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wting commented on If you're remote, ramble   stephango.com/ramblings... · Posted by u/lawgimenez
majke · 25 days ago
This is a great comment. Thanks.

In my case - indeed the name is a historical baggage, I'm not arguing for or against it.

Indeed we had regularly situations that we had to pull in experts from other rooms, to discuss specific topics (like TCP), so we should have forwarded the conversation at the start.

But I don't think this should be categorical. There is value in non-experts responding faster (the channel had good reach) by your non-expert colleagues than waiting longer for the experts on the other continent to wake up.

Maybe there should be an option to... move conversation threads across channels?

I think there is place for both - unstructured conversations, and structured ones. What I don't like about managerial approach, is that many managers want to shape, constrain, control communication. This is not how I work. I value personal connections, I value personal expertise and curiosity. I dislike non-human touch.

"You should ask in the channel XYZ" is a dry and discouraging answer.

"Hey, Mat worked on it a while ago, let's summon him here, but he's in east coast so he's not at work yet, give him 2h" is a way better one.

I know that concentrating knowledge / ownership at a person is not always good, but perhaps a better way to manage this is to... hire someone else who is competent or make other people more vocal.

And yes, I don't like managers trying to shape communication patterns.

wting · 25 days ago
> I know that concentrating knowledge / ownership at a person is not always good, but perhaps a better way to manage this is to... hire someone else who is competent or make other people more vocal.

> And yes, I don't like managers trying to shape communication patterns.

I'm a manager who shaped communication patterns (e.g. default conversations to a public channel) because we're solving different problems. By moving conversations to a public channel away from an individual, we're improving redundancy and reducing single points of failure. Our primary responsibility, which understandably garners discontent, is to prioritize the system over the needs of individuals, within reason.

There are many issues resulting from defaulting conversations in private channels or DMs that you've probably seen first-hand.

wting commented on Visa and Mastercard are getting overwhelmed by gamer fury over censorship   polygon.com/news/616835/v... · Posted by u/mrzool
wting · a month ago
Visa, Mastercard, payment processors, banks, etc act as accountability sinks[0] for governments and political group by design. They are arbiters for moving/blocking money, not taking principled stances; there is no net neutrality equivalent for financial networks.

There's a lot of wasted discussion talking about an intentional design decision because they're arguing from consumers' perspectives, ignoring the huge benefit to political organizations (e.g. freezing Russian assets).

0: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks

wting commented on EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google   reddit.com/r/degoogle/s/Y... · Posted by u/cft
snickerbockers · a month ago
The European union never ceases to amaze me. Whatever happened to becoming less dependent on American corporations?

They flip flop on this stuff at least once a month, and the most annoying part is that they always herald everything they do as some new epoch-defining initiative only to quietly forget about it and do the opposite a few months later.

If nation states are dogs, then EU is the chihuahua: loud, proud and extremely ineffective.

wting · a month ago
Because of goomba fallacy.

The EU is not a hegemonic state, but rather an economic supranational organization. France/Germany tend to be primary proponents of increased EU strategic autonomy, while Poland/Czech/Baltic states are less supportive.

Similar to recent discussions of self-hosting, it's a tradeoff of autonomy/control vs efficiency.

wting commented on Tell HN: uBlock Origin on Chrome is finally gone    · Posted by u/ipsum2
KevinMS · 2 months ago
HN was so hyped when chrome came out. Pushing it hard. A few people were saying, um guys, chrome is made by a company that sells ads, this is not going to work out well.
wting · 2 months ago
Chrome launched in an era where IE didn't stop the gazillion pop ups and crashed pretty often losing dozens of windows, before tabbed browsing and with no restore. Firefox was a resource hog due to memory fragmentation.

