> It even seems true of roles like product manager.
Yes, but there are valid reasons for this. Speaking as someone who is currently in Product, let me point out that a lot of larger efforts in large organizations are inherently risky. This is probably measurable, but generally nobody invests in doing so, rather than that we model it with approximations. When an executive decides on a strategy which has a large effort as a downstream outcome, there is some risk possible that it becomes impossible, or that it is possible but at 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x the cost/time which erodes its value. Success doesn't look like hitting an arbitrary timeline or budget, success looks like getting to an outcome that aligns with the objectives/goals of the strategy, in a timeline that doesn't torpedo the strategy, and in a way which results in an economic ROI.
I am generally considered pretty good in my current organization. I have been lauded often. I don't think any of the major initiatives I've worked on have been "on time", but in almost every case it was due to cross-organizational dependencies dragging things out, which is an inherent risk accounted for when doing anything large in a large organization. But every single one of those initiatives has resulted in a positive ROI in a manner timely enough to support the strategy.
From the perspective of the organization, that's a win. And a win is rewarded.
I imagine similar things can be seen at executive levels. Nobody is asking detailed execution questions about your strategy to determine if its a win or a loss, they're looking at the aggregate outcome. Did your strategy result in improved profitability or reduction of cost or increase in share price, or not? CEOs seem to fail upward even on those metrics, but other executive roles seem to be more accountable.
I cut back drinking considerably because of how it affects my sleep. That, by itself, is the biggest thing for me. Even just one drink over a weekend lunch/brunch can disrupt my sleep later that night.
That said, when I look at the wider trend it seems obvious that "it's the economy, stupid" as are so many other wider trends. It's now commonplace in my city (one of the lowest CoL in the US) for a typical bar to charge $18-$22 for a cocktail and $9-$12 for a beer. Consider that the minimum wage here is still $7.25/hr and the average wage in the city is just $26.44/hr, and with the rise in cost of everything shrinking discretionary spending budgets, it's a big ask to expect someone to spend close to an hours labor for every single drink of an evening. There's obviously generational aspects as well, but how much of that is sociocultural vs economic? Gen Z is broke as a joke, they're not spending on booze when they can barely make rent and utilities.
I don't particularly like hosting, although I will do so, but I do enjoy gatherings of friends and interesting people over good food and good wine. What my wife and I did was join a dinner club. There are all variety of dinner clubs in almost every major city in the world. We are in our 40s and are the youngest members, because it seems most of the folks who join dinner clubs are older retirees that no longer have large families at home to host dinners with/for, but nonetheless we've found it rewarding.
Given that, though, I do see a bit of a generational divide. It definitely seems like the social circles of people in my generation and younger are larger, but not as deep. I have very good friends who have all moved to different places across the country, I fly to visit them, but the last time all of us were together was at someone's wedding. Contrast this with older generations who often have nearby lifelong friends and close by family, that provides them a smaller but deeper social circle with more opportunities for in-person interaction.
Dinner clubs are great, but not a replacement for the fact my closest friends are spread out all over the country. I don't really have a solve for that. If I were rich, I'd convince everyone to take remote jobs so we could build a "compound" with a bunch of houses all together and be near each other, but the economic realities don't make that possible for any of us.
As someone in Texas, who also donates large sums of money every year to the Innocence Project, I kind of understand their position even though I think they have written it poorly. I want anyone wrongfully convicted freed and compensated, and I want our justice system to be better at ascertaining guilt rather than using plea deals improperly to imprison people wrongly. I also want our prisons to be places where we take every reasonable action to preserve the lives of the prisoners, including for sure having air-conditioning.
But I also fully understand the point of prison is /punishment/, which is why it's such a severe injustice when someone is punished when they have not committed the crime. Prison is not supposed to be pleasant and comfortable, and we should take every action to preserver prisoner's lives specifically in order to ensure that they can serve their complete sentences, upon the assumption of fair adjudication. Without clear, just, punishment within society, we will revert to vigilantism and chaos.
