Since this is at the top of Hacker News: this article is not good advice generally. Here's what I do (and mentor people to do the same):
1. Don't start with the argument, start with the data. Debates/arguments/discussions etc. are what to do about the underlying data, but I've found very often the disagreement stems from people having different bits of data. Before you get into how to marshall an argument, you have to start with collecting what ground truth is. Many people don't practice this intentionally, so they get into a debate over some decision the team is making without having all the facts.
2. Form opinions easily, be ready to discard them quickly. I am quite happy to share my understanding of some technical matter, and I almost always provide that understanding with an invitation for people to tell me why I'm wrong.
3. Over the short term, yes, it's hard to change people's minds. Over the long term, you don't have to change people's minds, you can change the people you work with. You can vote with your feet or (if you're more senior) you can influence how your organization hires and promotes people. I actively seek out working with people who disagree with me in interesting ways. Not pedantically, and not over minutiae, but in ways that change how I see a problem. It turns out, when you seek out people who are good at productively disagreeing, you don't run into some of the problems OP writes about as often.
4. One of the ways to help sift out who the people are you want to work with is by offering feedback. Most people are terrible at giving feedback, so it's important to first get good at giving feedback. The author says that people don't learn from feedback, people learn from consequences. One of the effective ways of delivering feedback is to structure it as "Here was the situation, here are facts about what happened, here is the outcome." However, once you get decent at giving feedback, some of the benefit of giving the feedback is in the signal of how the person responds. The people I want to work with generally take this feedback well, and in turn offer me similar feedback.
5. Debate what matters. A lot of technical debates engineers engage in are either not important to the end product are easy to change later. Don't waste your time on those.
Mostly agree with this article. When I mentor people about managing, some other bits I also usually mention:
1. 'You’re not “part of the team” anymore.' - You're not part of the software dev team, but if you're doing things right, you're part of a team, just a new one. I encourage manager mentees of mine to read a book "Five Dysfunctions of a Team" which talks about figuring out who your "first team" is. Even in environments where you manage an autonomous team, you likely are working alongside other teams towards some bigger goal. Some of the things that worked being part of a software development team continue to work in the new setting, but you also need a new set of tools.
2. It's a two-way door. I've bounced back and forth between IC and manager roles. Some of it is just how the job market is (you look for a job, there aren't manager jobs, you go back to being an IC). Sometimes, people do it intentionally because they like being an IC. It's ok to try out being a manager, and realizing you don't like it.
A lot of what's here isn't specific to managing, and if you advance in your career as an IC, you'll experience similar.
I was in middle school at the time, learning programming. I think by that time, we had home Internet, but it was really slow, and so a lot of my learning about programming was either from the help files that came with the IDE (at the time for me learning Java, that meant Microsoft Visual J++) from books I convinced my dad to get me from Barnes and Noble as a reward for doing the "important" summer reading. I had a couple Java books before, but they were more focused on the mechanics of the language. Your book was the first that talked about how to put together a system.
As a specific example, I had never been exposed to much in the way of networking concepts before. Black Art has a chapter in adding networking functionality to a game which was my introduction to networking concepts and how to build networking software. Until much later when I learned about higher-level frameworks, I used the design patterns for network programming in several projects in school over the next several years.
Not a question, just thought I'd throw out that I worked through Black Art of Java Game Programming when I was learning Java in 1997 or so. I still have my copy because I don't like getting rid of books. I found it really helpful for learning patterns for building medium sized software projects. I hadn't realized that you wrote that until years later when you mentioned something about it in The Startup Way.
Not OP, but within Amazon we have pretty good connectors around integrating with our task system (so you can pretty easily ask your GenAI tool "look up the next item in our sprint board, let me know if you have any clarifying questions, but otherwise start implementing it"). We have decent integration with internal wiki and search systems, so it's easier now to figure out the best Amazon way to do some coding task. And Amazon being a big doc-writing company, there are lots of great tools for helping improve all phases of writing.
I work at Amazon (standard disclaimer: just sharing my own experience, not an official spokesperson, etc.)
I can't say that this isn't happening, but at least the parts of the company I get visibility into, what the article describes isn't my experience. There is a lot of interest in using GenAI, but people are mostly getting kudos around creative uses for GenAI, not just for raw amount of tokens. For most scaled GenAI efforts, there is a lot of focus on output metrics (metrics like accuracy, number of findings, number of things fixed, and so on).
The intentions of a government aren't enough. You need feedback systems. China doesn't have effective feedback systems, because the CCP actively destroys them. No one is "turning towards China" - they have negative net migration since 1968 (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.NETM?locations=C...).
I am glad most places are getting rid of non-competes. But here is the best argument I've heard for them:
For many companies, a lot of their value is in their intellectual property. Non-competes exist not because the company will enforce it against employees (they might, but they usually don't), but more as a fig-leaf to potential investors down the line asking about the value of the intellectual property. The argument goes, if someone could easily leave the company with the knowledge earned and go to a competitor, then the investment wouldn't be as valuable.
Not sure if this is meant sarcastically or not, but it is - it helps reduce transaction costs of changing employers. Anyone who has ever signed a contract with wide non-competes knows that it is hard for an individual to negotiate against it on an individual basis, but they are rarely enforced in practice, which leaves open individuals to worries about "maybe I'm one of the unlucky few?" These clauses then primarily only increased transaction costs, so eliminating them aids free exchange.
