>No offense intended, but most PMs I've met are fucking useless
Beyond basic horse sense, technical credibility, customer outreach, market sense, & roadmap development by nurturing sheafs of competing priorities while constantly mindful of critical constraints...
...A PM has to make their management happy. Who increasingly isn't technical at all.
Show me a 'pointless, clueless, idiotic' user story or epic, & I'll show you the result of PM negotiations with stakeholder(s) who asked (demanded) something far worse.
EVERY non-technical %VP, C%% and VC I've met just Loves to say "it's just software; it can do anything"... & completely miss the bitter irony that statement should embody.
>IMO I don't think it's mentally healthy to not at least 'enjoy' your work and have decent professional relationships with your coworkers.
You can have "decent professional relationships" with coworkers while remote. Virtual beer (I prefer scotch) drinking sessions work great, for example. And also opens your circle to ppl continents away.
>Work is a significant part of your life and to be socially disconnected and emotionally discordant about what your doing is not good.
Physical proximity is not necessary for social connection. Especially when it seems every app has webconference (slack too).
Also, frequency of needed connection differs if you're an introvert vs extrovert. Larger society typically views the latter as 'normal' & the former as 'ill-adjusted', but I wouldn't expect that tendency on HN(?)
> Single humans are wrong about a lot, multiple humans arguing are way more accurate.
I think this is only true if the commentors are SME's & operating in good faith. We've all seen whole threads hijacked by erroneous groupthink, while the 1 or 2 SME's were buried.
> The Oscars are not decided by critics. They're decided by peers.
That's the Oscar nomination process: it's by peers.
The entire Oscar Academy (ie all previous winners in good standing) get to vote on the winners in all categories.
Which is why many in the industry consider "it's more important to just get nominated", & also why the final winners are often a popularity context. Many of the ppl voting aren't skilled in the areas being voted for. E.g. there's 4x more actors voting for technical categories, etc.
> Neither side of the political aisle has a monopoly on lies and bad faith attacks, far from it. Some political movement are more guilty of it than others, but no political movement is fully innnocent, and no political movement can be defined uniquely in terms of these.
These statements are a combination of false equivalence and no true scottsman.
Nobody said 1 political party/etc is "fully innocent". What is useful & cogent is pointing out how much more 1 party is using gaslighting et al, systematically & unapologetically, than the other party.
And just how effective those tactics are, to the detriment of the social commons, and social contract.
> the hacker spirit was about working relentlessly towards a goal. PG would say the same. Whether that ultimate achievement benefits accrues financially just to you, or a larger corpo, is not that relevant
> - On top of that slack threads are lost forever in time unless pinned. The conversation rarely gets translated in to wiki or email or whatever so decisions are sometimes made and forgotten.
I've literally been requesting a "export to wiki" feature from Slack, since 2016. After tracking really useful #dev chats, & then watching them disappear in the ether of subsequent non sequiturs & horrible slack search, I can only conclude Slack isn't interested?
Add in the loss of content from deactivated users, & Slack becomes the place where useful convos go to die, surrounded by giphys & emoji
> I know how to fall (intellectually). How do I translate that into the real world?
As a martial arts instructor, here's my advice:
The first month or so of aikido classes is a great way to learn rolling. Start on your knees, on a padded floor, arc your arms/"hold a ball", & practice rolling diagonally (eg right shoulder to left hip, etc)
1. Keep arms in a curve: the arms pattern your fall, rather that 'push the ground'
2. Point your nose into your armpit. Don't let your head touch the ground
3. Protect your clavicles. Super easy to break, especially if you hit the ground with a stiff arm. Clavicles take MUCH longer the heal than wrists, & hurt worse too
4. DON'T learn rolling from gymnastics, if your goal is to survive crashes on concrete. Gymnasts practice on thick padded floors & don't mind that their head touches the floor. Bad idea when there's no padded floor.
Or notice how the core of his manifesto is ignored: that of all the police who horribly beat Rodney King & sent him to an early death, all were significantly rewarded in their careers and/or retirement. No lasting institutional changes were made.
And how can we just ignore the waste problem? [1]
In many cases, containment pools are full to the brim with spent rods [2], which is both environmentally hazardous, & a target for terrorists (dirty bombs)
> We stopped repairing stuff because stuff is cheap
However, OP's main example is the NYC metro system, which is decidedly not cheap. A similar problem occurred in SF: BART cars are being replaced with multi-$M cars full of electronics & are now having numerous breakdowns.
BART drivers used to reboot the old trains by flipping 4 sets of switches. Now the reset process has hundreds of steps, so most drivers just take the car offline & call for a mechanic. And there's far more failure modes to the new cars as well. Thus: the new cars are more expensive, more fragile, & harder to maintain. BART scored a perfect 'Reverse Better-Faster-Cheaper'.
How did this happen? Politics & payola. The new proposed cars were barely shown to the public, & only for UX/design feedback.
The tie-in's to capitalism that OP describes are apt too: very big companies tendered their bids for these new cars. Maintainability wasn't a key design feature. It's not just our economic system (capitalism) that isn't interested in maintainability- our political system isn't either. Decision makers who won't be in power to see the need for their shiny new acquisitions to be maintained, never seen to care that they will.
> You spend a long time arguing the opposite with your bicycle argument. The government never forced them to standardize and they did.
They really didn't though. From different axel widths forcing older ones obsolete (ie my 10yo $450 Chris King hub in perfect condition 135x10QR now has precisely zero frames it will fit), to actual wheel sizes themselves (26" wheel frame are nearly impossible to find, outside of Dirt Jumping), the bike industry is busily doing their own version of 'embrace & extend'.
There's even electronic shifting now, adding a teensy bit of advantage to rich roadies, while removing the ability to fix your own derailleur.
> I worked with a "brilliant" product manager whose idea was to onboard several of our enterprise customers right after our first major deliverable
FWIW, I recognize it's fun to target PMs for ignoring technical constraints & carrying water for marketing... but for many PMs (in USA at least), they roll up to Marketing dept, rather than Eng.
So while it can seem PMs are (willfully?) technically Invincibly ignorant by default, their bosses are worse.
The best way to 'manage' your PM is help them build the biz case for your position. Eg "reduce risk of $XX loss" from bugs, opty costs, network effects of customer losing faith in your product. Plus I've found the "walk before you can run" argument works: they want to expand customer excitement by showing bright/shiny/new things. Promise them an even faster cadence of new things, after they give you time to get the fundamentals deployed.
Beyond basic horse sense, technical credibility, customer outreach, market sense, & roadmap development by nurturing sheafs of competing priorities while constantly mindful of critical constraints...
...A PM has to make their management happy. Who increasingly isn't technical at all.
Show me a 'pointless, clueless, idiotic' user story or epic, & I'll show you the result of PM negotiations with stakeholder(s) who asked (demanded) something far worse.
EVERY non-technical %VP, C%% and VC I've met just Loves to say "it's just software; it can do anything"... & completely miss the bitter irony that statement should embody.