seanstickle

National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) | Director, Information Systems | REMOTE (US) | Full-Time

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) is the nation's largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to building better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness.

Hiring an IT Director to lead 2 Salesforce admins, 3 software developers (PHP/Laravel), 2 sysadmins (1 general, 1 call center). Working directly for the COO (me).

Needs strong empathy, management, tech skills.

Full details: https://seanstickle.notion.site/Director-of-Information-Syst...

You can reach out to me directly at https://twitter.com/seanstickle

National Alliance on Mental Illness | Arlington, VA (REMOTE) | Full stack web app developer | Full-time | $80,000-$95,000 DOE

We're a 501(c)(3) nonprofit association that provides advocacy, education, support and public awareness so that all individuals and families affected by mental illness can build better lives.

We're hiring a software developer to help us build a variety of applications using PHP & Laravel.

You'll need experience with any of the following: Laravel, Ruby on Rails, Django, or something similar.

Full details here: https://www.notion.so/seanstickle/Software-developer-at-NAMI...

Apply here: https://nami.applicantpro.com/jobs/1633027.html

Here's a list of the Great Books of the Western World, which is a pretty good place to start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...

At St. John's College (back in the 90's anyways), we called this "teaching science and math historically" (as opposed to teaching the history of science and math -- which tends to emphasize dates and names).

By telling the story of science and math, we gained the context of who did what for what reasons. Which unlocked my understanding of science and math in a way that textbooks never did.

A good history of where modern JavaScript comes from (from old school to webpack and babel).

https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/modern-javascript-...

Helped me understand the how and why of webpack.

Solar United Neighbors | IT Generalist | Full-time | Washington, DC | ONSITE or REMOTE | https://www.solarunitedneighbors.org

Women, minorities, people with disabilities, and veterans are strongly encouraged to apply.

Solar United Neighbors is a national nonprofit that organizes local communities around the country to go solar, join together, and fight for their energy rights.

We’re growing fast -- really fast. We’re expanding into new states, building new partnerships, and offering new services. That kind of growth requires a great IT infrastructure to help our members and supporters organize and advocate for solar at the state and national level. Your job is to help build the infrastructure that powers our growth.

IN THE FIRST YEAR, you can expect to work on projects that include:

- Work with our Go Solar team to CUSTOMIZE SALESFORCE to support new product lines and workflows, streamline their workload, and increase our ability to report on campaign performance.

- UPGRADE OUR COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (mass email, advocacy, event management, donations) to a more effective and flexible system (or systems) and integrate them with both our websites and with SalesForce.

- Work with our Growth team to REBUILD OUR WEBSITES to be more user-friendly, accessible, and effective at engaging our community of solar supporters.

- Work with our Engagement Director to DEVELOP WEB APPLICATIONS that automate the internal workflow for our two major national solar awareness campaigns -- Brews from the Sun and the National Solar Tour.

We’ve gone all-in with WordPress for our websites, so you need to know your way around WORDPRESS (and PHP in general) really well. Most of our core business logic lives in SALESFORCE, so you need to know how to customize SalesForce (custom objects, reports, workflows). Deploying and managing the servers will be your responsibility, so you need to be effective on the LINUX command line. And we have some data analysis projects on deck, so you need to be comfortable setting up DATABASES and writing SQL queries.

Just as important as all those technical skills -- maybe more! -- you need to be a COMMITTED TEAM PLAYER who is ready to shoulder responsibility, find the opportunity hidden in every problem, and build other people up.

Finally, you need to bring a commitment to innovation and continuous improvement. We’re huge fans of applying the LEAN STARTUP model to our work -- building quick prototypes to test our ideas in the real world, collecting data to measure how well those ideas perform, and learning from that data so we can make the next version even better. If you bring data analysis skills, that’s a huge plus. Either way, an “ALWAYS BE TESTING” attitude is required.

You'll report directly to the VP OF GROWTH (me) and work with a committed and brilliant team of communications experts, policy wonks, digital marketers, and community organizers on projects with ambitious goals and aggressive deadlines. Full details here: https://www.idealist.org/en/nonprofit-job/b37efcac8ec14283ba...

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics tackles happiness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicomachean_Ethics

"Let us resume our inquiry and state, in view of the fact that all knowledge and every pursuit aims at some good, what it is that we say political science aims at and what is the highest of all goods achievable by action. Verbally there is very general agreement; for both the general run of men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness, and identify living well and doing well with being happy; but with regard to what happiness is they differ, and the many do not give the same account as the wise."

