jib

As someone who once upon a time worked as a bike riding mailman in Sweden, it's largely fine. :)

There's a good amount of bike lanes, and they are largely snowy in the winter rather than icy (due to not as much traffic as the main roads), or they are graveled when there is ice, so it's rare that it is too slippery (biking on snow is fine, ice can be messy). You have to go a bit slower than normal, sure, but it's hardly a problem.

Cold isnt a problem - you do fine with like a fleece down to minus 10 or so, and most places aren't colder than that very often (unless you are very far north).

Rain is the same as anywhere - no problem as long as you have some protective gear.

Thats just the winter though - summer it is perfect.

Gallup recommends a 3 question version. Net promoter, how likely are you to keep using services in the future and overall happiness. I like that balance. Happy doesn't matter unless you will keep buying. Keeping buying doesn't matter if the reason you are only one providing, but customer actually not happy, etc.

Yeah that is the challenge. If I knew the right answer that solves it I would certainly share, but I dont.

What I try to do is talk about it over and over, and emphasize for each new initiative we roll out how we dont care about how it will impact the KPIs, we care about how it will impact our overall goals that the KPIs are trying to measure.

That said, #1 resistance point for most initiatives is still "how will affect the KPIs", so we are certainly far away from solving that problem.

Things we've tried to de-emphasize the KPI importance is going away from having an "exceeds" measure, now we are just "meets objective" or "doesnt meet objective", with "doesnt meet" set fairly low so that the people who like to min-max things dont have another clear target to min-max towards, and doing things like moving the focus to team oriented goals rather than individual goals to lower the link between KPIs and rewards, and instead linking individual rewards to general appraisals.

The best lesson I ever got about goals I got from learning to play (6-max, limit, texas hold'em) poker. Poker has stupidly high variance to profit ratio, and an endless amount of metrics you could measure to track progress.

Obviously, the goal of playing is to make money, and almost equally obviously, focusing on how much money you made is actively harmful if done for sample sizes lower than 100k hands or so.

The solution to improvement through quantitative analysis in that environment is to find key drivers that you believe impact your overall goal, analyse trends you see in those drivers, and based on those find a few areas that you want to qualitatively drill into to figure out changes you can make. I.e. - "I open 20% of the time from early position and 25% from late position - if I compare to other successful players that is too low a difference, so lets see if I can find some situations where I may be making bad decisions and plug those holes".

That is what we want to do with goal setting in business as well. Yes we have some high level KPIs that we want to improve, but actively working "to improve your revenue" is harmful and will no doubt lead to selling cars that explode etc. To be successful you set your overall KPI(s), then you forget about it and focus on smaller things that will over time incrementally add to your overall goal.

If you have managers and employees who cant make that separation or want to take short cuts to directly affect the overall goal without focusing on the smaller bits, or comparing to some kind of "best known" practise, then you end up with exploding cars, tools that has all features and no usability etc.

Like everything else - used right it is an aide, used wrong it is a negative.

If your goal is to pass tests you're missing out on the point of education. Which is to learn stuff (usually, at least).

The tests are the metric that we measure success with, they are not the goal. Confuse the two and you will most likely continue to confuse the two and you will find yourself writing extra lines of code or whatever metric you're going to confuse for a goal in your professional life as well.

Used right, this could replace part of the focus of tests and instead put the focus on learning. Which is way better. Used wrong, it could become another metric that people want to maximise, because they've confused the metric with the goal.

Metrics are indicators of success/failure, they are not success/failure, so if you try to optimise towards metrics you ultimately just screw yourself.

Use quantitative metrics to identify areas of greatest opportunity, qualitatively inspect and analyse to improve. Repeat. That's the most effective way I know of learning. Used that way, metrics are useful, and having more metrics is good, not bad.

Danish KR, not Swedish. About 350 USD.

Isn't this the same problem that music has though? The vast majority of musicians don't make a huge living from creating their own music. You either do it for the joy of it with the hope of possibly being discovered. Struggling artist etc. With the main difference being that software developers skills are also hugely wanted in other markets, which musician skills normally aren't.

