3,315 karma · joined March 28, 2014
It's about how Rome was defeated at Cannae due their overconfidence and inability to adapt, but doesn't examine how Rome ended up winning in the end. It is interesting how dependent on framing case studies are.
Management is about directing resources. Good management needs leadership ability to get the people they are directing to buy into where they are being directed, but also a bunch of other skills.
That being said, having the formal designation makes relationship and reputation building easier to start- subordinates are motivated to have a good relationship with you.
Management and leadership are overlapping but different things. You become a leader by having people who will follow you. Having control over their rewards and career (management) makes that more straightforward but it’s not the only way.
Do you know your boss’s biggest objectives, problems and worries? Your boss’s boss? Do you have opinion about what is holding your team back?
The answers to the above often aren’t strictly technical. Your boss might be under pressure to show efficiency improvements due to AI, or might have junior developers struggling to ramp, or be getting taken to task for quality issues. If you understand their problems and go to them with a solution they will typically be happy to make at least a little space to work on it. Succeed, and you develop trust, which in turn results in them being more willing to turn to you to solve problems and grant more autonomy to do so.
The key thing here is that you have to work to find problems that others want you to solve. You can develop autonomy, but only in the service of others.
That’s true whether you want to develop within a corporate environment or move into consultancy- you only get rewarded/paid to work on problems someone else wants solved.
In some industries you see education inflation- apprenticeships may be declining, but you can get a 2 year degree in auto repair at my community college. Similarly, you used to be able to become a lawyer through apprenticeship and self study, so a “junior” in the profession was the apprentice. Lawyers now enter the profession after 3 years of law school, so the bar for what a “junior” lawyer does and is has changed.
More significantly, you’ll see what is expected of a junior developer (and developers in general) change. My understanding is that prior to personal computers and spreadsheets accountants spent an enormous amount of time doing arithmetic. Presumably, junior accountants were expected to do a lot more of the arithmetic than the senior accountants. The invention of the digital spreadsheet eliminated a lot out of this work, but accountancy (and junior accountants) ended up evolving to deliver ever more insights about how a business operates and now there are more accountants than ever.
As a principal software engineer, I have far more problems to solve than I have time or available resources. If a new grad can solve those problems I’ll happily let them do so. There are precious few problems I have that an LLM can largely solve on its own and where that is true the new grad is often better at utilizing an LLM than I am.
We still discuss the code when delivered and iterate. Devs still receive feed back on their solutions and are held to account if the solutions aren’t of sufficient quality. The social element is still there, we are now just also co learning how to use this new tool.
I’ve set up various network level controls via Pi-hole and opendns family shorties (obviously this is mostly dns based). YouTube and all the search engines are set to in strict mode.
The devices we have also have various restrictions on them. Kindle kids edition has been great- lots of options for games and videos but limited ability to get into stuff they shouldn’t. We also have iPads now, with the suite of family controls applied.
Our lives are complex enough that our kids have Apple Watches now, again with parent controls in place. It’s a good compromise- they can chat with thier friends in sms, but not the stuff that pushes content on you.
It’s not perfect, but we plan on not getting smart phones or allowing normal social media until like age 18
The particular article found opioid deaths lowered life expectancy by 0.67 years, which is a crazy number.
Drug overdose deaths finally seem to be trending down in 2024, but they are still elevated and awful.
That’s ~$7000 more than the median earnings of the overall population (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t01.htm).
There will be college grads struggling and non grads thriving, but on average a person just out of college is doing at least as well as the general population income wise and can expect their incomes to rise with time.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. —-
A old soldier who was horrified at the cost of war, but keenly and sadly aware of the necessity of preparation and defense.
Complaints against self absorbed and lazy millennials have been an annoying trope for my entire professional life.
The ancient Greeks complained thier kids were disrespecting them.
I do enough work with new grads to feel comfortable declaring the kids are alright. Gen Z doesn’t feel different fundamentally from millennials to me. We’ve had good (mostly) and bad hires over time. College hires (really any early in career hires) have more variability over experienced hires because they may not belong in it profession they’ve chosen, but that’s been true over time.
The one really shocking number is the 6/10 have fired a recent grad. Given how hard it is to get rid of someone generally that is a huge number.
FWIW, the last firing of a new hire I was remotely a part of involved a Gen x or elder millennial woman who could not behave appropriately at work and managed to document her inappropriate behavior on company IT assets.
