Hiring: Assessing Communication – Essays and stories

We’re hiring for the Data team at Bevy . One of our core values is “communicate like a legend,” and it’s about communicating with respect, candor, clarity, courage, and empathy. We are building for the long term at Bevy, so it’s also about communicating to our future selves and future colleagues.

Of all the attributes we are looking for in Bevy data team members, I’ve been thinking a lot about communication lately. I’m trying to learn a lot about a candidate during relatively few interactions, and the nature of our communication during the hiring process is different from how we’d communicate if the person is hired to the team. An interview is different from a team meeting because the objective is different and there is more at stake. A take-home challenge is different from a team project because there is less discussion and there is more at stake. And there is a lot more talking than writing during the hiring process, with about 6 hours of live interviews. So how do you “get signal” on communication?

9 Ways to “Rewild Your Attention”

How to inject more weirdness and randomness into the stuff you read and see

Clive Thompson

Oct 29·9 min read

“Forest ,” by Jennifer C.

Back in August, I wrote about the concept of “rewilding your attention ” — why it’s good to step away from the algorithmic feeds of big social media.

I’d originally encountered the idea via a tweet by Tom Critchlow , referencing a post by CJ Eller , riffing off an essay by Ali Montag . You can go read my original essay , but basically the concept was that the algorithms in big-tech feeds have two problems…

Stand-up Meetings Are Dead (and What To Do Instead) – Honeycomb

Stand-up meetings. Is anyone happy with them at this point? They were supposed to help teams work in a more agile manner but they were already controversial in the before times and moving to fully distributed teams hasn’t made things any better. The same old habits, the same tired questions. There must be something better, right?

We began meandering syncs to replace stand-ups as an experiment at Honeycomb, but loved the results so much that we have adopted it across the engineering org. We think you might love it, too! But before I share how that works, let’s first take a look at how we got here.

Why the Status Quo Is So Hard to Change in Engineering Teams

A BigCo Story

Welcome to BigCo Inc!

It’s your first day as a software engineer and you’re excited to start your first commit. As your new co-worker Bill shows you around the codebase, you can’t help but notice how often Bill answers notifications on his phone. “Do you want to continue later?”, you ask. “Nah it’s just that I’m on-call this week. Don’t worry I’m used to it – those are not that important”. You’re a little perplexed but, as the phone vibrations keep rattling your desk, you let Bill show you the innerworkings of BigCo’s codebase.

Cut Out Time Estimates on Roadmaps: Get Into a Product Delivery Rhythm

All of the business of software, but especially the delivery of product capabilities, is inextricably bound up in questions about time. What’s the estimate? If we have N people working on it, how long will it take? When will we ship?

Putting a finer point on it, if you’re building products iteratively, incorporating customer feedback from early prototypes, tacking and jibing your way toward the right solution, there’s no way you’ll be able to accurately estimate the work it will take to get there. Trying to do so is performative and it sets teams up for disappointment or even conflict when the date “slips.”

What is a decentralized autonomous organization, and how does a DAO work?

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is an entity with no central leadership. Decisions get made from the bottom-up, governed by a community organized around a specific set of rules enforced on a blockchain.

DAOs are internet-native organizations collectively owned and managed by their members. They have built-in treasuries that are only accessible with the approval of their members. Decisions are made via proposals the group votes on during a specified period.

Why Do Companies Have So Many Managers? – The Atlantic

Lars Tunbjörk / Agence VU / Redux

America has too many managers.

In a 2016 Harvard Business Review analysis , two writers calculated the annual cost of excess corporate bureaucracy as about $3 trillion, with an average of one manager per every 4.7 workers. Their story mentioned several case studies—a successful GE plant with 300 technicians and a single supervisor, a Swedish bank with 12,000 workers and three levels of hierarchy—that showed that reducing the number of managers usually led to more productivity and profit. And yet, at the time of the story, 17.6 percent of the U.S. workforce (and 30 percent of the workforce’s compensation) was made up of managers and administrators—an alarming statistic that shows how bloated America’s management ranks had become.