For those that like to mess around with the J programming language, here is what I believe is correct code to generate this parallax compression pattern.

  pack =: 3 : '+./ (r,y+1) $ (npc*y+1) {. (npc*y) }. p' "0
  pc =: 3 : 0
    r =: npc =: y
    c =: +/ 1+i.y
    p =: 1 p: (1+i.c*npc)
    pack i.r
  )

Image of output for numbers-per-cell = 75 here: https://twitter.com/seanstickle/status/997675789264015361

Sounds like Reid Hoffman's book "The Alliance". Good read.

http://www.theallianceframework.com/

Star Maker was written by Olaf Stapledon.

http://www.amazon.com/Star-Maker-Olaf-Stapledon/dp/148264446...

Pretty much any of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...

Mostly because I'm an APL snob. Haskell is great.

One of my favorite books is "Algebraic Models For Accounting Systems" -- http://www.amazon.com/Algebraic-Models-For-Accounting-System...

Fundamentally this book is about the application of abstract algebra to the analysis of accounting systems.

Add in APL or J (or Haskell if you must) by way of "Algebra: An Algorithmic Treatment" (http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-algorithmic-treatment-Kenneth-...), and you build a quite rigorous proof-based accounting system.

At least in my communications department, we follow a style guide — like Bloomberg's — and capitalize for our own purposes, rather than to further the marketing of another company.

E.g., "iPad, iPod, iTunes. Follow the company style for capitalization in text: iPad, iPod, iTunes. In headlines, capitalize because the words are nouns: IPad, IPod, ITunes."

Winkler, Matthew (2011-10-14). The Bloomberg Way: A Guide for Reporters and Editors (p. 304). Wiley. Kindle Edition.

And: "When a name begins with a lowercase letter, capitalize the first letter in all references: EBay, not eBay; EasyJet, not easyJet."

Winkler, Matthew (2011-10-14). The Bloomberg Way: A Guide for Reporters and Editors (p. 271). Wiley. Kindle Edition.

Principia Mathematica

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica

This is how I learned proofs:

http://i.imgur.com/omXqvos.png

Well, technically I learned proofs from Euclid first. But this book followed close behind.

Clear and comprehensible (once you learn the basic symbols). Very much structured. There's hardly any prose in the whole two volumes.

See my reply to prostoalex at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8679172

The same it applies anywhere. You want results from people in the restaurant business, hospitality industry, or retail environments, right?

A Results-Only Work Environment isn't a Remote-Only Work Environment. You work where and when you want, as long as your work gets done. If you need to be in the restaurant during certain hours to achieve your results, then that's where you are.

The focus is first and foremost on the results, and everything follows from that.

That's a reasonable concern, adeptus.

What's preventing management from imposing huge amounts of workload and telling you to get it done in 40 hours — or you're fired and they'll find someone else to do it?

I do not mean this at all flippantly. I've worked places (and I'm sure others have as well) where the amount of work assigned is undoable in the amount of time available. People burn out, people deliver poor quality, people quit.

A ROWE is not meant as a mechanism to protect employees from destructive bosses. And, for knowledge workers whose work cannot be mechanically reduced to hours, neither is a 40-hour week.

A ROWE is about removing waste in the work process so that people can focus on the work they're hired to do, not on outdated ritualistic traditions about work that no longer apply.

That's a great question, tanderson92.

Unless you've had a remarkable work experience, you'll find that bad management shifts the goalposts in a 40-hour work environment too. "Work harder, work faster, work smarter!" This behavior is independent of the environment. The advantage of ROWE is that it removes a lot off waste (hours tracking, telecommuting paperwork, microaggressions about hours worked, etc.) and lets people actually focus on the work.

If you have executives that want to destroy the company by crushing the workforce then, yeah, no environment will stop them.

Once again, I have to point to the Results-Only Work Environment — http://gorowe.com/pages/rowe-standards. ROWE isn't the only way of doing this sort of thing, but it's a good approach.

Companies hire people to produce results, not to sit in an office for a certain number of hours. Given this, stop trying to manage where and when people work, and start focusing on whether they are delivering results.

This endless parade of articles about work hours is reminiscent of people discussing the threadcount of the Emperor's clothes.

Work hours are certainly a good proxy for effort spent. But companies don't (or shouldn't) pay for effort, they pay for results.

