I would argue that allowing the police to fire individuals from companies would be an egregious violation of human rights on par with disallowing free speech.
985 karma · joined May 28, 2012
Defining what makes a non-hostile workplace is hard, enforcing it on individuals is harder, so instead delegate that responsibility to each individual company and take action on the company if it does not do that.
In no way is it a perfect system (cue tons of excessively formalized training etc), but it is the best system I know of.
Allowing companies to remove the external force of "If you do not do this, you may face civil action" breaks the model though, so I completely understand why Googlers would like to remove forced arbitration. The risk of that is a contributing factor towards compliance.
The police’s mindset (at least the ones I’ve interacted with) is one of three things:
1. Deterrance from crimes to be committed (doesn’t apply here)
2. Achieve convictions for crimes (would also not apply in your situation)
3. Deploy force to break up ongoing altercations (also doesn’t apply)
2 is interesting. Talk about a specific alleged crime with a police officer and they will not be discussing whether it was a crime or not much, nor if the person committed it, they will be discussing whether it can be proven in a court of law or not that a criminal act was committed by a specific person, beyond reasonable doubt. It is a purely pragmatic operation of “how can I provide proof that something occurred that is against this list of rules”.
The police are in no way useless, most people just misunderstand what their job is. Their job is not to dispense justice, or make sure you get your revenge.
In your specific situation it sucked, but from a police point of view what would they do? Is there a crime? Maybe. Would they be able to present a chain of evidence proving beyond reasonable doubt that a crime occurred - most assuredly not. Would a conviction, however unlikely, achieve something meaningful? Nope, the guy would get a fine at most, but would still be working with you.
On the other hand, an employer is fully within their right to fire someone for a situation like that. They do not have the same burden of proof, they can refer to previous records of incidents, and the consequences would better match what you’d want (removal of the hostile environment).
Twitch prime used to justify paying half of the cost on its own, but that no longer gives me the one benefit I care about (no ads). That leaves video, which is a good fringe benefit, but not a main need for me. Amazon music was not a replacement for Spotify (too much things gated behind another 9 usd a month paywall).
To me, it feels like they decided to slowly weaken the benefits of the overall package and hope inertia kept people from opting out (not to mention the dark patterns like cancelling subscription removes the benefits of the current subscription).
Project management is happily alive. Thinking Agile in some way solves project management is insane.
Plan out your system, estimate the time to build it (you don’t even need good estimates), execute ruthless change control. It’s not hard, just takes discipline. Ruthless change control is the hard part. That doesn’t mean saying no, it means saying “if you change things, it costs you schedule days”.
If you want a clear cut system, iDesign has some good classes. Imo at least.
That some people get disillusioned as they get older is probably normal. That most still are happy with work seems nice - there’s a lot of crappy jobs out there.
That is not obvious to most people, because the concept of customer service we understand, while we really don’t understand learning algorithms.
It’s not about talking to, it’s about proper hands free control.
95% of things are better controlled with hands, but there is a significant set of things where voice control is superiour (usually due to your hands being otherwise occupied).
I guarantee you that unless your company recently downsized (or is very small) there are things you can cut, because no one cared enough to fix them or they thought it was cool to have X even though X is not returning value.
No one takes on more debt / raises more funds unless they have to. If your company needs to raise more capital your stock options are worth exactly 0 dollars. You already lost that bet, because your company isn’t solvent without external funds.
The new investors may give you a new bet, but don’t think your original bet still stands - you lost that when you had to do another round of founding. You should also expect the new bet to be significantly worse than the old bet, because you have no leg to stand on in the bargaining of the terms of the new bet.
MLM schemes are bullshit, don’t waste your money.
If you buy into Herbalife now you are truly not making a good decision, because there is already a huge pyramid of people above you.
MLM schemes are a bad idea at the start because they are unlikely to take off, and they are a bad idea when they are running because they are unlikely to be profitable for anyone at the lower levels due to the unsustainable structure of profit distribution.
It’s just another hot potato game.
If you truthfully believe bitcoin will develop into a stable alternative to state run currencies, great, I wish you good luck.
I don’t. To me it is like religion - they can’t all be right and they are mutually exclusive. I don’t trust myself to be able to pick the winner among all the losers.
Sweden has a thriving military export business (Bofors, SAAB) that is close to top of the world in USD per capita. Not wanting to work with that seems reasonable.
Everything is a spectrum, but there are also clear parts of the spectrum that contains death, and clear parts of the spectrum that are better than the others.
