ebiester

I mean, this is a task board and not a Kanban board - Kanban implies things like Work In Progress limits, continuous improvement, and measuring flow to get rid of blockers.

But you're right - you can visualize your workflow without using Kanban - I think it's weird how the term gets appropriated here.

People tried reinventing terminals, SSH, and tmux for phones. It's a pretty terrible experience using your thumbs. And it takes significant know-how to set up.

And in modern stacks, it almost necessitates a man in the middle - tailscale is common but it's still a central provider. So is it really the most inefficient way possible?

The number of maintenance items are fewer.

The cost of those remaining maintenance items are the issue. That said, it's a reasonable hypothesis to say that this is an economies of scale issue.

(Also, as I understand it, tires are used up more quickly on EVs still, but tire companies are learning to adapt to EVs so that may not be as true today.)

I heard a story from someone whose relative was in the Korean War - apparently people manning radar stations used to warm up by getting in between some microwaves. I just looked it up and the danger isn't cancer - but you stay too long you can get unexpectedly cooked (particularly eyes) because your body isn't detecting being warmed up like that.

It's not confounding at all. It's making the point that internal motivation, according to the study, has no major factor in savings regret.

It says that understanding risk (as operationalized by understanding probability) has a larger effect.

But it is also saying that the more external impact someone has, the more they regret saving more -- in the United States but not Singapore.

The study is explicitly saying that internal motivation does not seem to matter. And the article is arguing the reason why.

Put a culture of stopping work at 40 hours. Allow the work to be the work and stop deadlines.

Otherwise, people will take every time savings possible. If I'm using AI for anything, it's because it's important enough to someone else for me to do but not important enough to sacrifice my own time.

I don't think it's about people being scared, at least from what I've seen. It's about people being exhausted.

Consider - why did Discord or Slack win over IRC?

It turns out it's very slow to evolve a protocol. How long did it take for IRCv3 to handle channels having persistent history? How about channel takeovers via network splits? We knew these were problems in the 20th century but it took a very long time to fix.

Oh, and the chathistory Extension is still a draft! So is channel-rename! And account-registration?

And why is it still so painful to use Mastodon?

That's but one of many examples. Consider how the consolidation of HTML and HTTP clients was the only way that we ended up with any innovation in those services. People have to keep up with Chrome who just does their own thing.

I want to want a decentralized world governed by protocols, but good software that iterates quickly remains the exception rather than the rule.

Tenure, in this case, is rewarded by not being laid off - because this person had old knowledge and friends with people who were in power and knew them from earlier in the company.

It absolutely does happen. But I have also seen people rise through the ranks by just being there long enough and being competent. That said, it is not a way to maximize wage growth or general career progress by any stretch.

Not true at all, having seen the other side. In a large enough organization, entire divisions will be cut if a product is missing. Sometimes productive people are on the wrong product that gets slashed to maintenance mode, or they have the wrong manager. Sometimes deep cuts are necessary because the product is failing and a productive person on a growth initiative is cut for subject matter expertise in the core product that will allow maintenance mode to continue. Sometimes tenure is rewarded. Sometimes directors don't see the full story because the managers can't be told of the layoff.

It's trained on YouTube data. It's going to get roffle and drspectred at the very least.

I'd like you to go look at PRINCE2 and SSADM. Or read the original Royce paper - https://www.praxisframework.org/files/royce1970.pdf was written explicitly to term this Antipattern "Waterfall." (Note that Royce marks it as an antipattern.)

I discussed some of this in https://www.ebiester.com/agile/2023/04/22/what-agile-alterna... and it gives a little bit of history of the methods.

We are nearly 70 years into this discussion at this point. I'm sure Grace Hopper and John Mauchly were having discussions about this around UNIVAC programs.

Do you not see the difference between a toy language and a clean room implementation that can compile Linux, QEMU, Postgres, and sqlite? (No, it doesn't have the assembler and linker.)

That's for $20,000.

Or... the places they have deep expertise they have NDA/non-competes to worry about. (At least, outside of California.)

Sure, I could go and create an accounting app - or a clinical trial recruitment app - as a basic clone of what I've already created. And I might even make it better for some niche. But even if I know what that product system needs, I still need to find someone with the relationships to get in the door.

The trick is - you don't need an idea man for a non-technical founder. You really need someone with a rolodex and a problem.

So, that sounds fine in theory.

What's happening in practice, though, is a group of people (like Campus Watch) are looking specifically for anyone teaching gender, trans issues, race, and religion, and analyzing the coursework through their ideologies and harassing professors on account of it. And they're going through past years as well as present.

As a tangent, I'm seeing Lisbon trying to make a lot of buzz, but it seemingly can't crack into the larger ecosystem. What's missing, considering that it should be able to benefit from its EU integration?

“Don’t be needed” isn’t “don’t be valuable.” The EM should not be a bottleneck. The EM should be able to take a vacation without being paged. (So should anybody on the team!)

My teams would slow down without me because I can due process tasks more efficiently, but nothing demands me to be in the loop.

