When Best Practices Backfire - The Peltzman Effect

FromDeveloper Tea

Start listening View podcast show

When Best Practices Backfire - The Peltzman Effect

FromDeveloper Tea

ratings:

Length:

16 minutes

Released:

Jan 30, 2019

Format:

Podcast episode

Description

Today, we're talking about risk compensation.

Released:

Jan 30, 2019

Format:

Podcast episode

Titles in the series (100)

Developer Tea exists to help driven developers connect to their ultimate purpose and excel at their work so that they can positively impact the people they influence. With over 13 million downloads to date, Developer Tea is a short podcast hosted by Jonathan Cutrell (@jcutrell), co-founder of Spec and developer at @Clearbit. We hope you'll take the topics from this podcast and continue the conversation, either online or in person with your peers. Twitter: @developertea :: Email: developertea@gmail.com

Skip carousel

Three Overconfidence Smells: Today we're talking about ways to identify overconfidence in yourself and in your co-workers and we'll offer some tips to address overconfidence. by Developer Tea
14 min listen
Practicing Non-Attachment as a Developer: In today's episode, we're talking about the concept of detachment and how it corresponds to a developers work and behavior. by Developer Tea
15 min listen
Improving Confidence and Neutralizing Threats Through Detached Perception: In today's episode, we're talking about responding to situations by Developer Tea
19 min listen
How We Construct Software, Part 4a: Code and Communication: In part four of our discussion on how we construct software, we're discussing a theory of communication, and how it applies to code. This is a two-part episode (A and B) - subscribe so you don't miss the second half! by Developer Tea
23 min listen
Interview w/ Michael Chan (pt. 1): Today's episode of developer Tea is a personal episode with Michael Chan and today we're digging into faith, life and difficult situations. I challenge you as you're listening to part 1 of this week's two-part episode is to ask yourself how you would answ by Developer Tea
62 min listen
Problem Solving Intuitions - Additive, Subtractive and Reorganizational Thinking: In today's episode, we're talking about solving problems by subtraction vs. additive solutions. by Developer Tea
11 min listen
Interview w/ Ben Orenstein (pt. 2): You might remember today's guest back in episode 19 & 20. Today, we talk about new projects with the guest of the show, Ben Orenstein. During part 2 of this two-part episode, we dig into financial opportunities and I challenge you, while you're listening by Developer Tea
36 min listen
Bad Bugs - Avoiding Burnout When Solving Elusive Problems: Today we're talking about hunting down bugs. We'll cover the history of solving for bugs, recognize the appreciation that we're even able to solve these problems, and offer two tips to keep you encouraged during bug fixes. by Developer Tea
15 min listen
A Discussion On Falsehoods Developers Believe: Today we're talking about various falsehoods. We'll identify some common encounters, and offer some insight into resolving falsehoods when you identify them. by Developer Tea
18 min listen
Proof of Complexity and Seeking Simplicity: Today we're talking about the reality that the work we're doing as developers is complex and those complexities interact with each other. In today's episode, we're talking about ways to chase simplicity when working on complex problems. by Developer Tea
18 min listen
Visualize Your Goals in Details: One of this year's goals may be to become a healthy developer. In today's episode, we're giving a few tips to keep you on a path to maintaining a healthy lifestyle as a developer. by Developer Tea
22 min listen
Practical Tips for Minding the Details: It's December and a lot of folks are thinking about the gifts they plan to purchase or make for loved ones. In today's episode, we're going to talk about how we can take advantage of our appreciation for details and practical ways to come back to the deta by Developer Tea
17 min listen