The examples in the first paragraph, while not grammatically passive, are functionally passive. They would be stronger in most cases if the author wrote them with the actor as the subject. For example, yes "the bus blew up" is active, but does not answer who acted on the bus.
Being so pedantic, and then saying "but I'm not going to use the technical term voice" is particularly off-putting. If this is an article about grammatical pedentry, let's go all the way. Otherwise, the author should focus on providing useful advice.
This isn't really just a big company problem, lots of start-ups fail too. It plays out a bit differently at big companies, as those failures tend to be more public but also done in a way that lets the company shuffle people around to the next project. There were lots of start-up companies that tried to build social networks or ERP systems or map applications that most people don't hear about.
With other engineers I mentor, I often give similar advice: break the promotion into two steps. The one everyone talks about is when the email goes out. The one that probably matters more is when your manager says: "I'm going to start treating you like <target promotion role>." A lot less attention goes into that step, particularly at bigger companies that have more formal promotion processes.
> The strength of conviction people have about this policy–almost either way, but certainly among those against–seems to scale with distance from the city.
Writing this from mid-town Manhattan. There are a lot of strong feelings about congestion pricing. It was a common topic in the local media. The stronger voices tend to be those who drive and are affected by it. For Manhattan that is a relatively low percent of the population.
There are some people who are pro-congestion pricing, but as often has with these things the benefits are distributed whereas the costs are concentrated, leading to certain behavior.
The Last Viking - a biography of explorer Roald Amundsen
The Wager- a book about a ship by the same name which wrecked in the Drake Passage.
Eccentric Orbits - about the Iridium constellation.
The Great Bridge by David McCullough - goes into a pretty good amount of detail in the engineering and sub-problems of construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
No, everyone experiences this. This isn't a non-technical vs. technical thing either: I've certainly talked to non-tech people who left meetings unsure what the point of it was or what was even being discussed.
There are several reasons why this happens.
The first reason might sound cynical. There are people out there that do things that don't really need to happen, or need to happen but you shouldn't really need to worry about.
Sometimes this stuff matters, but it matters to the business but not to the tech team, or the way it affects those of us in more technical roles is maybe not apparent unless you've seen that sort of thing before. To take the example you provided: to "allow customers to collect and return online orders from our regional stores" probably requires changes to several different systems, some of which your team might be responsible for, but some of which might be a different technical team, or might require putting manual processes in place. Return handling by itself opens all sorts of process questions, and some of those processes will be automated in code.
Sometimes this stuff matters, but it's explained poorly. [Robert Smith] should be able to articulate the "So what?" in his [quarterly review]. If not, hopefully he gets appropriate feedback to make it more clear next time. In this case, it's not you, it's the person communicating who failed to communicate, but often everyone is too afraid to look like a dummy to ask the obvious question to explain what's going on.
Some specific tactics you can use:
1. Ask why should I (or if you'd rather, my team) care about [transformation strategy] or omnichannel strategy or whatever other thing gets raised. No one person can know everything, and your boss should be able to tell you what part you care about and why.
2. Rather than worry about [transformation strategy], worry about the metric that project is trying to drive. Tech and non-tech people alike use "SMART" (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, time-bound) goals for projects. If the organizational stuff disinterests you, look instead at the metrics.
3. Hopefully you have permission from your boss to not attend meetings that aren't pertinent to you. If you did (1) from above, and your boss's response is, "oh, don't worry about that," then you should feel like you can ask your boss "Next time we have a meeting on that topic, can I decline and focus on my own project instead?"
I read the story differently. It seems like WGU splits two problems (teaching material and verifying that the students learned material) into two different problems. It's not that the author crammed weeks of learning into hours, it's that the author _already knew all the same material from years of experience with it_, and just needed someone to help him verify "Yes, this person understands this material." I would love to see more universities who are happy to verify people's learning, instead of pretending there's only one way to learn the material.
The objection you raise seems more relevant to bootcamps, which claim to teach one how to program in a matter of weeks. After a few weeks, students might be able to get by, but they aren't going to be on par with people who have been working through some of this stuff for several years.
As many others have said, books are the best things I've spent money on, but let me say more:
Do books sometimes say things that are obvious? Yes. For example, when I first read Martin Fowler's book Refactoring, I had been renaming variables and moving methods from one class to another for years. But he gave a new framework for thinking about something that obvious. I've found the idea of separating out my coding flow between adding functionality and improving code really helpful.
Can you get the material for free? Almost always, yes. But it takes time to find the right material, and our time is valuable. A typical industry book is $40-$50, and a typical text book is $100-$150. The authors of these books have spent time organizing the material in a helpful way that you would otherwise need to spend.
For some topics though, it's not just a matter of time savings. I'm working on a topic now that doesn't really have many useful books, so I'm having to read technical specifications produced by industry groups, which lack context and are pretty opaque. I'm missing having a book that explains these ideas in a coherent fashion.
I have tried a few MOOCs for professional development. I've found they can be helpful for a superficial understanding, but they don't encourage the deep understanding I get from reading through a book.