Spotify for readers: How tech is inventing better ways to read the internet

Protocol | Fintech

Profiting from a missed fintech opportunity: Renters

Esusu’s co-founders say renters deserve credit.

Esusu, co-founded by Samir Goel and Abbey Wemimo, makes it possible for landlords to report rental payments to credit bureaus, helping tenants boost their credit scores.

Photo: Esusu

November 1, 2021

Benjamin Pimentel

Benjamin Pimentel (

@benpimentel ) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at [email protected] or via Signal at (510)731-8429.

Process People

For many years I’ve subscribed to the idea that in a product organization, there are essentially two types of contributors: makers and managers .

Makers definitely include your designers and your engineers, and supporting roles like user research and data analysts. Makers design and build the products we love, so most people understand the critical contribution of makers.

Managers definitely include the managers of designers, engineers, and product managers. Managers are primarily responsible for the staffing and coaching of the makers, so most people understand their importance, especially if you’re a maker fortunate enough to work for a manager committed to helping you progress in your career.

Agents of Doom: Who is creating the apocalypse and why

There are a handful of actors who are the most likely to cause a global catastrophe, but their power goes unchecked, says Luke Kemp. I

In 1995, a doomsday cult in Japan killed 13 people and injured more than 6,000 others. They were the victims of a Sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway committed during rush hour by the apocalyptic terrorist group known as Aleph (at the time called Aum Shinrikyo). Afterwards, 13 of the perpetrators were tried and executed.

The Next Big Challenge for Data Is Organizational

In the past few years, much has been written about problems like discoverability, observability, data quality, and the need for data teams to become more “engineering oriented” in their mindset. Movements like analytics engineering and open source tooling like dbt, Dagster, and Great Expectations have done an amazing job arming data practitioners with the tools that they need to start adopting the best practices of software engineering like modularity, testing, and release management. This shift in mindset has resulted in very real and very exciting progress in data as a discipline over the past 3-5 years, and will likely be looked back upon similarly to how React changed the frontend (Laurie Voss does a good job articulating this ). It is clear that much has improved in data land, yet many of the core problems outlined at the start of this post remain quite painful. Why is this?

What Is Underneath Productivity?

[

Superorganizers](https://every.to/superorganizers )

🔒 October 22, 2021

♥ 55

I’ve been obsessing about productivity for a long time. I used to spend a lot of time thinking about tools for thought and second brains. But these days, I spend most of my time thinking about metacognitions , the stress response , and interpersonal relationships .

In other words, it looks like I’m going soft. Or, at the very least, my interests are changing. But I’d actually argue that my interests are the same—I’m just approaching the same problems from a new angle. And it’s leading me to be a lot more productive than I have been in the past.

Are Pull Requests Holding Back Your Team?

Pull requests are great for open source. But they can hinder the team performance

David Masters Follow

Apr 1 · 14 min read

Photo by David Ballew on Unsplash

Intro

The rise of Git, GitHub, and Pull Requests (PR) has resulted in some big changes to the practices and workflows within the software industry. In particular, they’ve revolutionised the world of open source, providing a robust…

Working Backwards

This is a summary of a great 🌳 tree book . Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon is the first book that explains how Amazon really works, written by two insiders who were there when the techniques were invented. This is not a comprehensive summary; tree books don’t lend themselves to easy summarisation. You should buy the book and read it — the stories that the authors tell about the origins of each technique are absolutely critical if you want to apply them; do not rely on this summary alone. Read more about book classifications here .

The Most Heated Tech Job Market in History: Advice for Software Engineers

The tech job market is on fire, across the globe, for people with a few years of industry experience under their belt. This is especially true for software engineers, but other tech functions are also following.

I talked with dozens of hiring managers – from engineering managers to CTOs and CEOs – and they all shared the same perspective. Here is a typical quote from an executive at a global tech company:

Being the DRI of Your Career

Credit: Pexels

At DuckDuckGo, there’s an expression: “You are the DRI of your career” (DRI: Directly Responsible Individual). I like this, both as an individual who has always felt like the DRI of my own career, and I like it as a manager because I think it makes the boundaries of what you can and can’t do for people clear.

