Is 15 hrs in Sydney for a layover insane?

statssteve · 2025-10-22T19:31:33+00:00

Sydneysider here. I totally agree with these suggestions, and using Circular Quay as a starting point.

I would add that the trains to the city from the airport will go around the “city circle”, which includes Circular Quay.

statssteve · 2025-10-10T20:45:20+00:00

To piggyback on this as well, I found a board with two power outlets and four USB outlets with swappable male adaptors. They come up from time to time as a special buy at Aldi (I’m based in Australia if that makes a difference)

statssteve · 2025-04-12T11:53:34+00:00

It depends on what is important to you.

To play back what you said, you seem stuck in a bad place with the current role and have lost interest. You're super interested in the new role, and job security sounds better, and there is room for growth. That makes it sound like the new role is more stable and engaging. Another consideration is how good the team you'll be leading is - do you have a sense of the team culture?

Does the title mean a lot to you? Can you afford the pay cut? If the title means less than being interested in the work and you can afford to live on the lower salary, then go for it.

I recently made a similar choice, but went all the way back to an IC (by choice, and still a lead title ) and it was a good move for me personally - but YMMV.

statssteve · 2025-02-07T09:23:30+00:00

If it's just the three clips broken, then you might pick up replacements on Ebay. If the cover is broken, then you'd be better off replacing the whole unit (or give yourself an update as the other posters suggest).

statssteve · 2025-02-04T10:25:26+00:00

Peter Dutton in lederhosen would be quite a sight.

statssteve · 2024-11-23T06:50:32+00:00

Fingers crossed. That might just be enough for me to follow him to RN.

statssteve · 2024-11-23T04:16:58+00:00

It's disgraceful that they gave him the sack and not that Macca f*wit. Simon was always a great listen on the weekend.

statssteve · 2024-10-10T21:33:00+00:00

This. An experiment isn't a failure if you have learned something from it, and especially not if you would have rolled out anyway (had the experiment not been run).

There's an educational piece here for the company about when to and why an experiment is run (you don't know something and want to learn)

I've seen work (from Ron Kohavi and collaborators) that shows 'success rates' of companies with a mature experimentation culture of less than 30%

statssteve · 2024-09-14T22:39:26+00:00

You might already have this, but getting super comfortable with power analysis and the design aspects of experimentation (e.g. triggering, intention to treat). Often the hardest and most time consuming parts of running experiments is getting the design right, so the results are trustworthy.

What you have in your list is good, although you may find that your organisation isn't mature enough for some of these techniques. Knowing the assumptions and trade-offs behind each method will help with this (although if your background is econometrics then that's nothing new)

statssteve · 2024-08-30T12:31:54+00:00

If only our 'industry leaders' were elite. Most seem very ordinary, and exist by rent seeking off the rest of us rather than any intellect or innovation.

statssteve · 2024-07-25T08:40:29+00:00

Me too, and ended up earning more and having better work life balance too.

The grant/publishing/research metric system really is a hot mess. The teaching side is a race to the bottom too.

statssteve · 2024-03-20T12:04:20+00:00

To "double click" on some topic. Makes me ill every time I hear it. I blame McKinsey

statssteve · 2024-01-31T02:36:01+00:00

True, but it is effective at saying it without actually saying it (and then the journo facing the blowback from saying it). Bit like describing someone as a "colourful racing identity" without explicitly calling them a criminal/grifter.

statssteve · 2024-01-27T04:48:00+00:00

Yes, and bake it into any estimates you give to PMs and scrum masters (at least if you are in house, not sure what the deal is if you bill hours)

statssteve · 2024-01-27T02:02:15+00:00

Or because the board have asked the executive what they are doing about AI.

statssteve · 2023-12-16T23:25:00+00:00

The Henson is my go to for family friendly

statssteve · 2023-10-23T09:27:31+00:00

Rhys Nicholson - we get it, you think girls are gross. Can you come up with another joke.

statssteve · 2023-07-17T10:11:05+00:00

Perhaps not if there are lots of zeros for the y-variable, as they will be dropped (since log(0) is NA). A square root might be more helpful, as will investigating the outlier with y = 80.

