I was shocked to hear about doctors in hospitals not washing their hands (from a medical student who was shocked to see it during his internship), and when I discussed it privately with some doctors, they told me it all depends on the boss. When the boss in the hospital washes his hands religiously, and insists that all employees must wash their hands all the time, they will. But when the boss ignores this norm, then… ignoring the norm becomes a local symbol of status. So the norm within the same hospital may change dramatically in short time, in either direction, when the boss is replaced.
I saw a similar thing in software projects. You almost always have a list of “best practices”, but it makes a big difference whether the highest-status developer is like “we do this all the time, no exceptions”, or—much more frequently—he is like “of course, sometimes it doesn’t make much sense to … ”, and of course the scope of “sometimes” gradually expands, and it becomes a symbol of high status to not write unit tests. You can have two projects in the same company, with the same set of “best practices” on paper, with the same tools for automatically checking conformance (only, in one team, sending of the error messages is turned off), and still dramatically different code quality.
(And actually this reminds me of a time period when making fun of “read the Sequences” was kinda high-status here. I don’t hear it recently, and I am not sure what it means: maybe everyone read the Sequences, or everyone forgot about them so that the joke is no longer funny because no one would know what it refers to, or maybe both sides just ageed to not discuss this topic publicly anymore.)
I was shocked to hear about doctors in hospitals not washing their hands (from a medical student who was shocked to see it during his internship), and when I discussed it privately with some doctors, they told me it all depends on the boss. When the boss in the hospital washes his hands religiously, and insists that all employees must wash their hands all the time, they will. But when the boss ignores this norm, then… ignoring the norm becomes a local symbol of status. So the norm within the same hospital may change dramatically in short time, in either direction, when the boss is replaced.
I saw a similar thing in software projects. You almost always have a list of “best practices”, but it makes a big difference whether the highest-status developer is like “we do this all the time, no exceptions”, or—much more frequently—he is like “of course, sometimes it doesn’t make much sense to … ”, and of course the scope of “sometimes” gradually expands, and it becomes a symbol of high status to not write unit tests. You can have two projects in the same company, with the same set of “best practices” on paper, with the same tools for automatically checking conformance (only, in one team, sending of the error messages is turned off), and still dramatically different code quality.
(And actually this reminds me of a time period when making fun of “read the Sequences” was kinda high-status here. I don’t hear it recently, and I am not sure what it means: maybe everyone read the Sequences, or everyone forgot about them so that the joke is no longer funny because no one would know what it refers to, or maybe both sides just ageed to not discuss this topic publicly anymore.)