What does it mean to be the DRI of your career? To me, 5 things:

To Tame Burnout, Microdose Nature

A neuroscientist is discovering that time in nature is one of the best ways to reduce stress and increase happiness and productivity. Here are the specific doses that work the magic.

Michael Easter

Jul 23·3 min read

Photo by Silvestri Matteo on Unsplash

In my new book The Comfort Crisis , which looks at the benefits of engaging with forms of mind-and-body-enhancing discomfort our ancestors faced every day, I spend a section unpacking all the benefits of the outdoors … of which, I found, there are a metric shit-ton.

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Metaverse

In science fiction, the end of the world is a tidy affair. Climate collapse or an alien invasion drives humanity to flee on cosmic arks , or live inside a simulation . Real-life apocalypse is more ambiguous. It happens slowly, and there’s no way of knowing when the Earth is really doomed. To depart our world, under these conditions, is the same as giving up on it.

Who Is the Bad Art Friend?

Credit…Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan

The Great Read

Art often draws inspiration from life — but what happens when it’s your life? Inside the curious case of Dawn Dorland v. Sonya Larson.

Credit…Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan

By

• Published Oct. 5, 2021Updated Oct. 11, 2021

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To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android .

The case for slacking off at work

The word agile is pretty frustrating. Not because it’s the wrong word, but because it’s been so badly coopted it longer means anything.

At the heart of it, Agile software development is simply the practice of executing work in small batches, measuring the impact quickly, and then starting a new batch with that new information. It is quite simply optimizing for learning.

The Great Resignation Is Accelerating

I first noticed that something weird was happening this past spring.

In April, the number of workers who quit their job in a single month broke an all-time U.S. record. Economists called it the “Great Resignation.” But America’s quittin’ spirit was just getting started. In July, even more people left their job. In August, quitters set yet another record. That Great Resignation? It just keeps getting greater.

Composability Is the Only Game in Town – Roam, Shipping Containers, Lego and Twitter.

Lego Blocks, Shipping Containers, Roam Research, Open Source, and any other unreasonably successful endeavor follows the fractal design of composability.

Epistemic confidence: 3/5. I intend to return to this post in the future.

Shipping containers

The current iteration of global capitalism is built on the backbone of a shipping container. Not the car nor the plane. As much as I do think the washing machine is transformative (and do check out this TED talk by Hans Rosling ), it didn’t have an impact as huge as the shipping container.

How to Safely Think in Systems

The second most impactful book I’ve read is George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant which lays out his theory of communication. Lakoff explores a fundamental organizational challenge: as you grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate when you’re not in the room where a discussion happens. I once worked with a staff engineer who described their most significant contribution as giving initiatives catchy names and slogans to propel ideas further than any supporting data might.

What Makes a Great Leader?

It’s very difficult question to answer. How do you judge a leader? Is it financial success? The loyalty they engender? Their ability to inspire? There are war-time leaders and peace-time leaders. Leaders may be understated or zealous. I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to say definitively what constitutes a great leader. Regardless, we all want to improve our ability to lead, whether it’s a small team or a Fortune 500. But how?

Why Limiting WIP, Starting Together, Being Less Busy, and Working Together Is SO HARD

(Twitter is great. This week I had some great back and forths with Jacob Singh about normalizing being idle. He cranked out a wonderful post that you should check out called The Case for Slacking Off at Work . I took a different approach.)

Ask an executive “do you think we should optimize for keeping people busy?”

Against Platform Determinism

There is no doubt that platform corporations are among the most significant economic, political, and cultural actors in contemporary life. Platforms are powerful because they position themselves both beneath and in-between users — that is, they are both the place in which and the means by which users interact online. This not only gives platform owners privileged access to data about users, but it also enables them to dictate the rules about how the many people who depend on platforms interact with one another. As a result, current discussions on platforms—both in popular media and in academia — tend to focus on how central platforms are to the textures of daily life, taking on an “infrastructural” quality as they synchronize and standardize actors across industries in ways that often pit collective values — such as democracy — against private gain . In our upcoming workshop Against Platform Determinism , we are inviting scholars, technologists, and activists to flip the script on platformization to ask how institutions, individuals, and infrastructures mediate and shape platform power.

