My personal top priority is no Jira or other project management software, no standups, no sprints.
Not because these are annoyances in the sense of feeling like I have an Office Space job.
It's because I have a certain psychology of how I work where I thrive and overperform when I feel I have space. I lose engagement and shut down when I feel micro-observed, -managed, -scheduled. I admittedly have a much more sensitive threshold than most people for feeling discomfort from these, and need more space to thrive. But it's who I am. I can't help that it makes a world of difference to my performance and engagement. I've tried to adjust, it doesn't work.
I love my job when it involves the process of fluidly deciding what to do on a given day, balancing fires, deadlines, maintenance, new functionality, ideas I woke up with, etc. And also I'll choose how to communicate rather than fill out rote status reports or go to rote meetings. I enjoy communicating when it's at its natural cadence and level rather than driven by process.
I shut down when I have to represent tasks or resolve them with project management metadata and process.
It's not that slowing down annoys me, it takes away a kind of agency that's necessary for me to have. When I don't have it, my job is a stressful thing that I only do for the paycheck. I can't over perform in that headspace and then it starts a spiral where doing average work makes me feel bad about my career and myself.
I also don't understand how people feel true ownership of systems when their work is carved up in tickets and sprint boundaries. I see so many things falling through the cracks because people do the minimum that Jira tells them to do. Or some common sense important change doesn't get made because it's no one's job to do what needs to be done to keep something working well, only to respond to tickets.
Maybe not everyone can be expected to perform well with full trust of ownership, maybe most can't, but others can only perform well that way. The most important development of my career has been learning my own personal psychology of work.
It's a tragedy that we expect everyone to work and communicate in the same set of processes rather than optimize based on the diversity of individual psychology. And I get that this is high maintenance and not scalable for a huge org. But these days even small companies have the cargo cult behavior of adopting the process they see at large companies.
Between Obsidian, Roam, Amplenote, and Reflect it has certainly been a golden age for note taking over the last few years. It's hard to remember that it was only 5 years ago that second generation note apps like Evernote, Notion and Bear were the only viable options unless you wanted a 1st gen app like OneNote or Workflowy.
What might be most interesting about the new set of fast moving note apps is that all seem to be built by teams of 3 or less people. Obsidian seems to have ascended to the top of the heap with a team of three and no apparent VC funding. Anyone that roots for small companies and passionate programmers should appreciate Obsidian proving that the best tools don't have to be built by the biggest teams. More the opposite.
The Century of the Self is a great introduction to this. Modern advertising literally uses techniques originally developed for wartime (WWII) propaganda. Commercial advertising is literally brainwashing applied for economic purposes rather than political (though often both, too).
p.s. if you like the Century of the Self, watch Hypernormalization as well. Amazing documentaries.
It's funny how HN always complains about every status page.
I think Google Cloud has one of the only status pages that is always up to date and very forthcoming in giving as much detail as possible. Personally I couldn't ask for more.
> The bioweapon theory, however, is politically useful. If you want to start a war, or at least trade sanctions, a villain is a good place to start.
This is precisely Nature's gambit. She carefully engineered SARS-CoV-2 in a matter of weeks (to conceal the evidence, which was eaten), all naturally of course, but carefully, subtly made it appear like it might have been designed by mere mortals... and for this very purpose. Armageddon. When there's an imbalance, Nature corrects. And no one would deny there is an imbalance in the Earth regarding our species alone totally messing it up for all living things.
I allowed scripts from cdn.jsdeliver.net and that was enough to get it going. Way less painful than getting an embedded third party video widget working.
Every single Discord-related post here I see comments about the "bad ux".
I'm a heavy Discord user and I have no complaints with the UX, I find it pretty intuitive to be honest.
I'm also constantly seeing people in shock that people would choose to use Discord over IRC/Matrix/Teamspeak/Mumble. I find Discord to be light years ahead of anything else available, and for an average person who's going to have a hard time setting up any of those, the difference is even bigger. Plus, Discord's free, you don't have to host it, and all your friends and communities are already there. It's really a no brainer for most people.
There are a number of such tools out there. Here's a short list. I'd be interested in any experiences people have had with them in largish production environments.
There are some companies that facilitate this, like EquityZen and Forge Global. It seems to be a legal gray area, since the options are legally non-transferable, so creatively structured contracts are used in an attempt to work around that.
Not because these are annoyances in the sense of feeling like I have an Office Space job.
It's because I have a certain psychology of how I work where I thrive and overperform when I feel I have space. I lose engagement and shut down when I feel micro-observed, -managed, -scheduled. I admittedly have a much more sensitive threshold than most people for feeling discomfort from these, and need more space to thrive. But it's who I am. I can't help that it makes a world of difference to my performance and engagement. I've tried to adjust, it doesn't work.
I love my job when it involves the process of fluidly deciding what to do on a given day, balancing fires, deadlines, maintenance, new functionality, ideas I woke up with, etc. And also I'll choose how to communicate rather than fill out rote status reports or go to rote meetings. I enjoy communicating when it's at its natural cadence and level rather than driven by process.
I shut down when I have to represent tasks or resolve them with project management metadata and process.
It's not that slowing down annoys me, it takes away a kind of agency that's necessary for me to have. When I don't have it, my job is a stressful thing that I only do for the paycheck. I can't over perform in that headspace and then it starts a spiral where doing average work makes me feel bad about my career and myself.
I also don't understand how people feel true ownership of systems when their work is carved up in tickets and sprint boundaries. I see so many things falling through the cracks because people do the minimum that Jira tells them to do. Or some common sense important change doesn't get made because it's no one's job to do what needs to be done to keep something working well, only to respond to tickets.
Maybe not everyone can be expected to perform well with full trust of ownership, maybe most can't, but others can only perform well that way. The most important development of my career has been learning my own personal psychology of work.
It's a tragedy that we expect everyone to work and communicate in the same set of processes rather than optimize based on the diversity of individual psychology. And I get that this is high maintenance and not scalable for a huge org. But these days even small companies have the cargo cult behavior of adopting the process they see at large companies.