On some level, its a question of how you both eat the cookie and have it, right? What independent game developers want is some guarantee of a base income, but also with the option to cash in big if they do make it big.

Maybe there is an opportunity there - I'm not sure if a credits organisation is what you're looking for. But maybe something like a self-organised fund that will buy stakes in individual projects, where the stakes are paid out more in a salary style?

Semi-organised group of indie-game developers that guarantee a (lowish) living income to all in the group in exchange for a relatively large chunk of any large windfalls to support the future. If games are actually sustainable then something like that feels like it could stand a reasonable chance, right? Assuming you get past a critical size and have some name recognition. Could also move into the same benefit areas that unions do.

Essentially something like your own very light-weight union/co-op.

Thats a highly cynical view. There's plenty of optimization problems that aren't about squeezing out productivity at the cost of anyone, but rather about improving productivity and employee satisfaction at the same time.

For instance - lets say that I realise I have a problem with turnover that I want to fix, because my costs of replacing staff are too high. To address that I want to spend 1M on retention activities in a year. Should I spend that on additional vacation days, or should I spend that on extra events for the staff, or on extra training opportunities? If I spend that money, will the impact on my turnover costs be positive enough to warrant the spend?

That's the kind of discussions that always pop up. Being able to quantify the impact would make it easier to do the right thing that both benefits employees and the employer.

Or you can see it as finding out how to take the issue of money and other hygiene factors off the table.

Money isn't a great motivator. Lack of decently accurate compensation is a very good de-motivator. Same goes for a bunch of other things - I dont want to have to think about them, but if they aren't thought about it will annoy and demotivate me. Find a way to script that and it will increase my happiness by decreasing irritants.

I dont think that is true at all.

I am pretty sure I could teach just about anyone who is motivated and interested enough math/chemistry/physics/computer science to get through any given engineering degree in those areas.

I think the amount of business people who are motivated to and interested in learning the engineering skills is way lower than the amount of engineering people who are motivated to and interested in learning business skills, but that isnt about ability, that is about motivation and interest.

Engineering interest maps much more directly to engineering education than business interest maps to business education.

10M is way better. Not only is it enough to bank and live off capital gains, it's also a 2.5 times higher valuation than 5% at 200k.

The reverse may be interesting. 1m or 200k at 5% is harder.

Land is sort of a good example (there is scarcity involved, which makes it not a perfect analogy).

Land doesn't have any intrinsic value. There are two reasons (unused) land has value:

1) Someone expects to be able to use it to create value 2) Someone expects that someone else will want to use it to create value in the future and they expect that scarcity will come into play allowing them to charge more for it in the future than it currently costs to buy.

Land is only staggeringly expensive if either the value expected to be generated from 1) is exceptionally high or the expected value someone else will generate from it in 2) is exceptionally high.

If those aren't in play, you can get land very cheaply, or even for free, or in extreme cases be paid to take over land (that usually only applies for contaminated land etc).

Yeah I mean "If I am operating a business and someone brings an idea for something we should do inside that business, the expected value of that idea is close to 0, and for some business it may be negative".

That doesnt say that all ideas are useless. Huge businesses are built off of ideas all the time. Whether it be by accidental timing, cutting edge research, new synergy opportunities or actively spotting a hole that can be filled, the businesses start with an idea and they are not useless for sure.

Once you are up and operating a business however, if an idea is not about something you can trivially do as part of daily operations (continuous improvement has amazing value) but rather is something you need to divert significant resources or attention to in order to potentially realize some other values, then the value of the idea itself, on average, is low, because you will have a lot of these ideas, and you will not be able to dedicate your resources and attention to more than a few of them at a time.

It is far more valuable (on average) to be able to effectively choose WHICH of the already existing ideas have the best return than being able to add another idea to the pile.

A lot of people want to be "the idea guy", because it's cool and relatively easy. The problem is that ideas are cheap.

The value of any given idea is really low - I would argue that for many organisations ideas even have a negative value on average, because you are going to spend a lot of time dealing with the idea without it actually becoming something that generate value in the end.