Interview w/ Ben Orenstein (Part 1): You might remember today's guest back in episode 19 & 20. Today, we talk about new projects with the guest of the show, Ben Orenstein. During part 1 of this two-part episode, we dig into different opportunities in learning and I challenge you, while you'r by Developer Tea
45 min listen
3 Practical Steps for Avoiding Narrative Biases: One of our brain's main jobs is to predict our safety and survival, and stories are one of the best ways to pass down a framework to predict the future based on past experiences. In today's episode, we're talking about the power of narrative and ways to b by Developer Tea
23 min listen
Mental Models - Lenses for Thinking and Decisions (Part 2): In today's episode of Developer Tea we're continuing the discussion on challenging our mental models. by Developer Tea
19 min listen
Adding tests to a big untested codebase - Where do I start?: Where do you start when you're adding tests to an untested codebase? That's what we're talking about in today's episode of developer tea. by Developer Tea
11 min listen
Mental Models - Lenses for Thinking and Decisions (Part 1): Improvement is not a simple concept but usually comes from experience. In today's episode, we're talking about improvement based on questioning what kind of information you should be seeking. by Developer Tea
21 min listen
Expectations vs. Reality: What are you learning today? In today's episode, we're talking about movement in our careers and how our tools can be progressing or limiting our options and how to self-correct. We're also announcing the Tea Break Challenge! by Developer Tea
15 min listen
Why Rules Apply Especially to Exceptions: In today's episode, we're talking about a different way of looking at rules and perhaps come to a different conclusion on rules and understanding how and when rules apply. by Developer Tea
17 min listen
The Zen Developer - What Are You Pushing On?: On today's episode, we're talking about the idea of striving or pushing toward a goal. That energy we're putting into our goals based on our past. In this episode, we're asking you to think about where we're pushing and how we can shift our thinking to es by Developer Tea
12 min listen
How We Construct Software - Part Two (Beliefs and Models): In today's episode, we're going to talk a little bit about belief. by Developer Tea
17 min listen
Interview w/ Michael Chan (pt. 2): Today's episode of developer Tea is a personal episode with Michael Chan and today we're digging into faith, life and difficult situations. I challenge you as you're listening to part 1 of this week's two-part episode is to ask yourself how you would answ by Developer Tea
54 min listen
Interview w/ Bryan Helmig - CTO at Zapier (Part 2): In today's episode, we continue the discussion with Bryan Helmig, CTO of Zapier by Developer Tea
26 min listen
High-Churn Code Should Be Your Cleanest Code: What code do you believe should be the cleanest? by Developer Tea
8 min listen
Poisoning Retrospectives With Hindsight Bias: We recommend structured retrospectives. Identify things that went well and things that didn't go so well during a project or given week. by Developer Tea
12 min listen
Contingencies and Planning for Failure: Most of the time, even when we're succeeding the steps we take on a daily basis are failures. Failure is what we're talking about in today's episode of Developer Tea by Developer Tea
16 min listen
5 Tips for Improving Your Principles of Experimentation: In today's episode, we're talking about variables to inspect when encountering different problems. At the end of the episode, you'll get 5 tips to add to your toolkit to use when you can use in approach to various problems. by Developer Tea
19 min listen
Beating Procrastination: In today's episode, we're talking about specific reasons why we may be running into procrastination in our jobs. by Developer Tea
10 min listen
Replace Your Implicit Questions to Break Out of Incrementalism: Most of the changes you make as a developer are incremental. That's what we're talking about in today's episode. by Developer Tea
21 min listen
Stress Response and Anger as a Secondary Emotion: In today's episode, we're going to talk about the different stages of stress and how we can better manage our influence in the job when we're experiencing a stressful situation. by Developer Tea
16 min listen

