The Beauty of Earth From Orbit.

Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are already citing one another in a misinformation shitshow. This is fine. “If you ask Microsoft’s Bing chatbot if Google’s Bard chatbot has been shut down, it says yes, citing a news article that discusses a tweet in which a user asked Bard when it would be shut down and Bard said it already had, itself citing a comment from Hacker News in which someone joked about this happening, and someone else used ChatGPT to write fake news coverage about the event.”

One hundred drones now used across IKEA retail for stock inventory. “One hundred busy drones are now at work during non-operational hours to improve stock accuracy and secure availability of products for online or physical retailing. This solution supports a more ergonomic workplace for IKEA co-workers as they no longer need to manually confirm each pallet.”

Is Blockbuster video about to make a comeback? I didn’t realize how many chances Blockbuster had to not die. “In 1997, Warner Bros approached Blockbuster with an exclusive DVD rental deal that would have split revenue 60-40 in favour of the studio. Blockbuster rejected it, and the studio retaliated by dropping its DVD retail prices to undermine the rental industry. And then in 2000, Blockbuster made two even more fatal decisions. First, Blockbuster turned down the opportunity to purchase the then-fledgling Netflix. Second, it chose instead to partner with Enron. Within a year, Enron filed for bankruptcy. Within five years, Netflix was shipping out a million DVDs every day. Suddenly, Blockbuster was yesterday’s news.”

Is there a drop in software engineer job openings, globally? “The US, Canada and UK are currently seeing some of the lowest numbers of developer job listings since Feb 2020.”

Swimming outside the lanes. Tracy Durnell talks about leaving her day job and going out on her own. “People complain that no one wants to work anymore. And it’s true to an extent: no one wants to work in a job where they are underpaid, unfairly treated, unappreciated, and constrained. I like my work, but so far dislike jobs.”

Shiny Happy People, Being Chased By Monsters. Are we in the midst of a vibe shift back to the days of whimsy? “FreakyLinks may have been on my mind lately because I think we’re in another moment of cultural shift from seriousness to whimsy; if you don’t believe me, ask yourself why Everything Everywhere All At Once so thoroughly kicked the ass of that movie about the mean conductor lady at the Oscars. We’re at a similar moment to where we were in the early 2000s — where people are shrieking ‘I want to be happy!’ and ‘I’m tired of thinking! Give me some baggy orange leather pants instead!’”

Songs are what we carry, even when we have nothing else. On the B-Sides I talk about the latest U2 album a little bit. “It’s the sound of a band that has been together for close to 50 years starting to wind things down the only way they know how: they sing the songs they carry, even when they don’t have a whole lot left.”

David Poblador writes about The Pitfalls of Hyper-Growth: How Companies Can Do More with Less. Startups tend to operate more with a scarcity mindset at the onset, but as they grow…

As businesses grow, they often rely on flawed indicators of success that do not necessarily correlate with sustainability. One of the most common measures of success is headcount growth. Unfortunately, hiring lots of new employees can create inefficiencies, harm company culture, and reduce productivity. When hiring becomes the only tool to get the job done, it can detract from the most important things, like focusing on priorities and managing the company’s lifecycle.

David’s post led me to a fascinating interview with Jesper Kouthoofd, who is the founder of music-tech company Teenage Engineering. In the interview he talks about why they specifically avoid running after hyper-growth:

We only want to make great products and when you don’t focus only on making money and have reached a certain level, everything becomes about quality. Right now, there is a certain cultural fascination with fast growth, IPOs and so on, but I want to go slow, really slow and think long-term. It takes time to do good things. You see, this cultural phenomenon of speed and growth at all costs is displayed in every startup, they all look the same, it’s like fast food: it looks good, its taste is consistent but then you feel horrible afterwards.

This is obviously not desirable or true for all companies, but it’s worth noticing that there is more than one way to run a business.

This feed of imagined alternate universe tech products is mind-bendingly wonderful.

Employees Are Feeding Sensitive Business Data to ChatGPT. Feels like this should be a bigger story. “Employees are submitting sensitive business data and privacy-protected information to large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, raising concerns that AI services could be incorporating the data into their models, and that information could be retrieved at a later date if proper data security isn’t in place for the service.”

How companies can better understand neurodivergent employees. Good reminder: “If you use closed captioning, text messaging, or noise-canceling headphones, or have pushed a stroller or ridden a bike over the ramps at the end of sidewalks/curbs (see the curb cut effect), you’ve benefited from design that prioritized users who had these needs but are not the convenient ‘majority’ for whom many products are designed. Designing for difference enables innovation and productivity while setting up an enterprise to be future-fit and successful.”

