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Stratechery is great for general business strategy

Software Stack Investing is targeted towards investors in SaaS companies, but I also find it interesting from a strategy perspective.

AI Weekly is a pretty good recap of all AI related news and research.

This is a fascinating list. I wonder if it would make a cool open-source project to automate much of this analysis and package it as a tool that journalists and others can use for investigatory purposes.

I initially was extremely skeptical that USB-C was an improvement, but after having used it for 6 months I am totally sold. I was able to buy a relatively cheap dock from Dell, plug in my charging cable, 2 external monitors, printer, ethernet, webcam and a host of other USB-A accessories into the dock. Then I am able to simply connect one single USB-C cable to my laptop and everything works seamlessly.

If I want to move my laptop, I just unplug the one cable, instead of my previous 4-5. Further, I can mount the dock under my desk to hide the clutter and just have the single USB-C cable visible. For me, its working great!

This is incredibly impressive. I especially appreciate that they made their code available, they made their data available, and they developed a nice interactive dashboard.

code: https://github.com/ihmeuw-demographics/publication_covid_em data: http://ghdx.healthdata.org/record/ihme-data/covid_19_excess_... dashboard: https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america?view...

Has anyone extensively used DBT? What was your experience? What other alternatives did you explore? I have seen demos of DBT, but nothing I never saw made me say "Oh we have to try that!", but I am probably missing something.

Would love anyone's feedback!

"If you work at Amazon, you cannot use and refer to this document because of the copyright violation issues." --> This is really interesting. Does anyone know the background on this? Has anyone else seen this someplace else?

In my observation, Data Engineering leadership is the hardest skill to find recently. There is a good amount of entry-mid level individual contributors in the market, but at the Manager+ level the market is insanely competitive .

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the classic "How to Win Friends and Influence People". I found out about the book after learning that it was a favorite of Warren Buffet (https://www.ft.com/content/d02c002a-e934-11e6-967b-c88452263...) and I have found the advice timeless. In particular, the book discusses how trying to "win" an argument is a pointless path to persuasion.

It really changed how I try to approach disagreements. I find myself rereading it periodically and trying to implement more and more of the suggestions.

"The UK government explicitly states that their nudge unit believes in the use of masking as a way to remind people that coronavirus is about." --> I tried searching for this, but I couldn't find where this was stated. Can you share a link?

Flatland is amazing! Without giving anything up, its a short-story that takes place in two dimensions, where men are polygons and women are lines. It's a brilliantly written satire of Victorian culture and an interesting thought experiment.

I agree with the majority of the other posters; internal is typically best.

In my experience, usually how this plays out is:

1. Establish yourself has a high performing SSE. You need to build this reputation both on your direct team and department, but ideally across the org broadly.

2. Make it known you wish to become a manager at some point in the future. Have conversations with your direct manager, but also consider having conversations with other managers and leaders in the organization broadly. Ask them how they made the transition and what advice they would have for you.

3. Try to take on as much manager-like responsibilities as you can. This could include: a. Mentoring and helping onboard new employees b. Informally overseeing the activities of some employees (interns or junior employees can be a great place to start) c. Figure out if your organization offers some type of future manager training. Enroll in that. d. Getting involved with interviewing. e. Offer to take on special projects outside of your day to day work.

4. At some point when you have done the majority of steps 1-3, sit down with your manager and put together a written plan. Some companies will have great competency models or career frameworks that you can leverage, but many don't. If you fall into the later camp, check out online resources for companies that have published their engineering manager competencies. Use those to inform your plan and cite them in the document.

5. Get agreement from your manager on this plan and then execute.

6. Never stop working on your management skills. Being a people manager is a huge responsibility. Its deeply personal and you have a huge impact on the day to day welfare of your employees.

Edit: some engineering manager reference career frameworks http://www.engineeringladders.com/EngineeringManager.html Square: https://assets.ctfassets.net/1wryd5vd9xez/6bDnTwb4H7bfiFvg55... Dropbox: https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/m3_engineerin...

I am surprised to see Matlab so low on this pay scale. My impression is that the typical Matlab user is a highly trained scientist or non-software engineer (mechanical, industrial, etc). Maybe those non-software engineering roles are less inclined to respond to a survey from Stack Overflow.

Thank you!

Does anyone have any context or background on this paper and why its just now appearing in HN? Is this the seminal paper on random sampling? Has this recently become contextually relevant for some reason, or just an old gem that people are rediscovering?

Any background info is appreciated!

"KPIs" (Keypoint Indicators)" --> I believe KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. Source: https://www.klipfolio.com/resources/articles/what-is-a-key-p...

"Another problem with these corporate-type guys is that they do a lot of "management by numbers"" --> What is the alternative to this? Management by intuition? Coordinating a company with ~350,000 employees around the world is definitely going to require some structure and metrics to measure how things are going. There are certainly ways that this can be abused, but I don't think the answer is to have no measures of how the business is performing.

