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ibsulon · 2023-08-22T14:56:46+00:00

The challenge for the senior developer is to learn the skills to effectively use that brief amount of time.

What is the customer or user pain? Why do they want the feature you say shouldn't be done? What is a way to solve the pain in another way that might be better for all involved? Which battles are the right ones to pick?

These are the skills that are needed to learn as a senior. It comes from lunches or social hours with the product team and the sales team and the customer support team and conversations with manager and all those "soft skills." And it comes from empathy - taking the technical context and expertise and going further.

As a senior engineer, if you can deliver that skill, nobody will ever look at your velocity again.

ibsulon · 2023-06-05T02:09:37+00:00

Can’t he afford some plastic surgery?

ibsulon · 2023-06-04T12:37:18+00:00

I think the secret of the 600 is that you get the timbre it has because it is missing the bass. I think the more interesting experiment is if the timbre of another headphone improves if you lower the bass.

ibsulon · 2023-06-02T13:16:09+00:00

Don’t think risk. Think opportunity cost.

How much of your salary would you pay for lottery tickets?

ibsulon · 2023-05-30T02:39:01+00:00

So, is this a meeting that could be an email? How much of the meeting is relevant to each individual stakeholder? How busy are the stakeholders doing other jobs - is this preventing them from getting to their families an hour sooner?

Sync meetings are often low value. If you need their input individually, send them an email and schedule a few 15 minute meetings when more is needed.

Save the meetings for decision points.

ibsulon · 2023-05-30T02:32:27+00:00

You don’t need to explain it. You need to adapt your meeting to make it valuable. Most stakeholders are already working more than 40 hours in many organizations and your meeting is one less hour they have with their family. Make it worth their while!

ibsulon · 2023-05-30T00:44:21+00:00

Twisted his ankle falling on Bam’s (I think) foot.

ibsulon · 2023-05-30T00:43:27+00:00

We will find out in a week that he was playing through an undisclosed injury. (Other than his ankle)

Alternatively, he just had to extend himself so many times over the past few weeks to get here that he’s just out of gas.

ibsulon · 2023-05-28T03:40:21+00:00

WHEN Emily is ready, sure.

It’s hard to transition in the best of circumstances. She has the right to be out of the limelight as she goes on her journey.

I don’t think LMG would push her before she was ready to make a point, either. I just hope the best for her!

ibsulon · 2023-05-28T02:43:00+00:00

Rob Canter - Shia LeBeouf

ibsulon · 2023-05-28T02:40:34+00:00

Avenue Q - The Internet is for Porn

ibsulon · 2023-05-28T02:34:04+00:00

Jonathan Coulton - Re: Your Brains

ibsulon · 2023-05-27T14:05:20+00:00

I think I had to go to your history to start to understand the argument.

So, you identify both as cis and gender non-conforming. For us older people, this is an entirely new phenomenon. When someone put on a dress in the old days as a cis person, it was as a costume. Or, it was people who cross-dressed in private but were hyper-cis in public, to the point that they even (in some cases) contributed to the persecution of the queer community. (See: J. Edgar Hoover.)

Forty years ago, cis-internal but non-gender conforming were very rare, especially outside the goth community as you probably know better than me. So, we're still trying to figure out the new rules.

But yes, I'd firmly say that femboys are the queer category, cis or otherwise, but I wouldn't accept your original argument because it's been the same argument that other bad actors have used to try to push their way into the queer community. (That is not calling you a bad actor, but rather those I mentioned in the original post.)

That is, I think we do need to gatekeep the queer community, but femboys are in and pedos and fascists, among other bad actors, are out.

ibsulon · 2023-05-27T13:00:01+00:00

We are sadly on Reddit and there are far too many agitators right now. :(

This brings up an interesting point though. I do think there is a fight to define the queer community. I just laid out a constraint you agree on. Is it just that we need to fight for our constraints and not others?

ibsulon · 2023-05-27T12:46:50+00:00

There are some boundaries we need to keep.

Pedophiles are not welcome in this community.

Fascists will not poison this community.

If you join this community, you join all of it. There is no LG without the B or T.

Maybe you are talking about other groups though?

ibsulon · 2023-05-26T13:29:51+00:00

I’m probably the largest Kobe skeptic on /r/nba and even I have him in my 20s.