I needed to hear this, so I’m sharing just in case you might need to hear it too: “When we have a lot on our plate, we tend to neglect the very things that equip us to handle having a lot on our plate. We leave aside exercise, which is important for physical and mental health. […] Leaving out our health to fend for last place in our list of priorities is bad enough. However, doing it when you most need your health to contend with a growing list of priorities is worse still.”

This latest Amazon forced “return to office” news is bleak. “The fact that Amazon’s S-Team did not blink, and refuses to soften the return to work policy signals that they either don’t expect much attrition, or have calculated with additional attrition. […] At the same time, looking at the market, it’s hard not to ask the question: if people want to leave, where will they leave to?”

Chat apps are no substitute for documentation. “Chat apps like Discord [and Slack] end up diluting the available knowledge because the content shared in them isn’t persistent, and the allure of an always-available answer breaks down when the person that could answer is no longer available.”

Modern Font Stacks. System font stack CSS organized by typeface classification for every modern OS. “No downloading, no layout shifts, no flashes — just instant renders.”

In The Name of The Father provides a fatherhood lens on the first season of The Last of Us that really resonated with me.

The new M83 album is out and it is, in my opinion, a return to form. On repeat over here.

Here’s an interesting take by Sheril Mathews on why people often don’t trust their managers, or find them inauthentic:

Managers don’t come across as authentic because more often than not they don’t have an intimate understanding of the day to day realities of how their teams actually get work done.

Sheril goes on to discuss some some great advice on how to show up for our teams in authentic ways (spoiler: it’s about getting our hands dirty in the trenches). But I also wanted to share this 1973 (!!!) quote from Henry Mintzberg in The Nature of Managerial Work, because it really stopped me in my tracks:

The prime occupational hazard of the manager is superficiality. Because of the open-ended nature of the job and because of the responsibility for information processing and strategy-making, the manager is induced to take on a heavy load of work, and to do much of it superficially.

Hence the job of managing does not develop reflective planners; rather it breeds adaptive information manipulators who prefer a stimulus-response milieu.

Sheril’s article—and that quote—is inspiring me to take a real hard look at my own work, and where there could be opportunities to weed out the “superficiality”.

This is a bit of an addendum that I think is valuable enough to add here. I shared the above Mintzberg quote among some friends and the discussion ended up being really interesting. Vince pointed out that as for the assertion that superficiality is an inevitable outcome of management, he prefers Russell Ackoff’s take from 6 years later. Here’s what he said in 1979:

Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consists of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. Problems are abstractions extracted from messes by analysis; they are to messes as atoms are to tables and charts … Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.

Pete (who I’ve been begging to start a blog, please go yell at him as well) also went the less cynical route with his comments:

As you move up the levels of a company, you move to higher levels of abstraction. Every level takes the output of the level below, and distills and summarises it, passing it up. It also takes direction from above and tries to nudge the processes below in that direction.

I think that’s the just way it is, the way it has to be. I can’t think of any examples where a different model has been applied successfully at scale.

The key to this working successfully though is to make sure that information is correctly analysed, distilled, summarised and communicated at every level.

The problem with superficiality is not abstraction. It’s dillution. If you throw away the good parts and keep the wrong parts when summarising, the system starts fraying. And you’re setting those above you up for making the wrong decisions, and thus setting up those below you for failure.

In the latest Platformer piece Meta doubles down on layoffs we see a perfect example of why stable software development teams are more effective than “agile teams” where people are seen as interchangeable cogs in a machine. When leaders think that people can be moved around between projects and “initiatives” at will and without knock-on effects, they run headlong into the basics of systems thinking, as shown here by Mark Zuckerberg’s realization:

In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower priority projects. It’s tempting to think that a project is net positive as long as it generates more value than its direct costs. But that project needs a leader, so maybe we take someone great from another team or maybe we take a great engineer and put them into a management role, which both diffuses talent and creates more management layers. […] Indirect costs compound and it’s easy to underestimate them.

As a side note, this is honestly a pretty frustrating thing to read. It seems like such a basic software development concept—was there no one in Mark’s orbit that could tell him about the indirect costs of building VR headsets? And now that epiphany is costing Meta another 10,000 jobs. Ugh.

