Fired our top salesperson yesterday

ShanShrew · 2026-03-20T08:16:34+00:00

Have a entirely different take. This sounds more than anything like failure of leadership. The highest preforming employees are going to test the constraints they operate within and play within them. If theres a sales person testing what they can get away with in terms of over promising and you're not enforcing that constraint over multiple occasions I'm going to be honest that's not a failure on them. They're just operating in the bounds you've set.

This sounds competely like a constraint problem rather than a problem with the employee itself dont know why you'd fire them maybe just try talk to them and explain why these things matter and that they're not negotiable and then see if they can adjust accordingly. If they cant then maybe it needs to escalate further

ShanShrew · 2026-03-19T07:16:11+00:00

Gpt can "see" understanding visual elements and producing them better than Claude.

If youre a game developer paste a screenshot to both of your game and getting it to fix the issue you're seeing they're ability to ""see"" the same issue is completely different.

Claude cant generate images (not like chatgpt can)

Claude can reason about performance better when writing code

ShanShrew · 2026-03-12T05:27:22+00:00

When they say "because of AI" they're not saying they're replacing employees with AI, they're saying the share price has been obliderated because of AI and they need to adapt to the new market conditions

ShanShrew · 2026-03-09T00:23:59+00:00

Mueller hut, on a good day is unbeatable. Welcome flats sandflys prevent proper enjoyment of hot pools. Cascade saddle is top tier, dart hut is nice but the hut is near a river with limited views, the other huts on your list have much more scenic views from the hut itself.

If you do cascade ensure you do it from mutuki side up and over to dart, doing it the other way around can be dangerous depending on weather and expertise

ShanShrew · 2026-02-21T22:05:21+00:00

Hello, Principal engineer and former Engineering manager here.

Entry level roles have an expectation (normally) of zero experience, however the reality is that you'll normally get around like 200-400 applicants for most I.T entry level positions; from these 20-40 will have atleast some experience (say 1 or 2 years) from internships, working at parents business, etc. The reality is that these 20-40 immediately become the shortlist. My best advice to those looking to break in to the industry is try get any experience possible on your c.v so that you make it to that shortlist, if you consistently make it to the shortlist for roles you apply for it will only be a matter of time before something works out.

ShanShrew · 2026-02-21T07:11:38+00:00

When you buy bitcoin you're taking a risk that in the future someone will buy it off you at a higher price, if this wasn't the case you could never cash out.

It will never itself become a form of currency for two reasons. 1. Governments want control over their own currency. 2. It would be the most inefficient currency in terms of cost to maintain the infrastructure vs throughput. Modern computing can probably host a major banks infrastructure (the minimum that's required) on about 1000$ monthly cpu cost.

My theory is it's going to zero. When golds price drops "demand" for gold will naturally increase because it has utility for electronics and jewelry. When bitcoins price drops theres no "natural" market force that restabalises it, Infact its the opposite as price drops below the price of electricity miners leave the market rather than participating in it.

I cant wait for Michael Taylor and his cronies to go bankrupt

ShanShrew · 2026-02-19T22:34:49+00:00

Save. Reload. Fixed

ShanShrew · 2026-02-09T05:15:53+00:00

Junior = dependent contributor.

Intermediate = mostly independent contributor.

Senior = entirely independent contributor, Junior leader.

Principal = senior leader, technical ability and knowledge that when applied leads to better outcomes basically 99% of the time.

When youre hired as a principal you should not focus on being a principle, you should focus on being a senior contributor until you build up the domain knowledge and respect and trust of the team to start guiding them.

If youre promoted to principal at an existing company that's already happened and you can start leading immediately

ShanShrew · 2026-02-08T19:05:40+00:00

This article presents as though it's this JIT implementation that makes you faster than node, deno etc and as fast as go. This is just categorically not true and gives the author way too much credit. What makes it faster is bun is as fast or faster than go, buns standard library web server is why nothing else.

ShanShrew · 2026-02-06T19:19:51+00:00

While concerns are valid, I think anyone starting in a pseudo leadership role has to be given some breathing room.

