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duggan

2,691 karma · joined June 5, 2011

Software developer, CTO.

Working on Manano (https://manano.ai), a way for tradespeople to make quotes and invoices using only WhatsApp.

Mail: ross@duggan.ie

Mastodon: https://mastodon.ie/@duggan Blog: https://duggan.ie

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/duggan; my proof: https://keybase.io/duggan/sigs/Q5NKndkmAPY7z_rr6F5aCCILacMed6RndM3X7OZCpvA ]

submissionscomments
duggan··on When you're in a team that I lead, there are 3 things that I'd like to ask you
I think if anyone figures out a general solution to that one they'll probably have solved a much more important issue than corporate cultural dynamics; they'll have solved government.

The dynamics of risk change with the size of the entity involved. For example, in a small startup, losing a hard drive could mean the end of months of work - could kill the company. Or since everyone makes backups / uses hosted services these days ( right? ;) ), maybe a better analogy would be an employee being lost to sickness for months.

In a 100+ person company a broken hard drive should never be anything more than annoying, losing an employee is going to be unfortunate and might even significantly delay a product/feature; but it won't be the end of the business.

There's a raft of interpersonal dynamics which change too; the larger the company the less likely you are to be pally with everyone. Simple factor of surface area - you can't cover them all. So relationships become more formal. As spheres of responsibility begin to form, people develop moats around those responsibilities for better "separation of concerns".

At some point I suppose stuff starts to slip between those self-defined spheres, especially as people move in and out of roles, subtly redefining them each time. Making sure you're not being negligent (or seen to be negligent) in a multi-million dollar company is kind of a big deal if you expect to work somewhere else in future (and especially if you intend to keep working at that company).

duggan··on Find is a beautiful tool
I wrote a similar post last year (http://rossduggan.ie/blog/codetry/extracting-information-fro...); it's one of those things you can't believe you worked without before. Easily one of the best tools in a developer's arsenal.
duggan··on Girls sweep at Google Science Fair
I definitely thought this was going to be an article about the juxtaposition of an all female cast of cleaning professionals with an all male science fair as a broad analogy for the "glass ceiling" effect.

Glad to see I was mistaken :)

duggan··on If Dropbox Used GitHub’s Pricing Plan
You might not pay in dollars all the time, but you're always paying.

Friendships are a two way street. So is family. You can not hold up your end of the "deal", but see how long that lasts.

Talking to people costs time (something we all have a limited supply of).

Nature and public property? Really? Do you also not pay taxes in Canada? Free speech isn't free, it costs (and continues to cost) lives (and, again, tax for government, judiciary...)

It doesn't sound like you've ever actually run an EC2 cluster either. It's 10 cent/hour for a large instance (2 ECU, 7.5GB RAM) which is close to 900 dollars a year per machine. This is not even close to free.

Films and music have never been free, you just haven't been paying for them. There's a difference.

Just because you don't pay for something doesn't mean it's free. Some of the people can scrounge some of the time, but all of the people can't scrounge all of the time.

duggan··on Richard Dreyfuss' dramatic reading of the iTunes EULA
How bout this - http://soundcloud.com/rduggan/richard-dreyfuss-battle-cry
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