opmelogy

> If I disagree with you, that’s not an issue. Just like the songs Lennon and McCartney wrote together were better than the ones they wrote after, contrasting opinions on a team bring new insights and better decisions.

This is great but please tell people this upfront. Not everyone has an over abundance of confidence - especially candidates that come from traditionally marginalized communities.

> In order to go far enough, to make that feeling strong enough, it went too far. Others are powerfully lovely to us, but so, in a strangely different, strangely similar way, are flowers and sunsets.

I have such little patience for this sort of writing. If you are going to claim there are 13 ways to look at something, then put numbers on them and make it a list so it's easier to consume.

That's interesting. I wonder how much mass shootings or making abortion illegal costs.

this makes total sense. Tech really does funnel money into a smaller set of society and the way to keep doing that is to raise prices on everyone, even if that means the majority of the people that are making way less a year than their employees.

I'm surprised speeding tickets haven't been privatized yet. Get a device installed in your car that monitors the speeds of cars around you. If someone violates the speed limit your car reports them to the authorities and then you get a "cut" of the ticket. Great way to make some extra cash while ignoring the fact that everyone is getting pitted against each other as a way to stay distracted from all the crap the ruling class does...

> Those still involved in Windows desktop, will assert that they are running like headless chickens

I was wondering what was going on there because Windows is so incredibly bad in so many ways. I need my computer for productivity - not consumption - and Windows really seems good at getting in the way a lot of time. If I could jump back to using a Mac for work I would do it in a heartbeat.

There are exceptions right? Stripe isn't public yet I'm pretty sure there are ways to sell the stock that's accrued. I remember something about them opening up a way to sell your shares and since I get pinged on LinkedIn every so often about it I'm assuming it's a thing.

> A question I often ask myself lately is wether I am the person that I want my children to grow up to be.

I used to think that this sort of questioning was the norm. And then Trump got elected and I learned that very few people actually follow this, even though they say they do. So many things I was taught as a child from grown ups on respect, caring for others, etc went completely out the window when Trump showed up. People embraced his toxic attitudes, belittling of others (especially minorities and disabilities), and flat out fought as if winning is the only thing that matters.

It'd be great to see more people hold the ideals laid out in this post, but I've given up hope. Especially when this: "I hope to one day have the wisdom, strength of character, intelligence and resilience of my father" flips to people being duped into illogical thinking and base instincts (which I think really defines us more often than not...).

> You felt your partner was coasting so you checked out. They felt that you checked out.

Yes that's basically what happened. I get that this is their perception, but find it funny how much self-awareness is lacking as to what they contributed. I'm still friends with them and still like them, but they are firmly in the camp of "nope" moving forward.

> Maybe they were doing more than you realised, or maybe they were just freeloading.

I'd love for it to be the case where they were doing more than I realized, but considering we're all engineers and I'm the only one working on designs and implementing code...and driving all the discussions...you get the idea.

That really sucks. I'm sorry to hear it.

I tried twice to start software companies with people I knew. Both times the other party didn't invest nearly as much time as I was putting in. And in both cases I figured this out fairly early and started to match their drive and investment into what we were building. As you'd expect, the companies folded within a few months.

What's interesting to me is that one of the guys I'm still friends with and the story he tells for why it folded is very different from my view. To him, it was me backing away and causing it fail and from my experience, it was I switched from working on it 7 days a week to working on it two weekends a month. I don't think he's being mean spirited here - I think he is just that clueless about what was going on.

My current start-up was founded differently. My partner and I did multiple smaller projects together to see if we could work together. We also went through a deep dive on "past traumas" (key life defining moments for us) along with exercises on what sorts of values we want to inject into the company (ranging from how we handle feedback, to how we respond to failure, to what our employees would say about us and the company 2 years in the future, etc.). This allowed us to understand where we are coming from, figure out if our values aligned, and help lean on each other when things got hard/stressful. It really does make navigating building something together. Basically "wtf?!" reactions can easily be replaced with "uh oh, is everything okay?"

You bring up really good points.

I do think that there are always going to be people that fall in line with that they are told while a select few "decision makers" call most of the shots. The takeaway from your comment is that we need decision makers that are going to lead things to be more healthy instead just benefitting one side.

The word he is looking for is resentment. It's well understood in relationship psychology. But it's good to have someone outside of that field be able to untangle these topics and word them in ways that resonate with different people.

When I moved here a year+ ago, I was told by the leasing office for my apt that I needed to provide proof of rental information even though I had owned a house for 15 years (in another state, and had it fully paid off). They refused to process my application until I dug up contact info for a unit for a condo that was no longer being rented and for a property manager that did everything under the table.

