vladgiverts

I used story points for years with my teams and they worked "as advertised", which is they helped the teams understand the effort, complexity and risk for each story involved.

When there was disagreement, it helped them dig deeper to understand why and usually reveal somebody's incorrect assumptions.

It helped make sure teams didn't overcommit to the amount of stories they stuffed into a sprint and avoid either burning out, or worse, normalizing not finishing the sprint causing negative impacts to morale/motivation. (For some reason my teams often thought they could do more than the points implied!)

Most importantly, when large projects were proposed or were in progress, we were able to give realistic estimates to the various stakeholders about when to expect the various milestones to arrive, which bought us engineers a ton of credibility, trust, and respect with the rest of the company.

And yes, management wanted to see the story points and measure the team against them. I told them to F-off. Nicely. Kinda.

It helped that I was either a CTO or a senior enough exec in those cases with 3-8 agile teams. I essentially was the middle management and could put a stop to any destructive practices like evaluating teams against their velocity.

Been using this on my Macbook Pro M1 to play Breath of the Wild and Mario Kart using XBox controllers. My kids and I love it.

I'm pretty sure Tungsten and borated polyethylene are best at shielding against different types of radiation. Dense materials like tungsten and lead are ideal for blocking gamma rays and x-rays, while borated polyethylene is better at blocking neutrons.

Depending on your environment and the sensitivities of what you're shielding, you might need one or the other, and possibly both.

Disclaimer: I'm not a nuclear physicist. I learned this while researching for a hard-sci-fi novel I'm working on.

Speaking to the task size point, I’ve found (via leading a number of teams and training many more team leads) it’s possible to decompose any task into smaller tasks so that every task is within a small constant factor of each other.

If it seems impossible for a given task, maybe because it’s particularly complex or has lots of unknowns, then no problem, simply create a “spike” task to research or prototype whatever you need to in order to decompose the big task into appropriately sized chunks (for your team’s idea of appropriate).

See you end up with a bunch of tasks that are all roughly the same size or are spikes of similar size, and you can have the very nice predictability and productivity that the author is speaking about.

(btw, I also agree that contact switches are never cheap for software developers, so it’s better to let them finish whatever they’re working on whenever it’s not too unreasonable to allow it)

Soul Without Shame by Byron Brown.

It fairly accessible and yet opened me up to a much more complex world of inner experience than I was able to perceive before reading the book.

> But there is something wonderful in watching a figure emerge from the stone unsummoned, feeling the presence of something within you, the writer, and also beyond you – something consistent, wilful, and benevolent, that seems to have a plan, which seems to be: to lead you to your own higher ground.

As a student of spiritual work, it sounds like the author is pointing to an actual felt experience. It’s very much possible (and common among serious inner-work students) to dis-identify from our usual sense of self and instead feel a “presence” or a sense of “being”, where our body takes actions without us a experiencing ourselves as the “doer” of those actions. It’s as if the universe (or God for the religiously inclined) is acting through us and we are simply a field of awareness that happens to include the body and mind and our whole nervous system.

It depends what you mean teachable. When a leader is when faced with a serious challenge, the crux of great leadership is being able to set one’s own ego aside and act from a place of groundedness and a clear and objective view of reality.

When human beings are in a difficult situation they all too often try to comfort themselves by seeking praise/affirmation, stability/safety, connection/relationship, etc. And in those moments we see everyone around us as a means to the end of getting one of those things that we feel is missing for us. Our ego _is_ our personality. We’re fused with it and most of the time aren’t even aware that we have these impulses.

Great leaders are the ones who develop an awareness of their inner world and are able to set it aside when they need to act.

Can you teach this? Sort of. There are people who do. You can call what people like me do as a kind of teaching. But it requires someone more than just instruction and practice. The person doing the “learning” has to be willing to let go of parts of themselves that had been with them for most of their life.

I’ve found mere desire to be a better leader is not enough. People’s psychology is riddled with land mines and powerful defense that won’t let them abandon a deeply held belief just because someone taught them that it was somehow counterproductive.

The people that make the leap are usually feeling “stuck” or having some kind of recurring breakdown that they just can’t bear anymore and don’t know what else to do.

I agree that leadership isn’t “teachable” in the same sense that a skill or piece of knowledge is. But it can be supported and cultivated. It’s what I do for a living as a leadership coach. I don’t actually instruct anyone how to lead, but rather give them them the opportunity to discover it for themselves. I’ve seen pretty meaningful shifts for people on the timescale of 3-6 months.

There are so many articles that blame leadership for all that ails a company. To me, it seems a bit like saying "most program crashes are caused by runtime errors". While both are true, there are deeper explanations that can be more helpful in starting a discussion.

In the case of crashing a program, maybe it's because of a misused raw pointer or a type error in an untyped language. As soon as you frame it that way, you immediately see possible paths forward to improve the situation.

In the case of burnout at companies, I've found it has more to do with the mindset of the top leaders (who other managers down the chain tend to emulate). The mindset is that the company is "a machine", which makes the rest of us "cogs" (or pick your favorite machine part).

The leaders may be perfectly nice and considerate people in general (or not), but regardless, the company-as-machine mindset leads them to set aside their humanity in the interests of the company. All of sudden everyone on the team needs to be replaceable, have predictably high output, etc. Those might be fine concerns for a business, but they end up blinding managers to the flesh and blood human beings in front of them and they start to see employees as the means to the greater business ends of output, productivity, growth, etc.

I believe this is an issue of human development that affects most companies eventually. Only companies with really developed leaders who, when faced with serious pressure, are able to see people as the unique and complex beings that they are and not make people feel like they somehow don't matter at a fundamental level.

The saying “all models are wrong, some models are useful” seems appropriate here. The interviewee is arguing against both the correctness and usefulness of “sub-conscious thought” as a model for the human mind. But he seems to conflate the two arguments. It sounded to me like he was saying: “Here are all the ways that the sub-conscious thought is wrong and confusing, so it must not be useful either!”

He talks about motor neurons and sensory processing as an unconscious brain process, which is so different from what we consider “thought” that it doesn’t make sense to call them unconscious thought. He then goes on to rail against Jung and Freud and psychology in general. But that’s a straw-man. Based on my limited knowledge, I don’t Freud et al were talking about the mechanical brain processes when they wrote about the unconscious mind. Instead, they were talking about things like the self-images and expectations that we hold at any given moment.

Like, if I hold a very low opinion of myself (like I did for most of my life) I might feel awkward and insecure around girls or certain social situations. The unconscious belief in those moments was that there was something inherently wrong with me (I was unloveable, of little value, etc). Ten years ago if you had asked me I would have told you I was amazing. I probably believed it at conscious level. But given my levels of anxiety back then, it certainly wasn’t true. It’s only now after some inner exploration that I am able to see and realize this.

Is it fair to call that unconscious or subconscious if these beliefs were there all along I wasn’t aware of them? I personal find that a useful model and I think that’s what psychologists have in mind when they use those words.