I don’t think AR is going to teach kids to read, but augmenting instruction in things like the trades, sciences, and sports all seem likely to have strong benefits. Experiential educational opportunities like museums and historical sites also seem like likely targets.
A good analogue is video. Video can be a great tool in certain subjects- I still swear everything I know about protein synthesis is from a video in college- but it is generally used as an secondary rather than a primary tool.
The video is from the 1970s and protein synthesis is explained through interpretative dance and and poetry. Its truly amazing https://youtu.be/u9dhO0iCLww?si=lTO95vbysVTB6DLa
That means if you are a 12 year E6 and plan to stay in to 20 your real total comp is closer to $130k/year, and that’s not including BAS, retention bonuses, and other compensation. And it excludes tricare and other VA benefits post retirement.
The total potential compensation for military personnel is far more comparable than it looks, but is heavily weighted to non-cash compensation.
* Apologies if I’m being too pedantic here to much, but I wanted to make sure people who aren’t familiar with the subject can understand what I’m getting at as well.
Summary is- no effect on financial performance in the observation period, but it sure made employees unhappy.
I readily admit the internet is more usable today, but in miss engaging with sites with a clear voice like this.
And yes, the first 3.5 seasons of B5 are incredible.
Any house I lived in for more than a year or two I miss. It can be really painful to remember I can’t take my kids to my childhood home because my parents moved. Heck, I occasionally miss living in the first house I bought and I’m just renting that one out.
I don’t disagree that people need to pay their mortgages, but we also should recognize that there are real externalities involved. Thinking you had stability and then losing it hurts. Being forced to relocate hurts. Feeling like you failed your family hurts. Those undergoing that deserve grace, compassion, and understanding. Sometimes they also deserve our charity.
It will still often be necessary for those people to move, but it’s not just a financial transaction for those being forced to leave their home.
In general, all parties do better in freer markets and all parties do poorly in restricted markets. However, when one party in a trading system implements restrictions and the others don’t that party can gain outsized benefits versus others.
The world spent almost 50 years liberalizing trade systems, mostly with benefits at the national scale. It took 10-15 years for most of leaders to realize that China was successfully subverting the liberal system.
“it works when implemented correctly” is the wrong lessons and will lead us to widespread protectionism and make us all poorer.
The right lesson is that “bad actors need to be dealt with and excluded from the system.”
I don’t know how deep you are in your career, but I’m at 20+ years and I’ve felt like this at least 4 or 5 times. I’ve never actually switched companies, but I’ve switched job’s within my company 3-8 times spring depending on how you want to measure a job switch.
They currently love playing classic arcade games on a cabinet I built.
It depends on the kid, but I don’t think it’s just a generational thing. The limits tend to be very old movies with sound issues, which was my limit as well.
China has been fairly quiet and well behaved since 1980, but it is current quite publicly talking forcefully reintegrating Taiwan and has had continuous naval disputes in the South China Sea.
If we are talking about colonialism, “China” is a land empire that has absolutely dominated its neighbors and often conquered them. Making an apples to apples comparison to European colonialism isn’t very useful and I don’t pretend to know details, but historical China has plenty of expansionist and domineering episodes.
Without a strong counter vailing lobby there is little reason for politicians to risk alienating the Cuban bloc to normalize relations with a fairly repressive government that still remains broadly anti-American and opposed to US interests.
Developers are more careful about what they write and submit when they know they’ll have someone else looking at it.
We went through a couple iterations of our code review policy on a multi-year project a while back. We never really saw code reviews catch a substantial number of bugs over time, but whenever we pulled back on code reviews we definitely saw the production error rate go up.
Fuel accounts 30-50% of the costs of air travel. A straight doubling of fuel costs would not double air travel costs (although it would hurt)
The CO2 emitted from air travel wouldn’t necessarily need to be converted back to a very high energy molecule like jet fuel. I’m not a chemist, but I’m pretty sure there are polymers that you can bind the carbon into and not be nearly as energy intensive as recreating petroleum molecules.
Finally, wind and solar electricity generation are already generally cheaper than any fossil fuel generation besides nat gas. The EIA (via Wikipedia) had that at around 2x cheaper solar versus diesel generation, and solar and wind continue to see cost improvement.
All that being said, any carbon elimination scheme is going to have a cost, but the theoretical cost efficiency can be much better than if you assume energy is 1-1 with cost.
In the relatively awesome market in 2021 I did 70+ applications, 10+ screens, 4 loops, and ended up with 2 offers. And that was all as an internal transfer, with tends to be a little easier.