Learn To Hire Well And You’ll Never Lose

Three Tips For Leaders Who Want To Up Their Recruiting Game

Hunter Walk

Just now·4 min read

Show me the first 20 employees of a startup and I’ll tell you whether it’s going to be successful or not. In my mind there’s no greater indicator of success than the quality and characteristics of the individuals you’re able to bring on board. Success is a signal of two meaningful truths: you have the talent you need to execute your roadmap and A+ people have decided that you are worth working for. When I encounter founders who know how to hire, or founders who are self-aware enough to know it’s an area they want to get better at, it’s a huge plus in our investment decision.

Tweet from Corey Quinn

And now, a thread of Ancient Sysadmin Wisdom: an incomplete list of things we have learned from decades of outages.

“It’s always DNS.” Yup. Everything relies upon DNS, those relationships are non-obvious, and some things like to cache well beyond your TTL.

“If an outage lasts more than ten minutes, it’s likely to last for hours.” Yup. Usually related to electric power, but this is a good rule of thumb for “do we activate our DR plan” decisions.

Metaverse! Metaverse? Metaverse!! — Benedict Evans

Over and over again, the tech industry asks ‘what’s the next cycle?’ Smartphones were the locomotive that drove the industry and all the innovation for 15 years, but now 4.5-5bn people have a smartphones and the market is mature, so what’s the next fundamental trend? Crypto people don’t ask – they know it’s crypto – but everyone else in tech thinks that crypto is almost certainly a thing but not necessarily the thing, and wonders what else might come together.

Eating the Cloud from Outside In

Cloudflare launched on September 27, 2010, and every year since, it has made it a point to celebrate “Birthday Week ” with a raft of launches. By far, the show-stopper this year was the announcement of R2 Storage , an S3-compatible Object Storage service that directly takes aim at AWS’ “Hotel California” business model . This has been extremely well received, going by the response on HN and Twitter . In its past 5 birthdays, Cloudflare has gone from world-class CDN to offering:

Reid Hoffman’s Two Rules for Strategy Decisions

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Reid Hoffman — the co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn and partner at the venture capital firm Greylock — is a preeminent Silicon Valley strategist. I recently ended my tour of duty as Reid’s chief of staff and wrote a long essay about that experience — “10,000 Hours with Reid Hoffman: Lessons Learned on Business and Life .” These are the two major strategic decision-making lessons that I learned from working so closely with him.

The Mysterious Case of the COVID-19 Lab-Leak Theory

Since the coronavirus first appeared, at the end of 2019, four and a half million people have died, countless more have suffered, whole economies have been upended, schools have been shuttered. Why? Did the virus jump from an animal to its first human host, its patient zero? Or, as some suspect, was the catastrophe the result of a laboratory accident in Wuhan, a city of eleven million people in central China?

Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?

Let’s say that you’ve devoted your entire adult life to developing a carbon-free way to power a household for a year on the fuel of a single glass of water, and that you’ve had moments, even years, when you were pretty sure you would succeed. Let’s say also that you’re not crazy. This is a reasonable description of many of the physicists working in the field of nuclear fusion. In order to reach this goal, they had to find a way to heat matter to temperatures hotter than the center of the sun, so hot that atoms essentially melt into a cloud of charged particles known as plasma; they did that. They had to conceive of and build containers that could hold those plasmas; they did that, too, by making “bottles” out of strong magnetic fields. When those magnetic bottles leaked—because, as one scientist explained, trying to contain plasma in a magnetic bottle is like trying to wrap a jelly in twine—they had to devise further ingenious solutions, and, again and again, they did. Over decades, in the pursuit of nuclear fusion, scientists and engineers built giant metal doughnuts and Gehryesque twisted coils, they “pinched” plasmas with lasers, and they constructed fusion devices in garages. For thirty-six years, they have been planning and building an experimental fusion device in Provence. And yet commercially viable nuclear-fusion energy has always remained just a bit farther on. As the White Queen, in “Through the Looking Glass ,” said to Alice, it is never jam today, it is always jam tomorrow.

