Yeah I mean obviously the technical points here are correct (and I wish my colleagues would write more robust code with less Bash and regex all over the place), but I don’t know why he thinks you need an asshole manager to deliver that message.
Over-engineered. Too many moving parts. Refactor.”
That was it. No “nice work.” No “good attempt”. Just a hard stop.
Uhm yeah, would writing “good attempt” have hurt? Obviously not. He could easily have been nice and still deliver the technical information.
Good attempt, but I think this is too over-engineered with too many moving parts. For instance x y z would be simpler to maintain, and a b c isn’t robust to 1 2 3 for example.
The feedback in the article was obviously far from perfect, but from the sound of it, “good attempt” could be an actively harmful thing to say. Lots of effort had gone into making the wrong thing and making it fragile, which isn’t good at all, it’s bad. If you’d asked an employee to make a waterproof diving watch, and they came back with a mechanical clock made from sugar, even though it’s impressive that they managed to make a clock from sugar, it’s completely inappropriate as it’d stop working the instant it got wet. You wouldn’t want to encourage that kind of thing happening again by calling it good, and it’s incompatible enough with the brief that acknowledging it as an attempt to fit the brief is giving too much credit - someone who can do that kind of sugar work must know it’s sensitive to moisture.
The manager can apologise for not checking in sooner before so much time had been spent on something unsuitable and for failing to communicate the priorities properly, and acknowledge the effort and potential merit in another situation without implying it was good to sink time into something unfit for purpose without double checking something complicated was genuinely necessary.
Saying “good attempt” is just a nice platitude. It doesn’t actually mean that what you’ve done is good, especially if you follow it up with (effectively) “but you’ve got to do it all again”. I think most people understand that.
It’s not guaranteed that it’s interpreted as a platitude by the person it’s directed at, and when the mismatch between the task and the work done is big enough to make it obviously a platitude, it’s just patronising, and risks being more insulting than not saying it at all.
Yeah I mean obviously the technical points here are correct (and I wish my colleagues would write more robust code with less Bash and regex all over the place), but I don’t know why he thinks you need an asshole manager to deliver that message.
Uhm yeah, would writing “good attempt” have hurt? Obviously not. He could easily have been nice and still deliver the technical information.
It doesn’t take much. Don’t be a dick.
The feedback in the article was obviously far from perfect, but from the sound of it, “good attempt” could be an actively harmful thing to say. Lots of effort had gone into making the wrong thing and making it fragile, which isn’t good at all, it’s bad. If you’d asked an employee to make a waterproof diving watch, and they came back with a mechanical clock made from sugar, even though it’s impressive that they managed to make a clock from sugar, it’s completely inappropriate as it’d stop working the instant it got wet. You wouldn’t want to encourage that kind of thing happening again by calling it good, and it’s incompatible enough with the brief that acknowledging it as an attempt to fit the brief is giving too much credit - someone who can do that kind of sugar work must know it’s sensitive to moisture.
The manager can apologise for not checking in sooner before so much time had been spent on something unsuitable and for failing to communicate the priorities properly, and acknowledge the effort and potential merit in another situation without implying it was good to sink time into something unfit for purpose without double checking something complicated was genuinely necessary.
Saying “good attempt” is just a nice platitude. It doesn’t actually mean that what you’ve done is good, especially if you follow it up with (effectively) “but you’ve got to do it all again”. I think most people understand that.
It’s not guaranteed that it’s interpreted as a platitude by the person it’s directed at, and when the mismatch between the task and the work done is big enough to make it obviously a platitude, it’s just patronising, and risks being more insulting than not saying it at all.