[beachy]

The counterpoint to Chesterton's Fence is the psychology experiment with the monkeys, the stairs and the banana.

This is long but very pertinent to the "that's just how we do things around here" attitude:

> This human behavior of not challenging assumptions reminds me of an experiment psychologists performed years ago. They started with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, they hung a banana on a string with a set of stairs placed under it. Before long, a monkey went to the stairs and started to climb towards the banana. As soon as he started up the stairs, the psychologists sprayed all of the other monkeys with ice cold water.

> After a while, another monkey made an attempt to obtain the banana. As soon as his foot touched the stairs, all of the other monkeys were sprayed with ice cold water. It's wasn't long before all of the other monkeys would physically prevent any monkey from climbing the stairs.

> Now, the psychologists shut off the cold water, removed one monkey from the cage and replaced it with a new one. The new monkey saw the banana and started to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all of the other monkeys attacked him. After another attempt and attack, he discovered that if he tried to climb the stairs, he would be assaulted.

> Next they removed another of the original five monkeys and replaced it with a new one. The newcomer went to the stairs and was attacked. The previous newcomer took part in the punishment with enthusiasm! Likewise, they replaced a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey tried to climb the stairs, he was attacked. The monkeys had no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they were beating any monkey that tried.

> After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys had ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approached the stairs to try for the banana. Why not? Because as far as they know that's the way it's always been around here.

[Jtsummers]

I don't see how that's a counterpoint. Chesterton doesn't say "don't change it, that's how it is and shall be." He's saying, "Question why it's present before you attempt to change it."

Looking around, there were no obvious livestock or other reasons for the fence. But perhaps they're only there six months out of the year. Ok, make the fence a gate, and not a fence, so it can be opened more easily. Maybe it's no longer used for livestock, ok remove it altogether. But if it is used for livestock (but they were just over the hill that day), and the fence is removed, an error has been made (it existed for a reason) and the livestock can now wander beyond the lands they're supposed to be on.

[IshKebab]

Usually there is nobody to ask though, and if you're refactoring a mess then the code won't give you a clear answer. The only way to find out if the was a reason the fence is there is to remove it and see what goes wrong which is what you were going to do anyway.

[dotancohen]

Actually, the right place to ask is the unit tests or integration tests. Though there seems to be an inverse relationship between the code that needs refactoring and the prevalence of proper tests.

[shabbyrobe]

... which is a form of questioning why it's present. "Attempting to change it" in this situation is more like "submitting the pull request[1]" than "editing the code". The PR tends to only come together after one or more rounds of "git stash, try again".

[1]: or merging your branch, if you're solo.

[darepublic]

Short of doing that, talking to the stakeholders could help? I feel like if you understand the actual requirements you can safely make those refactoring decisions

[ahoka]

> The counterpoint to Chesterton's Fence is the psychology experiment with the monkeys, the stairs and the banana.

Except that experiment never happened. It appeared in some book without any source (a.k.a. pulled out of the author's ass). Interestingly there was a similar experiment, but with an opposite result; the old monkey re-learned the forbidden behavior from the new one.

http://www.throwcase.com/2014/12/21/that-five-monkeys-and-a-...

[distant_hat]

A lot of these parables are purely made up.

[cortesoft]

Except for most cases, this is the proper behavior. We share experience with each other, and we can learn from it even if we haven't personally experienced it, or even if the person telling us about it didn't experience it personally.

The anecdote says they don't approach the stair because that's the way it has always been, but the monkey might say, "we don't approach the stair because the last monkey in here told us that we would be sprayed with water if we did"

Learning from people who are no longer here is really important. Just because something hasn't happened in your lifetime doesn't mean it won't happen. There are so many stories from Japan after the Tsunami, about places that learned from their ancestors to stay safe from something they themselves had never experienced.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2018/03/11/how-cen...

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/43018489/ns/world_news-asia_pacifi...

[peelle]

I head a tale that had the same lesson. Not sure where I heard it, but it went something like this:

>There was a Buddhist monastery up in the mountains. Every day at noon the head monk would call everyone together in the main courtyard to meditate.

>One day a cat that lived on the monastery grounds started to come to the courtyard during these meditation sessions. It would screech at, and scratch the monks while they tried to concentrate.

> After a few weeks the head monk got tired of this. He ordered that every day before they meditate, the cat be caught. They tied up the cat away from the main court yard. After meditation the cat was to be released.

> This went on for a few years and everything was fine. Then the head monk passed away. A new monk was appointed.

