I don't have military experience and I will stop short of saying I wish I did because I think that does a disservice to both of us. What I will say is that the vets I have worked with have been excellent contributors and leaders. I work in a place that values strong leadership and makes a point of hiring veterans. It would be easy to dismiss that as public relations fluff but I truly believe vets make an invaluable contribution to a company.

The theory is that Israel punches above it's weight class in the tech/startup sector at least in part because most everybody there has at least some military training.

Interesting. I would speculate the high average IQ is a more significant factor.

Any source for "high average IQ"?

It's a reference to the notion that Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of something like 105, so have more 140+ IQs, and as such they are disproportionately represented in Nobel Prize winnings in the 20thC. Etc etc. I won't source for them (theres a Wiki article) since I think most of the variance can be accounted for by culture.

Thx

It's a culture that deeply values education, trust, and team-work within families, community, and country, all of which contribute to collective success in military, civilian, and business endeavors.

I have to ask...

Why did sailors try to drive through the closed base gate and test 440V circuits with their fingers?

I don't know. Why do we push files to production on a Friday evening? Why do we snipe hot-fixes into production via FTP? Because we are all crazy & lazy bums, I would guess.

> I don't know. Why do we push files to production on a Friday evening?

Because we worked for the whole week on it and now want that other people can see it on their weekend. Since we are so proud of our work and trust in its quality, we are willing to do an extra shift on the weekend, should problems occur.

While I understand and have also myself been guilty of this, I have come to believe that this attitude is selfish and irresponsible.

The experience which gave me perspective was on a project at my previous job. I worked together with another highly passionate engineer and we made amazing progress over the course of a very short time.

The day before the demonstration of our results to our bosses, meant to serve as evaluation and retrospective for this project, we had reached all goals and the simulation was really robust and stable. However, when I came to work on the day itself, I found my colleague sitting at his desk, looking very tired. He'd been working through the night to get all the extra bells and whistles implemented. The demonstration was a disaster. Nothing worked, everything crashed. A lot of people were upset.

Are you missing a /s?

Since this sounds very familiar I would venture that he's being serious.

I feel this is an extremely selfish attitude, as generally it's not just the one who pushed into production who has to do extra work on the weekend, and usually they are not willing to do extra work because someone's ego couldn't wait 2 more days.

Because higher ups forced us to?

Good use of metaphor.

> metaphor

Simile. Or analogy, perhaps.

... Is that kind of pedantic correction a sign of unlikable intelligence? :P

if you have the monitoring in place, and you have done proper canarying, friday evenings are not terrible

Of course. You're more than welcome to risk your own weekend over trivialities. The rest of us only ask that you please keep us out of your plans.

You never were. And there was a reason for that. Maybe you are not the person to put his 150% on the line when needed. It is ok. You do not have to be. Then you get paid accordingly.

You also didnt ask what could prompt before weekend pushes. It could be money, reputation or or compliance. Certain projects are out of your control and you have to implement in weeks notice, or have a deadline imposed by laws. Some are losing revenue so each day you do not release you are bleeding money.

So please, by all means, take your weekend off, while i plan for worst cases and make it so that friday releases are "trivial and safe" to deploy. I do not have to use it, but if i do, i do not need you around, it will be mostly automated anyway.

The problem isn't the day of the week but the fact that it is the day before time off.

If you work weekends then by all means push on Friday evening. However, don't push anything the before your next vacations.

and if you have someone else on call, Friday evenings are perfectly fine

:p

If and when this happens, the pusher person usually is the oncall.

monitoring only helps detecting a problem. and even with canarying there could still be a bad thing in production. it happened everywhere, even the big ones had akward problems. it's human to make errors, so if you do not have luck such a problem could occur on friday evening/night.

There is no doubt, but you see, there are legitimate reasons to do it.

yeah well I always do releases on friday and we have monitoring/canary. but sometimes a minor/major bug slips trough, but our customers only work from monday-friday and so it's not that big of a deal. and it barly happens and after that we add a regression test so that at least the same error won't happen again. funnily most errors on our codebase happened in client side or sanitazion problems. and the client side errors go away once we added all the types to typescript (we converted js to typescript and added any, so we still need to "correct" like 40% of our code base)

That is kind of my point. I believe over time, the monitoring gets solid enough that you can do abrelease anytime. I heard often teams not wanting to do a release, but i try to go towards "i can measure a good amount of metrics and slices that are important and can measure their impact in a controlled manner" which helps for friday releases, or any other release for that matter.

I dont do friday releases often, but if it comes to it, it is no brainer. I approach it pragmatically, and this helps people.

I’m glad someone else felt the need to ask. I did work on a computer with 480V into the rack and the electrical training they made us sit through scared the bejesus out of all of us. It was basically 4 hours of watching people get electrocuted with 480v+. A 480V arc flash is no joke[0]. The training had the desired effect: we played it absolutely by the book, the CPR-trained buddy system, the PPE, everything.

[0] https://youtu.be/-iClXrd50Z8 the helpful “ding” is the best part. At any rate, imagine take that on your arms or face.

Some people do stuff just because they can. Some because of bad day and some because of thinking those doors are always open so just drive without paying attention.

BTW love the username : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here

Me too. :)

Do you have examples or references for the types of charismatic speech and creative metaphors you used?

Charisma: if you like it, it's charisma, if you don't it's a sense of entitlement.

Metaphors: they're cooked up in the moment.

Sorry, what do you mean by “if you like it”?

He means the listener. Another way to put it: the difference between coming off charismatic vs entitled is having the emotional intelligence to predict what your listeners will like.