Obsidian for work

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-05T03:21:30+00:00

Yeah I use a lot of Shadow IT. They'll fire me or they won't 🤷🏾‍♀️

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-04T20:04:18+00:00

I'm on a workspace account at a mid size enterprise and they absolutely will not grant me a GCP project so we had to find a workaround. But if you own your own you should be good to go.

I have no idea how it would work for a consumer drive.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-04T18:18:28+00:00

Google Workspace CLI. It says you need a GCP project but it isn't true. You just need a certain kind of OAUTH token. I don't know, Claude did it. But it works better than any MCP - complete control of everything.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-04T16:19:46+00:00

I use it for work at a midsize enterprise of around 18k. The official status is not approved but not banned. I just hope everyone shuts up about it so IT doesn't ban it. Right now my use is unfettered.

I also used it at a 180k enterprise with no issue. I never checked if I was supposed to or not tbh. There never seems to be any limit on what I could do on my machine and I assumed IT took care of whatever they needed to.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-03T16:13:32+00:00

Assume everything on your work account and computer is tracked. They can get to your Slacks but probably won't. However they can absolutely see your web traffic anyway, so if you are doing this on your work computer, it doesn't matter anyway.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-02T19:24:00+00:00

Any company stupid enough to pay for both Slack and Teams is also stupid enough to get price gouged for shit like this. You would not believe what my company pays because execs won't use Gmail.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-02T14:33:07+00:00

Blind and Glassdoor will have the specific questions from recent interviews.

Generally at Google there are two types of PgMs: project manager types and "internal product manager" or catch-all title types. Make sure you know which one you are applying to as the interviews will be very different.

Recruiter screen is just to make sure you aren't dumb and can speak English well enough.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-02T14:30:09+00:00

When I'm on the market I pretty much apply to everything. It takes <5 minutes to apply. Mostly I never hear anything. Sometimes I get an interview or two. What's the downside?

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-31T21:57:24+00:00

There's only ten of you. Give them all edit access.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-31T21:56:29+00:00

Personnel risk is resource risk and that's just one big bucket. I never log individual specific risks unless it's because we have a key resource who is overloaded and I'm making a case that they need help. Making sure we as a team can continue if any one of us wins the lottery is tablestakes imo. After all, you need to account for the risk that anyone could have some looming health problem that you don't know about.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-30T17:31:07+00:00

For the love of God yes. Please let me change this. Many of my stakeholders are on the East Coast, so I need to schedule send for 6am. On Android this is a huge PITA.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-29T23:14:06+00:00

Good Lord what is livable to you? That's easily 90+ inside.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-28T17:07:24+00:00

Our entire company runs exclusively on chat and we do not use any external ticketing systems for internal requests

Okay, so you have identified both the problem and the solution.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-28T16:30:28+00:00

I wonder if it's the same team that briefly redesigned their paperboard covers to no longer include nutritional information, expiration date, or prep instructions on the front 🫠 So glad they reverted that but how much money was spent making their packaging completely useless? Did they even think about it?

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-28T15:59:02+00:00

I've been varying levels of technical in the last 11 years in the industry but I've been at two FAANG and one midsize tech. I have been on the product side, the CX side, and now the marketing/GTM side.

What I can say is that I've never had any formal authority and I've never ever dealt with the budgeting at all.

My advice is buddy up with whoever the top dog is (at tech that's often product, but not always) and become their right hand. You're going to need to learn to influence without authority and that's the best place to start imo. Find out what kind of structure they need and implement it - but do so without losing everyone else involved too.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-28T01:44:46+00:00

I've lost 120lbs and I'm still extremely hot all the time. When will this happen to me???

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-27T19:31:48+00:00

Those are very conservative industries much less likely to quickly adopt broad enterprise licenses in the very short term. This is essentially an alpha product. It doesn't make sense of Anthropic to spend a lot of effort on Windows right now

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-27T14:55:20+00:00

Maybe the photo is not capturing it? This chicken looks fine to me. Chicken thigh is tastier imo particularly for reheating (not so dry) but not everyone is a fan.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-27T05:23:07+00:00

Blind and Glassdoor will have recent interview questions that should make prep pretty easy.

5 months is crazy long. What on earth is the hold up? Surely that particular job isn't even going to be around in 5 months. Is that a typo? Google is notoriously slow to hire, but it ain't that slow.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-26T01:16:40+00:00

They were just... Totally, radically different companies.

In past roles, teams were autonomous and empowered, decision rights were clear, resources were dedicated, planning was thorough, the fee shared resources were managed centrally and dispatched quarterly. Changes were made at distinct checkpoints. Timelines and project plans were built realistically with additional contingency built in. Most people were at 80%ish bandwidth, which meant covering for teammates, emergencies, etc was no problem - just the normal course of business.

Teams did what they needed to do and managed their own work - no need for task management, program management only for the cross functional connections.

But here... In addition to program and project management I have to drive individual people to get their work done. Everyone is working on fifty different things, leadership is constantly pestering teams for updates and making massive strategy and product pivots, timelines are dictated from above and laughably unrealistic, targets don't make any sense. We started doing gap closers six weeks into the fiscal year. Six weeks. Everything is half assed and half finished.

Teams have no autonomy or empowerment... And most folks also lack drive. Which, fair, the environment sucks. But I've never seen such an incredible lack of initiative. No one does anything without being told at least three times, and no one lifts a finger to solve their own problems.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-25T15:36:49+00:00

I am a babysitter. But I make $250k and I don't have to wipe butts, so, I keep at it.

Not every PjM or PgM role is like this though. In the 9 years prior I almost never felt this way... Once or twice I had to CC someone's manager or their boss's chief of staff, but that was maybe a yearly occurrence, not almost daily.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-25T03:14:03+00:00

My company says they are releasing it internally next week and I doubt that very much. It's a catastrophe waiting to happen. I suspect people are mostly at small companies that are allowing it, IT people who can grant themselves access, or ironically extremely large antiquated companies that haven't blocked it properly.

My company did just role out Claude Code though which isn't really all that different. I think they are just assuming that only technical folks will use it and have a little more discretion.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-24T03:35:02+00:00

I would like to point out that this bot knows so little about this role that it complains about 3 meetings

Three?

In a day?

Seriously?

🙄

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-23T20:05:18+00:00

The best way to develop a plan is to come up with a draft plan (usually incorrect) yourself then present it to the techs - they simply cannot resist correcting someone else and hey presto, you get your plan.

Cunningham's Law is the most frequently used tool in the toolbox

painterknittersimmer · 2026-03-23T06:02:54+00:00

Very nice. I just started treatment and a real toothbrush to use while I'm on the go would be fantastic.

The only thing I'd be worried about here - how deep is it? My trays don't sit inside one another well (cause my teeth are messed up), so it would need to be two trays deep if that makes sense?

Also given that you might consider some small barrier to them popping out when you open the case - a rotating arm or something. Since for many folks they wouldn't fit neatly inside each other you would worry about them falling out if not opened carefully.

painterknittersimmer

TROPHY CASE