I can’t find it, but Julia Evans once did a comic where a stick figure is new at an org and thinking WTF,WTF,WTF, and then the person who has been there says “oh, this is normal” and then time passes, the WTFs get written smaller and more spaced out, and then a third person comes and the original person is now saying “this is normal” to a new person thinking “WTF”.
I joined Stripe in 2018, when the onboarding classes were small enough to fit into a large seminar room. Patrick (co-founder) empowered us to push back on the answer, “that’s how we’ve always done it” when asking folks why things were as they were. That’s always stuck with me, and I’ve encouraged new hires at Stripe (and now my next company) to question things (within reason).
We should have an explicit justification for what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. Otherwise, we might be doing the wrong thing.
I really appreciate the emphasis on Chesterton’s Fence here of making sure that you double-check the “why” for each “WTF”. On my current team, I have quite a bit more tenure at the company compared to my teammates and I’m often able to provide some historical context for some of our stranger WTFs.
Oh man, especially in the realm of “local build and test setups”. Yes, it’s a bit clunky to manage the testing VM, but when I onboarded, I spent a week deploying our product to my dev machine, and people definitely got into a state every once in a while where the environment was just done-for and would need to be rebuilt. I’d much rather just pave the VM and run a one-liner to reprovision it.
I sort of did this unintentionally. When I joined $current_role, I wrote down as much as I could in my notebook (obviously) to understand what was going on in this place. The processes, teams, what acronyms stood for. Part of this was the “WTF”s.
When it was decided to start documenting these WTFs (read: infosec risks), I put my hand up, because I was kind of across some of it already. Now I’m just the guy they get to log risks in our risk management DB. “Zak, can you add this”, “Zak is this in the risk man db?”. I don’t know how I feel about this however, being a junior (plus it isn’t really my role, its supposed to sit with a different team, and I have project deliverables to be doing /rant).
Not wrong. But I don’t think that’s going to happen here regardless given the current internal state of the org. Needless to say, I don’t have plans to stay for very much longer.
Strongly agree with this, and, can report it works very well in management & directorial roles as well. Being able to use this technique effectively is also a consulting superpower - because consultants are especially vulnerable to being “the person who just complains about everything” if they’re not careful.
I used to ask a lot of questions when first starting a role, but just stopped when the answers weren’t satisfactory and I was afraid of coming across as someone who just complains all the time. Really well put approach in the article
I can’t find it, but Julia Evans once did a comic where a stick figure is new at an org and thinking WTF,WTF,WTF, and then the person who has been there says “oh, this is normal” and then time passes, the WTFs get written smaller and more spaced out, and then a third person comes and the original person is now saying “this is normal” to a new person thinking “WTF”.
I joined Stripe in 2018, when the onboarding classes were small enough to fit into a large seminar room. Patrick (co-founder) empowered us to push back on the answer, “that’s how we’ve always done it” when asking folks why things were as they were. That’s always stuck with me, and I’ve encouraged new hires at Stripe (and now my next company) to question things (within reason).
We should have an explicit justification for what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. Otherwise, we might be doing the wrong thing.
Dan luu references it here https://danluu.com/wat/ but I don’t know if it exists as a comic
That seems like it.
I really appreciate the emphasis on Chesterton’s Fence here of making sure that you double-check the “why” for each “WTF”. On my current team, I have quite a bit more tenure at the company compared to my teammates and I’m often able to provide some historical context for some of our stranger WTFs.
In particular “The problem is relatively new, and the old problem it replaced was much worse” is one I can empathize a lot with.
Oh man, especially in the realm of “local build and test setups”. Yes, it’s a bit clunky to manage the testing VM, but when I onboarded, I spent a week deploying our product to my dev machine, and people definitely got into a state every once in a while where the environment was just done-for and would need to be rebuilt. I’d much rather just pave the VM and run a one-liner to reprovision it.
I sort of did this unintentionally. When I joined $current_role, I wrote down as much as I could in my notebook (obviously) to understand what was going on in this place. The processes, teams, what acronyms stood for. Part of this was the “WTF”s.
When it was decided to start documenting these WTFs (read: infosec risks), I put my hand up, because I was kind of across some of it already. Now I’m just the guy they get to log risks in our risk management DB. “Zak, can you add this”, “Zak is this in the risk man db?”. I don’t know how I feel about this however, being a junior (plus it isn’t really my role, its supposed to sit with a different team, and I have project deliverables to be doing /rant).
At the very least it looks like it’ll give you some strong arguments next time you ask for a raise :)
Not wrong. But I don’t think that’s going to happen here regardless given the current internal state of the org. Needless to say, I don’t have plans to stay for very much longer.
atm my life would be a WTF notebook. :-/
Strongly agree with this, and, can report it works very well in management & directorial roles as well. Being able to use this technique effectively is also a consulting superpower - because consultants are especially vulnerable to being “the person who just complains about everything” if they’re not careful.
Wish I had this a couple years back.
I used to ask a lot of questions when first starting a role, but just stopped when the answers weren’t satisfactory and I was afraid of coming across as someone who just complains all the time. Really well put approach in the article
https://thedailywtf.com/