
Resist the urge to punish everyone for one person's mistake - icey
http://sivers.org/punish
======
frossie
This being HN, let's talk about software.

I have seen people very wrong-headedly trying to apply rules to all employees
because of one misbehaving person, under the misguided notion that this is
somehow "fair". For example, a long time ago there was a person in the admin
group that was basically a slacker - came in late, left early and didn't work
very hard. Management got really annoyed by this and made a "Everybody in by
9am OR ELSE, no exceptions" rule. Well you can imagine how that went down will
all us geeks who were slaving 14 hours a day till the witching hour to fix
problems. They managed to piss off the most productive people in the building,
instead of standing up to one person and saying "you will be in by 9am,
because that is when your manager needs you, and if you're not, you will be
fired".

So, unless you are managing an organisation that is so large, and you trust
your middle management so little, that you can not address problems on a case-
by-case basis, then stay away from sweeping rules. I'm with the OP on this
one.

~~~
enjo
In one of my early post-college jobs I landed at a small startup. We had
something like 6 employees at the time. As my wife was still in PhD school, I
was commuting a pretty good distance. So I figured: "I'll just start every day
at home, make the drive after rush hour and leave for home before rush hour
hits." I was essentially in the office for about 5 hours a day.

Lasted about a week before the MBA in the building pulled me aside and told me
that wasn't going to work. The reason: the customer support guy also lived a
long way out and he thought it wasn't fair that I was doing this.

Of course, one of the very reasons I was drawn to programming in the first
place was the flexibility it came with as a job. I could be productive from
almost anywhere... and why shouldn't I be? From my perspective, if he didn't
like it, well he should think about a career change.

Now this was early 2002, which some might remember was a terrible time for
actually finding jobs... so I reluctantly gave in. My commute went from
roughly 30 minutes each way to 1-2 hours. I was miserable. That all changed
after about a year as the company grew and I gradually slipped back into a
better driving schedule.

It's still something that sticks with me today. Now that I own the company, I
promote a results oriented environment that gives everyone the flexibility to
come and go as they please. Sure we sometimes have to get everyone together
for meetings, but it's hardly been an issue so far.

------
pmorici
Does the author live in San Fransisco? Because I see this phenomenon _a lot_
in SF vs other places I've visited. Could have something to do with the
abundance of homelessness in that city but the restrooms esp. seem to be
locked down like Ft. Knox. For a city with such a liberal reputation they sure
act like a bunch of A holes in that respect.

~~~
whyenot
If SF weren't such a liberal city, it would have far fewer homeless. Part of
the problem is all the services that San Francisco provides to people down on
their luck. It makes the city a good place to live if you have nowhere to
live. But some shop owners have lost their patience, and I don't blame them. I
think I'd lose my patience too, after having to hose human feces off of the
sidewalk outside my store several mornings in a row. In some parts of the city
(like the Haight, anywhere near GG Park), it's gotten pretty bad.

~~~
pmorici
If there were more public bathrooms there would probably be a lot less shit on
the streets.

~~~
mattchew
Wait, a grown adult chooses to _take a shit on the sidewalk_ and you want to
blame someone else for this behavior?

My _cat_ has enough self respect to hold his feces if we accidentally close
the door to the laundry room for a while.

~~~
pmorici
Do you think if they choose to crap in the woods in GG park that would be any
better?

------
lsc
the other side of this is that you need to craft your services and policies so
that you are not attractive to troublemakers. For example, at one time I had a
'first month free' policy. Good god. I think maybe 1 customer in 5 was
legitimate, and my 95th percentile got absolutely destroyed (and this was back
when I was paying sucker rates for bandwidth.)

------
MicahWedemeyer
I run a marketplace ( <http://doleaf.com> ) and this is something we try to
get across to our sellers. Some of them have really draconian return policies,
and maybe they have good reason. But, to the buyers, all kinds of "NO NO NO
NO" all over the page is really a turn off.