Even if you have an idea, that works, and that will generate significant value if realised, until that idea IS realised, it is a negative cost.

People who can generate a large amount of those ideas are a commodity.

People who can cheaply identify an idea that can be realised and that have access to resources to realise it, and that can go through the process of actually realising the idea are not a commodity.

The bottle neck for putting new ideas to market is not the idea generation, and so the people who consider themselves "always starters" is not a scarce resource, hence I dont need to rotate them from department to department - every department I have already have access to more than enough good ideas, so adding the "always starter" to that department would be a negative cost.

Cost mostly if I got it right? The value in knowing the position doesn't justify equipping all airplanes with some kind of satellite position update system (the two-way part that is), and there is almost no value in that information outside freak incidents like this.

Come on. Full tilt decided to run a Ponzi scheme when they were unable to collect funds in the us due to online poker being illegal in the us. They gambled with all their customers funds and lost. That is not good customer service, that is immoral and illegal.

Poker stars is the company that had good customer service in that they didn't touch the deposits, as promised, and so we're able to be back in business almost immediately.

The 4th and 2 on the 2 argument bothers me every time someone brings it up. To me it feels like its an incorrect use of statistics. EV isn't the end all - kicking the field goal has way lower variance. If your goal is winning consistently then giving up high variance high EV plays for low variance slightly lower EV plays is often the right choice, as a football season is made up of a very low number of discrete events.

About 45% of all games finish with a spread of 7 or less according to a quick search. Making a play that has a close to 50% chance of making you be down 3 points is costing you a lot of the margin if you think you are a close favorite.

You can't win more in football but you can lose a sure win, so if you believe you are say a 3-4 point favorite then the right play is to take the field goal every time - giving up the safe points means you take half the games and make them a crap shoot.

Fat Tony probably did. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy

I think of it this way, I dunno if that is the right way.

Programs should be these beautiful mathematical models that describe things - stick something in, get something out. Stick the same thing each time and get the same thing out each time.

Unfortunately to be useful programs have to be allowed to deal with messy stuff that can have side effects or some other ugly situation, or read input from a user or other programs.

You use monads to be explicit about where your program is messy and where it is isn't messy.

That can be stuff like IO, or stuff like Maybe (I dunno if what I'm getting here will even have a result - if it does, then it'll be Just (the result) otherwise it'll be Nothing) but the point is there is some messiness in there and you want to know there is messiness, otherwise you dont know what parts of your programs have messiness in them.

Perhaps you can think of them as atomic actions in concurrent programming? You declare something as atomic because you want to know the stuff inside the atom at least won't be affected by the rest of the concurrent messiness, so you can think about the pieces inside it as a non-concurrent piece.

You are applying your values to his life. You're of course welcome to do so, just realise that he has no obligation or reason to accept your judgement. It sounds like you do accept that which is great.

To me it is not sad that he has chosen to figure out what his own goals are and find a way to meet them. To you it is sad. Both those things are ok.

If you were to try to tell me that it is not ok for someone to figure out what their own goals are then I would have a problem with that.

I am not sure why you feel it is rational to modify towards larger ambitions - don't you think that is that a reflection of your own values rather than an inherent truth?

I would possibly say that it is rational to modify towards having your own set of goals, but whether those goals are ambitious or not I think depends on what you value in life? As in - I think the "intelligence" part probably allows you to realise that it is possible to have many different types of goal in life and that working towards a set of goals that work for you personally is important, but that those goals can be defined by what you yourself value.

The most intelligent guy I know wants to have a family, work on somewhat interesting problems (in chemistry if it matters) but not work huge amount of hours, so he has set himself up to have a regular consulting gig that he can do from anywhere and still focus on spending time with his family.

I think the article makes a true point well.

Intelligence of the type that is approximated by IQ (pattern identification, relationship modeling and whatnot) is like most things just another ability.

It's a useful ability in that you can use it to mimic some other useful abilities if you so choose, but it is just another ability. Any implications of it being something else is just outside expectation applied by people who want to further their own agenda, goals, world view or values etc.

