cjcenizal

That does sound cool, but I’m not sure that’s what most folks mean by “chatbot”. My understanding was that a chatbot is an automated chat program that will generate responses to your messages, simulating a live human.

I think recognizing one’s privilege is uncoupled from how you choose to feel about it.

There is a bit under "Tarpit ideas":

"Carbon removal credits on the blockchain. Using blockchain technology to solve the double-counting of carbon credits is an attractive idea but in our experience it’s just a technology choice and a small piece of the product you ultimately have to build."

This sounds amazing! Could you share more info about your startup?

flexboxpatterns.com — I don’t have a way to measure its actual impact on folks, but it’s still kicking around and getting traffic after 7 years.

Ah, thanks for pointing out that ambiguity! The point I intended to make was that people make decisions that lead to rotations and other systems. And those people need to consider their decisions' second-order effects.

> People start to chastise those who open JIRA bug tickets as "too many!"

I know what you mean. I've seen teams treat a backlog's growth as being a root problem. They responded by closing issues with the explanation "We probably won't ever get around to this" or by creating scripts that will auto-close any issue after a set period of time.

I'm still on the fence about whether this is productive or not. I guess it depends on the team's context. A growing backlog indicates strong demand for features and/or many defects being found in the product, at a rate which outpaces the team's ability to respond. My instinct is to make changes to any part of that system but the backlog itself, since it is real data with real value. My strong opinion weakly held is if you manipulate this data, you're just putting blinders on.

Hi, author here! I wish I had a solution to this problem! The idealistic side of me wants everyone to "think critically". Of course if all humans were critical about the decisions they made and their effects on the systems around them (organizations, society, environment), we probably wouldn't have wars and global warming.

So that won't scale beyond the individual, which might be acceptable from a Stoic perspective but I doubt that's the solution you're looking for.

Oren Ellenborgen shared my post in today's edition of Software Lead Weekly [1], and in his summary of the post he suggests using Key Failure Indicators (KFIs) to counterbalance Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). From what I understand, the idea is that you observe metrics of success but you also observe metrics of health, and take action if the former starts degrading the latter.

For example, if you want to deliver features more quickly, you might measure the time between a change is submitted for review and the time it's deployed. But if you're concerned that this could degrade quality, you could also measure the number of defects that are identified. If defects increase as delivery time decreases, this indicates the success metric is causing some undesirable behavior. Hope this helps.

[1] https://softwareleadweekly.com/issues/513

I think the title is a bit misleading. The content seems less about operations and more about execution.

Sometimes for particularly complex changes, I like to comment out lines of logic and see if any tests break. It’s a fast and easy way to identify if the test coverage is adequate. Code coverage report generators are a good way to automate this, but not all projects use them and sometimes just because logic branches are covered by a test doesn’t mean the variations in behavior created by those branches have been covered. Tests that pass after I’ve deleted some code flushes these problems into the open.

This sounds rough. I have a question... do you feel like you're growing at work? Are you learning new skills and gaining new experiences, and do you value these skills and experiences?

I’ve just made this transition myself! Congratulations! I have a very short list of reading recommendations here: https://www.cenizal.com/reading/

In addition to the blog links on that page, I found these books to be the most useful:

High Output Management, by Andy Grove. My number one recommendation for anyone interested in managing people, particularly engineers. This book presents methods and processes for helping individuals maximize their impact, while remaining grounded in reality and humanity.

Thanks for the Feedback, by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. This book gave me great insight into how I handle feedback and what I can do to make the most of it. It also helped me understand how others might take my feedback, and develop methods for sharing my feedback effectively.

The Manager's Path, by Camille Fournier. A pragmatic guide to the stages of technical leadership, from tech lead to CTO. A great read even for engineers with no interest in people management, because it provides a clear line-of-sight into what those folks care about and how they make decisions.

Reminds me of “Motel of the Mysteries” by David Macaulay [1], who also wrote “The Way Things Work.” It tells the story of a future archeologist who unearths a motel and goes about completely misidentifying the purposes of various motel artifacts, such as claiming the toilet seat cover was a ceremonial headdress. Cracked me up as a kid, and the art is beautiful! Great gift for anyone who has young kids.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Macaulay

Anyone ever play Outpost 2? I loved the story and world of that game! Something about this game’s slow unit speed, inhospitable environment, emphasis on survival and infrastructure, and the narrator’s voice in the demo video remind me of Outpost 2.