The Curse of Xanadu

It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form.

It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. Instead, it sucked Nelson and his intrepid band of true believers into what became the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing – a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair. The amazing epic tragedy.

20 Years After the Anthrax Attacks, We’re Still Unprepared

The first fatal bioterror attack in the US killed five people and caused a national panic—and we’re still short of funding and tech to handle health emergencies.

It was still early when Larry Bush reached the gurney in the emergency room of JFK Medical Center in Atlantis, Florida, part of a strip of towns that stretches from Miami to West Palm Beach. Bush was the hospital’s chief of staff and an infectious diseases physician, on his way to a regular morning meeting, but some ER physicians had asked that he drop by. A 63-year-old man named Bob Stevens had been brought in about 2:30 am with a roaring fever. Now he was comatose and plugged into a ventilator, with his frightened wife by his side.

America Is Choking Under an ‘Everything Shortage’

Is it just me, or does it feel like America is running out of everything?

I visited CVS last week to pick up some at-home COVID-19 tests. They’d been sold out for a week, an employee told me. So I asked about paper towels. “We’re out of those too,” he said. “Try Walgreens.” I drove to a Walgreens that had paper towels. But when I asked a pharmacist to fill some very common prescriptions, he told me the store had run out. “Try the Target up the road,” he suggested. Target’s pharmacy had the meds, but its front area was alarmingly barren, like the canned-food section of a grocery store one hour before a hurricane makes landfall.

Engineering Teams Are Just Networks

Marianne Bellotti

Sep 30·7 min read

To be a great hiring manager don’t be distracted by rockstar engineers, study up on network theory.

As a manager I like to build teams out of spare parts. I hire candidates who are rejected from other pipelines, I pick up people with middling performance in other teams, sometimes I even hire people whose skills are weak or out of date. My proudest accomplishments all involve teams constructed in such a manner completely out performing best-of-the-best rockstar teams assembled elsewhere. I’ve often struggled to explain how I tell the difference between a diamond in the…

A P O P H E N I A

The easier it becomes to produce information, the harder that information becomes to consume — and the harder we have to work to separate the spurious from the significant.

Humans are meaning-making machines, seeking order in the chaos. Our pattern recognition capabilities are a key determinant in defining intelligence. But we now live in a dystopian digital landscape purpose-built to undermine these capabilities, training us to mistake planned patterns for convenient and even meaningful coincidences.

What I’ve Learned From the 16 Engineers Who Turned Down Job Offers at Our Startup

I’m the cofounder and CEO of Kapwing , a 30-person company based in San Francisco. In our three years of trying to recruit top engineering talent, we’ve made 36 job offers to engineering candidates, and 16 of them turned us down.

Like a sales or fundraising rejection, every startup founder and recruiter knows the disappointment of rejection from an engineer who you’ve pitched and gone through the interview process with. In this article, I’ll share my experience with closing engineering candidates, my own insight into how engineering candidates make decisions on job offers from startups, and advice for other entrepreneurs trying to grow their teams quickly.

Creatures of the dawn: How radioactivity unlocked deep time

When scientists discovered the energy embedded within atoms, it transformed how we think about the long-term future of humanity, writes the historian Thomas Moynihan. J

Just over 100 years ago, an ocean liner – twin to the Titanic – returned to Normandy from the US with a very special item. It was a summer’s day in 1921, and travelling on board was the scientist Marie Sklodowska-Curie, accompanied by her daughters, Irène and Ève. In their possession was a single gram (0.04oz) of radium, locked away in a lead box within the ship’s safe. In today’s money, it would be worth $1,500,000.

Why we need to be repressed

Is Going to the Office a Broken Way of Working?

Earlier this month, a technology entrepreneur named Chris Herd posted a thread on Twitter. “I spoke to 10 x Billion $ companies who canceled return to the office due to the delta variant,” he began. “A few predictions on what else is going to happen.” His first salvo was titled “Office Death,” and claimed that “by the time people can return to the office a lot of companies will no longer have space to return to.” His next prediction was about “City Flight.” He stated that workers would continue to flee cities and would quit if their employers forced them back into urban offices. The thread continued with sixteen more tweets.