The core ethical/moral complexity here to me is not about treatment of prisoners, its about how people become prisoners in the first place in the state of Texas. In Texas we have a long history of racist practices in policing, in the courts, and the use of coercive plea deal structures that have resulted in many people being wrongfully convicted. As long as that situation stands, it would be clearer to argue that nobody should be imprisoned at all, but that's also not a reasonable argument. As long people are being imprisoned, we should ensure they are rightfully convicted and understand that prison is a punishment, and that we should preserve prisoner's lives and health so that they can experience whatever just punishment has been meted out by society for the harm they have caused through their choices and actions.
At the same time prison shouldn't be deadly. 85F versus 110F is the difference between uncomfortable and death.
>Without clear, just, punishment within society, we will revert to vigilantism and chaos.
The problem is this doesn't really seem to have any relation to the punishment. In the US we love to think that beating someone to a pulp has a strong effect on their future actions that lead to the beating but redactivism rates do not show any strong correlations here at all. Things like education, living conditions, and wealth are far more correlated.
> At the same time prison shouldn't be deadly. 85F versus 110F is the difference between uncomfortable and death.
Fully agreed. There absolutely should be air conditioning in prisons in Texas. We need to preserve prisoners lives and health using all reasonable means so that they can receive their just punishment via their sentence.
Of note, however, there are /schools/ in Texas that lack working air conditioning due to mismanagement and underfunding, which I find a far more egregious and wrong circumstance.
> The problem is this doesn't really seem to have any relation to the punishment. In the US we love to think that beating someone to a pulp has a strong effect on their future actions that lead to the beating but redactivism rates do not show any strong correlations here at all. Things like education, living conditions, and wealth are far more correlated.
Agreed, punishment does not help with recidivism rates. You're making a rehabilitation argument. That argument might even be reasonable. That is not why prison in the US exists or how they are operated. They are a form of punishment, that is their purpose in our society.
> But I also fully understand the point of prison is /punishment/... Prison is not supposed to be pleasant and comfortable...
I appreciate the thoughtfulness with which you present your view, and also see it's validity-- that one purpose of prison is for the government to take a measured and limited 'revenge' for the victims of harm. Where the alternative is blood feuds.
Thus prison should not be comfortable, for those rightfully convicted of crimes involving harm TO OTHERS.
But by this same line, that the government's actions should be measured and limited. Prison should not be cruel, nor should the punishments be unusual.
> But by this same line, that the government's actions should be measured and limited. Prison should not be cruel, nor should the punishments be unusual.
Fully agreed, which is why I make the point that air conditioning isn't a question, of course a prison in Texas should have air conditioning. The 8th Amendment makes this pretty clear, that cruel and unusual punishments are disallowed, as they should be. The punishment is and should be the prison sentence itself.
I very much want this, but I also do not trust Qualcomm /at all/. Would love to see a performant alternative to current-gen M series which runs Linux. Can you imagine a true ultrabook style laptop w/ great battery life, minimal heat output, and excellent performance in a compact form fanless form factor running Linux? Would be amazing. But Qualcomm has a long track record of bait n switch w/ Linux community and relying on proprietary blobs, no documentation, and aggressively enforcing IP in ways which are detrimental.
Something I am not seeing much discussion about in the article or in the rest of the comments: UX is more than UI. You can have very stable UI and still have significant, targeted UX improvements needed.
Something I find sorely lacking in most modern desktop systems, Linux included, is the performance I expect given the power of the hardware available. Barring that performance increase, better perceived performance through subtle UI changes that elide over waiting moments is nearly as good.
Linux leaves a lot to be desired here. It's easy to bash Windows or Mac, but the performance issues on these systems are often difficult to perceive during normal usage while in Linux it is front and center and harder to understand because Linux is a box of parts.
A lot of it has to do with how long it takes to find the right candidate. As someone who has been involved in a lot of hiring over the last 20 years, I can say there's been a huge shift within the last couple of years and open reqs get 10-25x the number of applicants, which instead of increasing choice in a positive way has just resulted in the average applicant quality decreasing. That means recruiters and hiring managers spend a LOT more time vetting and also invest in parallel candidates to try to hedge, because so many candidates applying are legitimately unqualified.