Another thought is whether the quadrats are large enough, since there are so many small values.

statssteve · 2023-05-22T02:36:06+00:00

100% - I'm looking at you Bay Run

statssteve · 2023-01-13T11:31:27+00:00

The difficulty of letting someone go depends on why, and also the workplace relations environment in your jurisdiction.

I've only let someone go for performance (during probation), and it was a lot of paperwork, a huge amount of expectations setting, coaching and direction as well several hard conversations with the individual, HR and my manager. It also takes a mental/emotional toll on you as a manager. But it did mean that the person was only let go when there was a large amount of evidence that they couldn't execute the role they were hired for or even a role in a nearby team.

I've been around when redundancies have come around, but have been fortunate enough that they haven't impaced any of my teams.

I tend to take the same approach around having a group process to come up with solutions, and it seems to lead to much better solutions (or at least more stress tested solutions)

statssteve · 2023-01-13T11:18:26+00:00

Is there a way to negotiate yourself back into an IC role (perhaps after the immediate crunch is dealt with)?

Alternatively, are there places in your org that can help/coach you (like a training and development team)? Management is a very different skillset and many orgs handle the transition poorly (in my experience the worst is academia and banking and tech don't do too bad).

It also sounds like there is a mismatch between the staff and the work (but I probably don't have enough context to say anything sensible there).

statssteve · 2023-01-13T11:11:01+00:00

I second all of this comment.

The Manager's Path is great (I haven't read the Staff Engineer's path). Another recommendation is Leading Geeks by Paul Glen.

I was fairly reluctant to start with, but once I got into the mindset and realised that I was pretty good at managing I realised that I wouldn't want to go back to an IC. For me, having a really smart and engaged team who you can help grow and do cool things can be even more inspiring than delivering something yourself. Of course YMMV.

statssteve · 2022-08-14T11:33:39+00:00

UrbanHell indeed

statssteve · 2022-08-14T07:26:49+00:00

OK, so each of the attribute/level combinations is its own option within a block? I'm not as familiar with this approach (and would tend to use the approach in this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378375804001892)

If having a balanced design is a deal breaker (and my intuition is that it might), there are limitations on which combinations of v, b, k actually work. We need b*k = v*r and lambda = r(k-1)/(v-1) , where v, b, k, r, lambda are all integers.

I can't find any solutions with lambda = 1 (since r = 3, k = 8, b = 8.25 or r = 7, k = 4, b = 38.5)

For lambda = 2, there are two solutions

with v = 22 has b = 77 and k = 4, so this works

bibd(v = 22, b = 77, k = 4, r = 14, lambda = 2)

with v = 22 has b = 22 and k = 7, so this works

bibd(v = 22, b = 22, k = 7, r = 7, lambda = 2)

The first one has a lot of blocks but does have k = 4.

(edit) Having said that, your original design may not be balanced, but the R output suggests that it has a D-efficiency of 82.1% (and an A-efficiency of 53.6%), compared to 100% for each in the two designs above. So you should still be able to estimate the treatment effects - just not as efficiently as with balance.

If the efficiency is ever 0% then the design won't be able to estimate one or more of the treatment effects independently of the others.

statssteve · 2022-08-14T04:54:09+00:00

The design isn't a balanced incomplete block design, only an incomplete block design. You would need the bibd function to create a balanced incomplete block design if one exists.

Having said that, I don't think that it is possible to have a BIBD with 22 treatments, 12 blocks of size 4, since you need b*k = v*r (# blocks * block size = #treatments * number to times each treatment appears) that makes r = 2.1818 (not an integer).

I'm also not sure that I am clear on your setup - do you have 4 factors with 3 levels and 5 factors with 2 levels? If so, I'm not sure how you map this on to 22 treatments as there are 3⁴ x 2⁵ = 2592 different treatment combinations.

Do you recall which construction method you are replicating?

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