Now we just found out that the company we started a year+ ago didn't get registered in CA "in time" so we owe $800 even though it's made no money. And by "in time" I mean it was two weeks past their grace period for being exempt for your first year.

So yeah, not really feeling CA nor SF at this point. We're looking to move and move the business somewhere else.

I went through something similar. The core of it for me had to do with a fixed mindset vs growth mindset.

The research behind this showed that telling kids something as simple as "you are good at this" vs "you worked hard at this" can trigger a fixed mindset. This shifts their focus (and potentially their beliefs) that it's about them personally as opposed to the work they are putting in. From there all sorts of crazy things happened. Kids would protect their status moving forward, going so far as to lie to others about how well they did on exams. Meanwhile the kids that thought it was about the work they put in continued to grow, improve, and get better - leaving the other group behind.

With this knowledge, I began to change from thinking about comments and feedback to be about me and instead about things I've produced. Eventually it lead to me being able to respond with curiosity, embrace (and celebrate) mistakes, and to learn things much much faster.

This may sound odd, but I now have a visual I play in my mind to help navigate this. In the past, the visual was when getting feedback the other person was pointing at me when saying things - which felt like blaming, shaming, etc. Now it's that they are pointing at a piece of paper in front of us that we are both looking at. That piece of paper has things that I've produced and we are discussing it. It shifts the focus and blame from me over to discussing the results of my actions. This gives me a mechanism to mull over how to change my actions in the future to get different results.

Good answer.

> He’s famous...for gaslighting

This is an excellent way to put it and a great observation. I was never able to put my finger on it even though the BS meter was off the charts. Here it is. Thanks.

I missed this part but it makes even more sense now. The author only knows how to function like him and expects everyone else to function the same way. It reeks of immaturity and the inability to understand others.

This quote pretty much hammered in the last nail in the coffin. He has no idea how to run teams.

I find a lot of this to be surprising. The author seems sharp, but is missing so many obvious issues with what they are saying.

> It’s harder to get a hold of each other, as we’re not online at the same time. “I’ll talk about it when I see him tomorrow” — these delays compound in a huge way.

What? What does working remotely have to do with people working different times during the day? Core hours should be a thing - regardless of it being remote of in the same building.

> So most interactions are async, leading to lower bandwidth, more context switching, and more things falling through the cracks.

I can't wrap my head around why async communication results in more context switching. You literally decide when you engage with async information.

> Even sync chats aren’t as good. People can’t interrupt each other or have sidebars, and there are bugs with video, audio, screenshare, etc… These frictions compound too.

Ah here we go. Bro culture coming into play. If you have to interrupt each other in order to have discussions something is off.

> This causes us to be less aligned. We’re only a few engineers right now, and yet people feel out of the loop on who’s building what.

Now we're on it. The problem isn't remote work. It's how you are handling work and the process. If you think the only way to solve this is to put people in the same room then you are destined to fail on how to build stuff. You are limited in your thinking on how to work as a team and are going to greatly reduce your ability to deal with variations unless it "totally aligns with how you know how to work." This pretty much explains it all right here.

This isn't surprising. Amazon said that they were going to support remote work indefinitely and then changed their minds even though people have moved away from the main offices. Then they pull every back in the midst of massive layoffs and it really comes across as intimidation and manipulation. It doesn't matter if that's what it is - it's very very easy to perceive it that way. From what I've seen, older generations tolerate this sort of treatment better than younger generations. I don't mean that as a dig on younger folks and it being a commentary on maturity - I think that the younger generations have a different view of how things can and should function (to inject my opinion here - I tend to agree with them...things are really really broken and we have to change).

> Idk, the cynic in me wonders what he actually had to do. Because for a lot of degrees the answer is basically nothing.

I'm trying to remember any college course I took out of the three degrees I have (and extra college courses outside of that) that didn't require a lot of work. I'm not sure where you are coming up with this idea that it's not a lot of work and that it's okay to downplay someone's drive and abilities. Maybe it'd be more useful for you to do some internal reflection instead of dumping this garbage out on everyone here.

> * It'd be easy for Apple and Google to prevent downloads of TikTok for most users, which would also include app updates, as they have a significant amount of knowledge of users' locations and could prevent most users in Montana -- even those using a VPN -- from downloading the app or updating it.

I find this statement odd. It's one thing to have the data and another thing to assert that it's either readily available or easy to insert into legacy systems. Do you know this to be true? Or is this just a guess on your end? Because it sounds like a guess. And with guessing becomes weakened trust in what people "report" or "analyze".

You bring up a good point. When I read the post I applied a filter of "social media" so vetted everything from the perspective of Twitter, Facebook, Insta, etc. And a lot of the ideas hold up when compared to that.

It breaks down as you say with Netflix which probably means there's a line between user-generated content and curated content that requires a higher bar.

