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The regulating bodies of those utilities work hard to create incentives for them to innovate. I spent four years of my career working on energy programs with major utilities around the country in which they tried to incentive reductions in energy usage.

Which is a curious statement: why would a electrical utility want people to use less electricity?

The reason is because the regulatory agencies created incentives within the regulatory framework to encourage them to do it. Basically the regulators start with an outcome, bake that outcome into how utilities get paid, and then let the utility innovate to figure out how to do it. This led to meaningful reduction in energy usage across many markets.

Who are the victims?

When I lived in LA I always felt like the variety argument was kind of nonsensical. It's not like the typical LA neighborhood has great reprsentation of a lot of different ethnic foods. The best korean is in korea twon, the best chinese in the SGV, etc... but day to day it doesn't matter that "LA" has it because theres nowhere you can live where you are even an hour drive to most of it.

Most peoples actual LA experience is that they stay mostly confined to one little part of LA because they have a two hour commute during the week. They never get to really dig into that food scene because it's just to big a hassle to be a part of it.

Hot take: I don't think the best food in southern california is even in Los Angeles it's in Baja Mexico to the south.

I spent 6 years slogging through Symbian work. The whole "C++ but not quite" approach was infuriating, and the system level API's weren't much better. It was very difficult to work with. The original iOS SDK felt like a revelation in comparison.

Of course you're right, but I think anyone who is capable of getting their head around Elixir is capable of understanding that this is a trivial example meant to showcase a powerful language feature. What you choose to use it for is up to you, not the article's author.

John Carmack did something kind of similar a billion years ago at Id.

In Denver the law is that a person can only AirBnb a property that is their primary residence. If you have an ADU or want to rent a room you can do that full time. We rent our place when we travel..

It seems like a good compromise to me.

Does a hotel not add economic value?

When I worked at Riot Games they did something similar and it was fantastic. Twice a year for a couple of days the whole company stopped down to just work on cool stuff. Game projects were common of course.. but people would just kind of do whatever was cool to them. One of my favorite parts about working there.

This is correct in almost all cases (outside of highly commoditized goods) and it's crazy how people don't understand it. It's why the price of McDonalds doesn't increase when minimum wage does. McDonalds is already charging as much as they can for a Big Mac (where stores averages a 40% margin). Increasing minimum wage means that margin goes down a bit, not that prices increase. If they could increase prices they already would have.

I was in the middle of the second outage today that significantly delayed a flight for me. I was fine.. I was just coming home from a trip so no big deal.

That said. I think people were understandably pretty pissed. I talked to a family that was taking their first vacation in 18 months. He only gets a handful of vacation days a year and due to cancellations their vacation has been ended. Just like that.

If I was them I'd be out of my skull. It'll probably be another full year before they get to try again.

I think the important distinction for us is that it isn't "work from the office one day a week". It's work from home unless your team needs you. Our ask is that team leaders work very hard to limit the days that people need to be in the office and that when they ask folks to come in there is a clearly articulated reason and objective. Basically the idea is that we want coming into the office to feel valuable and therefore worthwhile.

In reality most teams don't need people to come in that often... I'm concerned about some long term drift where some teams never come in and others find themselves schlepping into the office a lot, but I think it's something we can manage with good coaching for our team leads.

This is gonna be the real challenge for the WFH movement. NYC is trying to get income taxes out of me because I worked for a NYC based company in 2020... even tho I never stepped foot in their state.

This is a really good point.

To add to it, WFH has one clear massive weakness: the lack of face to face interaction leads to quite a bit of atrophy when it comes to team cohesion. I've been managing WFH teams for the better part of a decade and I've yet to find a satisfactory solution other than getting people together every couple of months to work on hard problems together and build some trust.

I'm really bullish on the hybrid model right now. I think having an office designed more like a co-working space that can serve as a central meeting place for teams is what the future of software development looks like. No expectation that everyone is in the office every day, but rather reimagine the office more as a place where people come together when they really need (or want) too.