More Episodes from Developer Tea

Skip carousel

The Top Resumé Mistake I See, Plus the Best Resumé Advice I've Ever Received: After today's episode, your resumé is going to get better! In this episode I will share the biggest mistake and the best advice I've ever received about building a great resumé. This will take some work from you, but I hope you walk away from this episode feeling like you have the right mindset to improve your resumé drastically, and land more interviews, ultimately leading to better job opportunities for the Developer Tea audience! by Developer Tea
18 min listen
Prioritization Using Critical Path Thinking: In today's episode, we talk about the counterintuitive process of prioritizing based on critical path. This is not a novel concept that I've invented, but rather a revisiting of the classic discussion started by Eli Goldratt in his book "The Goal", and later in his book "Critical Path", based on the theory of constraints. by Developer Tea
14 min listen
Cultural Antidotes - Clarity Isn't Just Honesty: The most common mistake for any manager is to fail to clarify. This often happens because we mistake our average communications for having perfect clarity, when in fact we most often don't communicate at high levels of clarity. This isn't because we are bad at communication, but rather because our social communications carry less consequence when they aren't precise. Clarity is not simply being honest. We'll discuss the importance of clarity in this episode, and your first steps towards achieving clarity above the norm. by Developer Tea
14 min listen
Demystifying Culture and Values: What does your culture have to do with your values? In this episode we open up the discussion about a model of thinking for culture and values to understand how they link, and more importantly, when they don't. by Developer Tea
21 min listen
Principles of Work - Shorten Your Feedback Loops: Your feedback loops should be short enough that the cost of making a mistake is low enough that the value of the learning in the feedback loop exceeds the magnitude of the cost of a mistake. In other words: shorten your feedback loops to the point that you're no longer afraid to make a mistake. by Developer Tea
18 min listen
Principles of Work - Be Your Own Advocate: In this episode we discuss the importance of being your own advocate, and why this is likely the most rational position to hold. The takeaway: At any point, the person advocating the most for you is almost definitely YOU. by Developer Tea
13 min listen
Practical Application of Information Theory: In this episode we discuss a practical application of information theory. Information theory is similar to the classic theory of communication, but distinct in important ways; these two theories together are a useful combo for creating a strategy for clarification. by Developer Tea
17 min listen
Revisiting Core Working Principles - Hyperfixation on Measurements and Communication Degradation: In today's episode we talk about working principles again. Specifically, we're looking at a problem with measurement fixation, as well as the natural curve of degradation that most communication follows. by Developer Tea
19 min listen
Revisiting Core Working Principles - Clarity as a Precursor to Focus and Strategy for Possibilities: In this episode we are revisiting some of my own personal core principles of working. I'm sharing these with you for you to do whatever you want with them, so please share however you can! The principles we discuss today are around the relationship between clarity and focus, and about how most negotiations aren't about feasibility but instead about strategy. by Developer Tea
19 min listen
Two Principle Categories To Judge Productivity Advice: In today's episode we talk about principles of productivity. Most of the advice you receive will fit in the two categories we discuss in this episode. Once you connect with these ideas, you'll be able to use them for your own gain. by Developer Tea
24 min listen
Cost of Delay Curves and Classes of Service: In today's episode we discuss the concept of "cost of delay", and explore the fact that cost of delay does not necessarily follow a linear path. When cost of delay has a cliff, or an exponential curve, how do you weigh one opportunity versus another? by Developer Tea
25 min listen
Taking Personal Accountability for Systematic Failures: "What actions can I take to get better from here?" This seems like a simple concept, but in practice we often are more interested in protecting our ego. In this episode we try to practice this self-accountability through an exercise. by Developer Tea
15 min listen
Stat Series: What Statistical Measure Are You Overusing? (And What to Do About It), Part Two: In this episode we continue our discussion about the most overused statistical measurement. We'll talk about a few more counterintuitive properties of the average, and how you might be underserving your colleagues as a result of thinking in averages. by Developer Tea
19 min listen
Stat Series: What Statistical Measure Are You Overusing? (And What to Do About It), Part One: On average, you're probably overusing this specific type of statistic. In today's episode, we discuss the king of all misleading numbers: averages! There's so much to talk about with averages that we're splitting this into two parts. Disclaimer: I am not a mathematician. But we will talk about some of the interesting properties of averages and why they are so addictive to use for humans, but more practically what counterintuitive ways we might be using them incorrectly. If you're using your sprint velocity to forecast work, this episode is for you! by Developer Tea
18 min listen
Treat Your Time as A Product You Own: Today we explore the idea of treating your time as a product. Start with a wishlist: what do you wish was true about your week? What are your "if-only" statements? Next, put on your product owner hat. How would you improve the situation, if you knew the "consumer"'s requests? This exercise should provide unique insight and a new lens to view your time and agency through. by Developer Tea
