As a hiring manager that visited every resume Github link because of my FOSS background, >99% of them had nothing of substance (no activity, school projects, etc).
Eh, us-east-1 is the oldest AWS region and if you get some AWS old timers talking over some beers they'll point out the legacy SPOFs that still exist in us-east-1.
> 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.
A slightly different viewpoint is that sharing in public or larger private channels allows for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Sometimes the key person is wrong because they aren't the only one working on something. I know that ego might get in people's way sometimes but other people in the team and in the organization also have valid perspectives. As a manager, its important to try and get to a best solution and that means collaboration, not a specific person's approach all the time.
The redundancy also helps the key person be able to disconnect when on vacation. If you are the sole knowledge base for some critical part of the company, might as well drag the work laptop with you every where you go.
I like this post. It has the right balance between uncomfortable reality and some humour!
All middle managers (in my experience) talk a big game about reducing/preventing key person dependencies, but on 100% of my teams, there were always multiple key person dependencies. The real issue: If you are not the key person for anything, you are the easiest to layoff (fire).
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).
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.
> 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.
Well obviously, these states know how bad the Russians are since they were terrorised by them for decades. They'll be the first on the chopping block. And they know that Europe does not have much deterrent of its own right now so they're screwed without the US. Though this will come.
Sure, nobody is denying that. That does not contradict the argument (not mine) that perhaps people lived more secure lives under Soviet rule.
Note that I define "more secure" as in not living in fear of losing home and income. Not necessarily that their standard of living was as good as those in the West.
It depends: if you are part of the party and things are going good then yes. However, if you are from a group of people that you government has decided is trouble, then you tend to disappear in the night. Like my mother in law who says things where so safe when there was police on every corner in Spain during the dictatorship but my father in law was hiding "reds" under the floorboards as they where Jewish and being procecuted. One does not take away from the other, instead of criminals threatening you it's the government goons.
> if you are from a group of people that you government has decided is trouble, then you tend to disappear in the night.
So this really is a case of survivorship bias. Those that survived the Soviet times, remember it, not fondly, but as a more secure time. Those that didn't survive, we don't hear their accounts very much.
> my father in law was hiding "reds" under the floorboards as they where Jewish and being procecuted.
> Germany tend to be primary proponents of increased EU strategic autonomy
Germany isn't doing this as much anymore, because Germany Inc has become increasingly dependent on their investments within the US [0], especially after the triple whammy of the Biden-era IRA [1], the sanctions on Russia sparking a domestic energy crisis [2], and Chinese players outcompeting German industry in China [3].
This can be seen with Germany purchasing American weapons for Ukraine over French objections [4]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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