We're experimenting with that now in my organization and the results so far are pretty good. Some people come in every day. Some people come in every now and then. Others come in when their teams needs them. We're continuing to use all of the best practices for remote work and I think people are finding a really good balance right now.

What are the drawbacks exactly?

It's actually devilishly hard to strap plywood to a roof rack in a way that it won't take off in the wind (you're essentially turning your car into a giant kite) but also won't warp. It can be done.. but it's hard.

"You can rent a cargo van from UHaul without much trouble."

Maybe we have different definitions of what "much trouble" is. It takes like an hour to do anything with UHaul where I'm at. It's insane how bad that company is at doing the most basic thing that they've been doing for like 4 decades.

Bitcoin is worthless without dollars backing it. It’s because you can turn Bitcoin into dollars that anyone wants it.

Yes! This is exactly it. Very few teams that I've worked with had actually defined what is even important to them.

"but because we can learn a lot about a person's true personality when they are under pressure"

Do you have a source for this? I can't help but think about the person in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlCEmPF4-V0. You think you can learn much about her from that interaction?

I've consulted with quite a few companies on their interview process. Almost all of them had adopted Leetcode style interviews. My first question to the team always is: what exactly are you evaluating when you interview someone?

And I rarely get an answer that makes sense. Instead I get mostly rationalizations for Leetcode. The thing is I recognize those rationalizations because I was certainly guilty of it in the past ("We're evaluating intellectual curiosity" is one I cringe at now).

The real problem from my perspective is that most teams have never taken the time to really think about and identify the underlying principles about how they want to work. We go through a process of defining those principles and all of a sudden the interview gets a lot clearer. Do you value the highest quality code? Do you value getting things into the world quickly and then iterate towards the final solution? Is security always at the front of your mind?

Getting really specific about what exactly being "excellent" means to a team is really critical.

Because then you can design an interview process that actually selects for those things. I've never had a team define "the ability to solve leetcode problems under pressure quickly" as an endpoint they actually care about. Some teams continue to use leetcode, but only as a small part of the process with problems that ARE actually directed at what they care about. Having been through a bunch of interviews in my 25 year career I instantly know when a team has actually done the work to design a good interview process (which has been far too rare in my experience).

I haven’t one time in my 20 years of development had a time where that readability mattered tho. SQL very quickly becomes too complex for people who don’t intimately understand the language to make any sense out of it. Show a layman an INNER JOIN and see if they can make any sense out of what’s happening...they’ll just do what they do in real life: ask an engineer.

XKCD’s comic on competing standards feels appropriate here:

https://xkcd.com/927/

Every phase three trial is testing at risk groups.

Python 2.7 was the last of the Python 2.x releases. They likely started with an earlier version, kept upgrading to 2.7 and then had to bite the bullet and actually rework it for Python 3.x (which is a highly similar but different programming language). Which is why that quote makes sense.

Have you been there since 2014? It was fully renovated and there are a TON of tables and chairs in the main hall now. Including desks with power.

My favorite remote work spot in Denver has been Denver Union Station (I'm weird, having people around helps me concentrate).

As an executive (Product and Technology specifically) at a mostly work from home company: I find that engineers can do a pretty good job of effectively collaborating thanks to PR's, Slack, JIRA, and a host of other asynchronous tools.

It's on the product side that things are tougher. Great product work is often about finding meaningful insights in the data available to you, and that often involves long conversations between people with lots of different viewpoints. There's something about doing that in person that is just really hard to replicate remotely.

Even getting the environment exactly right only goes so far. I find that over Zoom people are just a little bit less engaged and that means getting to those really important insights takes a lot longer.

Previous to covid we had solved this by colocating our product team and then bringing the engineering team together once a quarter with product folks to engage them in those conversations. Now we're just sort of feeling our way though it...

I was on Chat Roulette very early.. and maybe my memory is bad (I'm getting old) but I remember it being dongs pretty much from day one.

Anecdotal I know but I went to an entire school for “gifted” students in Texas in the 80’s.