All you need to do is be there and love your kid.

Will runtime fields help you with post-pass filtering? https://www.elastic.co/blog/introducing-elasticsearch-runtim...

Degraded soil quality and adverse biome effects can reduce the amount of available food.

This was my favorite part, because I'm new to engineering management and this is a lesson I've been learning:

> Brianna did manage to beam and weave the new samples. She did as I suspected have to cull some of the warps in the densest part of the reed. But she learned that on her own. And she also learned that when tying in a new warp, you should use overhand knots. But kids learn by falling flat on their faces and picking themselves up and reevaluating the experience.

People learn when you give them the opportunity to fail. This has been a tough lesson for me to learn because I'm used to successful outcomes being visible -- a feature is complete, a bug is fixed, a project ships. But when someone successfully learns, the outcome is internalized and usually only manifests the next time they take on a similar challenge, so I just gotta wait and see!

That’s certainly a valid interpretation, but it’s not everyone’s interpretation. Someone could post that picture with different intentions and be a potentially stellar coworker. So you’re welcome to your worldview of course, I‘d just suggest being careful about judging everyone according to it — otherwise you’re guaranteed to make miscalculations.

They’re in meetings all day, gathering and distilling the information mentioned by the GP, and helping stakeholders understand and make trade-offs. If the engineers did this work, they’d have no time for executing.

I think a worst case scenario is one in which:

- The virus becomes seasonal, like the flu

- Like the flu, every year there are new strains (so surviving it doesn’t grant immunity)

- And we’re unable to develop a vaccine for it

Someone please correct me if I’m wrong but this scenario implies that the situation we’re in now becomes the new normal. Every year, we’ll lose an additional percentage of our elderly and those with pre-existing conditions. Medical systems will either be ground down by repeated surges, economies will be ground down by enforced social distancing, or both.

What else would be in the cards?

Another good one:

“It is really tragic that the economic effects of this are very dramatic. Nothing like this has ever happened to the economy in our lifetimes,” Gates said. “But money, you know bringing the economy back and doing money, that’s more of a reversible thing than bringing people back to life. And so we’re going to take the pain in the economic dimension — huge pain — in order to minimize the pain in the disease and death dimension.”

"Shape up" from Bootcamp recommends integrating one soup-to-nuts slice of functionality at a time as well (https://basecamp.com/shapeup/3.2-chapter-10).

A great read for anyone interested in simple, pragmatic, and effective approaches to shipping software.

TSLA

Really appreciate your post! I'm a dad who also takes an active role in raising and nurturing his kids. I agree with your point at the end about responsibility, but another way of looking at the author's reframing of "parenting" as "childing" is that the parent is also on the receiving end of the experience. As a parent I've found I've learned a tremendous amount of patience, humility, perspective, perseverance, and self-awareness from the role, so I found a lot of truth in that idea.

“Semantic” eh? I don’t think that word means what the authors of the framework think it means. :)

To be better understood, you could try directly stating your point instead of making a snarky remark that requires interpretation. :) as far as anecdotes, that’s all I have to offer on this topic. Feel free to ignore them if they don’t help you in evaluating something.

My Model 3 did exactly that this morning. I was in the act of changing lanes, expecting the car behind me in the target lane to either maintain speed or slow to avoid hitting me. Instead it sped up, my car alerted me, and as I glanced in the side view to see the car approaching, the steering wheel gently tugged me (us??) back into our lane, avoiding collision. I’ve never felt so grateful to an object before.

It sounds like your family comes first to you. If you were to explain your situation and decision to your team the same way you’ve done here, I’m sure they would understand. My advice would be to plan your exit with this in mind, and try to make decisions that are best for your family, ignoring the impact on your company. Once you have your plan, do right by your company by communicating it as clearly as possible. They’ll adapt to your absence, and perhaps even find a way to become stronger in the face of losing you.