E.g. asking existing employers to step down to part time or going on contract while taking on part time contracts elsewhere. When I took my first contract (currently back on full time), I took a 40% contract and negotiated with my then-boss to step down to 60%, which let me build up a bigger cushion first before I went onto contracting full time.
Critical that people don't underestimate the multiple they should be asking for, though, and actually set aside enough money and ensure they're properly insured etc.
I know how to file documents in filing cabinets. I don't know how the bearing mechanism for sliding out the drawers work, or how to replace the user-serviceable locks – but I know that there's a mechanism, and that the locks are user-serviceable, and I could look up the relevant information if I ever needed to do anything with that.
You don't need much knowledge of your version-control system in your head to be an effective programmer.
I left a C level position over going back into the office even 2 days a week. There were plenty of options to go to an all remote company - I had three offers before choosing where I would go. There are just a ton of permanently remote jobs out there at the moment.
Been back full time for 3 weeks by choice instead of being remote as people trickle in.
I think when people start going back we will quickly see that most aspects of the office are actually worse.
I am a hard worker but I am also social and with just a few people back I end up wasting at least 1 hour talking about non-work related things. This isn't even an open floor plan.
If you are going back to an open floor plan, forget about it. Things will be so obviously less productive.
I am enjoying going into the office but I also know this time is limited. At some point in the future going into the office is going to be a perk with remote standard. Bet your ass on that.
You don't even have to bring in the cost savings but the cost savings will be the knockout punch.
Well it’s waste in the sense that you are spending lots of energy to calculate magic numbers, which don’t have any other value except to prove you own bitcoin. It is or is very near a tautology.
In contrast to energy credits in scifi which is something like a promise to deliver a fixed amount of energy, like how a dollar used to have an equivalence in gold.
Like, do you imagine some future spacefaring civilization going around and blowing up stars in order to calculate hashes for their currency? I can, but really only as something that an evil civilization or runaway automation would do.
Why not build a dyson sphere and sell contracts on the energy instead, to people who will use it to be productive? Why is it better to burn all stored energy you can find off as quickly as possible to generate numbers you don’t otherwise need?
As long as humanity is divided and has factions that are in conflict, something like proof of work can be useful, because it allows those that are in conflict or don’t trust each other, to maintain a shared view of an accounting system (Bitcoin). When we pass that stage of bickering apes we won’t need Bitcoin anymore.
> because it allows those that are in conflict or don’t trust each other,
People use this argument a lot, and I don't get it. You're trusting that miners don't perform a 51% attack; you're trusting that the underlying crypto doesn't have shortcuts; you're trusting the wallet software. Some of these things are unverifiable, leaving you only with trust.
I don't agree; for most computing tasks, the result of every computation produced by each node is used. In Bitcoin, only the "winner" for each particular block gets their computation result used, everyone else literally throws their results away.
Tautological. This is essentially: “It’s only waste in so far as you consider it waste”
However the real point about bitcoin is it’s efficiency decreases as adoption or speculation increases, whereas another use of computation such as say Google search this is not the case and they are actively trying to make it more efficient.
A very large bitcoin mining facility [0] in upstate NY is in an old Alcoa smelter and is powered by a hydropower dam. [1]
The original factory was built to take advantage of the power from the dam. The dam needs a constant draw of power in order to maintain it and smelting potlines were perfect for this.
Today, transmitting the electricity further would be too cost prohibitive due to the remote location. In this case, bitcoin is less polluting energy arbitrage than aluminum smelting.
> In this case, bitcoin is less polluting energy arbitrage than aluminum smelting.
Only if 100% of global aluminum smelting occurred from green sources. As that’s not the case the world would be better off if they had kept smelting aluminum as long as the reductions occurred in less green locations.
It sounds like you are conflating scrum and agile. Lots of companies are still doing agile, few innovative ones (including the ones on this list) are doing scrum. Given that scrum is defined by its very specific rules and quite zealous about “scrum-but” being heresy I don’t think you can count kanban, spotify, or other models as scrum.
The way I have seen the role these days is Agile coach, who teaches the principles of lean and agile as needed and helps teams diagnose problems they are too close to to solve, which is a valuable service. There’s usually one per few hundred people at a company, rather than one per five or so for the scrum master.
