Stripe joins the list of companies that have tried out remote working and are now doubling down on it.
I’ve been very pleasantly surprised with the FT’s reporting, diversity, tech-savvy and also the travel specials.
The Zendesk story of how they built a globally distributed company is quite amazing, but there are many more like this by now.
“There must be agreement on a coalition between labor and capital, whose interests are aligned in seeking taxation from landowners rather than workers or productive activity.”
Edge C2 is a nice ideal position to move towards in this article about military agility that contains a bunch of useful elements including an interlinked OODA loop and a visualization of the Trust Equation.
“It is not quantity of his audience that matters so much as the nature of it, however. And the neoreactionaries do seem to be influencing the drift of Silicon Valley libertarianism, which is no small force today.”
An excellent overview of the issues around Slate Star Codex without having to read a single word of the blog yourself. That’s an excellent service.
Scaling up successful government bureaucracies is something I’ve considered as well and which has lots of benefits over privatization (and could be a real solution for the fragmented administration that Germany has for instance).
“This gets at the heart of what’s deeply wrong with this perspective: it prioritizes currently non-existent, possibly never-existent, hypothetical future possible people over living, breathing people today, because the former could possibly, maybe, perhaps far outnumber the latter.”
Some friends of ours have started a coworking space in Berlin hat includes childcare. The space looks great and I think that flexible solutions like this could alleviate a lot of the burden on parents right now.
As a bystander you can observe a retrospective and hope to see some of these symptoms listed by Adrian Howard of a good one. But keep in mind that you should be happy to hit some of these and getting all of them right probably means you have reached the summum of team work.
I can’t say I’ve read a lot of Beyond the Beyond nor been much of a happy Wired consumer in any case, but it’s passing still marks the end of an era. I remember Bruce Sterling’s closing speeches at SxSWi as one of the highlights of the conference (me being too late an arrival to attend his house parties).
Despite the popular idea that we need to “express”our anger so that it doesn’t eat away at us, research shows that expressing anger while we are angry actually makes us more angry. This in turn makes the other person hurt, afraid, or angry, and causes a rift in the relationship. Rehashing the situation in our mind always proves to us that we’re right and the other person is wrong, which again makes us more angry as we stew. What works is to calm down, and then find a constructive way to address whatever is making us angry so that the situation is resolved, and our anger stops being triggered.
Ages ago we also made a game that:
Not just one thing that every dev should know but a bag full of hard won non-technical multipliers that will improve all of your interactions in this podcast episode with Jesica Kerr.
A good definition of product judgement which is absolutely essential for project success. I’ve seen groups without this head off in the wrong direction too often to count and have usually had to jump in myself.
The Yak Collective is a great idea coupled with great execution judging from this incredibly strong deck about the New Old Home, changes to living during the pandemic.
Not every day I find a great blog with interviews about leadership, and even rarer to find one that is this good and in German.
I want to echo this and add that once you realize what the git `master` refers to, it is unconscionable that we reproduce it so often and so callously every day of our working lives. (Disclosure: Alicia reports to me.)
I’ve always felt that programming is more similar to languages than to mathematics. The number of hard maths problems that we solve as part of this work are really limited, the number of language problems on the other hand is immense.
A revealing tale about structural racism from Ramesh A Nagarajah who by his own admission is the token black friend.
Frédéric Lordon tries to own Piketty but comes around at the end anyway because as he says: the data is there, the timing is there and Piketty is a decent guy.
This interview with Marc Andreessen is mostly interesting for the talk about productivity and operations.
We have to build these ultra rapid trains anyway, so let’s start on it tomorrow.
A very long but quite inspired series of conceptual visual spatializations of the internet.
Challengers are great if they carry both sets of qualities: both questioning and delivering.
A useful overview of engineering manager archetypes to reflect and contrast the various responsibilities that managers can take on.
An interesting argument that uses Scott’s critique of high modernism to cast doubt on how beneficial machine learning will be for authoritarian regimes. Also a bit reminiscent of Weyl’s critique of technocracy.
A grand treatment by Arundhati Roy of the situation that India is in now.
I was saddened by reading that Iepe, a Dutch fixture here in Berlin, had passed away suddenly and far too young.
It’s common for angry people to be dismissed but it is also a fully wrong and unjust attitude.
A very thorough treatment of how “Good Intent” is harmful to diversity and inclusion.
A very thorough overview of William Gibson’s life and work which touches on a lot of familiar points. It reminds me that I should read Agency and makes me want to dive back and read the previous trilogies again.
“Tell them the contours of patriarchy closed in, but haven’t crushed me. I’m the same person I’ve always been, broke but stronger.
Tell whoever asks, that I’m still right here, and I — by which I mean we, us, women voices, mine and others — we’re not going away. We’re speaking up, erasing patriarchal privilege by calling it out.”
I had put the Ray Dalio book on my do-not-read pile even before knowing exactly how evil it is.
A lovely set of easter eggs hidden in Switzerland’s official maps.
A striking reconstruction by Jaap Stronks tracking the Netherlands’ faulty COVID strategy and the efforts of a group of activists (with whom I’m loosely associated) to bring to light the discrepancies.
An overview of the philosophical and technical revolutions that are necessary to be able to develop in production. It’s a long way but I believe even the journey to get there is worth it.
People think they don’t have the time to write so they’ll have a meeting instead which is probably the worst thing they could do, but it’s easy.
Ming-era génocidaire Zhang Xian-zhong
Remember that most of the adults who seem like they’re doing okay are actually just treading water; the rest have generational wealth and family money the likes of which you will never have.
so people never settle … they simply won’t stop tweaking their tools, instead of focusing on the actual work.
The Spotify model wasn’t even a silver bullet for Spotify and it definitely wasn’t one for all the organizations that simply copied it.
A useful article that slices the valuable insights in High Output Management for non-managers (tech leads, seniors, etc.).
Companies insisting on long hours is probably only one thing holding women back, but this article goes deep on that one question and uncovers a panoply of assumptions and attitudes.
“When people say that telecommuting isn’t as efficient or as effective as working co-located, it’s probably because they don’t know how to do it well, not because it’s not doable. The thing is, it’s all learnable if people want to learn it. And I’d say it’s important to learn. Even before coronavirus, I’ve always felt that knowing how to manage well remotely was a competitive advantage.”
Daar heeft iemand het hondje geblaft.
The Cantillon effect has been menioned regularly as part of the government bailouts but it is important to read this explanation of what it is and how money is not neutral.
The Netherlands is going to get Anand-pilled this Sunday.
The first lesson Amiga learnt when she started to kill was how easy it is, and how utterly horrifying that can be.