I 100% agree with all of this. A few tips:

1. This chair comes in sizes. Make sure you are actually getting the right size for your body. 2. I was able to find several of them used on Craigslist locally with a few small minor defects such as worn armrests, gas cylinders, etc.. I was able to buy my chair used with a bad gas piston, buy a replacement for $40 on Amazon and easily install it. I was able to do all of this for a few hours of work and under $300. 3. I would recommend taking a few minutes to read the website on how to properly configure this chair. 4. Even if you have the best desk chair, if your desk, monitors and keyboards are not also ergonomically aligned, you will not be getting the majority of the benefit. 5. There are a number of great accessories for this chair. I also have an Atlas headrest that I really like.

Many struggling technology companies will go private to all them to substantially invest in RnD. This allows then to make those expenditures without having the overhead and distractions of having to be a public company where investors are expecting short-term returns. Further, these private equity companies may then roll up several related businesses in an attempt to create synergies through sales or product.

Ultimate software is a recent example of this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2019/03/01/an-insid...

This is an interesting move. Many companies are still operating on-prem, hybrid cloud or they need to have a multicloud strategy (to operate in certain geographies or to avoid vendor lock-in). If Cloudera can get to the point where they have a big data infrastructure that is competitive with the native offerings from GCP, AWS, etc but easily supports on-prem, hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud, I would imagine there would be many ready corporate customers.

Going private could give them the opportunity to make significant RnD investments away from the quarterly demands of a public company. On the other hand, the private equity backers could enact a bunch of cost-cutting, gut the company, cause its top employees to leave and load the company up with debt. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out.

Gorilla Glue! Jokes about using it as a hair product aside; this has saved me thousands of dollars. I recently used it to repair a wicker outdoor dining table that was fraying. I recently used it to fix the base of an expensive blender that has broken. Its about a $7 purchase at your local hardware store, but it will easily pay for itself.

If you have an appetite for a more in-depth book, the McKinsey book "Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies" is a classic that is taught in many business schools and used extensively in practice. Although the title is specific to valuation, it covers the basics of financial statements and also offers solid guidance on leveraging financial data to drive strategy.

I would recommend selectively reading the chapters based on your specific situation and previous level of knowledge. It appears used copies are available on Amazon for about $25.

Milk Street Kitchen is the absolute best periodical for recipes and cooking in my opinion.

https://www.177milkstreet.com/

Its by the same founder of America's Test Kitchen/Cooks Illustrated, which is another respected publication. However, Milk Street recipes tend to be simpler, less fussy and more internationally inspired. Everything I have made from them has been an absolute winner. They also have an outstanding high quality TV show free on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpGcoQ4AmidJSpDUXPZoq8A

Obligatory "I don't understand why people still use Excel and just don't learn to program" comment

This is a great tool I use all the time. In addition to about 2 dozen hotstrings, I have a script that will automatically open my email editor, a script that will open my calendar to allow me to schedule a meeting, and a script that will open a new message in Slack to allow me to quickly fire off a message.

Huge time saver!

Anyone have a copy of this not behind a paywall?

A remote start for my car. I live in a chilly part of the country and unfortunately have a long commute. Being able to get into a warm car is really comforting!

In briefly skimming this, the things that standout to me are:

1. Almost every single moment is accounted for. There is very little slack or break times baked into the schedule.

2. It seems like there is a high percentage of time spent on ceremonial activities and photo shoots. Perhaps this is to be expected.

3. It might be an interesting ML project to try to classify time of presidential schedules and compare how that allocation various across presidents, during recessions versus expansions, during wartime versus peacetime, etc.

Love the question. I would be curious to hear others' feedback on my method and understand what others do.

Assuming we are talking about technical writing and nonfiction, my preferred method is outlining. I will typically have one section per chapter. My next level of bullet points will be the major conclusions that the work draws from that chapter. The level below that will be the supporting evidence for each of those conclusions. In the case of math/cs work, that is where I will put the proofs.

Additionally, I will use several notations to indicate items of special interest. I will write "TODO" to indicate future tasks I want to do inspired by that section of the book. Examples of this typically include researching other papers, looking up the definition of a term I do not understand, etc. I will then change this to DONE once complete and update the relevant section of the notes.

I also will tag items as "IDEA" for potential areas of future research, product ideas, etc. The advantage of using these tags is that I can keyword search them in the future easily.

For statements I deem particularly important, I will informally cite them with PN<page number> (for example, if something was on page 55, it would read PN55) to indicate exactly where in the work I found that fact.

I tend to take my notes directly in Evernote and I tend to write them while I am reading, versus writing a large summary at the end.

The big downside of Evernote is that Evernote does not support LaTex. I have read some hacks online where people claimed to get this working via various methods, but I could never make it work for me. In the cases where I need to write detailed equations, I will use a simple online latex editor and paste the resulting image into the appropriate section of Evernote. This historically has been the part of my system that causes the most frustration.

In graduate school, I was an adamant paper note taker. Now I have a dozen large binders containing years of work that I am reluctant to get rid of ("in case I need it some day"), but that manage to annoy my partner by taking up valuable closet space.