“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.”
https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/articles/btc-michael-lopp-interview-management
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.
https://theintercept.com/2019/12/20/mit-ethical-ai-artificial-intelligence/
“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.”
Raylene Yung drops a massive list of career trips for engineers and engineering managers.
I know more about TikTok than almost everybody around me and still I hardly know anything about TikTok.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/how-meme-accounts-surface-the-meanest-parts-of-tiktok.html
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.
https://rushabhdoshi.com/2019/11/04/hiring-engineering-leaders.html
Translated diary excerpts of a soldier involved in the Dersim Massacre describe a normal kind of horror.
A wild ride of an article that draws the essential but often overlooked connections between neoliberalism and fascism.
“If “star salaries”can’t be explained by contribution to the productive enterprise, high managerial compensation would appear to be what economists call “rent”— essentially, profit extraction.”
“The most plausible explanation is that supermanagers are paid for governance where the state has been redeployed elsewhere or, even, effectively dissolved.”
“Anyone who takes seriously the threat of the newly empowered reactionary right, must take seriously the role neoliberalism has played in laying out the red carpet for its arrival.”
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.
Wild that even a mild cycling habit at the population level can strongly reduce obesity rates.
Een bijzonder goed stuk van Yael van der Wouden over wat het betekent om Nederlander te zijn en wat het betekent om dat niet te zijn.
Nederlanders hebben sorry gezegd. Dat is de context van een wit lichaam dat het wil hebben over Joden, dat een grapje wil maken over een gaskamer: het mag toch wel weer eens weer een keertje? En als de context wegvalt, wanneer het ‘witte’ of het ‘Nederlandse’ wegvalt, dan is de taal het enige wat er overblijft. Een kutjood is niet meer zo grappig als iemand niet eerst sorry voor de oorlog heeft gezegd.
https://www.dipsaus.org/exclusives-posts/nederlandershebbensorrygezegd
A fairly definitive article about why SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) should not be used. Mostly because it is the antithesis of every kind of agility.
Away is a good example of how Slack can get totally out of hand if your company culture is toxic.
I usually get a lot of resistance when I suggest using monorepos but this article explains really well what cultural benefits that choice entails.
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.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/smartphone-has-ruined-space/605077/
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.
That is a fully comprehensive and excellent list of guidelines to unlearn toxic behaviour in code reviews by Sandya Sankarram.
Anybody who’s ever seen a SUV driver knows this, but the car industry themselves have verified that the people who buy those cars are assholes.
Who has been buying SUVs since automakers turned them into family vehicles? They tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities.
Germany is deeply entrenched in coal as this utterly backward and destructive position by Siemens underlines.
A long piece on The Daily which reveals a lot about its inner workings and the all-consuming scale with which something like that operates.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/michael-barbaro-the-daily-podcast-new-york-times.html
Ik kijk heel erg uit om dingen op het vernieuwde OneWorld te lezen.
https://www.oneworld.nl/anders/achtergrond/dit-is-het-vernieuwde-oneworld/
A broad treatment of what the essential quality of Fingerspitzengefühl means.
Venkat keeps churning out these legendary and broadly valid pieces. This one is about why everything online is on fire all the time. Strap in.
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.
https://www.eater.com/2019/12/16/21003452/japan-kissaten-traditional-cafes-pizza-toast-travel
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.
“Obsessing with “clean code”and removing duplication is a phase many of us go through. When we don’t feel confident in our code, it is tempting to attach our sense of self-worth and professional pride to something that can be measured. A set of strict lint rules, a naming schema, a file structure, a lack of duplication.”
As always, people get too attached to the parts that are the most obvious and the least important.
“The privilege I have — how? No, genuinely, how?”
Well, I say, in terms of wealth, class, education — that kind of privilege, in knowing how to decode the rules in certain spaces. As a caveat, I add that both of us have privilege, and it’s not a criticism; I was simply curious to know what she thought. Things take an awkward turn.
“Well no, because, no… ”There is a very long and tense pause, before she insists that, actually, there is little difference between her experience and that of her co-star John Boyega, who grew up in south London to British Nigerian immigrant parents. “John grew up on a council estate in Peckham and I think me and him are similar enough that… no… Also, I went to a boarding school for performing arts, which was different.”
Daisy Ridley has no idea that she is privileged.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/dec/07/daisy-ridley-jj-abrams-star-wars-a-religion
Een verslag van Marijn Kruk over de bijzonder grimmige politieke situatie in Frankrijk.
“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).”