Expecting someone with that type of intelligence to conform to any specific set of values or goals is like expecting someone who is tall to conform to the idea of being a sports star etc.

I was expecting the story to be that even "trivial" problems have complications once I saw it was about zip-codes. :)

A few reasons I've seen where assumptions about how zip-codes work lead to not taking money:

Ireland - no zip-codes (outside Dublin) - dont do mandatory fields

UK - numbers and letters - dont assume only numbers in zip-code

Brazil - 9 digit codes - dont assume max of 6 or 8 characters

Ya - it looks a lot like this website actually. Its a good way to visualise it.

We did. Not tying it to raises but rather the opposite, as a move to get away from more knowledge=more pay. Raises are based on contribution to the business, the gamification puts some fun stuff around self-improvement without tying it to money. Seems ok so far.

I think the point he is trying to make is that if your goal is to maximise your profits then it is not always optimal to play the nash equilibrium strategy. That is true.

The optimal strategy beats everything but an equally good strategy, and ties against itself, but it doesnt necessarily maximise profits against other bad strategies.

If you are able to identify flaws in your opponents strategy then you can play non-game theory optimal to increase your profits against that perceived strategy. Doing so comes at the cost of you yourself no longer playing the best strategy though.

There exists strategies that gives higher yields vs certain unbalanced strategies than the game theory optimal strategy (or strategies - for all we know there are several optimal strategies in limit hold'em).

For instance - in limit poker if your opponent will never raise, call every street, but not call the river with anything less than a pair, regardless of what you do, then bluffing every river is a more winning strategy than the game theory optimal strategy. The game theory optimal strategy would include times when you do not bet the river, for balance, but knowledge of your opponent's flawed strategy would tell you that betting 100% of the time has a higher yield.

No you don't need to know what the opponents strategy is. You calculate based on worst case (ie op playing perfect) and worst case is you break even. There is no way to maximize profit but you can play unexploitable, ie at a minimum not lose and possibly win assuming op doesn't play perfect.

Yes, because you know all possible states of the game.

Starting out you have 2 cards and you know your opponent has one of 2450 possible combinations of cards.

You know exactly how your 2 cards stack up in chances of winning against those 2450 combinations, and you know how much money is on the table initially. Each time an opponent has an action he can take one of two or three actions (call, raise or fold) - your job is to calculate a strategy that makes either of those decisions have the same expected value for your opponent. That is doable, but quite complex, because it requires you to consider not only what your opponent has, but also what possible hands you could have based on your previous actions.

The complexity is obviously enormous (hence why it hasnt been computed yet) but it is not impossible to compute by any definition.

Yes it is possible to mathematically solve limit poker (as well as no-limit poker, but no-limit poker is orders of magnitude more difficult - they are effectively different games).

The definition of solvable is "Does there exist a strategy that, regardless of opponents play, is not a losing strategy" though (because the game is symmetrical). It is not possible to solve for "Does there exist a strategy that, regardless of opponents play, guarantees maximum profits". You can solve it for not losing money, but you cant solve it for making the max amount of money.

Trivially it's not possible to write software that beats any opponent (because what would it do playing against itself?) . Less trivially, any game that has a finite amount of decisions (and limit hold-em does) has at least one Nash equilibrium, so there exists a strategy that will at least have you break even.

The way to solve the game is to calculate your odds of winning based on previous actions and ensure that you take actions that make any future decision of the opponent have the same outcome (to reach a Nash equilibrium).

That strategy hasnt been calculated yet, but the best limit players are most likely playing very close to it, at least if you compare to the best no-limit players playing no-limit (the variable amounts possible to bid in no-limit multiplies the possible strategies massively).

This is how I see it. Incidentally, stuff like trying to move from 37.5 -> 40h / week is probably one of the most stupid thing a company could do, assuming you have a culture where working time is seen as a social agreement rather than a strict contract. Once you are haggling over 2.5 hours, you open the door to haggling both ways, and the social agreement is at risk of collapsing. It's cool that you managed to break out of it, because (in my experience at least) one of the hardest things there is is to bring that back in once it has temporarily collapsed.