As the company grows a certain proportion of new engineers - by law of averages - will be self motivated to seek out and understand how things work, what makes the company tick and how people go about getting things done. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to acquire this knowledge - for they will be standard bearers in carrying the culture forward to the next generation. Record videos and documetns from greybeards and leaders on war stories, architecture, general rules for making decisions and really any other topic that is germane to how culture is defined.
Circumscribed of course as my opinion only, and what I've seen in my career.
The example argument is very weak, the fictional organization has a goal of "increasing revenues and profitability", isn't that a tautology? I mean are there any firms where that would not be the goal. Any reasonably competent leadership will go atleast a few levels deeper and have goals that have demonstrable product outcomes, which translate to increased profit or sales. At least that has been my experience. I'd like to understand if there are any orgs out there with such simplistic goals as stated in the article.
> I don't know of anyone who likes high pressure time crunch interrogations except maybe the ones getting to do the interrogating part.
As someone who has been through this early career I agree with the sentiment. But being mid-career it is kind of fun to go through one now, the catch being that you shouldn't give a sh/*t if you get through or not. Think of it more as two-way courting instead of a one-way interview, not all of them pan out.
Logically, shouldn't the compensation for a worker be a function of both leverage and risk?
CEOs have enormous leverage to affect change in their company, with proportionate increase in company returns. An average worker or even an excellent one has fewer opportunities, and even then influence is usually limited to a single team or product.
An example of leverage would be, investing $x million in product line x instead of y. While anyone theoretically can make this decision, the larger $x is the more you want someone owning this who has made these type of decisions before. Which requires someone who has progressively taken more risks in their career and made the right calls.
We had a term where I used to work - Promotion Oriented Architecture. In most places progress in the engineering org chart is heavily influenced by delivering software for complex usecases. Unfortunately IME most developers correlate complexity in the problem domain to complexity in the solution domain. This becomes a very strong driver for adopting novel solutions, even when a simpler one would have sufficed.
A second factor is the difficulty in measuring success. Once a solution is adopted it is very hard to demonstrate the opportunity cost incurred by not selecting a simpler solution. And the costs themselves may not be evident until long after delivery. And since measurement is hard, the lack of data also makes it difficult to articulate effective counter arguments to gratuitous complexity
Why the purple? Dont know if its just me, but found the styling to be a distraction. The content is good enough to stand by itself without the font and color gimmickry.
This may seem somewhat out there, very uninformed or misanthropic, but I've been thinking about basic human needs(emotion,ego,the desire for companionship - both spiritual and otherwise) as vestigial evolutionary artifacts. Evolution and the survival of the human race required collaboration, those who did not died and failed to pass on their genes.
In the modern age though, I could argue that close collaboration is not a necessity for survival or even success, and as such why cant a portion of humanity thrive without the need for extensive social contact?
+1 I agree with waiting. In fact I'm personally coming around to the point of view that 90% of verbal technical discussions miss a key point which becomes very evident on reflection and/or are an inefficient use of time(N developers * x minutes and so on). You can be much more effective by writing a doc about the subject, reviewing it over email/Slack with an in-person discussion if required.
- check CO2 levels in your bedroom
- allergens(dust,pollen, etc) in your sleeping environment can cause breathing problems.
- Acid reflux can also cause sleep issues. I've had good results raising the head of the bed by 6 inches to reduce this.
- For daytime energy I've had very good results with supplemental potassium(500mg x 3). High daytime energy means more activity, which makes you tired, which makes falling asleep as night easier.
Its unreasonable to say that individual exceptionalism is all that matters for success. There needs to be a way for hard work yo matter as well. Perhaps have both union and non-union shops and let employees vote with their feet.
I'd agree on exercise being ineffective, or only marginally effective as a way to control weight long term. However there are surprisingly effective strategies to lose a lot a weight in a short time period(days-weeks) with low-intensity steady state.
My team opted for postgres over a graph db in one of our projects to model a network of devices. Primarily due to the pgRouting extension, which implements many graph algorithms in postgres.
Do you extend that opinion to both unit and integration tests? I agree with you that unit tests at the application level have low ROI, but I've found integration tests to be invaluable for applications/services, especially when performing large scale refactoring. Where I work currently there is a fairly large service, full of unit tests, but which the team is wary of changing because it lacks integration tests.
Circumscribed of course as my opinion only, and what I've seen in my career.