There is a bit too much emphasis on the relationship between the manager and individual subordinates as the only thing a manager does. It's certainly the relationship that programmers have with their manager, but it ignores the reason why managers exist at all. In the end, managers are part of the translation layer between the company's top-level goal of acquiring customers and improving profitability and code that gets written and deployed.
The day-to-day responsibilities of a manager vary by company, but in essence can be boiled down to: Take priorities that are handed down from above -> apply those priorities as efficiently as possible to the team -> assist in execution.
The manager might be part of the discussion of priorities and clarify them before relaying them to their team, they may actually have quite a bit of freedom of interpreting the priorities, or they may literally just be a task-assigner-and-enforcer. The manager might also have technical leadership authority, architecture responsibility, or anything else, but these are still all in service of coordinating a team to produce the best output possible.
How a manager relates to their subordinates is important, of course, and the best managers treat their subordinates as individuals that have different needs. There's a responsibility to give them room to grow, keep them happy, and keep them productive as part of the job, but that alone isn't the job.
I've seen it work in a few ways; these are not mutually exclusive:
* You have someone whose job or as part of their job is to it is to discover these kinds of internal organizational efficiencies and automate them. Something that organically comes up like this gets assigned to that person.
* Managers are not incentivized to stick to a rigid schedule or metrics based on an inflexible roadmap.
* Flexibility and autonomy is built into developers' schedules so they can work on things outside of just their rank-ordered task list.
These sound like good ideas. I guess I just don’t work in such companies and I think this is the norm unfortunately.
There are strict timelines that span months if not years, often optimised to a large extent. There is little room for spontaneity and organic projects to come up.
I've worked at companies where this sort of thing is encouraged, and others where I'd be afraid to even ask about the possibility of doing such a thing. Naturally it's a spectrum.
(Although, there is also the company that claims to encourage it, and then buries you in bureaucracy...)
RTS has always been my preferred competitive genre. Yes, basic build orders are pretty well mapped out. In Starcraft 2, for example, the first 1:30 or so for beginners, the first 3-4 minutes for intermediate players, and the first 8-9 minutes for pros have "standard" build orders.
But once you get past this, there's so many things to worry about - balancing tech versus units versus upgrades versus economy, micro, scouting, unit composition, harassing and defending harass... And then the meta layer, which is allocating your limited time and APM to those decisions and actions! Really challenging and rewarding to improve at, and the only "e-sport" I find interesting to watch.
This article, like Duke's book, has a solid premise, but fails to provide any actionable advice aside from a simple risk/reward framework. When I read the book, I was hoping there would be more information about how to properly handicap various situations, but there just wasn't.
Business and life decisions aren't as simple as calculating pot odds and outs. Anyone who has estimated a complex and unfamiliar programming task knows that the unknown-unknowns are the biggest part of any equation.
The largest fault in the practical (life) applications of probabilistic thinking is that estimating the odds in real-time is often impossible. Poker is a constrained environment where the odds are computable.
It's a useful framework for thinking in various situations, but it is almost never going to reduce to an equation that can tell you some objectively correct answer or decision.
If the main reason your effort estimations are off is that you don't allow for unknown unknowns, then that's easily fixable.
After all, although we don't know which the unknown unknowns are, the possibility of them is known. And they do, in my experience, tend to increase the required effort by, say, 1--30 × depending on task complexity and familiarity.
So even in the most complex and unfamiliar of tasks, you can adjust the upper end of your estimate by 30× and there you go! Unknown unknowns accounted for in your effort estimation.
(Simpler or more familiar tasks require smaller adjustments to their upper end. Knowing how much adjustment is appropriate is a matter of deliberate practise.)
There's a kind of vicious cycle here where people feel disconnected from their surroundings and communities, and attention-stealing apps make a business of providing a surrogate through parasocial relationships and infinite access to the spectacle and new ways to interact with it.
Parasocial relationships aren't real relationships, and the spectacle replaces doing anything directly, there is no fulfilment and the cycle continues. There's an epidemic of people who can't have hold a conversation or relate to anyone without mediating the conversation through a common topic that they've experienced on mass or social media. They're addicted to watching a simulation of having a life, and not actually living the one life they have.
