jitter kills
309 karma · joined May 18, 2018
I run tricky R&D projects. From inception to product and spinoffs.
Collaborative efforts spanning multiple disciplines, countries and cultures. Usually around 15-30ppl, 2-5y, 5-10 organisations. Mainly in medtech / biotech, fintech, computational modelling. Too curious to focus, often stray outside my comfort zone.
Work globally. Based in Liechtenstein / Zürich / München, Gothenburg / Oslo / Copenhagen. Mostly consulting, sometimes entrepreneurial, occasionally employed.
20y R&D leadership, 10y academic research. PhD on computational physics in medicine.
ping me at: jiro.csol@gmail.com
jitter kills
Having a record allows all kinds of automated followup, post analysis, etc. This level of business intelligence and actual understanding is helpful in improving organisation function and individual training long term.
Asynchronous is _a_ great next step beyond that:
Moving discussions and decisions async has been a massive improvement in the organisations I have helped. Goes against dogma and habit (with all the huge obstacles that come with it) but pays off quickly.
Discussions are more factual and evidence based.
Decisions are thought through and transparent.
Collective (and individual) memory of what has been discussed, decided, and why is much better.
Training people to be clear, succinct, transparent also help them not get bogged down in gut feeling, habit, dogma, ego, posturing, pestering, politics, etc.
And of course the immediate bonus of individually flexible scheduling and not killing efficiency by slicing everything to administration/manager-mode-time.
Perhaps we should learn from other places that have better solutions already? E.g: Japan? Singapore? etc.
Somehow many western countries have gotten stuck in red tape and the inability to learn from other cultures.
And to make it even more short sighted, the idea won't go away, it will just take a little longer and then pop up in competing colours.
Hard numbers from 20+ projects over 20+ years say the exact opposite. Hard core tech R&D projects, small and large.
When I compare the distributed all remote projects to those run in house, it is night and day difference.
... quick search [1]
Standards change greatly with time and it is a joke to believe that applying the same standards to everyone will get a good outcome.
Anecdata: I would have loved to get the possibility to study higher math at high school level, at school. I had to dig it out on my own since the local school topped out after basic calculus, linalg, statistics. I was not alone.
Today I would estimate that top 5% could easily and happily handle multivariate, ode/pde, etc in high school given proper support and encouragement.
Top few percent learn several times faster than average. What is the point, other than ancient ideology, to slow them down and hinder their learning progress?
E.g:
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/do-coal-fired-power-sta...
Love tools that help, eg checklists, when used right.
But over time they have a very strong tendency to become set-in-stone dogma, at which time they will create a priesthood and a very large dead zone where thinking and flexibility is no longer allowed.
Depends on the cost of energy and the interior comfort level you want.
Reduces calendar time, risk, cost. And I'm likely to make better decisions once the code and market is better understood after the prototype is tested under real world conditions and the requirements have changed (like they always seem to do).
Plenty of people get seasick, but there are still quite a few of us who enjoy sailing a day through a proper October Storm.
[1] https://seb.se/privat/livet/att-skaffa-barn/sa-paverkar-ett-...
Parents who take time for themselves and don't _just_ live for their kids tend to end up happier and with better relationships with their children as they grow up.
[1] I don't have children of my own, so wtf do I know. But: My lifestyle, spending a lot of time practically living with my friends and their families, allows me to get a fairly deep insight into a large set of varied families over the last 20y.
[1] https://research.tuni.fi/uploads/2019/05/0a103135-p086568.pn...
but I have inspected plenty of organisations where strong engineering teams are drowned by management bullshit. even found places where most of the individuals, engineering and management both, are arguably competent but the overall organisational decreptitude kills any and all effective work, no matter how heroic or skilled the individual and collective effort gets.
nope. plenty of stress, long hours, tons of work.
just very little product output. often even negative output.
Thanks for catching that. Sedentary lifestyle is around 2000kcal/day, ca 100W.
I assumed the ca 20% efficiency was for efficiency of chemical energy extraction from the food (on average, varies a lot between carbohydrate, protein, fats) to storage as glucose/fat before we run it to ... > AMP > ... > ATP & NADH.
But that should probably already be taken into account by the output calculations from the agricultural production. Right? (so my original comment was wrong).
Embarrassing that I don't know this off the top of my head. I used to be good at it. Need to dust off the books. Or probably buy new ones since the field has progressed since last I dug around in it.
E.g: human rest power is ca 100W at ca 20% efficiency. The agricultural production is at best 2% efficient. That's already 25kW, just to survive. * Edit: partially wrong, see comments below. *
But it is perhaps relevant to exclude all non-CO2 energy sources? Thus putting the agricultural efficiency much higher since the sunlight would be "0".
When calculating footprint I generally use the partial cost paid for the item as proxy for the partial footprint to attribute for its total lifecycle. Interested in hearing about degenerate/edge cases.
There are a lot of them with similar results, going back to 1960s.
Kohn "Punished by Rewards" is a good general start for that stuff. I think there was some generalised study/review published in late 90s. Probably Deci and Ryan (?).
? links to good job boards ?
I know several people (stem MSc / PhD)s who are on and off looking into migrating. They would come with around NZD 0.8-2.4M net capital from selling their current houses.
Yes! And a lot more as well. Many are under the impression that income tax is the majority of their major tax burden.
Total taxation from billing to salary net + vat of normal spending. This must include all forms of employment, social fees, and other government imposed costs for the employer. This is higher than income tax for many regions and income brackets. On top of this should be added other taxes for a given lifestyle. E.g. fuel and vehicle taxes, property taxes, etc.
Then the services provided: health care, schooling, child care, child support, pensions, etc.
Things look a lot different when making a complete cost comparison between countries, and varies a lot depending on what is included as a "normal" lifestyle. E.g: couple with 2.2 children at median income looking at retirement at 70 vs a single high income earner looking to retire at 50... and ... so ... on ...
On top of that we can also include other living costs ... but we started somewhere at average house price vs annual family income?
? what is your stance on, e.g., competitive sports teams ?
For the general public it seems like a new thing. But many of us have been working fully or mostly remote for decades, used to be called distributed. There is a lot of knowledge out there for anyone who want to learn, extensively tested in many organisations. The gitlab stuff, linked above, is one example.
I've been building and running globally distributed asynchronous organisations for 20y, and I've learnt some of my tips/tricks/tools from people doing it very successfully for many years before I started.
My best tips: ditch the traditional management dogma, it's quite inefficient anyway. Trust your people. Make sure they have the information and training they need. Flatten out. Push for transparency. Go async! Especially for decision making.
For me it has been exceptionally rare that people are less productive when they are given control over their own circumstances.