NotesWhat does it mean to get things done in large companies? Most importantly, it means finishing things. How can you finish things in a world where you can keep improving systems indefinitely? It means getting them to a point where the decision-makers at the company are happy.FeedUnfurl
NotesPerhaps what we need is a new understanding of where happiness can exist in this AI-augmented world. Maybe the joy doesnât have to disappear completely â it just shifts. Instead of finding delight in writing the perfect algorithm, perhaps weâll discover satisfaction in the higher-level thinking about system design, in the creative process of describing exactly what we want to build, or in the human aspects of software development that AI canât touch.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesOK, so AI doesnât think the same way that people do. Iâm fine with that. Whatâs important to me is that it can do some work for me, work that could also be done by people thinking. Cars (âhorseless carriagesâ) do work that used to be done by horses running. No one now complains that cars work differently than horses.FeedUnfurl
NotesBy emphasizing documentation as the primary source of truth, establishing explicit linkages between development artifacts, and employing iterative, human-guided prompting, the whole team can harness the power of LLMs while mitigating their current limitations.Unfurl
NotesOnce you overcome your desire to compete with others, you can actually just sit back and enjoy the outcomes that others compete to produce for you.
Read great books, watch interesting movies, dance to the music, use latest gadgets, and eat good food. FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesYou might have already heard of a 10x engineer. Probably too often, actually. If there's such a thing as a 10x engineer, surely there must be a 1x engineer, too?
Of course there is! Let's dig into a non-exhaustive list of what qualities make up a 1x engineer.Unfurl
NotesLike many people I thought Covid, with its stopped clock and blunt force, would bring a major reckoning. A reckoning with small things, like what we wear, and with large things, too â how we relate to each other, for example, how we consume and, crucially, how we work. But what seemed to happen, and very quickly, was that people rushed back to try to make life exactly as it was before. There was a panic to fill the empty office blocks, to repopulate the Prets and very little incentive to use the imposed pause to look around at what could be improved and what weâd got terribly wrong. I sound like a child saying this, I know, but what if the office blocks became affordable flats instead? What if we learned one single lesson? The rise of hybrid working was one of very few silver linings to the pandemic â that reach for an elusive balance and acknowledgment from employers that their workers were human beings, too.Unfurl
NotesIt shouldnât be a radical act because results are better if we can cooperate. And life is better without cult leaders.
How do we tear down parochialism and ego?Unfurl
NotesAt 8:30 p.m. on 16 May 1916, John J. Carty banged his gavel at the Engineering Societies Building in New York City to call to order a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. This was no ordinary gathering. The AIEE had decided to conduct a live national meeting connecting more than 5,000 attendees in eight cities across four time zones. More than a century before Zoom made virtual meetings a pedestrian experience, telephone lines linked auditoriums from coast to coast. AIEE members and guests in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco had telephone receivers at their seats so they could listen in. FeedUnfurl
NotesAs Gideon Haigh observed 20 years ago, the era of neoliberalism has been associated with the âcult of the CEOâ. The office has been the shrine of that cult. In their plaintive call for a return there, CEOs are like declining deities who see their votaries deserting them.Unfurl
NotesIt could well be that future generations spend a fraction of the time we do today in transit but see far more of the world. Like preindustrial humans, they may work mostly in their homesUnfurl
Notesmost (all?) of the senior engineers I know take on a significant amount of helping-other-people work in addition to their individual programming work. The challenge I see me/my coworkers struggling with today isnât so much âwhat?? I have to TALK TO PEOPLE?? UNBELIEVABLE.â and more âwait, how do I balance all of this leadership work with my individual contributions / programming work in a way thatâs sustainable for me? How much of what kind of work should I be doing?âFeedUnfurl
