Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings.

I just wrapped up a month-long incident, and my body broke down on me, so I spent the whole weekend inside and taking ibuprofen!

Hopefully, you had a better weekend and managed to restore energy for the week ahead!

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Things I enjoyed in the past week

• AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less (xpost) Another great post by Charity Majors.
• 10 reasons why (human) creativity will save the day a post by a writer I follow on Substack.
• I've been enjoying the World Cup, I have my Argentina and Japan jerseys ready!

At work, we've been trying to redesign our test environment architecture for a long time.

A lot of effort has gone nowhere, between just trying to patch it and trying to burn it down and create anew. In general, the more I pay attention, the more I notice things, the "resistance to change" type of things that a lot of books talk about (e.g., Switch, Thinking, Fast and Slow).

Lack of Clarity

Whenever people are confused or simply unaware of the new solution, the status quo wins.

There's a lot of pull not to let go, even if that ship is sinking or making us really unproductive.

You not only need documentation, but I've also noticed you need clear steps and actions repeated again and again. As the phrase goes, when you're tired of repeating, they've started to hear it.

Make them Care

People fear losing what makes them productive (even if not really that much productive), or we're still talking about how that attempt 4 years ago failed, we should never try again.

In practice, we should look into ways to make them care about the new solution, explain how it will benefit them, or evoke an emotional attachment to it similar to that for old technology.

Like: "We won't be fixing this again and again, or turn it on and forget the platform will take care."

Make the right thing easy

This is important; people will ask for all their hacks or tricks to be "grandfathered" into the new solution.

And while some may make sense, most of the time, it doesn't. Because they're built around unblocking a single person while not benefiting the group.

I don't fully like the word "incentives," but the incentives aren't aligned and are clearly visible because this single person knows the "Konami code" for the test environments.

These people tend to be blocked one way, and they need to deliver their ticket; they push all the buttons and get unblocked, so they keep doing it.

In practice, these behaviors should be made harder and harder, instead of fixing the actual issue, or fixing the platform.

Happy coding!