Re:Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professio...
by karatestomp on Friday June 05, 2020 @10:54AM
(#23429242)
I've noticed that (low- to mid-level, at least) business, marketing, and other folks are generally a whole lot looser with their numbers than developers are. That is, they'll toss around measures that aren't meaningful—and not just in some quibbling sense of "well technically maybe these could possibly be wrong" but truly are very likely to be way off the mark—because they didn't properly control for confounders or are clearly measuring the wrong thing or whatever. They'll assign meaning to measures that could easily have nothing to do with what they're saying they mean, or mean the opposite.
... but this usually goes over just fine. Rarely questioned. I think if they didn't do this they'd be just as bad off as developers, if not worse due to (again, generalizing) having a worse understanding of how to measure things well.
- This database change will improve our page load time from 3s to 1s at the cost of 25% of a sprint's capacity.
- This library version change takes X amount of time because there are 45 sites in the code we need to change, and that impacts 120 test cases which we need to rerun.
- Not adopting this <security tech> puts us at risk of an incident like <example incident from the news>.