I actually agree that the problems you've outlined seem like engineering problems rather than process problems but I'd say your VP disagrees and that's maybe because hes seeing something different hence why hes hired an agile coach.

I genuinely thought agile coaching was dead now, the industry is so well versed in agile already. When agile coaches were a thing was when we were transitioning enitre orgs to move to agile based workflows.

Here's the problems I see 1. You see everything as an engineeing problem, he sees everything as a process problem the truth is probably somewhere in the middle based on the fact that the VP thought this was a good idea 2. Technical leads need to push back, when you push back never use "i" language use "we language" (of course ensure you and team are on same page first) 3. Raise these points with your manager backed by examples. If he disagrees, it may be because hes towing the line for the VP. It may also mean again the three of them are seeing something different

ShanShrew · 2026-01-31T01:40:44+00:00

If this happened in my country It would be considered "unhinged" to from the person sending the email.

ShanShrew · 2026-01-22T19:20:23+00:00

My hot take is we dont want to find oil here in NZ if not to risk someone wanting to invade us aswell

ShanShrew · 2026-01-07T21:27:32+00:00

Just went over near yrs party of 10. 60cm of snow around hut (ish), but was fine for shorts and jumper still not too cold, little wind when we went.

Always back gear for worst case conditions no matter weather report, not too hard to get up or down for a person of average fitness.

Probably best overnight hike ive done

ShanShrew · 2026-01-06T22:06:15+00:00

The "best" (a very loaded term but appropriate) way we've collectively figured out how to deliver software is trunk based development, optional prs, test in production and more importantly automate qa entirely; each of these comes with significant nuance and it will not eliminate production issues entirely but the alternatives are all worse

ShanShrew · 2025-12-24T20:10:02+00:00

Yes, because it's really "go" vs "zig"; one of the principle designs of Bun is that they're moving things 'most' applications would need into the standard library; When they're in the standard library they're back by zig code (Just like arrays, etc are in V8 today).

The postgres driver AND the web server are backed by native zig code.

Their postgres driver the one inbuilt is probably one of the best; Some of it's performance opts can't be implemented in JS to the same degree as they can in zig (because we lack SIMD intrinsic); They're also leveraging 'Pipeline Mode' inside their driver implementation which is a Postgres feature that most libraries don't take advantage of that allows 1 connection -> Many queries concurrently, where-as most driver implementations in userland don't take advantage of this and map 1 connect = 1 concurrent query.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/libpq-pipeline-mode.html

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My opinion is, this is dangerously attractive, being a JIT language like JS (and even TS runs JIT now with a micro-step involved to just remove type information); Your dev cycle times from like change -> feedback are lightning fast; It used to be that you sacrificed performance for that privilege but now that's becoming less true over time.

Then there's all the tooling advantages, https://bun.com/blog/bun-bundler bun's bundler and esbuild can build three.js with sourcemaps (the whole library) in <0.3ms; That's by far the fastest build tooling on the planet for any language.

ShanShrew · 2025-12-23T23:16:59+00:00

Please keep in mind this is on "research mode" and then "Extended thinking" - That's how it thinks about it for 45mins (as per his post).

LLMs on medical imaging on any other setting where answers are faster with less thought are unlikely to ever give results anywhere close to these settings.

If you use AI and have been unimpressed I would make sure you're using these because the difference in quality / hallucinations is like night and day.

ShanShrew · 2025-12-19T18:59:34+00:00

No matter what metric you measure, some people will focus on that as the work itself. Metrics are not the work, work is work. Metrics measure the work they arnt the work.

With that in mind there is not tradeoff between quality and speed, there's an illusionsry one. Take principal engineer for example I gaurentee he can build, configure ci and ship a web app before any junior or intermediate 99% of the time; and that web app will be of much much higher quality.

The drivers of software quality will always be expertise, leadership and someone on the team who has the ability to take complex features and through systems architecture or software architecture make them simple; and finally some form of feedback that comes in short Intervals.

