danabrams

Did this program earlier last year and it had enormous benefits. It’s really easy and you’ll be running decent distances in no time.

“Workers unwilling to work hard at types of places where bosses willing to go talk to a national newspaper about how lazy their employees are” is my preferred headline.

Didn’t read the article, but just going by the headline—London must have had a bank before 2017.

So if your org can get excellent at remote work, you have a distinct competitive advantage in hiring...

My fear is that if you’re being productive 20 hours and unproductive 20 hours a week and the work week is reduced, how do we know you won’t just end up being productive 10 hours and unproductive 20.

That said, we should definitely be experimenting. If people are equally productive at 40 hours and 20 hours, we shouldn’t keep them in the office just for aesthetics.

We just had a baby this month, and I was shocked by how much time the medical staff was spending entering data into Epic. So much that they couldn’t actually fully concentrate on giving medical care.

Everyone was very busy but it was very hard to get actual care.

The SAFe promise is that you can make your enterprise agile without any of the difficult changes that senior and middle management have to make to truly make agile. Just pay scaled agile lots of money for your project managers to become certified.

It’s like a diet that promises you can eat as much of whatever you want, as long as you pay.

For B) Parkinson’s law predicts that useless bureaucracy, if left unchecked, will eat any gains in productivity.

For a) you can at least measure the ratio of managerial to non-managerial staff (which has become more substantially more heavily weighted towards management since 1983).

How feasible is this alternative theory: the growth of computing systems, while increasing productivity, has also allowed a substantial growth in bureaucracy.

TLDR President Reagan, as a younger man, ruined the lives of people who's crime was that he suspected they once believe something different from him (often when they were young and those different ideas were fashionable).

And because he knew what he was doing was wrong, he did it in secret.

Need to find a good reason to try fly.io. Seems like they’re doing some cool cool stuff.

Congrants on launching, but I have to be negative here: the idea that a standup is a time when everyone cycles through and gives a status update IS the problem with standup.

This is like Jira for standups (and I don't mean that in a good way)

Phew! Found a new one just in time.

I'm a really big fan of Chad Fowler's reframing of legacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH_y45he4-o

TLDW: In most endeavors in life, legacy is a positive thing, a bequest or accomplishment that you leave behind for future generations. Only in software do we have such a negative feelings towards "legacy"

For software to become legacy code, a system has to survive and that means it has to a) work and b) be useful. You're working on something that has stood the test of time. Just as it's much harder to restore an ancient, archeological treasure like The Colosseum, it's harder to work on legacy software... You were chosen for a task that's challenging, but important.

100% agree that it’s about dependence on other teams. That said, I’d much rather that we were communicating across a well defined api boundary, rather than a graphql api. You could, of course, very easily do this with an api layer in the middle.

My therapist...

I think "what kind of an organization would let someone like that represent them?" and thank the gods for learning early to avoid that place.

One way to look at it is that taxes and fees like this are the cost of living in such a place.

California is a very desirable place to live and to employ people, so they can charge through the nose, both in terms of taxes and bureaucracy, but also in terms of housing prices.

Low-tax sunbelt states are less desirable, ergo they have to compete on price, be it taxes, housing costs, or regulations. If Texas or Florida provided amenities that people wanted and a workforce as desirable as California, either there would be a massive influx to those states, 5, 10 million people a year, or they could charge people a lot of the pleasure of living or employing there.

Personally, I don’t enjoy nearly as much as I did when I was 4.

The measure of how much value YOU generate for YOURSELF is how much you get paid.

But generally, if you can generate a lot of value for the company, and demonstrate it, you will go far, and you will make much more money, especially if you can do it consistently and threaten to leave.

Doing a jira ticket in 20 minutes instead of 2 hours, then spending the extra time watching youtube is fine, but how about becoming a manager, making 3x as much money, and spending 100% of your time watching youtube? Or better yet, watching movies in first class on the plane to the "strategic conference" in Hawaii.

Understanding the system of work in which you exist. Your company, your industry, your society.

W. Edwards Deming said over and over again that the system in which an employee works puts a ceiling on how much output they can produce.

But you should take it a step further than just trying to maximize your output, and instead understand how your work creates value for your boss, your company, for society. Productivity is not a measure of how much you can output, it's a measure of how much value you can create, or how much closer you can come to achieving your goals.

If you can come in, spend five minutes and change the label on one button and increase sales 200%, you've been much more effective than if you spend years optimizing the performance of a component that isn't impacting overall performance of the system.

This article is describing what happens when an institution starts to lose trust. There's a perception, even by participants in the system, that the system results in too many wrongful convictions and too many wrongful acquittals.

That's a problem that should be talked about and addressed, but blaming people who are knowledgable about the system (licensed attorneys) for a changing set of values due to reduced trust in the system is silly. If a system is consistently producing outcomes that are different from its value, the system is broken, and it people are going to rationally lost faith in its old customs.

The company I work for does it. It's nice.

It's an oldie, but The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox kept me from succumbing to stress during a particularly stressful period at work.

It's a great business book in the form of an ok novel, and everyone who cares about management or has consistent stress at work should read it.

I’m a consultant. This is my experience at most large companies, at least in legacy industries.

Different large companies have different cultures, which mostly is about how much the employees like each other. But they’re all giant, kafkaesque bureaucracies that our government red tape to shame, in my experience.

Generally, the mess will be created by the structure, processes and culture of the organization. Unless you created the mess by somehow changing the process, culture or structure of the org, not only is it not professional to leave, but you should go as soon as you can, because it will never get any better. The same chaos will always reappear.

Larger teams ship faster?

My experience is that in most situations larger teams ship slower, precisely because of the collaboration costs you mention. There are ways to reduce the dependencies, but most organizations can't get there.

"You might have come across .mov while working with Apple softwares such as QuickTime, it was introduced in 1998 and uses a top secret compression algorithm. It is often quoted as the catalyst to Apple bringing feature length movie quality to their devices."

This description is absolutely killing me.

> these companies rely heavily on masses of junior/inexperienced developers. So they figure a strong management layer is necessary to properly direct the project's goals.

Development isn’t an assembly line process—and cannot possibly be. It’s about theory building and mental models. It requires experience.

It’s fine to have juniors, but they need to lean heavily on experienced colleagues. No amount of management and no management process can change that. A team where the juniors outnumber the seniors 3-to-1 is going to cost more money in the long run.

What you’re describing is exactly what I’m talking about when I say companies are unable to achieve this. Hire 3 senior people instead of 12 junior. You’ll get more done. Reduce your collaboration costs. But, as a manager, you get paid more if you manage more people, or if the people below you manage more people, so there’s a perverse incentive to build as much bureaucracy as possible and staff the lowest layers with the cheapest possible hires.