NotesThe Old Guard is the cultural bellwether of the company. I believe that culture is a slippery thing to fully define, but I do believe it is the responsibility of the Old Guard to not only take the time to define the key values that are the pillars of that culture, to communicate the nuance of those values over and over again, and, lastly, when it becomes apparent they are no longer serving the company, they must be willing to let those values evolve.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesYep, you read that right. While itâs no surprise that remote employees are happier than their commuting counterparts, many business owners are shocked to learn distributed employees are also more productive. How could that be? Itâs actually pretty simple. Psychologists have proven time and again that a happy employee is also a productive employee. Unfurl
Notes"Social loafing is the tendency for individuals to expend less effort when working collectively than when working individually. A meta-analysis of 78 studies demonstrates that social loafing is robust and generalizes across tasks and S populations. A large number of variables were found to moderate social loafing. Evaluation potential, expectations of co-worker performance, task meaningfulness, and culture had especially strong influence. These findings are interpreted in the light of a collective effort model that integrates elements of expectancy-value, social identity, and self-validation theories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)"Unfurl
Notes It may be hard to swallow but the extra effort and hours that you put into your job as a software developer does not usually amount to someone higher up thinking you should run the company. It has been my experience that good producers are more likely to be asked to continue to produce. If they moved you to a higher position and better pay then who would produce the software?FeedUnfurl
NotesBarring a civilization-ending event, technology is not going to move backward. More and more of our world will be controlled by software. Itâs already become so ubiquitous that, argues one of my colleagues, itâs now ridiculous to call some firms as âtechâ companies when all companies depend on it so much.FeedUnfurl
NotesThat's an... interesting perspective: "Kanban is a paternalistic project management theory that aims to set developers on the right path. It promotes the idea that the manager is the arbiter of success and the deliverer of change. And like its forbear Scrum, its major proponents are those who donât code for a living."Unfurl
NotesWe need to return to the communication medium of writing as a skilled, and sometimes arduous craft. We should favour neither speech nor writing above each other, or as binary opposites. Both mechanisms should exist equally in our world and each be used correctly in their appropriate contexts.Unfurl
NotesPerhaps the most striking response to the Hostess news, in that sense, was the tweet from conservative John Nolte, who wrote âHostess strikers had pension. PENSIONS! What is this 1962?â It was once taken for granted that an industrial worker who worked for a big company for many years would get a solid middle-class lifestyle, and would be taken care of in retirement. Today, that concept seems to many like a relic. Just as Wonder Bread does.FeedUnfurl
NotesIf youâre writing tests for code thatâs rapidly changing, youâre going to spend more of your time writing tests instead of shipping features. For code thatâs brand new, I typically only test-first a small amount of code and wait a while before hitting that green bar on a code coverage report.FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes"Old farts" are often excluded from that culture, not because we're lousy coders but because we won't put up with that shit. We have lives, we have families, we have other things that are important to us. We're not about to sleep at our desks and trade watching our kids grow up for the promise of striking it rich. Especially when the people who really strike it rich aren't the ones writing code.Unfurl
NotesRobinson writes: âIf they came to work that drunk, weâd fire them â weâd rightly see them as a manifest risk to our enterprise, our data, our capital equipment, us and themselves. But we donât think twice about making an equivalent level of sleep deprivation a condition of continued employment.âUnfurl
NotesEvery day I read a new article about some company whining about how hard it is to hire technical staff. Invariably it turns out that theyâre only looking for people within a commuters distance of their office. I refuse to feel sorry for such companies.FeedUnfurl
NotesHe's telling you the story of, "If you bust your ass and don't sleep, you'll get rich" because the only way that people in his line of work get richer is if young, poorly-socialized, naive geniuses believe that story! Without those coat-tails to ride, VCs might have to work for a living. Once that kid burns out, they'll just slot a new one in.FeedUnfurl
Notes âWhat people are learning in school is often not connected to the world of work,â she said. âBadges can fill that gap. They can be a kind of glue to connect informal and formal learning in and out of school.â If valued, they might also inspire students to accomplish new tasks. Unfurl
NotesAs a developer, you are sitting on a goldmine. Do you even realize it? No, seriously, a @#$% goldmine!
