December 13, 2009 — Do you "flip the bit" on people?
If you don't know what that means, you probably do it unknowingly!
When you "flip the bit" on someone you ignore everything they say or do. You flip the bit on a person when they are wrong or make a mistake over and over again. Usually you flip the bit unconsciously.
You are writing a program with Bob. Bob constantly writes buggy code. You get frustrated by Bob's bugs and slowly start ignoring all the code he submits and start writing everything yourself. You've flipped the bit!
This is bad for everyone. Now you are doing more work, and Bob is becoming resentful because you are ignoring his ideas and work.
Instead of flipping the bit, perhaps you could work with another person. If that's not possible, take a more constructive approach:
It seems like a simple evolutionary trick to save time. If someone is right only 10% of the time, would it be faster to ignore every statement they made, or faster to analyze each statement carefully in case it's the 1 out of 10 statements that might be true? Seems like it would be faster to just ignore everything by flipping the bit.
But this is a bad solution. The two presented above are better.