This is the big one for me, even though I do 0 social broadcast apps (only 1:1 chats, news, reddit and hacker news). Huge improvement, yet still I use it in the same parasocial way, using your terms. It sucks!
I like the feature of being able to select what equipment you have available. Lots of us lost access to a gym with COVID and don't have the ability to put a power rack in our abode. A simple concept, but great execution!
PS: Do you know where I can download more RAM for my computer? It's been a bit laggy recently.
Many companies implemented work-from-home policies very quickly, almost all public events (sports, standardized tests) were canceled, schools and sports gyms closed, and some companies that didn't go to remote work had employees stagger commute times so trains would be less crowded. This all started, iirc, while the number of cases was still in the tens (not counting the cruise ship).
It is also more accepted to wear face masks, as many people have pollen allergies so it's quite normal, and there is less direct physical contact between people overall.
I remember reading that the number of flu cases was about half that of a normal flu season because of the precautions everyone was taking, which points to a high percentage of people doing their part to help prevent the spread.
This is the big difference: people doing their part to help instead of, say, panic-hoarding or obstreperously insisting on going on as if nothing were happening.
All the extraneous ads, tracking, etc in Windows 10 has made it so I have never bothered upgrading from 7.
It seems like it would be a huge pain to go through and disable or blocking everything, and even then how confident could I be that I didn't miss something?
Your great-grandparents were right, it's just hard to imagine listening to radio with family being "destructive", when today people have less friends than ever and are literally choosing Netflix, video games, and pornography over having a social life.
I think entertainment is a lesser issue to the real problem which is car centric urban design. We all live so far apart that it is very time consuming, expensive and tedious to meet other people. Rather than just stepping outside and walking/cycling to someone you have to own a car, spend 30 minutes driving and then 30 minutes back. Or you could just play a video game with them over the internet in the few minutes it takes to set up.
I would guess they've shut themselves in and away from the shame and rejection by society and have found the tiny inkling of happiness possible in that hole. And as society continues to rejects them further for being in a hole, the hole only gets deeper.
Understandable, since the minute they go outside, everything is stacked against them and even with help, they probably won't be able to compete on the same level as the normal people who didn't fall into the hole. I can't win outside, but I can be happy in my hole. Hole good, outside bad.
I'll admit I know very little of the culture in Japan so there are quite likely other factors. I am just talking from personal experience as a 2x year old in Australia. I would happily meet up with friends regularly but it never happens because they live too far away, most of us do not have cars and because most of us live with parents, meetups tend to be in the city where the only activity is drinking. Video games perhaps allow us to have fun when we might have otherwise forced ourselves to go out but I think the primary factor for me is how difficult it is.
Yes. And yes. I'll do anything to hang out with people, especially the ones I like.
You sound like you're making an excuse for a lack of friends by implying there is no one worth being friends with? Perhaps I've inferred too much, I sure hope so...
To be fair to the poster, virtually anyone you meet in real life will be far less interesting than chatting with someone in a specialized forum like hacker news.
Mass extraction and consumption of oil and coal will happen until these resources are too sparse to warrant building new plants or maintaining existing ones.
I don't really see any future where this doesn't happen. If you remove coal subsidies, or tax them, then some of the energy production currently handled by coal will change to oil, but once the oil becomes expensive enough to extract, coal mines will open back up again.
This just seems inevitable to me. Is there an angle I'm missing?
the cost of solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage continue to drop. They are already undercutting coal in about half of the world. They’ll depress the prices of fossil fuels until it’s no longer possible to turn a profit on them at all.
The day-to-day responsibilities of a manager vary by company, but in essence can be boiled down to: Take priorities that are handed down from above -> apply those priorities as efficiently as possible to the team -> assist in execution.
The manager might be part of the discussion of priorities and clarify them before relaying them to their team, they may actually have quite a bit of freedom of interpreting the priorities, or they may literally just be a task-assigner-and-enforcer. The manager might also have technical leadership authority, architecture responsibility, or anything else, but these are still all in service of coordinating a team to produce the best output possible.
How a manager relates to their subordinates is important, of course, and the best managers treat their subordinates as individuals that have different needs. There's a responsibility to give them room to grow, keep them happy, and keep them productive as part of the job, but that alone isn't the job.