So teach your kids to kiss ass and play poltiics. Or to stay far away and do something useful with their lives.
This is what I really don’t get about these types of folks. Do they really want to remember their life’s work as “kissing ass and playing politics”? I get the “work to live” and all that, but you’re basically tossing away half your life…for what, money? How much money do you need!?
Depends where you want to live, but $5M to $10M would help with enough passive income to future proof one’s family and their kids.
> At scale, even your bugs have users. First place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turnin…
> The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turning on their computers, and spending the next 10min chatting and drinking coffee One of my early tasks as a junior engineer involved some automation work in a warehouse. It got assigned to me, the junior, because it involved a lot of time working in the warehouse instead of at a comfortable desk. I assume…
One of my work involved automating some process which was very manual and tedious, took a lot of time and there was dedicated employee for that process. After I did the project, it turned out that this job wasn't necessary anymore and that employee was fired. I felt uneasy about the whole situation.
> At scale, even your bugs have users. First place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turnin…
I optimised out some redundant processes on a unix system and sped up boot time.
But I had to release dummy processes which just printed out the same logs, as management didn't want to retrain operators or reprint the documentation.
Mid 90s. All training and operations manuals were hard copy.
15 years in leadership worked at 3 jobs lead major transformations at retail where nearly 100B of revenue goes through what i built. Ran $55-$100M in a yearly budget… over 300 FTEs and 3x contractors under my or my budget,…largest retailer in google at that time…my work influenced GCP roadmap, Datastax roadmap, … much more all behind the scenes…. besides your capabilities and ability that had to be there to get you i…
> So teach your kids to kiss ass and play poltiics.
Teach your kids to kick ass, and to distrust politicians.
> At scale, even your bugs have users. First place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turnin…
Yes nice but also very naive. Most developers do not have that level of ownership, nor know how their users interact with the software. Their job is precisely to complete tickets from the product manager. The product manager is the one who should be in charge of UX research and “build a software that solves users problems.” Sure, in abstract that is the mission of the developers too, but in any structured (and hopefu…
Good software engineers are concerned with product strategy. They might not be able to decide things but they can help inform product about options because they're closer to actually building things.
If you just implement product tickets you'll probably get replaced by LLMs.
This feels somewhat hypocritical coming from Addy. Addy Osmani plagiarized my code and 'apologized' years later by publishing an article on his website[1] that he has never linked to from his social media accounts. I cannot accept his apology until he actually syndicates it with his followers. Seems relevant to note this behavior in light of points "6. Your code doesn’t advocate for you. People do.", "7. The best cod…
FWIW, the actual apology is well written.
If you run it through originality.ai, you'll see that bits of it are his writing, some is mixed and some is just ai. This blog post everyone is discussing is also written with ai.
And material UI is still the worst of all UIs. Had the pleasure of rolling out a production oauth client ... jesus christ. Only worse is microsoft in UX. You don't want me to use your services, do you?
> And material UI is still the worst of all UIs I'm not sure how that got approved either, but at least we now know what would happen if a massive corporation created a UI/UX toolkit, driven only by quantitative analytics making every choice for how it should be, seemingly without any human oversight. Really is the peak of the "data-driven decisions above all" era.
> quantitative analytics making every choice for how it should be, seemingly without any human oversight
I first learned about the "innovation tokens" idea in "Novelty is a loan you repay in outages, hiring, and cognitive overhead" from this, still one of my favorite essays on software architecture: https://boringtechnology.club/ Likewise, "Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call." made me think of this 23 year old classic from Joel Spolsky, the Law of Leaky Abstractions: https://www…
My former boss had a rule of “One novel thing per project”. This was both an upper and lower limit, which ensured that he was “always learning”.
I’ve followed that rule for decades and always regretted it when I couldn’t: projects were either too boring or too stressful except at the magic level of novelty.