From How to Be a PM That Engineers Don’t Hate:

You see it everywhere: Engineers complaining about the product managers that they work with. Hating on PMs is kind of like complaining about your utility provider or the TSA—so universal that it’s always good for a light chuckle in the right circles. The PMs don’t know how the technology works. All they do is send emails and take credit. They’re meeting generation machines.

When I interview engineers my first question is always, “Tell me about your experience working with PMs.” I do it to calibrate what kind of PMs they are used to working with, or to put it another way, how much I should apologize for our profession before we continue…

Anyway, the linked post is less about that, and more about some things PMs can do to work more collaboratively with other teams—not just engineering. Lots of good, practical tips and examples here.

Some fairly standard advice here from Peter Yang on How to Run Meetings That Don’t Suck, but this point in particular is so important:

Try not to cancel or move 1-on-1s. If you’re a manager, it’s easy to move or cancel your 1-on-1s for other “important” meetings. This is disrespectful to your direct reports. Even if you see them everyday, nothing beats a private half-hour conversation where they can be open about real issues.

How we show up in meetings as leaders is very telling about how we view our team’s time. The most important rule is this: do not be late. I know this is hard to do in our culture of back-to-back meetings, but nothing says “I don’t respect your time” like consistently showing up 5 minutes late to meetings with no explanation. Here’s a quick tip: if you need a minute to go to the bathroom and/or get some more tea or whatever, make sure you join the meeting first and tell the person/people that you just got out of another meeting and you will be right back. Oh, and do not forget to mute when you leave…

In This will only take a minute the Raw Signal team shares some much-needed advice for leaders who feel like they never have time to think and reflect. This state of constant hypervigilance is not a sustainable lifestyle because:

On one level, you’re a human being. Regardless of your title or role, you are worthy of work that doesn’t wreck your health, or your happiness, or your ability to enjoy lunch away from your webcam. On another, if you’re a manager, you’re responsible for the work of a team of other human beings. If you don’t have the time to be thoughtful about your own work, the odds are very high that your team doesn’t either.

They go on to share some ideas for how to make this time to step back a priority, once you are “past the point where working a little bit more is going to clear your plate”.

The African Bricks 3. Mosaic artworks inspired by the culture and beauty of Africa, by Charis Tsevis.

The Cello in Soho Square. I like this description by Michael Lopp of the difference between “dabblers” and “S-tier” people (who are the absolute best at something): “There is an infinite list of exciting things to learn, but the Dabbler knows they have finite time, so they dabble. They get 80% of the juice, and they move on. Respect. S-Tier knows the last 10% of the challenge is the hardest, but it also teaches you the most.”

Physicists Say Aliens May Be Using Black Holes as Quantum Computers. This is fine. “In a recent study, a German-Georgian team of researchers proposed that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) could use black holes as quantum computers. This makes sense from a computing standpoint and offers an explanation for the apparent lack of activity we see when we look at the cosmos.”

Honestly, it’s probably the phones. Don’t dismiss this argument just from the headline, like I almost did. There’s some solid evidence presented here. “If we’re looking for one big ‘silver bullet’ or ‘grand unified theory’ of modern teenage unhappiness, phones are probably the place to start looking.”

Papercraft Models by Rocky Bergen. “Construct the computer from your childhood or build an entire computer museum at home with these paper models, free to download and share. Print, Cut, Score, Fold and Glue.”

In an Uncertain Job Market, How Can Companies Retain Workers? The conventional wisdom that people tend to hunker down when there are layoffs around them might not be accurate: “Layoffs ‘create an environment where people worry it might happen to them next,’ said Laszlo Bock, who was Google’s SVP for people operations. Poorly handled reductions may ‘degrade trust in management as people start hearing rumors of further cuts, and that in turn raises anxiety, which causes more people to quit.’” (NYT gift article)

How the Phonograph Created the 3-Minute Pop Song. I can’t resist a good “technologies people thought would ruin everything” article, and this is another fascinating one: “Plenty of folks worried that records would destroy musical culture. John Philip figured it would demotivate anyone from learning to play an instrument themselves. Why bother, when you could just put on music by a true virtuoso? ‘When music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study,’ he fretted in a 1906 article, ‘it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely.’”

The Case for Hanging Out. I love this essay. “Pushed further into isolation by the pandemic, we’re all losing the ability to engage in what I view as the pinnacle of human interaction: sitting around with friends and talking shit.”

Explore. I think it’s probably too late for a viable LinkedIn alternative, but this site would be a great contendor.