Perhaps, though personally I haven't found that to be an advantage compared to having two separate roles with decent communication skills.
2,180 karma · joined May 11, 2015
I worked at a company that incentivized owning the company's stock. The company was doing fine but it was still controversial among employees because of the risk of correlating your employment and investments -- if the company does poorly then you may lose your job and a large chunk of your investment at the exact same time.
(In practice there also ended up being some jealousy as people who decided to play it safe missed out on some large gains.)
But when hiring I rarely bother reaching out to them. It's not just that being responsible for both is tiring or demanding, but a project team that dedicates one person to each role delivers faster than a team with one person wearing both hats. And given that people who can do both well at the same time on the same project are exceedingly rare, they typically earn high six figures (or comparable equity) so there's not much in the way of cost savings either.
Having said that, maybe it'd be worth it for a founder or an early employee where there is a strong pressure to maintain a low headcount?
I used to teach at a UX grad program where students were required to learn both design and development. But doing both on the same project was almost always a mistake -- the designer has to deeply understand and advocate for the end-user's mental model while the developer has to deeply understand the technical model and constraints. Attempting to do both often end up conflating them or compromising on at least one of them.
Sort of like how many lawyers are skilled enough to handle either prosecution or defense but few do both on the same case.
I think there's a Nielsen/Norman article on this but can't find it at the moment.
The system would prompt students with problems that incorporated dozens of sub-skills, each of which incorporated other sub-skills and so on. If the student gets the problem right, all requisite sub-skills are marked as reasonably strong. If they get it wrong then the statistical model concludes that at least one sub-skill must be weak/faulty/missing, and when selecting subsequent problems the system would incorporate problems with different subsets of the original sub-skills to identify the missing sub-skill(s), with the goal being to spend time reinforcing only those skills that the student has not mastered.
I no longer work in that domain, but I recall it being amazingly efficient -- it often only took a dozen questions to assess a student's understanding of thousands of skills.
Level 0: This code meets (met?) my personal needs. I'm pleased if you find it useful but do not expect a response to suggestions or bug reports.
Level 1: This tool has a solo maintainer. I'll do my best to incorporate suggestions that fit my vision and address bug reports with reproduction steps when I have free time.
Level 2: This project is maintained by a handful of like-minded contributors. Besides suggestions and bug reports, if you're interested in contributing, please join our discord/element/forum/listserv.
Level 3: This project is maintained by an organization. Before submitting a bug report, please read our wiki.
Deleting inappropriate requests is totally reasonable, but one alternative could be a template letter, if you don't happen to have one already. When I receive inappropriate demands for my time I find it hard to muster the sympathy necessary to write a kind and patient message explaining that their priorities are not my priorities. It's much easier if I have something ready to go.
Many small open source projects still operate this way and their community consists a small number of people who have fun hacking on a project together after work.
But as projects grow some of them acquiesce to end-user expectations and slowly turn into "organizations".
They have schedules and regular releases, commit to timely triaging of bug reports, provide forums for end-user support, publish status updates, respond to feature requests, write documentation, have a slick website with a nice logo, form committees and sub-committees to make decisions, adopt codes of conduct to try to deal with the jerks who invariably show up, file the paperwork necessary to deal with big donations, etc -- all the "necessary bureaucracy" that comes with being a large, reputable organization.
At that point you've basically added back all the unfun parts of working and turned it into a second job, so why not get paid?
The real issue is skipping several days in a row. If I drop my routines for a weeklong vacation it takes more than a month to build them back.
One thing I've discovered for myself is that the routine doesn't decay as quickly if I at least maintain a placeholder. For example, even if I don't have time to do an exercise routine I can usually do five pushups. Even if I can't meditate for ten minutes, I can still sit and breathe for a minute. Even if I can't do all the dishes before bed, I can scrape them off. That makes it much easier to resume the routine. It doesn't deepen the rut but it does prevent it from being washed away.
Many people appear to experience a commensurate increase in appetite after exercise such that they do not lose weight unless they also consciously restrict calories.
But compared to other world-class cities they have (had?) this weird car-shaped blind spot where every neighborhood and park was filled with cars and most people don't care.
My criticisms of NYC traffic aren't based on the throughput efficiency for drivers, but the impact on the people who live there.
At least when I was in NYC, every attempt to charge market rates for parking, improve daylighting at intersections, get people to stop parking on the sidewalks, build protected bike lanes, stop making mountains of garbage bags on the sidewalk, etc were all met with fierce resistance. (Though I gather from this thread that things have improved in the last ten years or so.)
While the pedestrian fatality counts in NYC are breaking records, just across the Hudson River you have Jersey City and Hoboken prioritizing safe, pleasant streets for residents and have achieved "Vision Zero" with no traffic deaths.