~~~
icey
This is kind of an aside, but if you get the time sometime, I'd love to see a
blog post of how things are going with DoLeaf. I remember the posting about
your beta awhile back, and it's good to see how much progress you've made
since then.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
Ok, the post is up: [http://blog.aisleten.com/2010/02/04/update-on-doleaf-
progres...](http://blog.aisleten.com/2010/02/04/update-on-doleaf-progress)

I also posted an item here on HN:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1100662> Upvotes would be appreciated

------
smokey_the_bear
Once I took a mini vacation up to a natural hot spring resort. I'd heard it
was a relaxed, hippie-ish, communal living place. When we arrived there were
just signs absolutely everywhere, in big letters at face level on all doors.
Where to take your shoes off, where to be quiet, where to put your food in the
kitchen, how to use the communal food shelves, where you had to wear clothes,
where to line up for dinner.

None of the things were unreasonable. Some seemed a little unnecessarily
precise, but if it had been a more crowded weekend could have been more
critical. Most were intuitive. But it made me uncomfortable. I'd expected to
be able to settle in and find my own place there, but I just felt in the way
due to all the signs. And anything that wasn't explicitly allowed by a sign I
wasn't sure about.

Also, I got a massage there. And when it was over the guy just stormed out
without saying anything. I found out later that it's a style for ending
massages, not saying anything to ruin the buzz of the massage experience. But
I was very startled by it and thought I'd done something wrong. They should
have had a sign about that.

------
swombat
Then again, sometimes, a few lonely rain drops can be the harbinger of a
monsoon. It's worth having balance in this as in all things. Don't just shrug
things off if it can go from an ignorable nuisance to a major disaster - but
don't react emotionally to a perfectly rational problem.

------
10ren
Making changes to addressing problems only when they occur is part of agile
development. The problem here is that the change is an extreme one, that
generalizes from one instance to all. But how do you tell how much you should
generalize?

A starting point is raw statistics: if you have 1000 customers, and 1 has this
problem, should you fix it? Then, account for consequences: how serious is
that one problem (what is its cost to you, to the person, to the community)?
Finally, what are the knock-on effects, looking at the big overall picture:
will addressing this problem improve your business overall, or undermine it?
(sometimes, that 1 in a 1000 problem is a good excuse to fix something, or a
signal to grow in that direction).

Then, you can think about the best way to address the problem. Nasty
prohibitive signs probably don't help; even nice prohibitive signs probably
don't help either. Sometimes, you can reorganize how you do things so that the
problem cannot occur (e.g. when training animals to not do something, you can
train them to _do_ something that is incompatible with the undesired action;
e.g. floppy disks are shaped so that they cannot be inserted in the wrong
way).

The owner of a prominent software respository site told me that no matter what
you write on forms - or how you highlight it - people will simply not read it.

BTW: Sometimes the sign has underlining and exclamation marks added in a
different colour, apparently upon second and third infractions. Exasperation
marks.

------
spatulon
Like with so many things in life, it helps to be the type of person who can
take a step back and reflect objectively, rather than reflexively reacting to
everything. It seems that far too many lack this ability, or at least haven't
learned it.

Offtopic: It's a small world. I went to the same little school as Derek,
albeit much later. Now I know why we could only drink water at lunch.

------
electromagnetic
If he'd ever worked in a cafe or coffee shop that didn't have those rules,
he'd want them plastered up on the wall.

First of all, you get the pissy customers who come in to take every one of
life's problems out on someone who can't retaliate for fear of losing their
job. Secondly, you get the customers who blatantly try to steal; they'll order
ABC at $2.79 but when it's being made, they'll say they ordered DEF at $4.79
and that they're making the order wrong. The time to speak up isn't when
you've paid and it's half-way made, it's when you visibly see them enter it
wrong, however these people know it wasn't entered wrong.