Google was also the company that espoused, "Do no evil" and contributed a bunch to open source. A lot has changed since then.

wting commented on Breaking down tasks   jacobian.org/2024/mar/11/... · Posted by u/Timothee
crucialfelix · a year ago
Dwight Eisenhower, who also created The Matrix.
wting · a year ago
For clarification, "The Matrix" refers to the urgency vs importance decision matrix and not the movie: https://asana.com/resources/eisenhower-matrix

It's a framework to prioritize important tasks instead of falling into the agency trap, akin to prioritizing meaningful strategic tasks such as product development and tech debt instead of fighting fires.

wting commented on Breaking down tasks   jacobian.org/2024/mar/11/... · Posted by u/Timothee
chrisweekly · a year ago
Tangent: I can't recall where I first heard "plans are worthless, but planning is essential", but there's definitely some truth in it.
wting · a year ago
Another perspective is that planning is a breadth-first traversal of the solution space, and coming up with a path to the solution. When reality hits and the path is often wrong, one can switch to other paths quickly since the graph was created ahead of time. It's writing the table of contents for a book before fleshing it out.

Without planning, a depth first traversal is a high risk endeavor in the likelihood that the that path is wrong but backtracking and creating the graph is comparatively expensive and susceptible to sunk cost fallacy. Depth-first traversal is writing the book a chapter at a time without a table of contents in mind.

wting commented on Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build   fishmanafnewsletter.com/p... · Posted by u/rubyissimo
ListeningPie · 2 years ago
How do you evaluate whether someone wants to do a project? If a boss asks, "Do you want to do this project", seems like another way to ask "Do you want to remain employed?"
wting · 2 years ago
After the roadmap is finalized, as the manager I ask every one on my team to stack rank at least N preferred projects from the roadmap. I map preferences to projects with some optimizations (e.g. career progression, avoiding knowledge silos), review it with everyone, and then commit for the roadmap.

If there's grunt work that no one wants to do, I distribute it fairly among the team. Fairly can be splitting it up evenly among the team (everyone refactors _n_ files) and sometimes it means we round-robin the responsibility (e.g. quarterly compliance reviews with auditors). Obviously this depends on the team size and role in the company, but I think it's only come up a few times over ~4 years.

wting commented on Google Search Is Dying (2022)   dkb.blog/p/google-search-... · Posted by u/punnerud
A_D_E_P_T · 2 years ago
Reddit is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet, and there's an entire ecology of PR/marketing firms that focus exclusively on it. There's also a thriving market in "high karma" accounts, which can be bought for as little as $30.

> Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses

It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.

Basically, Reddit's system is terrible.

wting · 2 years ago
> It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make.

User karma has no impact on the default sort ranking[0]. The source code is available here (as of ~2018): https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/l...

> And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.

User karma is impacted by mods' use of AutoMod on a per subreddit basis or fraudulent[1] accounts, but otherwise there is no site-wide application of user karma.

Source: I spent some time experimenting and implementing alternative rankings at Reddit.

0: Subreddit hot score, not applicable to logged in users' default feed.

1: Shadow banning (vs direct banning) fraudulent accounts makes it more difficult to reverse engineer signals used to identify malicious accounts.

wting commented on Thirteen Years of Go   go.dev/blog/13years... · Posted by u/ingve
playingalong · 3 years ago
Anyone else feeling put off by golang? The syntax, the crazy error handling, etc. To me it's like taking a step back in programming, or actually 20 years back. Not better than Java (which is annoyingly verbose), maybe better than Pascal.
wting · 3 years ago
Yes, but in the end it's because people who like Go because they prioritize a certain set of features (language, community, ecosystem, etc), and those who prefer non-Go languages prioritize other features.

I don't like Go personally, but I have advocated for Go to be used in many situations depending on context. It's unproductive to start a language war here since it's generally situation-dependent.

wting commented on Ask HN: What software do you miss that no longer runs on modern hardware?    · Posted by u/offsky
gregjor · 3 years ago
FTP itself mostly deprecated because not secure.

I spend most of my work time in a terminal shell connected to a Linux server, very similar to what I used 40 years ago.

wting · 3 years ago
Many (most?) banking systems run on SFTP today.

u/wting

KarmaCake day2935June 20, 2012
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