No doubt, but the question is to what degree the preferences of people who live in Queens should override the preferences of the people who live in Manhattan when it comes to deciding how to manage the streets of Manhattan.
> Greater Boston is a suburban hellscape. If traffic is your Kryptonite, beantown is worse in some dimensions.
For drivers, sure, it seems nearly as bad as NYC. I recall it being congested and confusing the few times I drove through Boston. Though it is nice that they buried some of the highways so you don't have to hear or see as much traffic downtown. But in general my concern is less about the impact on drivers than the impact on neighborhood residents, pedestrians, and cyclists. In some ways the Greater Boston area seems ahead of NYC in that regard.
Now all they need to do is calm traffic on the transverses...
> The problem is other stakeholders live in the provinces.
Exactly. People who live in New York City often end up being beholden to the preferences of people who live outside the city.
There are downsides to the culture of localism in New England, but one nice thing is that cities and towns are typically able to prioritize the lives of their own residents which makes them nice places to live.
Still, when living in NYC I felt constantly surrounded by car traffic, far more than other cities I've lived in.
That's wonderful to hear! I lived in NYC for the better part of a decade and was a big supporter of orgs like Transportation Alternatives and their work with the DOT to advocate for road diets.
At least when I lived there the painted bike lanes were a running joke and more dangerous than just taking a car lane because every block there was at least one taxi or truck blocking the bike lane. And in cases where there was physical separation you had to contend with moped drivers riding at unsafe speeds. The Queensboro Bridge bike path was dangerously overcrowded and every year they claimed they'd open another lane; it looks like that's still "just around the corner" https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2024/04/08/first-look-the-dot-fi... but I wouldn't hold my breath. The Queensbridge Greenway shared use path became a muddy parking lot soon after it opened and it seems like they're still struggling to keep cars off it. NYPD still seems more enthusiastic about ticketing cyclists than drivers who park illegally.
I didn't mean to imply that the NYC bike/ped folks haven't notched some wins. And I used to tell myself that as bad as it was, other US cities were worse for cyclists and pedestrians. But that wasn't true and every time I go back to visit friends and family I'm still grateful when we leave.
I was reading about kei trucks when I came across Telo[1], a startup working on a US-legal electric kei truck. Depending on ground clearance that might tick every box for me even though I don't live in a city. They've got a steep hill ahead of them; I hope they succeed.
I eventually moved to New England because it became clear that despite the city having good bones, the leadership (and many voters) were more interested in coming up with ways to make it convenient for drivers to drive and/or park in every neighborhood in the city than making it a pleasant place to live. The ghost of Robert Moses influences everything there.
So I was floored when it seemed like such an incompetently managed city as NYC was actually going to implement the obviously correct solution of charging money to allocate a scarce resource. What was less surprising was the fact that it was derailed by a state politician but only at the last minute and after hundreds of millions had already been spent.
For example, many years ago I worked on military AI for my country. I eventually decided I couldn't square that with my ethics and left. But I consider advertising to be (often non-consensual) mind control designed to keep consumers in a state of perpetual desire and I'd sooner go back to building military AI than work for an advertising company, no matter how many brilliant engineers work there.
The only possible way I can imagine someone with the title "VP" going to a vendor's website and clicking a "get quote" button to get a sales call at a random time from some junior salesperson is if we're talking about one of those companies where they give inflated titles and anyone who isn't an intern is a VP-of-something-or-other.
Agreed. Unfortunately it seems like increases in battery density are soaked up by either increased energy consumption (screen resolution/brightness, processor) or decreased battery volume to make a thinner device.
I have a smartwatch that doesn't require wall charging (a Garmin Instinct with solar) and I really like the combination of solar cells, low-power processor, monochrome screen, and frugal radios.
That got me curious about a low-powered laptop and I've been eyeing an e-ink tablet with keyboard (e.g. Boox Tab or Remarkable 2) but I think it'd be a little too limited for my laptop usecases. And all the super-energy-efficient phones (e.g. e-ink) I've seen simply shrink the battery volume to offset any efficiency gains.
What makes you say that? Do you know of a region that does not have DR (demand response) options?
Every US utility I am aware of has had DR programs for commercial and industrial customers for many years. Back when I worked in electricity markets a decade ago only a few had DR programs for residential customers but since then many have added residential DR or have started pilots as they upgrade their residential infrastructure.
TVP (time-variable pricing) is also very common, though moreso with commercial/industrial customers. I'm honestly not sure how many residential customers have the option to pick a provider with TVP/TOU pricing.
Some crazy ISOs (looking at you ERCOT) even allow residential customers to pay rates pegged to RTP (real-time pricing) which is gloriously insane and very Texas.