From time to time, you'll occasionally get a variant of type 1, who'll come
into the store and order their coffee wrong (ex. they want a black coffee, but
they'll order 'coffee, no cream, no sugar', which means you'll get coffee one
cream, one sugar, because a black coffee is a black coffee and isn't said any
differently anywhere in the anglosphere, don't be different), they'll then
proceed to swear at the staff in front of a line of customers. As a customer,
I've had to tell these people to leave before and I've seen several others
who've had to do it; it's flat out being a bad person and when these people
have shirts and ties and company logo's plastered on their vehicles, they
deserve to be fired because I'll never use their company. I expect more out of
someone in a business suit, and I frequently see worse language and behaviour
than anyone else.

I know for a fact that if I ran my own cafe/coffee shop, I'd have those exact
rules. I wouldn't have them plastered on the wall, but they'd sure as hell be
enforced on any jackasses who don't know how to behave in public. Life has
rules and boundaries, and far too many people don't understand this. I was
taught this in childhood, I assume everyone else was, but mature fully grown
adults don't seem to grasp this.

I've seen this behaviour in convenience stores and supermarkets, in the
lobbies of companies and in high-end restaurants, and all of their responses
are: please leave the premises, and in the case of the swearing psycho's
they've had the police called on them. I've heard even more stories about this
going on. So why a small diner can't enforce the same rules is well beyond me.
I've seen at dentist offices that they'll kick out the people chatting or
texting away on their blackberries for no other reason than it's annoying to
both staff and the others waiting.

There's an established etiquette in the world, just like there's an
established etiquette on HN and anywhere. I don't go into a full-out swearing
tirade against PG for some perceived wrong caused by myself, no one else does
either. Why people believe they don't have to follow the rules is beyond me,
and I believe these people should be punished to the full extent the law
allows because the law is there to punish those that don't follow societally
established rules and boundaries, AKA societal etiquette.

If I try to rip you off, I expect you to deny me service. If I swear at you
endlessly, I expect you to deny me service. If I'm misusing your property, I
expect you to deny me service.

I'm sorry, to me these are a given and don't need to be up on a wall. For way
too many people, it's not a given.

~~~
pavlov
I'm not a native English speaker and have never lived in the USA, so I'm
having a hard time understanding this:

 _(ex. they want a black coffee, but they'll order 'coffee, no cream, no
sugar', which means you'll get coffee one cream, one sugar, because a black
coffee is a black coffee and isn't said any differently anywhere in the
anglosphere, don't be different)_

Are you saying that "coffee, no cream, no sugar" will be understood as "two
coffees: one without cream, one without sugar"? That seems... unexpected. I
can easily imagine myself making that mistake.

~~~
electromagnetic
Everyone who wants a black coffee says "Black Coffee" or "Coffee, Black", the
word 'black' is the keyword here for how you get your coffee. When a worker
hears "Coffee, no cream, no sugar" what they're actually hearing is 'Coffee'
'Cream' and 'Sugar', the no isn't a keyword to them and you'll get a coffee
with one cream and one sugar just because you said the words. Without those
words, you'd have gotten what you wanted.

When you can say in 2 words exactly what you want, you shouldn't be using 5.

~~~
pyre
> _When you can say in 2 words exactly what you want, you shouldn't be using
> 5._

Right, because human beings should strive to be as efficient as possible and
throw anything that isn't as efficient as possible. Love? Too inefficient!
Socializing? Not getting enough work done! 5 words instead of 2? I'm so
embarrassed that that seppuku is the only option!

> _When a worker hears "Coffee, no cream, no sugar" what they're actually
> hearing is 'Coffee' 'Cream' and 'Sugar',_

So you're saying that the workers aren't paying any attention to what the
customer is _actually_ saying, and that it's definitely the customer's fault
for not knowing the 'secret code' of the coffeeshop?

------
gaius
Tell that to the Marines.

~~~
nzmsv
I think most customers don't expect a diner to be a boot camp :)