> A few more after that the cat passed away. The monks retrieved a new cat from a nearby village and they started typing up this new cat; as is tradition.

[sonnyblarney]

The monkeys are passing intelligent learned behaviour - the monks are not.

In the monkeys case - it makes sense they 'follow the herd'. The learned behaviour of their ancestors is saying something: "you're gonna get sprayed with cold water if you do this"

I'd imagine a lot of things get passed on this way, maybe some right some wrong, but I don't think this really helps the 'go your own way' case so much. That we generally follow crowds millions of years into our evolution might indicate that there is indeed wisdom in crowds. Though perhaps it's helpful to realize that they are not always right.

[neumann]

That was such an awesome story that I immediately tried to find the source. Unfortunately, all I found was an article and a stack exchange answer arguing that it is made-up by the authors of the book it first appeared in. [0] [1]

Nevertheless, I can come up with a few examples similar behavior in large organizations surrounding processes, workflows and general wisdoms.

[0] http://www.throwcase.com/2014/12/21/that-five-monkeys-and-a-...

[1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/6859

[e1g]

It’s an apocryphal story that became popular with “new age” and personal development crowds to encourage you to not be like the masses. It is endearing and illustrative of a useful truism, but sadly made up to be that way.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect

[stuntkite]

I think it's always important to lead with an attitude of service and compassion for the labor of others before you and yourself now. Get upside down on that and it makes it really hard to be impactful.

It's easy to get mad at code when you first show up and just apply Chesterton's Fence and move forward. Personally, with legacy systems (and what isn't really?) when I show up to a new project I do my best to grok the internal knowledge and test it. With official tests but also building out an environment around it so I can test conclusions. I document what people tell me, what docs and scripts they link me to, and what my results are. Almost without fail, the institutional knowledge is cargo cult.

People rarely break out of their mold for what works for the thing they need to work on. This isn't a problem that they need to fix, but legacy systems always need someone to take the time to make more clarity. So as a new person I focus on building up dev and deploy environment from zero, over and over. It's kind of an ops process. For me it's about finding multiple/duplicate configuration points, processes, improving VM or container environments, profiling, making sure that if external services are being leveraged that they can be bootstrapped to local dev or at least faked, and confirm tests harnesses if they exist.

With a "big existing code base" I have found that almost universally, the full stack can't be bootstrapped on the devs computers. They rely on tricks to run parts and cloud services and undocumented scripts. It's never because it's impossible and as a new person, I am uniquely qualified to solve that. Once I have a smooth rebuild process I move inward and refactor for clarity and tests, being careful to not disrupt other people's working strategy.

So in my experience, the first 4 weeks are asking questions and documenting the lies while repeated bootstrap. Second 4 weeks is environment cleanup. After that it's learning the system from the outside in by making the entire environment single command bootstrappable. I keep a daily journal of my experience and try to build out docs/readmes to consolidate and correct the practices that were relayed to me in the first 4 weeks as well as new clean up that I'm working on.

Being a new person on a large legacy code base is powerful. You don't have the entrenched survival problems other people have. Clean up and document to explore and try to be an exponential productivity add while you do it. One of my favorite tricks is "adding" features by removing things that people did not remember they have put into production. At my current job, my first three months was -7000 and +500 lines to our master repo. My negative -7000 was more impactful than some people that pushed 100k+/- in commit. Also I find it's useful to wildly speculate about how things work and be willing to be VERY wrong early and often. People are more likely to tell you about how they think something works when they are correcting you than when you ask directly for help. No clue why that's a thing, but it is.

After you get done cleaning things up you can make your own horrible lore and mistakes and start the process all over!

[jrochkind1]

> People are more likely to tell you about how they think something works when they are correcting you than when you ask directly for help. No clue why that's a thing, but it is.

While some of that might just be people's enjoyment at telling other people they're wrong, I think it's actually often something else. It's just easier to _respond_ to something than it is to start with a blank slate.

The question "How does this work?" is a blank slate. Even when asking it for yourself about a gigantic new codebaes, you form hypotheses and then 'test' them in some way, as you say, "testing conclusions". When you give someone a theory, you've just given _them_ a 'conclusion' they can 'test' against their own domain knowledge. :)

[jamesmus]

If someone ask me to review a commit that contained +/- 100k loc, I think I'd reject it on principle.

[stuntkite]

Not one commit, total sum over 3 months. You would be right to refuse that in most circumstances.