1,925 karma · joined August 23, 2009
Email "dan" at the above domain
To borrow a football term, sometimes company structure seems like it’s playing the “long ball” game. Everyone sitting back in defence, then the occasional hail mary long pass up to the opposite end. I would love to see a more well developed understanding within companies that certain teams, and the processes that they have are defensive, others are attacking, and others are “mid field”, i.e. they’re responsible for developing the foundations on which an attacking team can operate (e.g. longer term refactors, API design, filling in gaps in features that were built to a deadline). To win a game you need a good proportion of defence, mid field and attack, and a good interface between those three groups.
Any IRL interaction between two humans becomes almost impossible. It’s like travelling from the US to Japan today (assuming you don’t speak Japanese), you’re reduced to pointing and google translate.
Because you just never interact with other real people, and real people often seem like pale shadows of the hyper real AIs we talk to, the concept of fellow human beings having a “soul” or deserving rights or dignity is eroded. Policy (and life in general) becomes more ruthlessly utilitarian. Eg climate change has screwed the people in Yemen. Meh. I probably don’t even hear about it. If I do I don’t register those people as important humans because most of the “people” I intact with every day are artificial. I regularly delete the ones I don’t like and generate more. The idea that I should care about how they _feel_ is a strange and alien concept to me.
For me this is a strength of a constitutional monarchy over an appointed or elected but mostly ceremonial head of state. The people have a relationship with the king, they’ve grown up together and there’s a connection there that’s hard to define. In times of crisis that connection could play a key role.
Now “They want to (add, prevent from decay) as many edges as possible” becomes “They want to encourage different parties to lend each other things they want”.
The UK has no written constitution, which has its advantages sometimes, but could be a problem here. What we have instead is institutions. So we must hope that one of them steps in and puts limits on how this can be used.
In the same way that swapping steam engines for electric motors didn’t yield much benefit. Just swapping real meetings for zoom meetings feels like a backwards step. But the real benefits come when you _reorganise_ your production processes around the new technology. Sadly for many middle managers, their role is disappearing and their income is dependent on them not understanding this.
I have many acquaintances, I’m not shy or socially awkward. E.g. When I was running a business I would often go to business networking events alone, start conversations with people, establish a rapport and spend hours chatting, but all those interactions have essentially left me with one good friend.
I’ve often found it easier to establish friendships with women, but (being straight) they get complicated. Either I develop feelings, or they do, or there’s a suspicion from someone’s parter about the real nature of our relationship. It’s just too problematic.
I think the female “model” of friendships outlined in the abstract just makes more sense to me. “emotional support, intimacy, and useful social information” is what I want from a friendship.
I suspect there are other men in this position and that the dominant male “model” of friendship that we have (and which is outlined in this article) is more cultural than biological. But I have no proof. What do you think?
The elevator cars couldn’t have cables of course, but they could be driven by electric motors on the cars themselves (powered by induction), driving a gear wheel that runs on a fixed track on the side of the shaft.
These days I try to make the case at work for targeting containers and using the cloud platforms' container hosting tools instead.
1. This building is beautiful. 2. How did they build this all that time ago? For example, the Great Pyramids, Stonehenge, or a large stone cathedral built 800 years ago. 3. The sense of unbroken continuous activity in this building from the time it was built until now. Which connects me to history and a sense that by being in this place I am a part of something bigger than myself. This is stronger if the type of activity in the building has stayed the same for all that time. E.g. Attending a service in an 800 year old Cathedral makes you feel awe.
#1 Is still relevant if the building is restored, but #2 isn't.
#3 is interesting. If a building was damaged but restored immediately then the sense of continuity might remain intact. But if a building was left unoccupied, or it's use has changed then this effect is lessened. For example, visiting a 500 year old pub is better than visiting a 500 year old building that was recently turned into a pub. Visiting a royal palace in England has some quality to it that visiting Versailles doesn't have because there is no longer a French monarchy. Stonehenge is very impressive (because of #2) and even though some groups have started using it for rituals, there is no real connection to the original builders so it lacks awe on the #3 dimension.
My experience of these large IT services companies is that their middle management is very focused on maximising profitability for the work their engineers are doing. To the point that they hold engineers back from doing the “right” thing. Eg “don’t add logging to this new feature - it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the change request”. You could argue this correct from a purist capitalist perspective of course. But that just underlines my belief that outsourcing IT to outside services providers is always more expensive in the long run.
For me, the fact that remote working lessens the influence of middle management is a feature not a bug, even if it hurts the large IT Services provider business model.
External stimulus means you’re with other humans that you can cooperate with. That you’re sharing stories and learning. That you’re hunting for food. That you’re building a shelter. All these things are necessary for survival. It seems possible that being sociable and industrious might well have been bread into us at some point. And it’s probably the reason we aren’t like big cats in Africa, just hunting and then resting to conserve energy.
We should not be suggesting to people that their instincts are a moral failure to be cured.
Buying one person, or one team, a tool like Adobe CS doesn’t really change any processes so it’s easy. But dropping a new system in that changes a process and everything changes.
“Helen from risk wants a new fraud detection system” is effectively the same as “Helen wants to review all our fraud detection policies and if anything changes and subsequently goes wrong it won’t just be Helen that gets fired”. There’s a huge pressure on the software provider to make their system support whatever unique, crazy or arcane processes the risk team were previously using, and support all existing interfaces into and out of the risk team, because nobody wants to sign off on any changes. So enterprise software has to be crazy flexible. And flexibility makes for bad UX.
Conscience, selfless love for our children, culture, and religion are varying levels of patch on this simple human brain chemistry. I don’t think technology adds anything fundamentally new.