I had job where we had an agile coach. First job at of college.. I thought it was the dumbest thing ever and pointless. Then they fire the person and replaced them. It was a complete 180. The new person was so good at just coming in sitting down and just listening. Then give some quick advice and things to try. Then leave and then follow back up after a bit and check in. Not everything they suggested worked. But it was extremely helpful.
Scrum master and Product Owner are both roles where, if I’d never seen someone do them at a high level of competency, I’d question whether they were necessary at all.
Scrum master: One time I was having an argument with a couple engineers because we couldn’t figure out how to implement a particular thing. I said “if K (a senior architect) was here, we’d be able to settle this, but I’m sure his schedule is booked up”. We continued arguing in circles, then suddenly 5 minutes later K materialized out of the ether. Our scrummaster had overheard me saying that, and silently navigated the bureaucracy to get us immediate time with the person we needed, all without being asked, and that unblocked our team. When you have a good scrummaster, they’ll know when it’s OK to bend/break rules and when to enforce them, and they’ll have a “particular set of skills” necessary to keeping the team unblocked.
Product Owner: At my previous job there was a Product Owner named Terry who I continue to hold up as the gold standard. She was totally unafraid to get her hands dirty learning about the part of the system she was stewarding. You could parachute her into a deeply technical area and within a sprint she’d have found the happy paths, the edge cases, the things customers cared about/didn’t, and she’d (this is critical) be in a position to reject stories that legitimately didn’t pass muster. She perfectly walked the difficult line of knowing when to call BS on someone and knowing when to trust their explanation.
When done poorly, scrum masters fall back on rigidly performing ceremonies or processes without considering whether they’re providing value. When done poorly, Product Owners will ask developers “what’s this thing I’m accepting?”, and hopefully the developer did their job, because the PO won’t know if they didn’t and will just rubber stamp the story. The unfortunate thing is that there are a lot of folks in these roles who are simply “performing the motions”, and so the overall reputation of these roles gets tarnished as a result. But when done well, they deliver a lot of value.
Yes when there are really good people, the roles are a godsend to developers who can then focus on writing code rather than negotiating bureaucracies and listening to users and customers.
The problem is the vast majority of times you don't get those good people in these roles and it ends up hindering then helping on average.
In my experience, the most common failure case is that businesses will try to cut costs by either combining the roles, or stretching a PO or scrummaster across multiple teams. I’ve met people who I imagine could be good POs in a different situation, but were scatterbrained from having to manage 3-4 teams’ backlogs.
> She perfectly walked the difficult line of knowing when to call BS on someone and knowing when to trust their explanation.
This, 100%. The best PM I ever worked with had exactly the same skillset.
If your PO / PM can't internalize the technical edges of the product quickly, it's better to have no one in the role.
And that's a difficult ask, because it's extremely hard to reason logically about something you had 12 hours to cram for, with people who are experts at it. But nonetheless, I've known people who can do exactly that!
Unfortunately, there are far fewer of them than open PO / PM job roles...
Oh gosh, Agile Coach is definitely the worst. Pure BS. I can get the job of the scrum master, but agile coach? Sorry, we should've a much higher bar for subjecting our engineers to this role.
On a perfect team, where everyone is great at time management, honest about productivity, has superb communication skills, and is enthusiastic/loves their tasks, yes, scrum is dumb. For but for the rest of us, the scrum master handles all the unpleasant organizational crap for the team, and thank god for them.
Maybe not _need_ it, but it can help in a lot of cases. Though I have seen some cases of active resistance coming from participants, in which case toxic co-workers can really make the experience miserable.
This is one of the roles that I passionately hated in my previous company. No value add, and just wasted time with meetings. If your team, product manager, eng manager has no clue on what they are doing, then yes scrum master's role has a concrete outcome (atleast to keep people busy working). but if any one in the team has any clue on what they are doing, I found no value. Most of the scrum master/agile coaches i interacted with are more married to the whole process of scrum ceremonies rather than the concrete goal they are trying to hit at end of month.
I've had a full time scrum master for, what, 4 months out of 15 years of doing scrum. It made a lot of positive difference to have someone operating on the meta level of the team.
