To Cover One's Ears While Stealing a Bell

To cover one’s ears while stealing a bell is a literal translation of Chinese proverb 掩耳盜鈴^[1]. It can be compared to the idiom “to bury one’s head in the sand.” It is based on a story of a thief who wanted to steal a large bell and thought to smash it into easier to carry pieces; when it made a very loud noise, the thief simply covered their own ears, hoping that, if they could not hear it, maybe others could not hear it.

The proverb can be used in the context of software development. Imagine receiving a build warning that the file size of the built assets are extremely large. This can be a very helpful warning, letting the team know that something is not as efficient as it could be and that there is room for optimization. But then imagine being told that a fix for this issue is to simply turn off the warning or to overwhelmingly increase the limit after which the warning appears; this would be a case of someone having a warning bell go off and covering their own ears in the hopes that the underlying problem goes away. (This theoretical example is real and it is how I learned of this proverb.^[2])

References

1. 掩耳盜鈴 - Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ↩︎

2. Some chunks are larger than 500 KiB after minification · vitejs/vite · Discussion #9440. GitHub. ↩︎

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