I don’t really know why we have this debate, but the following is a thorough and definitive argument against technocracy by Glen Weyl: “Technocracy divorced from the need for public communication and accountability is thus a dangerous ideology that distracts technical experts from the valuable role they can play by tempting them to assume undue, independent power and influence.”
I’m finding that I really enjoy the role of management for the reasons listed in this piece below and some more even.
https://www.davidbrunelle.com/2019-09-12-reasons-to-try-management/
This piece by Arthur C. Brooks about professional decline, touching on Hinduism, Buddhism and many many more things is quite something.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/work-peak-professional-decline/590650/
Slack says that letting people do a code review as a take-home gives a similar or maybe even better signal when hiring.
“[…] we also wanted to know that these folks were good teammates — that they were concerned with maintainability and documentation, and that they could express themselves with empathy and a mindset towards collective learning.”
https://slack.engineering/refactoring-backend-engineering-hiring-at-slack-b53b1e0e7a3c
An interesting reversal here where I once said that any application could be delivered through the chat medium, now Kevin Kwok signals a tendency for one chat platform to permeate all applications.
An amazing and inspiring play-by-play of how Clio doubled their representation of women by improving their hiring game and setting a quota.
https://labs.clio.com/how-we-doubled-the-representation-of-women-in-engineering-at-clio-2d9a4a1a0282
I think everybody (myself included) can and should get better at managing up. This guide by Claire Lew has some helpful tips that mostly boil down to: “context”.
Teams just like so many Microsoft products is so bad that people have to be forced to use it.
https://medium.com/@joshuamkite/the-horror-of-microsoft-teams-c18360712361
An interesting bit of news did the rounds last week but I’ve personally heard of multiple cases where people leaving online reviews have been faced with legal action.
Germany has a lot of lawyers and judges and the system finds work for them.
Unsubscribing from Micromobility
As an occasional listener to the various Asymco podcasts and somebody very much interested in new forms of mobility, I was taken more than a bit aback by this.
Dediu revealed himself as a founder in Bond which is the same company as Smide. I remembered him having somebody from Smide on in one of the first episodes of the Micromobility podcast but there was never any disclosure then or after about Dediu’s connections there.
A lapse in disclosure and some backroom action is not a big deal and nothing much seems to have come from this, but it is a good reminder that everything you see online (not just the posts on Instagram) is fake.