11 min listen
Von Restorff Isolation Effect and a Backfiring of Process: The Von Restorff effect says we remember things that stand out. This is probably mostly intuitive - "that stood out to me" is a common colloquialism. But what isn't intuitive is the implied downside of uniformity, which is often the product of process. In other words, if your process creates perfect uniformity, elevating any one thing, say, in priority, is going to be exceedingly difficult. Additionally, if your "escalation" process is overused, it will once again violate the point of the escalation in the first place. "If everything is urgent, nothing is urgent." by Developer Tea
13 min listen
Perform a Career Premortem: In today's episode, we do a journaling exercise to provide a new lens on developing your own career roadmap. We're going to practice the power of hindsight, finding our wiser selves, and ultimately looking forward and backward...at the same time. It sounds a little odd, but it's all based in solid cognitive science. If you have a notoriously hard time figuring out your career path, I'd invite you to participate! by Developer Tea
15 min listen
Delegation, Ownership, Responsibility, and Agency: As you grow your career, you will continuously lean on delegation to scale your efforts and focus on the most important things. True delegation requires ownership, and ownership can be thought of in two critical parts: agency and responsibility. In today's episode, we discuss the fool's errand of delegating only one or the other of these parts. by Developer Tea
16 min listen
Apply Little's Law To What You Can Control: Little's Law explains, in a given queuing system, what the relationships of throughput within that system are. We can garner insights both for our work, and for our own lives, by recognizing how these relationships work and what we can do to utilize them. In this episode, we talk about when it is useful to use Little's law to your advantage. by Developer Tea
13 min listen
Finding Leverage by Escaping Functional Fixedness: Finding leverage is difficult to do, but a lot of the reason for this is that we allow ourselves to fall into well-traveled cognitive pathways. If we reject the solution domain-set that comes to mind immediately, we may be able to consider options for solutions we had never considered. This larger solution set may also include a high-leverage option we had previously ignored. by Developer Tea
12 min listen
Is it Actually Important to Question Assumptions?: In today's episode, we discuss turtles, resolutions, and why your beliefs and what you see as fact is probably worth questioning anyway. by Developer Tea
10 min listen
9 Years - Persistence by Reducing Expectation: Today Marks 9 Years of Developer Tea. Thank you all for your support, and your friendship. I wish you all well on your journey, and may you find clarity, perspective, and purpose. (Don't worry, we aren't going anywhere!) by Developer Tea
18 min listen
Good Plans, Bad Plans, and Road Trips: What characterizes good plans from bad ones? And how can you make your plans better on average? In this episode we discuss how to better organize your intentions and processes to yield better plans. by Developer Tea
19 min listen
Negative and Positive Lollapalooza Effects: The "lollapalooza" effect (coined by Charlie Munger) occurs when multiple other effects have a compounded outcome that tends to create an extreme situation. In this episode, we discuss lollapalooza effects and how you might fall victim to them, and more importantly, how you can use them to your advantage. by Developer Tea
22 min listen
Fresh Eyes - How Anchoring Bias, Bandwagon Effect, Status Quo Bias, and Uniqueness Bias Interact When Joining New Groups: When you are newly joining a team, you have a huge opportunity to do something that no one on the team has: to find your "weathervane." The pressure pushing against you to adopt the beliefs of the team you are joining. What you do with it is one huge way a team can improve, or otherwise, stay the same. by Developer Tea
17 min listen
The Dark Side of Optimism Bias: Most people believe good things will happen by default. Not to be the bearer of bad news, but there's a downside to this endless optimism. You cannot will good things to happen, and when you don't prepare for adverse events, you won't be ready when they inevitably occur. by Developer Tea
15 min listen
Backlog Psychology - Breaking Out of the Habit Trap: Your team's process for managing a backlog is probably growing stale because you are running on habit rather than procedure. Break out of procedure and remind yourself why you have a process to begin with: orient yourself to the outcomes! by Developer Tea
12 min listen
Availability Heuristic and Substituting Hard Questions: What is it about our present situation that changes our perspective? In today's episode we talk about the availability bias and why our present reality looms so large in our decisionmaking. by Developer Tea
17 min listen
Spend Your Time Intentionally Through Expectation Mapping: What do you expect of yourself? Are you spending your time in ways that align with those expectations? In this episode, I provide you a simple framework as a starting lens for getting a better idea of how you are spending your time in relation to who cares the most about those investments. You'll walk away with a new lens on how to evaluate your most precious resource: time. by Developer Tea
15 min listen
What is the Real Question? How To Be An Exceptional Listener: Almost every conversation you have will start with a question. Have you stopped to listen closely? Questions are extremely meaningful and deeply human. Paying close attention to questions is a skill that will put you head and shoulders above the average engineer or manager. by Developer Tea
9 min listen

Discover this podcast and so much more

When Best Practices Backfire - The Peltzman Effect

When Best Practices Backfire - The Peltzman Effect

Description

Titles in the series (100)

More Episodes from Developer Tea