254 karma · joined October 31, 2011
Or are you referring to the party that screams "weak colors" when the president chooses to wear clothing deemed to be wimpy?
first, the caveat: a software dev project will take up as much time as is allotted to it. when you have more than enough time allotted for a project, most people either spend more time in research or allow themselves partial implementation paths of multiple solutions to help decide which one is best. on the other end of the project, every project can be polished forever. so dev projects will take as least as much time as has been allotted to it.
when we go through the planning process, it usually follows something like this:
1. dev estimates how many "points" (which translates into time in most peoples mind) to allot to a task. dev then pads it to account for dev optimism and wanting to make sure they have the chance of meeting the "committment" 2. program/project/product manager pads the number a bit further because they've been burned in the past on dev optimistic estimates and it's better to underpromise and overdeliver 3. dev proceeds on the task with the bloated estimate baked in and the task takes the full time allotted to it. it's baked inefficiency.
part of the problem is the concept of "committment" for estimates. good scrum organizations have changed that term to "prediction" instead of "committment" since this has been such a big problem. but even that isn't enough to solve the political capital lost when you "predict" wrong.
i think that any estimation above "t-shirt size" is going to bake this inefficiency into your process. the solution is less planning and more doing.
the building itself was also devoid of any signs that indicated this contained an FBI office.
interestingly enough, a few months later, i was contracted for another job at a different FBI field office. that one had a sign out front and seemed surprised when i asked if i needed to remove my badge before leaving the building.
until then i had never been exposed to any of the evidence countering the "population bomb" hypothesis. not in education, not in media, not in personal discussion.
If it's not safe enough to try, then understand when you use your authority to stop them there will be a strain on your trust relationship that you need to deliberately rebuild.
After that, he spoke about figuring out how to provide the most value for the business. I've had a 25+ year career and can verify that everyone should follow this advice.
Whatever hidden biases we are concerned about in the workplace, they all pale in comparison to the metric of fulfilling the purpose of the company. It took me a few years to realize that businesses were less interested in paying me because I was smart and could solve hard problems and more interested in how I could measure and move the purposes of the company.
The only direct value a manager provides to a company is a regular calibration of employee purpose with the purpose of the business. This is best done with regular 1-on-1s, not through semi-annual reviews.
There are other indirect things that a good manager brings to the table which mostly revolve around increasing employee happiness and satisfaction, but all of it pales in comparison to aligning employee and company purpose.
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strong engineering culture. great products. really, really smart people. management that understands the value of management (and what can be detrimental of management).
i think you are being a bit naive and dismissive. the law could easily be interpreted as his endeavor requiring a Data Protection Officer. the guidelines (http://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/document.cfm?doc_id=44100) for the DPO require that processing "special categories of data" needs a DPO. those categories include tings as benign as "trade union membership."
so if his chat app has someone in the EU chatting about trade union membership while this chat service then "processes" that data, they might be held liable to the DPO requirement.
go!
That implies that diversity initiatives are going to continue until we have slightly more than 50% representation. Which is not bad in and of itself, but it seems like the initiatives are not allowed to used research or data beyond less than 50% representation. It gets sinister and loaded with unintended consequences when the expected shortcut is just to implement quotas to teach that one metric.
it's company-public and i've had others comment on how some of my TILs helped them. i've also had others offer their own insights to what i learned and subsequently learned more.
as per the theory of co2 precipitating the Permian extinction, i am aware of some very recent research that makes the claim that the extinction entirely happened during an 80,000 year ice age on the border of the Permian and Triassic periods. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170306091927.h...)
if the data are correct, it seems pretty convincing to me that it wasn't the warming that caused that extinction.
btw, your point about the planet not being destroyed is well taken. i guess what i'm trying to understand is how the positive feedback loop of temp->co2->temp is broken if trace amounts of co2 is such a massive forcing. when the earth had 4000+ ppm of co2 in the atmosphere, there had to be some other, much stronger, forcing to bring the temperature back down.
i'm not yet convinced that the temperature increase that we've seen in the past 150 - 200 years is abnormal from a geologic timeframe. esp. considering the warming pause of the past ~20 years.