> A hospital probably needs a backup battery (or a guaranteed slice of the grid’s battery capacity).
Yes. Hospitals often have special utility contracts and get priority when there are brownouts or blackouts. (One benefit of living next to a hospital is that you'll get power back more quickly after a blackout!) But most hospitals still have backup generators, and special circuits so that they only need to power critical equipment.
> we don’t have any incentive to try and automate that inconvenience away, so who knows? Perhaps we could see a resurgence in more efficient designs, like chest freezers.
This is already very common with commercial/industrial customers, but hopefully you're right that as residential customers get more exposure to things like dynamic pricing and home solar generation that more of them will alter their behavior and appliances.
Some loads are slightly time-dependent because you can shift them with minor inconvenience such as pre-cooling your home or refrigerator (using it as a thermal battery) or scheduling when your car charges (using its battery as a battery).
Others are entirely time-dependent. Waiting until it's sunny to process an online order, take MRI images, run an assembly line, or use your TV to watch a sporting game incurs substantial additional cost and/or inconvenience.
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” ― Edsger W. Dijkstra
My experience has been that most "car-free" areas in cities operate similarly -- they use a combination of unlockable bollards, speed restrictions to 5-10mph, zones for active loading/unloading but no parking, and/or no through routes to reduce the number of motor vehicles. But there are rarely zero motor vehicles.
> Have fun moving big items with hand carts.
If you don't have steep hills it's trivially easy to move moderately large items like couches, washing machines, and computer equipment with an unpowered platform truck. If there are steep hills and you're a skinny IT tech like I was you'd probably want a platform truck with electric assist or an NEV (aka golf cart). On the aforementioned campus it was significantly easier to borrow a platform truck or golf cart to move big items than to file a request and wait for moving folks to come with a van or box truck, so we became proficient at moving large items ourselves. It turns out with the right setup it is easier than most people think, sometimes even easier than figuring out how to lift the equipment into the bed of a box truck.
Right, that's why before I responded to your question ("why would the government have any right to tell me what to do with my building?") I tried to make it clear that I think there are better approaches than what the GP was advocating for i.e. directly seizing vacant properties.
> This is a tortuous chain of logic to get from building with squatters to government overthrown.
Can you be more specific about what part you disagree with?
To be clear, I'm not arguing that squatting results in overthrown governments, but that the acceptance of widespread squatting is sometimes a (shortsighted) policy response to a housing crisis. Squatting is a symptom but what can actually topple governments is sufficiently high levels of homelessness. Any government that allows a sufficiently large percentage of residents (especially young people) to become homeless will eventually be replaced by anarchy or a new government.
To reiterate, I'm just trying to answer your question of what right the government has to tell you what to do with your property -- I'm not specifically defending the GP's suggestion.
I suspect it would make more sense to do so via tax policy, i.e. high property taxes (or LVT) with a deduction for each occupant.
> why would the government have any right to tell me what to do with my building?
For one thing, governments have a vested interest in not being overthrown. If a sufficiently large percentage of the population believes that their living standards are declining (including not having a place to live) then an increasing number of people will arrive at the conclusion that revolution or terrorism has a positive risk/reward ratio.
I've worked in a country where the previous government had allowed this to occur; apparently it happened gradually and then suddenly. Beyond a certain point you can only consider something "my building" if you have the means to defend it against anyone who might wish to make it their building. In that case, the possession of a piece of paper which you once used to outsource the enforcement of your property rights to the previous government isn't very useful.
(Edit: To be clear, I think allowing squatting is a poor solution to the problem of reducing homelessness and better tax and housing policies are more sustainable and equitable, I'm just explaining why the government has a substantial interest in what private landowners do with their properties.)
But other than that I'm not sure I see a problem. If a company "can just poach all of [your team] wholesale" then they were probably being under-compensated to begin with and are better off at their new company. After all, the primary point of banning noncompetes is to protect employees from employers who use noncompetes to suppress their wages. The increased competition is a nice ancillary benefit, not the primary motivation.
However, I'm trying to imagine who would use this product. It's deskbound (until 2027 it looks like) so that rules out worksites but is far too constrained (and pretty) for traders and military use. You list "product development", "leaders", and "international teams" as potential roles, but as evidenced by the responses in this thread, many people who do product development treat synchronous voice comms as an abomination. The closest I can imagine would be call centers -- helpdesk, marketing, support, that sort of thing.
I'm very curious how much user research and long-term usability testing you've done with real teams trying to get work done. If not much, I'd suggest making that a high priority. I apologize for how harsh this sounds, but my initial gut reaction is that this is a typical Silicon Valley product that pairs wonderful industrial design and engineering with a complete ignorance of other people.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=trading+turret&iax=images&ia=image...