5,070 karma · joined September 25, 2009
It’s routinely replaced by steel for, say, cans because that ends up being cheaper (with thinner walls), but steel is also cheaply and effectively recycled. It also often has a thin plastic layer when holding acids (like Coca-Cola), so it’s not a complete replacement.
That might convince people to use paper bags or only certain types of plastic.
Appropriately enough, the last thing they did was to insist —demand, really— that, in 2018, I fax them my demand. It just so happens that this could have been relatively safe because, after asking everyone I knew for a week (including some venerable hackers), the only way that I found to send a fax was to ask the local branch of the same bank.
Asking them to authorize the transfer wasn’t possible (by showing them all relevant documentation). Asking them to let me send a fax, using their machine, to a sister branch to tell them to authorize a transfer without anyone verifying my ID, was fine.
Where it’s a No-No is in accounting: those should probably not be counted as “sales” but as gifts in nature or some particular category. Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner are investors, so naturally, they balk when they hear that the documents they read, financial statements, have a creative take on reality. Still, I don’t think they think that lowers Google’s overall value. They just want that in a separate column.
The truth is that those are two very well-funded companies with incredible engineers who are now facing very clear competition. Progress is going to be sharp. Remember when the Google Pixel came out, putting some fire under the Apple iPhone monopoly? The decade of innovation after that is what we should be looking forward to.
Either it’s a series of unchallenged false positives, or there’s a lot about web interface that neither I nor they understand, but I would challenge the idea that is the result of a well-informed A/B testing culture. It’s the output of a thousand monkeys running a thousand tests a day for three years, and releasing anything that hits the green line.
You experienced a bad compromise of having high density of a city and the high car ownership of suburbia. Like a "stroad," a road that is trying to be a street, it doesn't work.
Try to spend a week in a place with walkable density and no cars: Amsterdam, Oslo, or closer to US, Disney Land.
In general, I think that piece has a bit of a European blind side when starting by “The United States leads the world in airline safety.”
This is all done in such a smart, seamless, obvious way to deliver a lesson that would make the Brothers Grimm feel cheated.
Strongly recommend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sIzfGzf_50
If a billionaire slams his toe on the leg of a chair, it still hurts, and being sorry for his real pain isn’t denying his otherwise staggering privilege. It’s an excellent example to use to have him empathize with others. If you want to make them act in society’s interest, you can point out that paying taxes or enforcing environmental regulations won’t prevent them from being rich beyond words.
An engineer worried about being fired experiences genuine distress: you can empathize with that there and then because it’s real. Once they have a job, ask them to be more considerate when designing processes or buildings so that everyone can work comfortably in the shade or without having to fear how they are going to feed their family by the end of the week.
The second element is that this particular junior engineer has seen enough to know not to share his name. Naivety goes both ways, and the rhetorical engineer tends to leave identifiable information if they don’t think getting caught is a problem. This one does. He’s asked internally, and the answer wasn’t reassuring. I’ve been on the receiving end of “What do you think we should do about this?” and hard trade-offs; if the manager knows what they are doing and they are not pushing bad stories, the junior engineer learns something.
The last element is that this is not new: very senior engineers complaining about penny-pushing MBAs ruining the company and “that won’t stop until someone gets hurt” are as old as the merger with McDonnel-Douglas.
Would I trust the technical details and the recommendation of that particular engineer? Lord No: I know nothing about airplanes. But I know what a dysfunctional operation sounds like, and that sounds like the bassoon—but there’s the strings, the brass, and the percussions playing the same tune.
I do believe that good engineers like their work and drive a lot of self-esteem from it being valued—more than living off a stipend because they shot their career in the foot. It’s well-paid enough they rarely think they need to rely on the generosity of strangers, and that’s not a bad mindset to keep.
In circumstances like these, people talk about loyalty, notably to their employer; I don’t think loyalty is a bad value, but in that case, you want to advocate for loyalty to the craft and the corps, not the organization profiting from putting people in danger. Engineering values, like the brass ring some get in Canada, are things that you want to support not by saying “we’ll support you if that blows in your face” but “We want people like you to speak up during our meetings.”
Giving engineers a guarantee that their craft, their talent and their willingness to ask tough questions is what you value, as a team lead, is something I occasionally can do (not now, though: changing team) and something I’m happy to compensate at fair market value, because it’s objectively a good thing for me too — not because that would put me at odds with my organization, but I’m willing to sacrifice that for some ideal misaligned with profit.
We need to work on getting eggheads at Boeing understand that their cost-cutting was a bad idea (SkyScanner letting you filter-out plane time is beautifully aggressive that way), but in the meantime, we need to tell people facing tough decisions that engineering is full of hard trade-offs but that security is not one of them, and not one that should need charity.
Do you want me to complain that I had to spoon-feed you that?
Engineering supremacy in that context means that if engineering says no, it’s definite.
What Boeing needs is QA supremacy: nobody wants them to be particularly creative, original, or unusually hard-working when doing audits; they need to be thorough and systematic. We need to make sure that their voice isn’t challenged.
That’s what is keeping so many of them silent: a mortgage, school fees, maybe a H1B.
Suppose the idea is likely impactful but complicated to implement. In that case, you might want to think about putting those ideas together to argue for refactoring that would enable more impactful ideas.
If the idea would change the kind of service being offered, then it should inform strategic product thinking.
If the idea is relevant but unlikely to have an impact because it's too low level and about code quality, maybe you want to think of automating or including it in the linting process.
I think the problem here is that the tool, Jira tickets, isn’t suited for the use that you make of it: communicating with clients and defining product strategy. The problem is that there isn’t a good tool for that.
Developers can require that. Several apps I use do.