as far as the article you posted, i've read it before. it's fairly standard in that it adds another theory (southern warming -> release co2 -> increase northern warming) that, for me, would require more observable predictions to prove. that's not an easy task, but my scientific skepticism requires it.
maybe if we could see that effect happening in our modern temperature data? i'm just riffing here, but it seems like if that's the mechanism to explain the ~800 year lag where temperature increase preceeds co2 increase, then it should also be observable today.
i guess i'm also not convinced that the warming of the past 150 - 200 years is out of the range of normal variation (esp. with the latest warming pause) when looking at geologic times. i know it's a difficult thing to prove since constructing geologic GLOBAL temperature is very difficult, but i just don't know.
it does seem like the increase of carbon in the atmosphere is abnormal, if not entirely unprecedented.
the long answer is that my skepticism comes from climate being a classic complexity issue where trying to isolate a single factor (carbon) as being the main forcing for climate change requires a lot of real evidence.
i'd turn the question back around on you by asking "why do you believe in CAGW?" when i asked myself that question (because i was like most people and believed the standard news reports before i tried to really understand it), i discovered two main pieces of observational data that were overwhelming for why the increased carbon is going to lead to run-away warming:
1. the correlation of atmospheric carbon and temperature in the geologic record (ice core samples and tree ring data). it's very clear looking at those records that atmospheric carbon and temperature are correlated. but, when i dug into it i found out that in the geologic record the temperature increase PRECEEDS atmospheric CO2 by hundreds of years. if we were going to infer causation by correlation, then it would have to be the other way around. so that strong piece of evidence turned out not to be actual evidence.
when i sought answers for this from the global warming alarmist scientists, what they had to say was "yes, it's true. what we know is that the temperature increases for some unknown reason, then carbon is released because of the temperature, which then causes the temperature to increase more and a positive feedback loop is created."
but, if this were really how it happened and co2 is the overwhelmingly main forcing for temperature increase, then why wasn't the planet already destroyed back when we had 10x+ the amount of carbon in the atmosphere than what we are doing today?
2. after #1 melted away, i realized that the strongest evidence for CAGW was rooted in the predictions of climate models. it wasn't being proven by geologic or current observations, so what do the models tell us?
well, the models are very interesting because they are mechanisms we use to try to understand a classic complexity problem. these are notoriously difficult problems to fully understand down to it's constituent components.
add on top of it the timeframes we are talking about with the models, and it becomes very difficult to understand it right now. the models predict noticeable temperature increase in the 100s of years timeframe, not in the decadal timeframe.
so to be able to actually observe the predictions of the models, we'd have to wait 100s of years.
so, i wondered if there were other things that the models predicted that were more in the annual/decadal timeframe that we could observe to be happening.
as it happens, the answer is yes. all models that predicted runaway warming due to the co2 greenhouse effect ALSO predicted a warming of the atmosphere at a greater rate than a warming of the surface. (which makes sense based on the theory)
so all we'd have to do, is show that the atmosphere is heating up at an accelerated rate than the surface, and that would be a significant data point.
but what we actually observe is the opposite. the surface temperature is increasing at a faster rate than the atmospheric temperature. so the observed data appears to be going against the theory.
now, to be clear, i don't disagree that the planet is warming. i'm just skeptical that an increase in co2 is the main culprit.
with that in mind, i'd love to hear other people's observational evidence that backs the theory up. that's what will convince me.
and to make it clear, what will not convince me are fear mongering about "what if the theory is right?!" or the quasi-religious appeals to authority by saying "all these smart people believe different than you."
i want predictions made by the theory that show observational corroboration (with, preferably, an elimination of other explanations for the outcome).
as someone who has done a recent job search, i knew i couldn't afford to live in the bay area with my large family, but half og the companies i interviewed with were in the bay area allowing me to work remotely. the technology and kind of work we do (software engineering) is getting good enough to broaden the reach of "the office."
if we had just fully integrated audio and visual environments, for work collaboration, i could see many people choosing to live at the lakeside in montana and work in seattle rather than having to live on Lake Washington.
i do think that this is a part of it. degrees and certifications are largely an exercise in compliance. that's not to say they aren't hard work, but that hard work is often busy work. what makes it hard is that it's not interesting nor informative and thus is kryptonite to the intellectually curious.
people who have spent considerably and pushed through that menial task of compliance have bought into the system that tells them that they are now more useful to society and, therefore, deserve elevated status in our cultural and literal hierarchies.
part of left-leaning ideology is a belief that the smart and well-educated (the intelligensia) are better able to make decisions for the body politic than the chaotic "invisible hands" of various complex systems left to their own devices.
with that in mind, the question can be re-phrased "why are people who have spent a large amount of time and money to increase the perception of their own value to society more willing to give authority and power over to those who spend a large amount of time and money to increase the perception of their own value to society?"
