Eli Stark-Elster has a piece that reframes the “kids and screens” debate in a way I haven’t seen before. The usual narrative blames addictive tech design, but he offers an alternative:

Why do our children spend more time in Fortnite than forests? Usually, we blame the change on tech companies. They make their platforms as addicting as possible, and the youth simply can’t resist — once a toddler locks eyes with an iPad, game over.

I want to suggest an alternative: digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us.

The argument is that kids have always needed spaces away from adult supervision. We’ve just paved over the forests and creeks where they used to find it.

What makes this more than speculation is the research he cites: 72% of 8 to 12-year-olds say they’d rather spend time together in person, without screens. 61% wish they had more time to play with friends without adults around. The kids don’t actually want to be on screens all day. They’re looking for something we’ve taken away.

It seems like what they want is to wander together in a forest. But they can’t. So they boot up Fortnite or TikTok instead.

I’m still sitting with this one. It doesn’t let tech companies off the hook, but it does suggest that “just take away the iPad” isn’t addressing the real problem.

I like this alternative to the “Disagree and Commit” saying:

“Disagree and let’s see” allows you to stay aligned with the team without forcing you to pretend you had conviction you didn’t have. It lets you walk into a room with your team and be honest:

“Here’s the path that was chosen. It wasn’t my first pick, but here’s the experiment we’re running, and here’s what we’re trying to learn.”

That’s a much more authentic stance for most leaders than repeating something with a tight smile and hoping no one notices your doubt.

Source: “Disagree and Let’s See” →

Lorin Hochstein is a big name in the LFI (Learning From Incidents) space. He often writes about post-incident reviews, and he has a very interesting write-up of the Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 blog post. I especially loved this part:

Companies generally err on the side of saying less rather than more. After all, if you provide more detail, you open yourself up to criticism that the failure was due to poor engineering. The fewer details you provide, the fewer things people can call you out on. It’s not hard to find people online criticizing Cloudflare online using the details they provided as the basis for their criticism.

I think it would advance our industry if people held the opposite view: the more details that are provided an incident writeup, the higher esteem we should hold that organization. I respect Cloudflare is an engineering organization a lot more precisely because they are willing to provide these sorts of details. I don’t want to hear what Cloudflare should have done from people who weren’t there, I want to hear us hold other companies up to Cloudflare’s standard for describing the details of a failure mode and the inherently confusing nature of incident response.

Source: Brief thoughts on the recent Cloudflare outage →

This is an essay I think everyone should read, front to back. It’s about all the things we are living through right now, but it’s especially about work (and AI):

I’m not sure hiring can ever be much more efficient, because neither side has reason to show themselves as they really are, warts and all. Idealistically, both would come straight; pragmatically, it is a game of chicken. Candidates polish résumés and present curated versions of their abilities, listing outcomes and impact statistics with dubious accuracy and provenance. Companies do the same, putting culture and mission front and center while hiding systematic dysfunctions and looming existential risks. When neither side is forthcoming, you’re left with proxies: a famous logo on a resume, a polished culture deck.

Source: Selling Lemons →

Wild story:

Multiple people we spoke to for this story lamented feeling “ganged up on” as a partner used chatbot outputs against them during arguments or moments of marital crisis. One of these sources, a man who’s now in the process of selling his home as he and his spouse barrel toward divorce, recounted feeling voiceless as his partner turned to ChatGPT to pathologize their relationship. “I was really hurt by the way [ChatGPT] was being used against me,” said the man, speaking through tears. “I felt like it was being leveraged… like, ‘I didn’t feel great about whatever happened, and so I went to ChatGPT, and ChatGPT said that you’re not a supportive partner, and this is what a supporting partner would do.’”

I think we have to realize that non-tech people don’t have a good understanding of the sycophantic nature of LLM bots, so we’ll see more and more examples like this.

Source: ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as It Goads Spouses Into Divorce →

This resonates so hard. The tech industry’s obsession with LARPing roles in the public sphere has really hurt our ability to work with people who care and want to do the best work of their lives without distractions.

I think it’s unlikely the industry will get much better at identifying and evaluating candidates anytime soon. And so I’m sure we’ll continue to see posts about the importance of your LinkedIn profile, or your GitHub, or your passion project. But you neglect at your peril the engineers who are working nine-to-five days at boring companies.

Source: The illegible nature of software development talent →

Well, today I learned about the consequences of population decline:

The U.S. cannot grow through native-born fertility alone. As immigration collapses, the US population will stagnate and even shrink. Urban economics will buckle. Fields will go unharvested. Homes will go unbuilt. Sick Americans will go untreated. Life-saving medicines will go undiscovered. Many voters hated the era of record immigration. They might hate the era of record deportations even more.

Yes I know this sounds dire. But read the whole essay, Derek brings receipts.

Source: The US Population Could Shrink in 2025, For the First Time Ever →

Here’s some research about professional success that I wasn’t aware of before, but this totally tracks with what I’ve observed in my career:

In fact, studies consistently find that traits such as conscientiousness (the quality of being dependable and disciplined), emotional stability or agreeableness have a stronger link with professional success, relationship durability and longevity than the links between those outcomes and someone’s intelligence or socio-economic background.

Now here’s the problem…

All this makes it disconcerting that levels of conscientiousness in the population appear to be in decline. Extending a pioneering 2022 US study which identified early signs of a drop during the pandemic, I found a sustained erosion of conscientiousness, with the fall especially pronounced among young adults.

Digging deeper into the data, which comes from the Understanding America Study, we can see that people in their twenties and thirties in particular report feeling increasingly easily distracted and careless, less tenacious and less likely to make and deliver on commitments.

Source: The troubling decline in conscientiousness →

Yep this tracks.

Researchers at Gartner have observed that high-performing employees react to a return-to-office mandate as a trust issue, resulting in a 16% lower intent to stay. “High-performing employees are more easily able to pursue opportunities at organizations that offer hybrid or fully remote policies,” said Caitlin Duffy, a director in the Gartner HR Practice. “Losing high performers to attrition costs organizations in terms of productivity, difficulty in backfilling the role, and the overall loss of high-quality talent available to fill critical positions.”

Source: The hidden cost of RTO: Why forcing choice is detrimental to your business →