Anyone know about this idea about low fiber diets making it easier for bacteria to get through the intestinal lining? And that this bacteria is likely a cause for autoimmune issues?

I read about this about 10 years ago in the NYTimes and haven't seen it in print since. But the last 3 doctors I've seen (in different cities), I've asked them about this and the responses have ranged from "reach is showing this is likely the case" and then another one responded with a flat out "yes, that's correct." Yet I don't see anyone actually talking about this.

Google has a history of killing off products that are actively used by people. The trust is broken at this point. I'm super weary of relying on Google for anything now.

> All the points noted in the slides etc just come from poor engineering leadership. i.e decisions/choices, etc.

Hindsight is 20/20. It's easy to make these claims after the fact. In the moment it's far more complex and the decisions made at the time take in a lot of factors. Oversimplifying things and placing blame on a tiny thing doesn't push the discussion and learnings forward.

Lambda came out in late 2014 and Step Functions came out in late 2016. It's entirely likely that this team was an early adopter of the tech. Internally a lot of these AWS technologies have a roadmap that sound like they will solve a lot of your issues but those roadmaps get tossed fairly regularly as priorities shift at the product level and AWS-wide level.

We won't be able to get the info on what went on here (likely the team that improved things doesn't even know due to turn over). But watering it down to be "poor engineering leadership" is off the mark and way too simplistic.

> there’s nothing wrong with this opinion, attitude, what have you. it is useful. important.

This is dead on.

There's a lot of value in knowing where one fits and thrives in the dev process. We need people that thrive building the v1's and we need people that thrive extending the v1's into v2's and beyond. They are both really valuable.

> ...delivering results isn’t the end all be all. It’s delivering the right results on a known and predictable time scale without any surprises.

Well said. I've had a hard time articulating this but you nailed it.

I consider this like drinking water. It's a no brainer that you should drink water, but some people need reminders because mentally they are getting caught up in other stuff.

> why did (apparently) some large proportion of all valley tech businesses park their working capital at the same bank? Is that something we'd expect to happen in a free market?

What's the concern/issue your brain is picking at with this? Based on what I'm getting from your comment you are asking why large groups of people clump together and end up following what's popular/well known. To me, that me says more about psychology and less about the idea of the free market balancing things out. (Not disagreeing with you and not aiming to be confrontational - sincerely curious.)

I'm trying to actually figure out what his points are. None of it is making much sense because he just seems so far off in his own thinking that it's not connected to DEI at all. Still trying to untangle it, but here's my lol as I work through what he's saying.

1.1 When did we start pretending to care about diversity?

He says 1978. What? He's fabricating a story to prop up his flawed belief system.

1.2 Diversity is intellectual?

It's good because it promotes a good education. What? It's far more about that: representation, opportunities for historically marginalized groups, challenging the status quo with ideas of how things should be done, etc.

2.1 The argument for affirmative action

How did we get to affirmative action? Are we back in the 1980's view of how we are supposed to level the playing field?

> by diversifying the racial composition of the student body, we will be indirectly producing intellectual diversity.

Yikes. He's totally missing the point around opportunities, exposure to diverse backgrounds that force you break out of your own stereotypical thinking...

2.2 Idealogy

> The most “woke” people are the ones who aggressively try to silence all dissent and to exclude conservatives, libertarians, etc., from the Academy.

This is a myth. Conservatives tend to get excluded because their whole goal is to exclude others based on their religion, their desire to prevent others from being able to become self actualized (ex against same sex marriage), their support for laws and institutions that maintain the status quo...

2.3 Other countries

> the most diverse people would naturally be those from other countries.

Yikes. He's totally gone off the rails now. Completely misses the point of what DEI is about.

2.4 Other races

> Affirmative action would also apply more strongly to, say, immigrants from Iran, or Korea, or Israel, than to black people (or anyone else) from our own society.

face palm that is just so painful to read. Yes, on the surface it's true, but not what DEI is actually trying to address in the US.

2.5 social class

> rural white people would get more affirmative action points than middle class suburban blacks.

lol this guy doesn't understand racism very well.

2.6 Proportionality

His point: you don't need a proportional representation for diversity.

And...? Not sure why this is even here. Seems pretty obvious.

2.7. Non of this is happening

> Conclusion: By and large, they don’t care about diversity. They’re just lying, in a really transparent way, because they think it gives them a patina of legal legitimacy.

lol my god how did we land here?

3. Conclusion

> “Diversity, inclusion, and equity” refers to ideological uniformity, exclusion, and discrimination.

Sigh. He really has no clue what he's writing about or how this works outside of his world view. I can't shake the feeling how sad I from having slogged through this. I'll chalk this up to being useless noise that's out of touch on what's going on in the larger world.