phereford

IMO, someone’s tangible value of putting an Ape as their avatar pic on social media might be greater than that of someone being able to use a ship purchased in Star Citizen.

It’s a little crazy to me how Twitter profiles with Apes are viewed as “influencers” and “pioneers” and get treated as such. Not my cup of tea per se, but there is tangible value for some people there.

This! I prefer 80 characters so I can have two panes of code side by side or a REPL next to my code. It is near impossible to do that on a laptop if the line length is extended to 110 without a line wrap.

Point being, everyone has very different preferences and work practices. Team standards are going to be very different from team to team but standards do help reduce cognitive overhead on wondering if line lengths or other styles need to be different.

100% this. The teams that I have been a part of that have had a lasting impact on me allow for authenticity. Sure, sometimes you get a disparaging remark that can escalate. But, in my limited experience, that downside is so minuscule to the upside of having authenticity creating happiness in the workplace.

To add to this sentiment, tests also give teams confidence that is needed. It gives engineers confidence when developing new features because the test suite will break if you introduce a regression. It gives engineers confidence during deployment/CD.

While the tangible benefits of unit tests are very important, there are other intangible benefits that are equally important.

Honeypots are the best. It will filter out at least 90% of the spam (or so I have experienced everywhere I have implemented them).

Tools that have worked in the past for me: - Confluence for long lived documents - JIRA for time boxed groupings of work. - Slack for real time comm if anything arises. - "Culture" and Process Living Document

I ran a team of about 25 in the past and followed the following agile principles to help with alignment: - retrospectives - "sprints" (preference on the 3-4 week range) - Sprint Review

Alignment, while tricky, isn't all that hard so long as processes are evolving from retrospectives and you have a single source of truth for long form documentation.

What is soul crushing to you is not soul crushing to someone else. You can certainly find people who are motivated to meet new engineers and talk and spend part of their day doing that than going to a meeting of choice.

If you are leading a team of engineers, chances are you have some form of recurring check in to see how the individual is doing. In those times, it is the leaders responsibility to understand what motivates that individual and what they enjoy doing. This way, your delegation is impactful in an empowering way and not a “well thanks for unloading the stuff you don’t like”.

I prefer people to opt in to the processes that need to be handed off as that is how you get true ownership, evolution, and trust.

Most times you are correct. In this scenario, however, it seems like he started as an individual contributor and transitioned to management. When that happens, in my experience, companies want to continue to leverage the system knowledge from the individual in some form of producing technical assets.

Believe it or not, _you_ and you alone can fix this. DELEGATE! Delegate enough to get back SOME of that coding time. Block off 2 hours a day as "Free Time" or "Creative Space" a la Michael Scott from _The Office_. People will respect that.

At my prior place of employment in which I grew the team from 0 to 25 in 3 years, I eventually delegated all the stuff I did not like and empowered my team to own it. It sounds like you can do something very similar with the culture you have there.

An example: At first I loved phone screens and getting to know candidates. I refined and built that process from scratch. Once that process was up and running, it was no longer the best use of my time to be hammering the phones and scheduling screens. There was a better use of my time and someone else that REALLY enjoyed that aspect of team building stepped up. I was able to move myself to the end of the recruiting funnel which freed up 70-80% of my time allocated to that function. The opportunity cost was simply too high for the company having me screening people.

You can certainly find a way to do that as well.

If you feel like chatting more on this, my email is in my profile. Good luck and don't burn out! Your work should be just as fulfilling as your team members work.

I know we are talking about this in the digital realm, but this also exists in the property realm too. Imminent Domain is used be governments to acquire land, generally below its actual valution, for building of infrastructure.

I wonder if this concept will ever make it to the digital world.

It does not have complete feature parity. One of the things missing, that is important for me and the team I am on, is the ability to share screens and allow for remote control in that session. That is a Mac App only right now, at least the last time I checked.