questionableans

That’s why a lot of companies only promote after demonstrating a track record of performing at the next level.

It can also be an argument for secret levels. Although I’m not sure how useful that really is in practice.

For someone who does well at influence, it’s not a mandate, it’s permission to spend some time on the nontechnical factors that are necessary to make your work turn out better. And that also means helping others who have good ideas but aren’t comfortable with the influence part themselves.

That’s life. Unless you’re a hermit, a complete pushover, or a slave master, you’re constantly trying to influence without authority.

Want to go out to dinner with friends? That’s influence without authority right there.

Want to get your PR approved? Influence without authority.

Trying to get your point across to strangers online? Ditto.

Not only that, but leading through a reporting line is 90% influence, too. Relying on pulling rank will get your best reports to find a way to leave ASAP, and others will follow.

If it’s important and it’s not getting done, yes.

Let’s take aligning divs.

What’s the real problem here? The front end looks really bad and it’s causing us to lose potential customers.

Why is that? Maybe we have a shortage of frontend devs. Maybe the frontend code is a mess and people are just hacking in small changes here and there to minimize the time they spend with it. (Maybe both.)

What do you do about it? Fix the alignment now to stop the bleeding. Through that exercise, understand what’s wrong with the front end architecture, get engineering buy-in on an easier approach, and train devs and/or refactor code (efficiently, prioritizing and allocating effort commensurate with the problem), pairing with some devs who have been suffering from the pain and are interested in finally being able to fix it. Advise management on whether we’ll need more frontend talent even after we fix the alignment issue. If so, suggest who might be a good candidate to transition to more frontend work, or else work with sales to lobby for hiring more front end devs even though we have zero headcount budget.

That’s principal level aligning divs.

The way it works is you convince engineers and managers to want to work with you.

It’s all about being balanced and picking the right strategy for the situation, not doing everything all at once. A guide like this could be useful for someone to consult when they find themselves in a different situation, regardless of their seniority level.

And in my experience, more senior engineers don’t have a greater risk of being fired for a project going badly because they identify problems to work on that matter and are within their areas of expertise, and evaluate possible risks early and communicate them.

It’s definitely not for everyone. But if the person, the org and role are a good fit, it’s not going to be that kind of worst case scenario.

IMO, “nothing is not your job” is odd phrasing that doesn’t really mean “everything is your job,” it’s more like “see something, say something—-in a way that is received constructively and results in positive change, whether through your own actions or others’.”

The unstated corollary is if you’re in a shitty organization that just will not get better, the most positive change you can make for the world is to stop wasting your time helping them and go somewhere better, where you can make a difference.

One way to gather the skill set is to rotate through and master different aspects of the role. First become really solid at the technical fundamentals. Then volunteer to spend some time focusing on complementary skills like project and product management (in very technical areas, where you couldn’t just hire a nontechnical person in one of those job families). Start looking out for the problems worth solving that take multiple technical experts to accomplish, and make the solution great. Maybe be a manager for a while. Understand how to make your managers for at least a couple of levels up better in some ways, and help them with that. You will become someone trusted to get the right things done well. When it comes time to find the next job, focus on carefully vetting opportunities and interviewing prospective employers at least as much as they do when hiring, to find that opportunity you can be truly great at.

It’s not necessarily disdain, it’s the fact that writing code is necessary but not sufficient to make a successful software project. To have the most positive impact, sometimes you have to focus on the parts that everyone else finds difficult or uninteresting, yet are still important.

Letting people who want to immigrate do so instead of pressuring people who don’t want to have kids do so is not slavery.

If we can’t get our act together and help each other out while living within our planet’s means, what kind of life are we even offering to future generations?

It’s undeniably worth investing in immigrants, including refugees. Rhetoric otherwise is just veiled racism. These people already exist. It’s our duty to take care of them as global citizens, just like it’s our duty to care for the elderly and others.

I also think you’d be surprised how little time to pay off would actually be needed. Give people a calm space and community (including their friends and family), and we will all flourish.

Immigration helps even out where populations are located. Immigrants built America.

I really don’t think we have anything to worry about not having any people left. There’s still plenty of innate drive to reproduce, both biologically and intellectually (as in, educating far more people than the number of kids you could ever have).

At a global level, a more reasonably sized human population is exactly what we need, and a decline in birth rate is the most ethical way to achieve that. We have to find a way to make it work, because otherwise our trajectory takes us beyond the carrying capacity for our planet.

There are three things we need to deal with the temporary population imbalance:

Older people who remain healthy continuing to work to care for their peers—-not necessarily hard physical labor, but being out in their communities helping, which is rewarding and will help them stay healthy, too.

