frausto

great quote: > the problems we face with software are rarely technical. The problem is always the people creating accidental complexity and pushing it to the next person as if it was "essential"

Until a level of absolutely massive scale, modern tooling and code and systems reasonably built can handle most things technically, so it usually comes down to minimizing complexity as the #1 thing you can do to optimize development. And that could be

- code design complexity - design complexity - product complexity - communication complexity - org complexity

And sometimes minimizing these ARE mutually exclusive (most times not, and in an ideal world never… but humans...) which is why much of our job is to all push back and trade off against complexity in order to minimize it. With the understanding that there are pieces of complexity so inherent in a person/company/code/whatever’s processes that in the short term you learn to work around/with it in order to move forward at all, but hopefully in the long term make strategic decisions along the way to phase it out

As someone who struggles with cycles of depression, but let's call it funk, I relate to the downward behavioral and thought spiral it can put you inside. Yet, inevitably, I DO get out of it. For me, it's been a combination of things, largely changes in the external environment that force internal action. I tried medication and eventually (after a painfully long time trying to find the right "fit") found some combination that got me through. But I didn't like what it did to my thoughts and, more importantly, to my perception of the world. Not to mention the physical side effects (including headaches, fogginess, and nausea), depression medication, as prescribed by psychiatrists, made me feel inevitably less ME. I did not like that. I do not like that.

So what did work?

When I was younger, I "solved" the issue by moving. I would move cities, move apartments, move jobs, and so on and so forth. And that worked! Such significant external changes forced a coming out of sorts, forced me into action that kicked me out of my spiral. It also lead to new experiences and a lot of learning! Great for young me. But as I get older and have more responsibility and weight outside of myself in my life (now including wife, children, dog, and house), I cannot in good conscience keep doing the same.

I know how this may come off, but I did try micro-dosing more recently and found it supremely helpful, not as a long-term solution, certainly not as a means to enhance my ability to achieve more in any particular task, but supremely helpful in terms of kicking me out of a vicious and unrelenting downward spiral. Enough to find my footing and make my way out, replacing it for a more upward trajectory. Once footing is found, I can stop and, on my own, work my way up. The last time I did this was several years back, and we'll see how the cycles go from here.

All that to say I have found no perfect solution. I still search, though not as desperately as before. And time, more than anything, has its sway.

Why write this? Perhaps I'm just feeling introspective in the new year.

Anecdotal, but everything running fine and looking normal on our us-west-2 instances

"Revenue is the Dominant Term."

This really speaks to me and is one of the driving philosophies when we created our pricing model for Warmintro, which ironically has a mission very close to the author's example: "to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."

We make it easy for private groups to create their own online community portals, and it would be very hard to stay true to community-focused ideals, if our revenue didn't match the mission.

For this very reason, a sizeable chunk of our customers migrate to us from Facebook groups due to privacy concerns. Facebook makes money on your data and by serving you ads, that is the direction that everything they do leans. The groups that they host suffer from that fact.

We made Warmintro paid from the very beginning. It made things harder for us in many ways since we acquire initial customers more slowly, but it also guarantees the direction of our priorities. Because at the end of the day, how you make money determines the ultimate direction of any for-profit company.

How do you feel about monthly 1:1's? This was my approach though the topic was less about keeping up to date with what the team/person has been doing, and more about how they are feeling, if there any roadblocks I could help them with, if they are interested in the work they are doing, etc etc...

I think of my job as a manager as supporting and empowering my team to be productive and making sure they are happy with their work, this was just one way for me to do so.

Given your preference for less 1:1's, I would be interested to hear your take.

Software ones can be good or bad, but software adjacent ones can be downright ridiculous.

A running joke at my last role was that I would keep trying to get the company to pay for my Scrum Master Training, which conveniently had a Hawaii option.

But in all seriousness, what a silly "Certification".

Spooky how similar this sounds to my own experience.

I would add as well that if the acquiring company does not have a solid plan for how to integrate your team/product... you're gonna have a bad time.

That's a good way to put it. As my economics professors liked to point out, Black-Scholes was a self-fulfilling prophecy in that the success of the model was determined by the fact that everyone was using it (or some variation of it) to price derivatives.

If it had never been published would it still have been as accurate? Who knows.

When you dive deep it's easy to think of economics in terms of math and forget the fact that, unlike physics, it is a social field and there is no right and wrong aside from what people agree on.

Been getting blocked by recaptcha more and more, do any of these tools handle dealing with that or workarounds by default? Tried routing through proxies and swapping IP addresses, slowing down, etc... Any specific ways people get around that?

I feel this problem is especially significant in San Francisco. Having lived in several other cities, I can say that, at least for me, this was never a major issue before living in SF. Meeting other programmers and people in tech out in the real world used to be a pleasant surprise. Now it's just a given.

Coffee shops, climbing gyms, museum nights, hiking meet ups, hanging out in the park, etc etc... I, like apparently every other person in tech, enjoy these things. I do miss the diversity of thoughts and lifestyles to be found in other cities. Not that SF doesn't have such diversity, it's just that I never before had to make an effort to find it outside my normal activities.