Never in modern history has it been so easy to create something from scratch, with little or no capital and a marketing model that is limited only by your imagination.Unfurl
Notes"I started thinking about programmer performance a while ago. Everybody will tell you that you canât measure programmer productivity, but this is at best a half-truth. We can, and we should. Perhaps what we shouldnât do is use those measurements to compare programmers to each other, but we can definitely measure ourselves."FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesThinking I might have to try this with the ASUS Transformer I have. "On September 19th, I said goodbye to my trusty MacBook Pro and started developing exclusively on an iPad + Linode 512. This is the surprising story of a month spent working in the cloud."FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesCoffee & Power is what Rosedale calls a "meta-company," a framework for doing business with no managers or middlemen, all arranged through a website, an iPhone app and the workclub. The site, the app and the first workclub on Market Street in San Francisco all go live today after a rapidly developed beta period starting this summer. Workers of the world, take notice: this San Francisco startup wants to make each of us the boss.Unfurl
NotesNobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, itâs just not that good. Itâs trying to be good, it has potential, but itâs not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesnât have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone Iâve ever met. Itâs gonna take awhile. Itâs normal to take awhile. Youâve just gotta fight your way through.Unfurl
Notes"Call it âfill-in-the-blankâ invoicing. Or âpay what you wantâ pricing.<br />
<br />
The notion is, you do the work first, then let the client decide how much to pay for it."Unfurl
Notes"One of the most difficult periods in any job is the first few weeks, while you are getting to know your team, the company and your new job. It can be a difficult time for any employee, but it can be even more difficult for employees who are working in remote offices or telecommuting. Getting to know the team and understanding the company culture are much more difficult when you arenât sitting in the corporate office with the rest of your team. However, there are plenty of things that you can do as a remote employee, or as an employer of remote employees, to make that first week a little easier on everyone."Unfurl
Notes"Sometimes walking away from the computer is the best way to use the computer."
What does your company do? Every company does something different, no matter how slight. Even Burger King and McDonalds have their differentiators. These differentiators, and ones you've planned to release later, are vital to your survival. They make your products...Unfurl
Notes"Your employees will love it ... You can hire great people wherever you find them ... You will use better communication tools ... You can still be social ... Your offices will be more fun"Unfurl
NotesCue the Tina Turner... o/` We don't need another hero o/` "Managers: stop rewarding people for pulling long hours. Donât punish them, of course, but rephrase the conversation within your company. If someone is working at four in the morning, something is deeply wrong. Figure out whatâs broken and delegate the work out evenly across your team such that it doesnât happen again. Donât pat your hero on the back for âpulling another late-nighterâ. Youâre clearly managing someone highly motivated, but you need to shape that motivation into something more constructive. That energy needs to go into design, architecture, planning, and testing, not late night patch sessions."Unfurl
Notes"Please fell free to use any of the excuses listed below. And Employers, please stay out of here, unless you have something to add! We don't need you knowing how we came up with our latest excuse!"Unfurl
Notes"Basically, you'll start the day off right by grabbing a sheet of paper and writing down the goals which you can realistically accomplish that day. The important part is to immediately assign time slots to those tasks by order of importance and difficulty because these designated times make you more likely to accomplish your goals and give you a way of tracking your progress once every hour. At the end of the work day, you'll take a few minutes to review not just the last hour, but the entire day."Unfurl
Notes"In today's increasingly mechanized world, where the bottom line so often takes precedence over human considerations, the working man never knows how long it will be before he is replaced by a machine. It's no secret that some in management at Gillian's Fish Products, where I work, feel that automation would improve productivity and quality control. But what they don't understand is that they will lose something far more valuable if employees are let go: the resentful human touch."Unfurl
Notes"Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches.Small batches mean faster feedback. Small batches mean problems are instantly localized. Small batches reduce risk. Small batches reduce overhead. "Unfurl
The Hidden Cost of AI Coding â Terrible Software
Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work
Horseless intelligence | Ned Batchelder
Literate Development: AI-Enhanced Software Engineering
1x Engineer
Employees are being marched back to the office. But why? | Life and style | The Guardian
Egoless Engineering
The First Virtual Meeting Was in 1916 - IEEE Spectrum
In their plaintive call for a return to the office, CEOs reveal how little they are needed | John Quiggin | The Guardian
The Builderâs High â Rands in Repose
15 rules for communicating at GitHub » Ben Balter
The Old Guard â Rands in Repose
How the internet is making us poor â Quartz
Who Killed the Twinkie? : The New Yorker
Work-from-home Wednesdays â The Connected Company â Medium
Write Code That Works by Reid Burke
Bring back the 40-hour work week - Salon.com
Stop whining and start hiring remote workers - (37signals)
Watch a VC use my name to sell a con. | jwz
Yield Thought, Work Is Fascinating: The Metagame
Yield Thought, I swapped my MacBook for an iPad+Linode
New rules of work posters
Goodreads | Quote by Ira Glass: "Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I w..."