Easy immigration for regular people so they can move to where they’re needed.

General efficiency so we’re not wasting resources. This requires both technological and lifestyle changes, even for the rich. The more efficient we can get, the less we have to reduce our overall population.

Not destroying society is in the best interest of Apple shareholders, whether they believe it or not.

You mean because people don’t value education and want to vicariously cosplay as rich bitches, because that’s what the consumer media feeds them?

The true measure of a country isn’t a number like GDP, per capita income/wealth, or tax revenues. It’s how good of a place it is for everyone to live. If we have to keep family members out because medical costs are out of control, we’ve failed. So the question isn’t how to exclude people, it’s how to efficiently provide good healthcare and other basic needs for all. It’s not easy, but it’s what matters.

It’s hard to move around in his current state.

Because conservatives are, by definition, people who don’t deal well with change. I wouldn’t go that far, but I’ve heard it called a mental illness masquerading as a political position (well, there may be something to that in some cases).

They were mad that work was interrupted, and if they ever wore any masks at all, they weren’t high quality respirators that are actually awesome to wear in the winter or allergy/smoke season—they were either uncomfortable (humidity built up inside the mask, hard to get people to hear you clearly, fiddly rubber bands hurt your ears or mess up your hair) or ineffective (low filtration, worn without a good seal).

So they want to argue that it was all unjustified and we should just ignore the next pandemic so we can stick to how it’s always been done, because that’s more comfortable.

That’s an unusual definition of superstars. It sounds like you’re talking about very lopsided people who are experts at one thing?

I would love to see less pay inequality, but unfortunately, the median household in the US really doesn’t have it great due to the costs and risks of everyday life.

For comparison, I live in a place that is typically considered as tier 3 or 4 out of 4 in the US by employers (4 being the cheapest). Costs of living are honestly more like tier 2 cities, but it’s a small city in a poor state. 7 years ago, the going rate for an unlicensed handyman was $32/hour, often paid under the table in cash (I don’t have more recent numbers because I find DIY better and easier than hiring someone reliable).

Corrupt Autocrat Lives Matter movement, anyone?

Under $100: lightweight battery operated LED headlamp

See and be seen in the dark, while keeping your hands free. Great for taking out the garbage or checking the mail at night, especially because we don’t have much lighting outside (unless it’s a full moon) due to light pollution regulations.

Under $100: Reusable respirator masks + P100 replacement filters.

They were harder to get earlier in the pandemic, so I bought a less popular brand in addition to the popular brand one I already had from a repair project.

Reasonably comfortable, and I haven’t had a single respiratory illness since I started wearing them when going out. Also good for allergies, smoke, keeping my face from freezing in the winter, and looking like I’m in a SciFi movie.

I’d honestly rather be paid less and have more equal pay across society, while not having to worry about age discrimination or medical debt or something wiping out my savings and throwing me out on the streets, however unlikely that may seem.

In the US, basically all of my spending outside of the basics is on things you could classify as avoiding ever being poor/homeless. No vacations or eating out or streaming subscriptions or “toys” or whatnot. Maybe these kids feel that same pressure but took it too far, into fraudulent territory.

I’m sure they mean total compensation, as reflected in employee W-2 forms. Modulo a few details, public company stock-based compensation is as good as cash the moment it vests (and in fact is cash if you make an automatic sell-all election, which is not subject to trading windows).

At Meta, $400k would be high E4 or low E5. That’s someone earlier in their career who probably feels fairly anonymous and is used to taking all the deals they can get to live cheaply, even if they don’t need to anymore.

At Meta, $400k would be high E4 or low E5. That’s someone earlier in their career who probably feels fairly anonymous and is used to taking all the deals they can get to live cheaply, even if they don’t need to anymore.

It helps with being able to measure whether you're advertising to the right people. Traditional mass media advertising made a lot of money off of showing ads to completely irrelevant people. Targeted advertising makes even more money off of showing ads to mostly irrelevant people.

It doesn't have to be that way, but that's typically the most profitable strategy, because most products actually suck.

> Also, fact is that matching consumers with products that they like doesn't just have enormous business value, but is actually socially positive!

Well, sometimes. But what people want is not always good for them or for society at large. Targeted advertising has a side effect of hiding what exactly is being advertised to society. There's obviously the extreme cases of "vices," but what about things like junk food? People love it. Targeted advertising can induce cravings that make people buy and eat things they know are not good for them. Or for another example, what about pesticides and gas guzzling trucks? I don't want all my neighbors' vanity being exploited in order to pollute my neighborhood. We can openly talk about what we all see on TV, in newspapers, or on billboards, but if I'm not seeing the same ads as my neighbors online, those conversations aren't going to happen.