This list is heavily skewed toward self-organization because I work for a company (Zappos) that is currently transitioning to a self-organization model. I thought I'd answer the question about what books I wish my "manager" would read even though I don't have a manager because in a self-org environment, you do have leaders that emerge organically. The main difference between "manager" and "leader" is that managers influence their charges with coersion (even if subtle and unintentional) while a leaders ability to influence comes from the bottom-up and is more meritocratic based on perceived experience and ability by those being led.
Most companies hope to promote the leaders so their manager structure is reflective of the actual effective social leadership structure, but all companies get it wrong often.
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About the company: Zappos.com is an online retailer specializing in shoes and clothing. We've been around since 1999 and were purchased by Amazon appr. 5 Years ago. We have been recognized as a cultural leader and have recently moved to a self-organized model using the governance system called Holacracy.
The directive each new software engineer gets is "It's your responsibility to figure out what the best use of your time is for the purpose of the company" and then people pitch them for teams and projects. It feels like it's startup impact with the resources of Amazon behind you.
If this new style of working appeals to you, or even if you just have questions, feel free to shoot me an email at bkirkby@zappos.com
Thanks, -bk
you're making many mistakes in your opinion:
1. correlation and causation. this latest round of people leaving is only because there was an extension to the offer made in may for a group of people. far less left this last time than anticipated.
2. you aren't running the test long enough. because of this second offer, the hard work of self-organizing was largely being delayed. it actually feels like we are just beginning (at least in tech).
3. you are measuring the wrong thing. in no way does an attrition rate reflect the success of self-organization. any organization can be made better byt he right people leaving.
the metrics i'm interested in are: 1) employee happiness, 2) customer delight, and 3) innovation rate. feel free to email me in a year to get an idea of what those are like then. (notice, a profitability metric is just an assumed by-product of those measurements, although it's not what we focus on).
this latest round of news stories all stem from the offer that was given in may being extended to a select group who were deemed critical to finishing the "supercloud" migration. that extension ended in january, so another "exodus" occurred as a new round of people took the offer. since the project was a tech project, this new round was almost 100% from tech.
the ones who accepted this latest round were heavily tilted toward managers. mostly product or project managers with a healthy smattering of engineering managers. out of all the engineering managers (~15), there are only 2-3 of us left. we are the ones who took on active roles in writing software and making an impact by doing rather than commanding (https://medium.com/zappos-engineering/elastic-beanstalk-vs-a...).
fwiw, from my perspective, the story is far from over. i feel like it is only now that we can really progress the hard work of self-organization. the extended offer was holding us back. it's tough to move forward with distributed authority when you know that a good portion of your peers are not interested in that distributed authority.
i guess the message i'm trying to get across now is that for those of us here and moving forward, it's far from a "finished" project. it's certainly not a "failed" experiment yet. it feels like it's just starting.
and we are starting to see some of the benefits of people self-organizing. one example is that for the last couple of years we've tried to contribute to open source. i'm not entirely sure why we weren't able to do so except to point at bureaucracy and traditional management putting up roadblocks. if your manager doesn't see how you working on open source is going to help them out, then you have much less incentive to contribute to open source.
in a self-organized system, with the directive being "figure out what the best use of your time is for the purpose of the company," when an individual senses that contributing to open source benefits the company, then they can do it. since the tearing down of the traditional management hierarchy, we've had an open source project released and are deep into releasing a second.
it's hard to say this never would have been possible under the traditional hierarchy, but it is accurate to say that it didn't happen after two years of trying and then happened within months with self-organization.
"The 1983 announcement by the US of their SDI program prompted further political and financial support for the satellite interceptor program."