Works is not an acceptable standard. Imagine if we built bridges with the criteria that “well I crossed the river on it, so it works”. What tonnage can it support, how many years can it stay viable, does it fail gracefully if we drive something heavier than intended over it, what amount of wind can it take... none of those things are captured by “it works”.
Similarly for code. If your answer is “well something changed, so we need to refactor” or “well that wasn’t in the requirements so we can’t do that” then your solution didn’t work in the first place, because works implies scalability, extensibility, reliability etc.
Those are not style or opinion. Making anything “work” in the now is trivial. Building things that are not fragile to change and time is engineering.
Undocumented code and decisions are just a more slowly accumulating cost, it is no less costly than bad or failing code.
This is a reason I love having outspoken and extroverted devs. The guys who love to talk so much that they will explain in extreme detail and at length.
I was reading through an old bug yesterday, and the guy who had done some work in that area had left a 5 paragraph explanation of what had gone wrong, what he thought may have caused it and some things he was planning on doing. Having that written down was invaluable when I got to the thing a year later.
Process rigour is not the goal. Communicating what is strange and different is. If you have guys who do that naturally, great. If not, you need some process.
We recently had a magic the gathering old cards discussion internally. People were showing off their collections, many of which were in the mid five digits price range (full beta power etc).
People keep those things in bank vaults. If they play for fun they just use proxies. The odd time they go to a real tournament they take out the cards and use them.
To me the desire to collect these things doesn’t take away anything. It is still a game, but it is also something to collect and enjoy just owning something rare for some, and that rare thing happens to also have other utility.
The point of a thing can be multifaceted, and collection is as valid as any other point is, to me at least.
/r/fitness also has a great wiki with a number of programs, including a recommended progression of programs.
Yes you CAN. That doesn't mean it is not a hell of a lot easier to get the same results by using other tools though.
If you want to get fit (build muscle), and you're not using a barbell, you're most likely making things harder for yourself. If that is what you want to do, fine, but recognize that you're taking a more difficult route.
http://randsinrepose.com/archives/a-hard-thing-is-done-by-fi... this article is pretty good when it comes to forgiving yourself for procrastination in terms of starting something.
In terms of finishing, for me that is a question of self-image. I am someone who completes things. I build my reputation on delivering things on time and with attention to detail throughout the project. Others know they can rely on me to do that, so they will not try to micromanage me or look over my shoulder, because they can rely on me delivering the way I always do. That image is important to me, so I will go to great lengths to keep it.
People think I am good at attention to detail (even though I have no natural propensity for it at all, outside an obsessive need to understand how things work) and they rely on me to be that person in the business environment, so I have an unwritten social contract to fulfill, and keeping that is important to me, even if the actual task I need to do to keep it is not very engaging.
That's all there's to it. Start, and finish what you started. I don't tie any kind of rewards or punishment to the process. I'll procrastinate a bit before I start, but that is part of figuring out what the thing you're starting is, and I will finish (on or before time) because others are relying on me to finish.
You can do a lot of chips in a day though, I did around 10k per day if I remember right, so there was still some profit.
It was actually a good job most days. Certainly made me more fit than before. I think most work is like that right? Some crappy things and some cool things. But like you say, doing that for 20 years or more I am not sure about.
I did it for a year and a half full time and then part time for two years while working on a CS degree.
5-6 hours a day biking in -15C snow with wet feet (Mailman).
8 hours a day moving chips one by one in and out of an EPROM writer because it was cheaper to have me do that than pay the extra 2c to have them preprogrammed. The chips were 25c without programming and 27c with. (Ericson subcontractor).
And I am privileged as hell, coming from Sweden with a good education and a family I can rely on.
I think the point of burning out on work is relatable still. It is not fun to work long hours of anything, and it is even less fun when something you used to do for entertainment turns into a chore. But I'm pretty happy with my desk job in the software industry because the other jobs Ive seen have been a lot less nice.
If I was to review my career (which is by no means exceptional, but still), the times I've taken giant steps it has been either because of luck (I joined a company at a good growing point) or a mix of skill, luck and a network of people that help put me in opportunities to be exceptional. I have the skills to be great, but I need the opportunities to be great as well, and opportunities are not necessarily only created by skill.
Skill is a necessary component, but it is not the only component. There are a lot of things a lot of people can do, and the determining factor in who ends of doing them is usually not skill. There is such a thing as skilled enough, which is hard to get to, but if you're opting between getting 1% better at something and getting 20% better at something else, often taking the 20% thing will pay off more, whether that be in networking, finding more opportunities, or whatever.