It may sound like I'm blaming candidates, and sometimes it might be fair to, but this is also a problem caused by companies not investing in training and hiring junior level employees, which means that people who are unqualified feel forced to apply for more senior roles, as those are the only roles hiring. It's honestly shocking how many candidates I've interviewed in my career who don't even meet the basic bar for the role they've applied for, and are essentially just hoping to get lucky and snag a high-paying tech job even if it ultimately results in them being terminated, they can collect a check for 3-9 months without delivering.
Mass applications, AI cheating, fraudulent representation (e.g. saying you are person X but are actually interviewing on behalf of person X who you are not), lying on resumes and in screeners, and even nation state attacks on hiring (see North Korea trying to farm tech jobs for money to get around sanctions), it's not great on the hiring side either.
If this was in the US, it's all security theater. Basically if you get flagged, they swab everything in your bag to find what's getting flagged, and if it's legitimate they pass you through, or they keep swabbing you if its just your hands/arms because they also inspect your bag. It's kind of dumb, but also kind of makes sense.
For extra fun times, baby wipes / wet wipes get flagged as explosives in the US when they use the sniffer devices.
I will be the first to join you on "most of TSA is security theater"; the baby wipes are glycerine getting flagged by ion mobility spectrometry. The machines are fast because they just look for basic chemical building blocks, not doing full spectrometry to figure out the whole compound. So glycerin, nitrates, etc. set it off (and someone else's sticky glycerin e.g. sunscreen can gunk up the machine for multiple subsequent people).
The system is also likely designed to have false positives so they can validate that the security people are doing their job. This is more obvious on the x-ray machines but resembles the "can you spot the phishing email" emails that often get sent out in corporate environments to detect people who need additional security education.
I can understand the inclination, but actually I /do/ want the details, because without the details I cannot consider and measure if the change proposed is a reasonable pathway to help manage the class of problem. Many times, people in organizations while well-meaning are siloed and focused specifically in their own niche and therefore will propose changes that cannot be coherent in any holistic manner across all the parts of the organization that would need to be affected by the change. That means you /do/ need to understand the details, and also have a big picture view.
The executive is there to help with the big picture, but you can't see the big picture if the canvas is blank.
My experience matches this also. My observation is that most business people think things they know they don't know are hard, and things that they think they do know are easy. My additional observation is that AI tools make business people think they know a lot more things, so they consider a lot more things easy, when they are not. AI tools are a machine that makes business people Dunning-Kruger-max.
Yes, but there are valid reasons for this. Speaking as someone who is currently in Product, let me point out that a lot of larger efforts in large organizations are inherently risky. This is probably measurable, but generally nobody invests in doing so, rather than that we model it with approximations. When an executive decides on a strategy which has a large effort as a downstream outcome, there is some risk possible that it becomes impossible, or that it is possible but at 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x the cost/time which erodes its value. Success doesn't look like hitting an arbitrary timeline or budget, success looks like getting to an outcome that aligns with the objectives/goals of the strategy, in a timeline that doesn't torpedo the strategy, and in a way which results in an economic ROI.
I am generally considered pretty good in my current organization. I have been lauded often. I don't think any of the major initiatives I've worked on have been "on time", but in almost every case it was due to cross-organizational dependencies dragging things out, which is an inherent risk accounted for when doing anything large in a large organization. But every single one of those initiatives has resulted in a positive ROI in a manner timely enough to support the strategy.
From the perspective of the organization, that's a win. And a win is rewarded.
I imagine similar things can be seen at executive levels. Nobody is asking detailed execution questions about your strategy to determine if its a win or a loss, they're looking at the aggregate outcome. Did your strategy result in improved profitability or reduction of cost or increase in share price, or not? CEOs seem to fail upward even on those metrics, but other executive roles seem to be more accountable.
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