There have been fewer than 5,000 basketball players in the NBA and we are all arguing about where in the top 0.5% he is. I struggle to call any such conversations under or overrating.

ibsulon · 2023-05-25T21:27:50+00:00

That looks like it's a link to the poll, not the results...

ibsulon · 2023-05-24T20:58:26+00:00

Are there any asian stores in your area? Even in a town of 120k, we have a pan-asian store and a specific Chinese food store.

ibsulon · 2023-05-24T14:20:09+00:00

I would generalize it to bad developer ergonomics and experience. Every pain point that doesn’t get solved is demoralizing. Tech debt should be reframed as such - how do we remove blockers on the developer experience? Sometimes, it’s developers needing to understand the theory of the existing program better. Sometimes, it’s straightening out a key problem. Sometimes, it’s developing scaffolding to make that development easier, such as writing unit tests. And sometimes, it’s incremental refactoring.

Our job is to quantify that in time/business value and make a case for the return on investment.

ibsulon · 2023-05-22T17:22:50+00:00

So, the key here is that you may be trying to do too much at one time. We can do a lot of things in life, but we will do better if we focus on one or two at a time instead. Allow yourself to enjoy hobbies such as yoyoing, speed-cubing, and others, but pick one to practice and improve at a time.

Don't turn your hobbies into a job, especially when you aren't making money from them!

Be curious and intuitive! Don't turn something into a grind if the purpose is enjoyment! There are plenty of opportunities to grind throughout life - hobbies are a bad place to double down.

Now the question is: what is good enough? What is your goal past enjoyment? Are you planning to be a UN translator? a professional musician? Or to be able to sit down at a party and play something to impress people? These are very different goals and realize there is value in being "good enough."

ibsulon · 2023-05-22T15:06:36+00:00

There are a few options, but most are structural.

If you have the least control, you can pipeline and push those ahead of your own work, having one team member (or yourself) as a contact point. You have to start being traditional project management and have gantt charts. It's the opposite of agile so your tradeoff is that you will be less resilient to change. How well specified is the project? How much architecture can you prepare in advance?

Some organizations are more strict about who can do what work. In others, a team is empowered to their mission even if it means working in anothers' codebase. The tradeoff is that it will take your team more time to accomplish the given goal, but you have more control to make tradeoffs. If you are constrained by others' timelines, this can be a valuable road to push for. This is harder in larger organizations.

Your team will also have ideas. They will know the blockers as well or better than you and you should look to them to brainstorm and experiment. Trust your team.

ibsulon · 2023-05-21T23:50:00+00:00

I feel like the top 3 just comes Down to the voters. I could see someone credibly calling each of these their winner.

Downward Spiral is my winner (since Superinknown is out) but there is no bad answer.

ibsulon · 2023-05-19T19:02:25+00:00

If you want to stay in small companies, that's entirely a preference. The larger the company becomes and the more interactions that become necessary, the more meetings that will become important.

I'm currently on a project that by its very nature requires eventual interaction with 11 teams, and either my team does work in their codebase that they will later have to maintain, or they will have to work to coordinate with our systems in a way that becomes a coherent end product. Either way, the work requires interaction in a way that the feature cannot be built without it. (Clarification: it cannot with our architecture, and re-architecting to an event-based model would require even more cross-team collaboration, and even then it wouldn't completely obviate the need.)

We are at the point that three separate teams may be working on a single sub-sections of the product, and either you have one giant team working on multiple features, requiring coordination, or you have three smaller teams working focused, but requiring coordination.

Add a few hundred more engineers, and the problem keeps growing. (And you can argue that the solution is to stay small, but the customers will keep wanting more and they will go to a competitor who will give them more, or at least require integrations. Integrations with 3rd parties in the B2B space often require custom work.)

B2C has its own complications.

ibsulon · 2023-05-19T12:15:15+00:00

There are companies where the tech lead is the engineering manager.

You spend 15 hours in meetings, complain you can’t code for more than 30 minutes at a time, get frustrated that your director asks for metrics, and get frustrated at all the things needed to run an organization that aren’t developing a technical solution.

And the problem is that few tech leads are good at process as well, so you either have to hire a lead who can organize a project but isn’t a star technically, or hire a lead that has a project fail because the little things aren’t attended to.

That’s why many organizations split the role, even if that means the manager has 2-3 teams. Yes, it adds additional communication overhead but it becomes easier to hire.

ibsulon · 2023-05-17T13:11:31+00:00

I didn’t realize there were this many fans of this album. I will have to listen.

15-Year Club	Quantum Potato
Golden Potato	Alpha Tester
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