The newcomer was somehow never at a loss and showed himself to be an experienced man of the world. Whatever the conversation, he always knew how to keep up his end: if the talk was of horse breeding, he spoke about horse breeding; if they were speaking of fine dogs, here, too, he made very sensible observations; if the discussion touched upon an investigation conducted by the treasury—he showed that he was not uninformed about legal wiles; if there were some argument about the game of billiards—in the game of billiards, too, he would not go amiss; if they spoke of virtue, on virtue, too, he reasoned very well, tears even came to his eyes; if on the distilling of spirits, then on the distilling of spirits he also knew his stuff; if on customs supervisors and officials, of them, too, he could judge as if he himself had been both an official and a supervisor.
As it turns out, you don’t have to choose between being honest and being effective. You don’t have to choose between candor and your career. People who routinely hold crucial conversations and hold them well are able to express controversial and even risky opinions in a way that gets heard. Their bosses, peers, and direct reports listen without becoming defensive or angry.
One of the points in this list by Paul Osman that I recently stumbled on is that things like “staging”are indeed mostly useless however much people want to keep using them.
“The piece of advice that I give to new managers—and this sounds simple but it’s really hard—is you have to really listen to your people. They are telling you what they want, and you have to hear it. At the end of the day, it’s not about you. It’s what this human is telling you.”
Not surprising that the entire concept of ‘ethical AI’ is another scam perpetuated by the MIT Media Lab. At this point I would assume any project coming out of that institution to be compromised unless proven otherwise.
“The best engineers can toggle back and forth between manager and IC roles. Make sure your technical foundation and fundamental skills are solid enough to pull that off.”
It’s not that often that you see a guide how to hire engineering managers, let alone people at the DirEng/VPE level. That makes this guide by Rushab Doshi rare and useful.
Every place that turns car free like the city center of Ghent here is incredibly well received by the residents. The people who seem to be against it don’t live there, they just want to drive through.
You are indeed probably not communicating enough. My advice is to just communicate more. If you are communicating too much (highly unlikely that you would reach that point), people will let you know.
Ian Bogost remarks on the eery flattening of place and the retreat of people into the domestic cozy, since home can be any place you want it to be thanks to digital technology.
Reading back on Fallen London I spent altogether too much time on it in the beginning but don’t have the heart to go back, that is if the city would even take me back at this point.
A long treatment of how to scale work as organizations grow with some helpful guidelines: “Keep the work parallel, the groups small, and the resources local.”
Pizza toast and all kinds of toasties are a staple here with small kids which seems to imply that an odyssey through Japan like Craig Mod undertakes here could be a great idea.
I’m glad that this takedown of Clean Code by Dan Abramov got so much traction. I have no problem with clean code (lowercase), but inevitably the process of getting there and the things people do as a consequence make the entire endeavor an anti-pattern.
“If I have learned anything from the experience I’ve just described, it’s that the desire to shape, bait, surf, defy, find meaning in, or otherwise control and draw sharp lines between myself and the haters puts me on risky psychic territory. It’s dangerous. My provisional conclusion? That the best path for me, should hating on my person ever recur at scale, is to deploy, to the best of my ability, relentless sincerity, credulity, wit, and yes, shamelessness, but, crucially, shameability, too—openness to being justly shamed. If I become unshameable, after all, what good is my shamelessness? If I start assuming in advance, deep down, that no one whom I’ve upset with my words has valid points to make, what will I have become? I found it least harmful, actually, to keep my eyes and ears open throughout the dogpiles, experiencing them as reminders that the revolution will not be content-moderated; that I am fighting for things that make people hate me and that that’s sort of okay, I can respect it (plus, hey, it’s mutual).”
Lekha is a former collaborator who now has this lovely site of her own. Her sense of systems and many skills have always made it a joy to work with her.
I used to know Wytze and the foresight and innovation that he put into the Urban Arrow back in the day (2010) which is still going strong is nothing short of mind-boggling.
I read this science-fiction short story which is reminiscent of Ann Leckie’s books in how it plays with gender and militarism, but I think this is better.
I listened to the writer of this book explain how the people in the Obama administration thought things would work the same way as they did in The West Wing. Properly hilarious stuff with very serious consequences.
The disappearance of Page and Brin is one of the weirder and more foreboding things. You have to wonder whether we will ever hear from them or anybody similarly rich ever again.
Not surprisingly I agree with these reasons to do give management a try. It can be a very rewarding thing for the right person at the right place/time.