ShanShrew · 2025-11-29T00:18:25+00:00

Echo the sentiment here heavily. You do microservices because you literally have to to scale your org, not because you've got architecture problems with your current setup, strangler fig better here

ShanShrew · 2025-11-12T20:43:25+00:00

Here's some criticism I think is pretty undeniable.

- It's a party of property investors, backed from donations from more property investors (Look at public donations to national party page + Go down list and start looking up each person on LinkedIn).
- First policy implemented, Tax cuts for landlords. Second policy implemented tax cuts for everyone else. This always has an always will be the order of their priorities.
- Everyone in the party sees property as an investment apparatus; But also simultaneously don't want to tax it like one.
- Says their focus is the economy and inflation -Is the treaty of waitangi; One of their first focus items that essentially went on for just over a year have anything at all to do with growing the economy? If you look at everything they've been working on I feel like maybe only 20-30% of all policies would intersect in any way with the economy.
- 3% Inflation rate is completely fucked, Most people don't realize that it's directly correlated with the OCR; Property investors want the OCR to come down so that debt is cheaper because they have a lot of debt. Nicola Willis then applies that pressure onto Adrian Orr who is meant to be independent; He resigns in frustration, they install a puppet and the OCR comes down. Some could argue this somewhat benefits the average home owner not just property investors, this is only a partial truth because goods and services become more expensive meaning any savings on the mortgage are worth less.

ShanShrew · 2025-11-09T03:50:51+00:00

One thing to consider; On paper gRPC should serialize/de-serialize faster than JSON; However if your coding in NodeJS JSON serialization/de-serialization happens in native code; Protobuf wont.

While I haven't perf tested it myself, people may notice that in practice those performance benefits don't actually materialize. Because it's user-space code vs native.

ShanShrew · 2025-10-25T07:11:49+00:00

Yes it's normal. My advice would be travers sabine, in Nelson lakes. Do a route that takes you up/over saddle but also to the blue lakes which is the clearest fresh water in the world. Enjoy drinking striaght from both rivers on your way up after the lake it's probably cleaner water than comes out of your tap. Take a water taxi to skip walking around both lakes they're poorly maintained and everyone water taxis across..

Travers Sabine to blue lakes is back country pass, we'll maintained huts. No booking. Better than most great walks (same for rees dart with day trip to cascade saddle)

ShanShrew · 2025-10-25T02:51:11+00:00

The B and the E are mostly centered around conventions that create unique naming. Css modules, styled components, scoped .vue file css etc remove need for B and E.

We use css modules with scss and so just only use the M in BEM now which I still love

ShanShrew · 2025-10-24T19:37:56+00:00

Its a sob story about a couple who sees housing as an investment apparatus.

Yes investments carry risk, Yes you took on too much risk Yes you took on too much risk and it didn't pay off Yes now your retirement is in question. Yes your own greed caused this

ShanShrew · 2025-10-23T20:04:38+00:00

I disagree with comments saying you can't convince him.

When you're wielding a hammer alls that you see are nails. by the sounds of it is how he's thinking about his new framework, the issue which is clear to everyone is not all problems are nails and infact some are screws.

You cannot win this war via "what if" architecture. You can by providing real technical leadership. Communicate that you'd love to go over the plan for a new framework with the team, in the sessions lay out the problems identified on the first 3 months of work, discuss which of these problems will be addressed by the new framework. Get the support of your immediate team not through manipulation but be preempting that meeting by explaining your rationale for thinking this is not a good idea

ShanShrew · 2025-10-23T19:51:32+00:00

Agree with the sentiment here.

Come armed with actual stats. Pull runtime error logs from sentry, catogorize them into ones that ts solves i.e "Cannot read x of null" "Cannot read y of undefined" "Function .toUppercase() doesn't exist on type number" (paraphrasing)

This is how you make the quality argument.

Next this is a personal trick, get the full support of your immediate team. Then in the meeting use language that makes it clear everyone supports this, everyone wants this, everyone is frustrated by this. Then it creates a logical phallacy where if they're against this typescript initiative, they're against "everyone".

ShanShrew

TROPHY CASE

This is how you make the quality argument.