Introvert doesn't mean one doesn't enjoy socializing, just that one needs quiet down time to recharge from it. Extroverts tend to be energized by socialization. It's also not always so cleanly binary, either.
I really hate that introversion gets conflated with social anxiety or misanthropy on the internet.
I'm a staff eng and have 1:1s with other managers I don't report to and my peer staff/principle engs in other reporting chains and they are some of the most valuable meetings I have to keep connected with what other teams and the rest of the organization is doing, what's going well, what they might need from me, pain points, initiatives, etc. And of course just to build and maintain rapport across the org, which absolutely pays dividends.
I do these less frequently than with my direct manager, but still on a regular cadence, typically once a month or every other month.
Sounds very similar to The Heroes Journey, which was a heavily modified EverQuest emulation server that got destroyed in court by Daybreak Games, the current owners/operators of EQ.
THJ was sort of like arcade mode EQ and became wildly popular (relatively, for such an old game) and started making real money off donations and in-game transactions. They likely flew too close to the sun by making money off it, but it demonstrates that there is real creative opportunity with these old IPs if only given the chance. See also the rise of classic and progression servers for the likes of EQ & WoW, which also started as a community emu effort but have now been officially launched and monetized by the IP owners.
And now Daybreak is launching their own THJ-alike but without any of the community goodwill so we'll see how that goes.
You've never had a manager or product person take estimates, even clearly communicated as low confidence or rife with unknowns, as gospel truth? Lucky you.
QA and SDET has been gutted as a role more or less industry-wide over the past 10-15 years. Nobody in charge cares about quality. Devs doing their own QA is like Boeing doing its own FAA certifications. Even with the best of intentions it's a setup for failure.
Yeah a lot of QA teams weren't the best, but the solution isn't to get rid of them it's to hold them accountable and improve them. But that takes effort and costs money, easier to just cut them and shift more responsibilities onto devs. The results are predictable.
Resources or the care, tbh. FOSS is a big umbrella and a lot of it simply isn't meant for "customers". Some FOSS apps clearly are trying to build a user base, in which case yeah the points this post makes are worth thinking about.
But many other projects, perhaps the majority, that is not their goal. By devs for devs, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that.
Pleasing customers is incredibly difficult and a never-ending treadmill. If it's not the goal then it's not a failure.
If manufacturers in general were serious about improving efficiency they'd stop putting huge heavy wheels on everything, instead of chasing fractions of a percent with overcomplicated and failure-prone door handles.
Side bonus, smaller wheels with taller sidewall tires are more comfortable, less prone to damage, and the tires are cheaper and easier to replace, too!
Me too, the hard part is showing that this slower, more methodical process is more valuable than the flashy, quick shallow approach. And it means I might have to chew on a problem for a bit before delivering anything, even a proposal or design much less a product. But for a longer time scale it does pay off.
Fortunately I've had a few good managers and business partners in my career that recognize the value, but it's far from universal and I sometimes have a hard time communicating it myself in the face of the common move fast agile culture that is so prevalent in most of tech.
Most notably, I published a little browser extension I created to scratch a personal itch. It got a little bit of attention and users, and then the feature requests started coming. Among a couple reasonable ideas were big demands like make it work on different platforms, make it integrate with other sites, or make it work entirely differently. And unhelpful bug reports that often didn't even make sense.
Not one of them ever contributed to the repo, and many of them were ungracious and demanding in nature. Fortunately nothing outright hostile, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth for daring to share a neat personal project as-is.
I'm one of those night owls, thank you. I've had to deal with early morning standups in the past and it was soul crushing and a huge net-negative for my work.
Fortunately my current team does 11:15 which works great, especially from home.
I replaced the mish mash of bulbs in my house with all GE "Reveal HD" LED bulbs of different temperatures. Nothing super fancy, just name brand hardware store bulbs.
In the variety of old bulbs, the Feit ones in particular were causing issues with dimmers and also getting slightly discolored and buzzy. Only one had outright died, but seemed that more were on their way.
All the new GE ones have been great so far (only a year), but I'll let you know in 10 more years.
Refreshing all the lighting in the house with modern, matching, actual-dimmable LED bulbs (along with nice dimmer switches) has been a really nice ambiance upgrade.