abhayb

I used to live under the guy that ran Lost Weekend on Valencia street. Held out till like 2014/2015. At the time I wasn't really sad about it but now I wish it was still around

Thanks for that! I'll have to get a pint next time I'm there (for some prog-metal in like two weeks). Concert beer tastes better in glass glasses too heh

Sorta sounds like Enneagram types is what you're looking for?

First, I understand what you are saying and understand the constraints keeping you at a job you have issues with. I've certainly seen organizations go too far on consensus even when each person individually (especially the ones at the top) would like more decisiveness. This is a hard and draining place. And all moves out require even more energy that you may not have and should not (in a just world) have to expend.

Someone recommended "Moral Mazes" and I heartily second it. Though mostly because it was so profoundly cynical that it pushed me to defend the systems I was so annoyed by.

If you want to learn the language of design by committee, "Nonviolent Communication" by Marshall Rosenberg is the book that the rest of the committee is playing from. It has genuinely useful pieces. But I also find it fundamentally dishonest in that it frames all other forms of communication as "violent" in a rank misuse of the word. Additionally, the techniques it recommends require that you put in all the effort of framing a situation as no-blame or shared-blame when it very much is not. You do not need to agree with your opponents' tactics manual to find value in its study.

"Radical Candor" by Kim Scott is an attempt to bring directness in to otherwise passive aggressive situations. It's a valiant attempt but it's unclear to me how viable its recommendations are.

However it's not clear to me that any amount of high or low level reading is going to help with your feelings of dissatisfaction here. It sounds like you're looking for a "win" instead of an "out". And despite the deeply cynical feelings it can generate, you cannot succeed at office politics through cynicism. Or irony. Or cynical, ironic, distance. The successful are either completely earnest, or sociopathic enough to fake complete earnestness. And from the outside those are indistinguishable.

Secret third option: spun out of the Business School!

Data has always been plural! Datum is the singular. But actually treating it as plural is mostly a question of where the person speaking/writing is based. Americans treat it as singular, Brits plural. See also, corporations

Hello, yes, recent member of the HN note-taking crowd here. Throwaway meeting notes are exactly my use case. It helps that I do most of my thinking on paper anyway so I have a pen and pad handy at all times. For me it's all about focus. Writing is an activity that I enjoy doing independent of what I'm actually writing. Can't zone out if I'm taking notes which leaves me in a position to drop all of the many great insights I always have in every single meeting.

Hey komali2, why'd you have to go and describe me this sharply on a Saturday morning? Is it that I accidentally crowded you out at the Four Barrel pour-over bar and now you want your revenge?

I've heard it said about running: it doesn't get easier, you just get better. I'm beginning to think that that is true of life in general. My greatest source of dis-ease (rather than literal disease) is the feeling that I'm not living up to my potential. Been with me since at least third standard/grade.

While I've never been to Stockholm (heard Noma's a good local joint), I'm at the place where I'm more afraid of getting too comfortable than I am of never being at ease. I'm trying (and usually failing) to think of things one bandaid at a time rather that the whole million at once. Setting my goals real low: to suck less rather than to be good/great. Help's a lot that there's one or two things that I legitimately feel I'm damn good at.

I'm curious, especially on the topic of stringing-together-unix-tools-on-a-whim, have you found any little tricks that apply to that area specifically rather than to the general concept of productivity?

This is what I hear out of Bangalore too. Maybe even further? Like you can command Valley level comp (or at least base+bonus) if you can clear the right hurdles. Though maybe in Poland too, the issue is that there are far more people one rung down. Cut distance from from 110m to 100m and suddenly there's a lot more competition

Some amount of post-install runtime loading is basically necessary on Android if you're using shared native libs. Can't remember off the top of my head what needs to happen but basically every app runs into strange crashes until they start packaging their .so as a resource and then loading it in Application.onCreate. Chrome does this so it's at least de facto allowed.

Google has to allow dynamic loading at app start because of this. Or fix whatever subtle interaction between Android and an OEM's "improvements" is causing this. Not a huge step from here to getting your library from the internet instead of bundled with the app.

Not trying to justify any one app's behavior, just bringing up a fundamental reality baked into what you're saying: Apple doesn't have to deal with the gaps in its security model becoming load bearing features.

Yes! I've seen these called guardrail metrics. Having a single metric be the one to optimize works pretty well if that optimization is what you want. But optimizing a teams work is messy and generates organizational instabilities. Tuning the guardrails feels like the best way to make sure that you get enough instability for interesting things to happen but not enough that other teams start deciding to take over whole functions just to get work done.

All infra teams eventually become platforms. All product teams eventually become experiences. When viewed negatively this is called scope creep. I don't know what it's called when viewed positively but I expect the word "holistic" to be used unironically.

Org charts that ship a platform are default stable because everybody it a team or group is doing approximately the same things. Growth is less uncomfortable, advancement feels more objective, and individual developers are relatively interchangeable.

But what if a company needs to change? Now the stable org chart resists that change. By rejecting requests from client teams that are responsible for a new set of objectives. This recurses. One layer of platform can simultaneously be moving too slowly for the layer above and too quickly for the one below. Shear forces tear it apart and the organization finds itself with n (3 < n < 6) fewer platform engineers.