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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
“Wie kann es sein, dass die aufwändig erarbeiteten und austarierten Betreuungs- und Versorgungsnetze aus Kita, Schule, Hort, Babysitter*in, Großeltern, Tagesmutter-/vater und weiteren Mitbetreuenden, von Verpflegung in Einrichtungen und haushaltsnahen Dienstleistungen von heute auf morgen von behördlicher Seite gestrichen werden, ohne dass gleichzeitig Aussichten auf Kompensations- und Unterstützungsangebote gemacht werden?”
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.