Hm, my conclusion of the thread was less “VC is evil” and more like “We underestimated the impact VC had and overestimated the impact “organic growth” would have for us.” What’s hypocritical about that?
375 karma · joined January 4, 2013
Both “addictive elements” and “grind” have layers of nuance to defining them, particularly when it comes to intended game design. I’d argue if you apply the “you know it when you see it” test, neither of those pass for Animal Crossing at least.
I’ve been concluding lately that the only way to slow down or stop continued polarization is to drop off of social media entirely OR remove revenue-earning by way of just clicks.
I don’t see either of these happening.
This article doesn’t really touch on it other than to say “do a bunch of things right and folks can self-manage”, which is a retort to a narrow use-case for management. Not all managers are intended to be people managers, nor do they want to be.
I can’t help but think the management vs non-management paradigm is 50% due to anti-management stereotype, and 50% due to actually toxic management practices. And I imagine half or less of that latter 50% are toxic because of a bad manager. Everything else is likely due to overbearing leadership, poor company goals, a bad process that management would too like to change but can’t, etc etc.
Generally, I agree with the article’s sentiment. Don’t force a process, find what works for your employees. Get company buy-in. Set clear rules and goals. Hold folks accountable, and tell them to hold you accountable too.
You and I both know that if all the folks did yesterday was go into the Capitol and march and chant in the halls, they'd be framed as deranged lunatics who might've gone a bit too far - not domestic terrorists. Show me the video evidence from the women's march where they coordinated a group to push into the police while yelling for "fresh patriots" to come to the front line and push back.
It's a toxic race for attention and engagement to either a.) generate revenue, b.) acquire some taste of "fame", or c.) both. Being anonymous plays a role in some corners of the internet, but the ones that are contributing the most to the cultures you mention above don't depend on anonymity. They're being perpetuated and propped up by very knowable online identities, and I highly doubt the folks doing the propping think they're safely anonymous.
Surely you are trolling? Plenty of evidence of plenty of police doing things that warrant civilian complaints that were never intended to be documented in the form of a citation by a police officer.
I also disagree with the parent. Bringing change is almost always easiest from within. “Don’t like it? Leave.” stances aim to do more to attack the person involved than it does to take a critical look at whatever problem it is that’s being discussed.
So, short-term, you have happy leaders who see releases as they want, and unhappy devs who are in a shitshow of code.
Long-term, if your startup is either acquired or starts to grow a strong revenue stream, leaders need to appease their new owners or their influx of new customers, and you can’t slow down because either a.) the new board needs to be impressed to justify their large acqui-investment, or b.) your new customer base is too big to risk losing. So you keep building on bad code, maybe squeezing in a few skunkwork refactored that only the dev peer reviewing and QA know about, and accept any delay on release as the result.
The approach should be somewhere in between, ideally with the engineering team being empowered to tell leadership “yo, we have a bomb of bugs just waiting to burst if we add one more feature with duct tape, let’s prioritize time to address it”.
If leadership doesn’t trust your team, then you have bad leadership.
The author may have realized that "MVP" has lost its originally _good_ meaning and became something else. They wanted to publish a post bringing focus back to what MVP originally was supposed to be, but felt that it's meaning has become so tied to its new, less good one, that they needed a new acronym to wrap their message in.
It's all reactionary, and in your own words, you acknowledge nobody would care if they just presented it as "our MVPs are what they _should_ be".
I try to assume good intent; they want to use influence to reign back the practice of building MVPs in a poor UX sort-of-way, and felt a new acronym was the best way to get an audience and tell the story.
it feels a bit naive to shrug this off as "elite wealthy people getting their ego boosted". where are the articles praising Jeff Bezos' "expeditions" website[0], or Bill Gates' personal blog[1]?
You’re modeling makes a lot of assumptions and discounts too many human-driven variables.
In my opinion, a PM is a jack of all trades, and a master at communication and organization. Engineers on Team A who can identify why Feature A has dependencies on Feature B that Team B is building is awesome; but that’s the accepted exception. I’d also argue there’s a case that an engineer’s time should be spent building and writing code, not managing the release schedule to best meet business goals. Leave that to the PMs.
Good PMs know how to gatekeeper from other departments and leadership, identify engineers strengths and defer to their expertise, and remember answers to the same technical questions so they can at least build upon their knowledge of the craft. I have no clue how rare they are, but those are what I try to do on a regular basis on top of disseminating information as it changes from product stakeholders to engineering.
I can list a whole host of reasons why engineers can flounder without a mediator between product and marketing leadership to make sense of requests. I’m also acutely aware that great engineers can make things work in lieu of someone who owns that process.
I’m not going to bash engineers as a whole though. I’m not ignorant.
- I was the one-person support for a while, and created our support process, user guides, etc. Any way that I could automate the process to speed up response time and free myself up to do other small tidbits of work, I tried.
- I was the one-person QA team, and documented known corner cases, golden paths, feature-specific regression testing guides, etc. When another employee began helping with QA, it made it much easier to onboard them to the process. We’ve since hired someone to build test automation programs and they’re referencing the same guides that are years-old now to guide their automated tests. I thought that was pretty cool.
Hence the momentum to address the monstrous differences in opportunity that have been created after many, many generations of treating particular groups of Americans as second-class if not outright sub-human.
Generally though, most of not all were just thankful to not have to depend on VC. Revenue wasn’t high enough to keep the company afloat, and the value in us was largely in our established brand within the market combined with a rather active user base.
Fortunately, most everyone who was in the company pre-acquisition are still around over a year and a half later.
By the tone you write in, my guess is arrogance may have played a role when it didn’t work. But what do I know, I’m an interviewer :)
Not debatable though is if eating an apple for lunch means you're still fasting; you aren't.
Two main takeaways I've gained from fasting (I've done multiple 24 hour fasts prior to this 5 day one):
1. You don't need to eat nearly as often as you think. Hunger pangs are usually just food cravings, and drinking lots and lots of water, water you should probably be drinking anyway, will mask them more easily than one would expect.
2. The successful self-deprivation of food (in a healthy, reasonable way) and the almost exclusively positive benefits that it brings makes you wonder how much of an economic and nationwide health impact the USA would see if everyone practiced some form of fasting.