This Is What Impactful Engineering Leadership Looks Like

Jessica McKellar is now the founder and CTO of Pilot **.

In 2012, Jessica McKellar and a group of friends from MIT started stealthy chat startup Zulip. Less than two years later, it was acquired by Dropbox . And this wasn’t an anomaly. They’d done it once before, selling Ksplice to Oracle just as fast. This wild ride has given McKellar a more diverse set of management opportunities than the average engineer ever sees — she’s been a team lead, a founder, a technical leader at a massive corporation, and today, is the manager of dozens at a rapidly growing global startup. (Oh, and on the side, she’s a major figure in the Python community .)

Speed! Nuance, and Learning.

Speed, Nuance and Learning | Flight Levels Academy

How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum

Project management is a topic most people have strong opinions on, and I’m no exception. To answer the question of how different companies run engineering projects, I pulled in help from across the industry. In this issue we’ll cover:

• Project management approaches across the industry. An overview of a survey with over 100 companies represented, plus key takeaways.
• Project management at Big Tech. How are these done? How does the organizational setup of Big Tech influence how projects are executed?
• The lack of Scrum at Big Tech. Why is the popular framework missing from most of Big Tech, and are there takeaways for companies operating outside this model?
• How should you run projects in your team? I’ll share my personal take.

Before we jump in, here’s a personal story about why it’s sometimes hard to put a finger on how important project management approaches are.

Inside the Trillion-Dollar E-Commerce Trend Boston Tech Is Building

Image: Shutterstock

There’s a trillion-dollar, modern-day gold rush taking shape. It’s not happening in the foothills and creeks of the American West, but rather the vast landscape of Amazon.com. And the much sought-after “gold” isn’t gold at all, but it is valuable: a successful Amazon third-party seller.

Acquiring Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) businesses has become an increasingly popular trend, with dozens of “roll-up” companies cropping up throughout the world. In a nutshell, they purchase third-party sellers for thousands and even millions of dollars, and then take over the ins and outs of the business. These private aggregators have scooped up hundreds of third-party sellers and attracted billions of dollars in venture funding over the last few years, and two of the top dogs are located right here in Boston: Perch and Thrasio .

Biological Deterrence for the Shadow War – War on the Rocks

The inadequate initial U.S. response to COVID-19, coupled with new advances in biotechnology, could make biological weapons more appealing for U.S. adversaries. The biological weapons capability achieved by the United States in the 1960s and by the Soviet Union in the 1980s suggests that it is very likely that near-peer adversaries have the capabilities to launch a biological attack with the same destructive capacity as a nuclear strike. However, in future decades, less lethal biological attacks may become more appealing. The risk is a new biological component to the low-boil actions by China and Russia that have been dubbed the “Shadow War .”

Students who grew up with search engines might change STEM education forever

Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files.

Jade Rubick – No-bullshit tenets for faster decision-making

Tenets are mental shortcuts that help an organization make decisions faster. They are a way to bias the decision-making of an organization in a particular direction.

An example tenet might be, “we build our software to scale by ten times our current baseline traffic”. This tenet helps reduce the number of decisions people have to make in the future, and aligns the organization around HOW we do things.

Coordination Models – Tools for Getting Groups to Work Well Together

As an organizational leader, you’ll be faced with many situations where the solution will be to improve the way people work together.

Today, I’ll list some coordination models you can use to address these situations. These models are very much like tools in a toolbox. You want to have a lot of familiarity with the tools you can use, and which tools make sense in what situation.

Jade Rubick – Implementing Amazon’s single threaded owner model a retrospective

I’d like to share the results of one of the most interesting management experiments I’ve been a part of. At a company I worked at recently, we implemented the Single Threaded Owner (STO) model from Amazon, where you have everyone on the team report to a single leader, including product, design, and engineering. You can think of the STO model as a more extreme form of cross-functional teams, where the team has everything it needs to deliver on its mission.