Oh, you bet they would. Nothing causes old white people to riot like mild inconvenience.

That's only mildly sarcastic. For many people, it's become a part of being American, especially on the conservative side of the isle. Now, I personally live in celsius and work comfortably in kilometers, liters, and grams. However, it has become a weird point of pride for some Americans.

It's not bad. It's the social media that least leans into driving addictive behaviors.

But you have to think about investing into it like a tool - not like a pastime.

It's interesting that the first thing you see in the comments is "don't contact anyone."

Right now we're in a weird place - if you have a network, you're pretty well off. If your network isn't hiring, or you are early in your career, it's brutal trying to get through the noise.

The truth is that proof of work matters. But the big problem is that proof of work is easy to fake right now. It takes being creative. I get a few emails a month right now. Honestly, I think this isn't going to work at this point - some go to my personal and some go to my professional emails. But what might work?

Look at people who are writing blogs. Is there something interesting on their blog? Is that worth engaging them on first? (I mean, don't waste their time if you aren't interested or if you're going to submarine it the second or third email - someone will feel used - but showing a dual purpose of the email might not be the worst thing and even if they don't have a position or influence on the position, you might have a good conversation.

Are you involved on bluesky/twitter/threads? Are you getting positive engagement? Are you finding ways to make community? It may not get the formal referral but it might make the social referral and give you 30 extra seconds with the resume and a reason to say yes.

Oh, I get them all the time. Usually from junior engineers. I don't hold it against them - it's good advice.

So, what's your trick to avoid getting skipped because a contract recruiter or internal recruiter is going through resumes at 6 a minute and looking for keywords nowhere near the job profile? What's your trick to get through the noise? Right now, it's brutal from junior to staff, and if your network isn't hiring there's no real way to tell the difference between someone who is taking care and someone spamming 200 applications and using 5 minutes of AI to customize. So other than "utilize the network you built over 25 years," what's your advice if all you have is "don't do that?"

I'm glad I have a job now. However, it's brutal for people on the hunt in bad situations or people who have been laid off.

I did a similar thing with productivity books early last year, but never released it because it wasn't high enough quality. I keep meaning to get back to that project but it had a much more rigid hypothesis in mind - trying to get the kind of classification from this is pretty difficult and even more so to get high value from it.

Having worked with both good and bad QA...

The biggest determinant is company culture and treating QA as an integral part of the team, and hiring QA that understands the expectation thereof. In addition, having regular 1:1s both with the TL and EM to help them keep integrated with the team, provide training and development, and make sure they're getting the environment in which they can be good QA.

And work to onboard bad QA just as we would a developer who is not able to meet expectations.

That's a problem with constrained supply. But nobody is willing to build up south of San Francisco as far as I still understand.

This post is talking about very small companies. At that 20+ person department, it's true. Once you have a team where the founder doesn't know everyone, the average matters a lot more.

If you have 15 people, you can hire 15 people and they will be able to organically organize if you hire well. If they have a question, they know what everyone is working on. The code base is small enough that everyone can just figure it out even if the documentation is bad.

The larger that group is, the more effort it takes to make sure everyone has the context they need to get their job done. That's where management matters.

And honestly, when I was the first manager (team of 17) brought in, I was writing code and on my own project in addition to starting to build up the "what do we need to do to scale?" You bring someone like me in at 17 people because you're going to need to scale soon and someone needs to build the first set of processes that solve the problems of the next stage, and figure out the onramp because done wrong, they make everything worse.

There is no world where a 4 hour commute to work is reasonable. That said, Stockton and Tracy seem like they happen more often at an hour and a half (to San Mateo or San Jose)

But why are we building a world where that is necessary? That's an awful world.

Coke from Mexico also has a slightly different flavor profile that has nothing to do with the source of sugar.

I think the major problem we have is we are lumping depression and anxiety into the same category.

Some people probably do have issues quickly resolved by SSRIs. Others are magically fixed by bupropion while it spikes anxiety in others. Others have major trauma that they have to work through and many therapies (like internal family systems therapy, as one example) are great at handling that. Others are stuck in cognitive distortions and merely learning about them and handling them (through cognitive behavioral therapy) can be life changing.

But if you have major trauma in your past, exercise is probably not going to do much. If you are heavily overwhelmed and your body is stuck in perpetual flight or fight) exercise and meditation might be a giant help.

But right now the practitioners are aware of this, but it's really hard to double blind test these divisions until people can do the analysis first. And at that point, you've basically already started therapy.

Yep, their QCs are good enough and the rest of the package makes up for it. It's their speakers of which I am still not impressed.

If only their sound signature was a bit better... they went all in on engineering tricks to make things small and cheap to produce, but it shows in their sound quality. Their QC headphones are the best in noise cancellation, and the sound quality is good enough that they're my pair of wireless headphones.

The bigger the product, the harder this is.

However, I think the biggest thing is the replacement of products. We are in a place where he talked about replacing two products his wife was using with custom software. I personally have used LLMs to build things that are valuable for me that I just don't have time for otherwise.