crdb

"Récoltes et semailles" (Harvest and plantings) by Alexander Grothendieck.

A couple years ago, I needed a front end developer to implement the work of our designer in a way the team could maintain. Not having a network in front end, I combed through the past 3 months of "Who wants to be hired" and freelancer threads, shortlisted 7 with the right skillset, got a quote from each, discussed their portfolios internally with the team, and hired the one we agreed on. The site is still up today. That was probably the fastest hiring cycle I've ever done, from start to payment in about a week or two.

I will browse the thread as a hiring manager but it is fairly rare that what I am looking for has relevant candidates. It is easier to advertise in Who's Hiring and get many qualified applicants with a much higher conversion rate than any channel except recommendations by existing employees.

Similarly, I found more relevant people faster in Who Wants to be Hired than on the regular sites for promoting one's design portfolio which felt a bit like browsing LinkedIn.

"I think, says that everything you do illegally, you do efficiently. This, of course, is perfectly obvious. For one thing, you do not write at all because writing on an illegal project is suicide. For another thing, you work with whatever equipment you have on hand, and of course, you do everything on your lunch hour, which starts at 8:00 in the morning and finishes at 5:00 in the evening. Another thing, when it doesn’t work well and it is illegal, you drop it very quickly and kill the project."

- Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake, Ron Westrum

> You'd want to put them in kind of nondescript areas to avoid taking out the historic stuff as mentioned in the article and maybe pay out 50% above market to existing buildings in the way so they are not too pissed off but it could be doable.

Already exists, see e.g. Croydon. Yes, not in Zone 1, but 14 minutes to London Bridge by Thameslink, about the same time it took me to go from South Kensington to Westminster/St James in the early 2000s and probably without having to wait out a couple trains at rush hour due to lack of space within.

At the time there were no other options in the niche, and it fitted well with what some of us wanted: huge battery life, few features that worked well, lightweight, robust... cheap! Meanwhile Samsung, Garmin etc. went after Apple looking for features at the cost of everything else.

Today there is a myriad of competitors; when pebble.com went down, I bought one with 45 day battery life and otherwise the same features as a Pebble HR+ at the same price, plus GPS. There's third party apps for a few bucks.

I do miss the always-on display and its clarity, but not dealing with the slow and buggy software and lack of sync or ability to export the data. And I have more confidence in Xiaomi being around in a few years, not that it matters with Google Fit, MyFitnessPal and local CSV backups.

My Amazfit Bip ($99) is supposed to have 45 days and lasts about 30 days on minute heart rate monitoring intervals (based on a month and a half of trying it).

I wanted something a bit smaller, to fit under the shirt cuff, so got the Mi Band 3 ($50) which lasts about 10 days (probably 20 days if you don't allow it to display notifications and set a higher HR interval).

The Mi app is pretty bad, which forces you to buy an extra app (for me, Notify & Fitness, for Google Fit sync).

The ironic thing about your reply is that it is crafted in exactly the type of management speak that executives used to convince stakeholders in both occasions.

"absolve relevant parties of their responsibilities" - what relevant parties? What responsibilities? It sounds great and responsible, giving a good impression of dismissal of the point made, but the wording is so general as to be impossible to act upon - just as with "a bank". I'm sure standardised checklists were ticked, committees reviewed the decisions and came to the conclusion that it was best, the board was satisfied with the new direction taken by the CTO's organisation, and the shareholders happy with the cost reduction at the time as described by the board. To paraphrase Thatcher, what colour trousers do the relevant parties wear?

You see this defection pattern everywhere. For example, the never ending stream of useless new features in most Google and some Microsoft products which coincidentally get slower and buggier every year, because you can get promoted for the visible addition of a feature as a PM, but it is much harder to prove that getting the Gmail app load time down by 70% has stopped the feeding of your best power users to the competition (Calendar is too easy a target for criticism).

The classic defector on the tech side is the "ninja rockstar developer" whose prolific output of code and visually attractive but functionally superficial features is matched only by the amount of frustration generated after they are promoted somewhere else or changes jobs if it doesn't happen fast enough, and the rest of the team has to deal with the technical debt and new, unrealistic user expectations.

Security is another good candidate for shortcuts, since there is no visible upside to good security (maybe you were just not attacked) and tons of downside for taking responsibility since you make yourself a visible scapegoat for blame when a crisis does happen.

And note that none of these examples are in "move fast and break things" i.e. "do illegal things and hope they become legal ex-post" territory! I personally take great pains to understand these dynamics so that I can avoid them in my own company, which is a matter of survival.

> a bank fired some old people to pay a billion dollars to a contractor who would hire the same (!) people to do the job

"a bank" is technically incorrect. The decision was a perfectly rational prisoner's dilemma defection from one executive (cut costs by firing the "expensive employees" and hiring "cheaper and newer"), who went on to be promoted on that basis, and it was the next generation of executives who had to deal with the mess and "hired IBM" so they could absolve responsibility of a situation with no visible upside if successful and tons of visible downside if not.