The Third Revolution in Warfare

On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, against the backdrop of the rushed U.S.-allied Afghanistan withdrawal, the grisly reality of armed combat and the challenge posed by asymmetric suicide terror attacks grow harder to ignore.

But weapons technology has changed substantially over the past two decades. And thinking ahead to the not-so-distant future, we must ask: What if these assailants were able to remove human suicide bombers or attackers from the equation altogether? As someone who has studied and worked in artificial intelligence for the better part of four decades, I worry about such a technology threat, born from artificial intelligence and robotics.

The Builder’s High

When I am in a foul mood, I have a surefire way to improve my outlook – I build something. A foul mood is a stubborn beast and it does not give ground easily. It is an effort to simply get past the foulness in order to start building, but once the building has begun, the foul beast loses ground.

I don’t know what cascading chemical awesomeness is going down in my brain when it detects and rewards me for the act of building, but I’m certain that the hormonal cocktail is the end result of millions of years of evolution. Part of the reason we’re at the top of the food chain is that we are chemically rewarded when we are industrious – it is evolutionarily advantageous to be productive.

Imaginable Tech vs Unimaginable Tech | by Nick Hilton | Aug, 2021 | OneZero

Voice commands wouldn’t shock someone from the 1960s — so what technologies are we failing to imagine in 2021?

Nick Hilton

Aug 31·5 min read

Pete Campbell, inventing Alexa

Earlier this week, I asked Alexa — the Amazon-designed voice-activated assistant, which is accessible via a worrying number of Echo devices in my house — to turn the radio on. I do this several times a day, but I’ve…

Revolt of the NYC Delivery Workers – The Verge

This article is a collaboration between New York Magazine and The Verge.
Lea el reportaje en español aquí.

The Willis Avenue Bridge, a 3,000-foot stretch of asphalt and beige-painted steel connecting Manhattan and the Bronx, is the perfect place for an ambush. The narrow bike path along its west side is poorly lit; darkened trash-strewn alcoves on either end are useful for lying in wait. All summer, food-delivery workers returning home after their shifts have been violently attacked there for their bikes: by gunmen pulling up on motorcycles, by knife-wielding thieves leaping from the recesses, by muggers blocking the path with Citi Bikes and brandishing broken bottles.

The Road to Self-Reproducing Machines

Illustration:

Tomasz Walenta

By

Frank Wilczek

Sept. 2, 2021 1:58 pm ET

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek explores the secrets of the cosmos. Read previous columns here ..

Throughout history, creative human engineers have taken inspiration from artifacts of the biological world. Leonardo da Vinci designed flying machines, submarines and tanks with birds, fish and tortoises in mind. Today, artificial neural nets, a computer architecture directly inspired by animal nervous systems, are the cutting edge of machine learning. But none of those applications get to the deep structure of biology—likely a beacon of future creativity.

A Second Major Seasonal Virus Won’t Leave Us Any Choice

This pandemic will eventually be over, and the Delta surge—in which most of those not yet vaccinated against the coronavirus could become infected—may well be America’s last destructive wave. But just because we’re eager to move past the virus doesn’t mean it’s finished with us.

In our large, open, and globally connected society, getting to zero COVID, the goal that Australia and New Zealand have pursued , is as politically unrealistic as it is biologically implausible. Americans are mostly done with the onerous shutdowns that such a goal would require. The virus has now spread so widely in the world that even tight, long-lasting limits on Americans’ movement—restrictions far beyond what we would tolerate—could not stamp it out entirely. Instead, SARS-CoV-2 will become an endemic virus, settling alongside the other four strains of coronaviruses that circulate widely among us.

TBM 16/52: Goal Clarity (and Embracing Different Perspectives)

Huge favor to ask. Have you learned a new analytics product in the last year or so? If so, and you have 5 minutes to spare, It would be a big help for my team.

Twelve people look at a proposed quarterly goal. They respond. Note the differences (you will inevitably encounter all of these in your career).

Person A looks at the goal and says “looks good to me!”