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jcolmanon How to make sense of any mess

This is a table of contents. Those are the names of sections. You can click on them to go to pages of more normally formatted paragraphs.

jcolmanon Intercom facing employee unrest after new policy ended support for Pride

Former employee here. So disappointed to see this. Those ERGs include groups for Black people immigrants, even working parents. They’re not political—they’re for people to support each other.

jcolmanon The scourge of job title inflation

This is a rant in search of a problem to solve. It doesn’t make a strong case for a “scourge”. The issues it points out have less to do with title inflation and more to do with bad leadership, planning, and comms.

jcolmanon A History of Black Print

FWIW, I asked about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778358

There’s a link in the comments to this 2005 verion of the net.abuse FAQ, which references “Do not feed the trolls”: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq/troll-faq/ reply

jcolmanon What we look for when we hire designers at Intercom

Reasonable people can disagree about how to do this best, so I'd be curious to hear any feedback you have. In our case, we're trying to be as open, transparent, and straightforward about what we look for as we can.

jcolmanon I Only Work on "Shiny" Projects

Unshiny products may not make your friends envious, but it's where the real impact is, not to mention learning and passion. Just substitute each instance of "Designer" in the article with "Engineer" or "Founder".

jcolmanon The dirty little secret about standing desks

Not sure that this is true for everyone. Shifting from sitting to standing full-time didn't change anything for me.

Even so, this is hilarious.

jcolmanon How to Give a Talk

Spot-on. As someone who speaks a lot, I still find this to be the most challenging (and worthwhile) part of the presentation lifecycle. Kudos for recognizing that and including it in your post!

jcolmanon Public speaking for introverts

Love this post. Great tips that are useful for anybody/everybody, introverts and extroverts alike.

Just want to make the point that shyness/anxiety/insecurity != introversion. They're completely separate spectrums. Sure, sometimes they cross one another, but correlation of the two does not mean causation.

Here's a good post by Susan Cain (the author of Quiet) that gets at this idea: http://www.thepowerofintroverts.com/2011/07/05/are-you-shy-i...

jcolmanon A Guide to Public Speaking for Introverted and Shy People

Here's some more information about the difference between shy people and introverted people. http://www.thepowerofintroverts.com/2011/07/05/are-you-shy-i...

Everyone's different and your mileage may vary, but it's important not to generally conflate these two concepts or else you risk framing someone the wrong way and end up totally misunderstanding them.

jcolmanon Ask HN: What are your daily must-read sites?

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/ Andrew Sullivan: balanced political commentary from a British conservative living in America and who voted for Obama.

jcolmanon Startups: Stop Trying To Hire Ninja-Rockstar Engineers

I thought this was pretty spot-on.

Why not hire junior devs (or marketers, or any other staff for that matter), train them in your company's culture and work methods, and let them grow into the senior role once they have a better understanding of your company and it's customers/users?

It seems to me like this approach would give entry-level folks a chance to develop their skills while also producing far more learning and teamwork than you'd have otherwise. All while saving cash for other strategic needs.