Take 2 people: one a talented auto mechanic, one is me (not mechanically talented). Give us both the task of changing all 4 tires on a car.

I take 8 hours. The mechanic takes 1. (Made up numbers, but you get the idea).

8 hours reflect my effort, sure. But you want the tires changed. If the mechanic finishes in 1 hour, great. That's what you're paying for — changed tires. Not hours.

I feel for you. Apparently you don't have a boss who can define what they want from you. This is not uncommon, and we're struggling with that ourselves. We've all spent so many years with the belief that putting in hours is the work, that we don't really know what we've hired people to actually do.

All your questions are the same questions you have in an TIME + PRESENCE = RESULTS job. What if they decide they want 11 instead of the current 4. What if you wait an entire week for the other department? These are all still problems. Are you excusing yourself from dealing with them because you say "hey, 40 hours in and I'm done, bye!"?

It's not difficult to measure results of work that you hire people to do. It's hard to decide to start doing that though.

Let's be honest. Both a Results-Only Work Environment or a "9-5 in the office" environment try to pack as much into an employee's schedule as possible. That's not unique to ROWE.

Some of the answers to your questions are: well, what do you do now, and how can that be made better? ROWE isn't magic. It's just a recognition that pretending that you're paying for hours spent in an office is nonsense, and that we should talk about the work itself rather than the things that don't have to do with the work.

The old equation (fetishistically held to, even in the face of its absurdity) of TIME + PRESENCE = RESULTS typically takes the focus of the conversation, and we end up in conversations about who can work remotely, and how many hours people should put in, etc. Instead of talking about the stuff we're actually paid to deliver.

As for not knowing how to improve processes, I don't mean that we should just say to them "hey, go improve things." It's a crucial management responsibility to make sure that people know how to do this sort of thing, to teach them how, and to provide ongoing coaching in doing it.

This is a cultural change that the company has to go through.

They're paying me for the results. Not for the hours.

Thinking that they'll "ramp up the required results more and more until you are working 40 hours a week" means that you're still thinking that you're paying for hours.

Still, it's the responsibility of all employees to improve the process that they work in, just as part of the company's continuous improvement. Which means that more/better results will be delivered over time anyways.

How do you agree on results that are "enough for the company" when you hire a consultant (assuming they're an intelligent consultant and don't charge by the hour).

I favor something more like a Results-Only Work Environment (http://gorowe.com/pages/rowe-standards), where the focus is on the results and not on how many hours are worked.

Too many companies (even startups) are conservatives and traditionalists in the sense of thinking that work needs to be done within certain hours and at a certain place, even when those are not drivers of the results.

I'm hired to deliver certain results, not to work a number of hours. If it takes me 10 hours or 40 hours to deliver those results, that's up to me, as long as the deadlines are hit and the deliverables are high-quality. And there's no reason to be in an office, unless the office is instrumental to achieving those results.

The focus on how many hours people should work is a fetish that reinforces a still-dominant 20th century office culture.

When Hercules cleaned out the Augean stables, he wasn't then obligated to refill them. Just because I can see a problem and criticize a fumbling attempt at a solution, it does not follow that I have an alternative.

Calling people "independent contractors" doesn't necessarily make it true. Depending on jurisdiction, they have to meet certain criteria to be called that; otherwise they're an employee, and the company can be subject to penalties from the IRS and Department of Labor (in the US).

What I find disturbing about this is that lean concepts, from Deming to Toyota to software dev and so forth, is meant to benefit both the company and the customer — reduce waste, increase flow, make products and services that people want and that make companies money.

"Lean recruitment" is a bastardization of the term, as it's basically a cool-sounding way for companies to exploit job-seekers in a way that doesn't make things better for the job seeker but certainly advantages the company.

Company gets some free (which may be illegal in some jurisdictions) or paid-but-still-illegal (just saying "independent contractor" isn't a magic word) labor and a low-cost way to vet candidates. Job-seekers get ... an opportunity to work in a diminished capacity in the hopes of getting a job. And no, calling someone an "independent contractor" doesn't necessarily make it so, if the person is doing work in the office, under your direction, with your equipment — companies get in trouble calling people independent contractors when they're actually employees. The description from the original post certainly sounds like it fits this pretty well.

I don't think the current interview process is working as well as it could, and it's ripe for some rebooting. But I don't see that labelling "worker exploitation" as "lean" gets us there.

Also, depending on local and regional laws, asking people to work for free can be illegal.