a superior, the only correct reply is "Yes sir I screwed up sir I’m sorry sir it won’t happen again".
-
"Okay, everyone is overworked, and we need you to hire more people for this team. We have too much tech debt, and we can't predict which bit of it will explode next week. The change needs to start with the attitudes of our executive leadership."Oops, now I'm fired.
All 4 developments of Blog post 'I Don't Want the Details' sparks HN debate over… →
MastodonHacker NewsNewswires