Hook up different kinds of alerts/notifications to office intercom and announce outages and pages! Gives the feeling of a real sense of urgency and danger! :-)
Sev1 alerts, DDOS attacks etc. You can do this for positive things too – like a e-commerce product launch going out of stock in record time, or hitting a sales target etc.
Last time I counted there were three or four of us, but bookofjoe is a prolific reader and poster courtesy of being retired.
We have a lot of down time during the day, just in very short increments. Thus the stereotype that we’re all crossword/Sudoku nerds. HN is something you can pick up and put down in a moment.
Also, I have always thought of the job as a sort of human engineering, or a big physiology lab. Programmers have REPL; we have vital sign monitors for instant feedback. Thankfully it is difficult to crash a human accidentally.
People think doctors bought computers early because they were rich. They could, but it’s worth remembering that if you were a science-and-math kid in the post-WW2 era, medicine and engineering would be the fields you would be pushed toward. That is not as prominent now as tech has started paying better and medicine less, but it’s still not terrible reasoning. I would have to screw up a lot to be unemployable, even if it did take me a lot of school to get to that point. Doctors bought computers because they looked fun.
Only one of my partners has an engineering degree (MechE). I majored in chemistry. Two pharmacists, one accountant. Don’t know about the rest.
"I have always thought of the job as a sort of human engineering, or a big physiology lab."
I like this. I used to tell med students doing a month-long rotation that the specialty could be described as a combination of applied physiology/applied chemistry/applied anatomy with the great thing being you get to find out if you were right in the moment/that day, rather than having to wait days/weeks/months/forever to learn if you had done the right things.
P.S. I majored in political science
P.P.S. ChatGPT-4o just told me that "The use of nerve stimulators for brachial plexus blocks became more widespread in the late 1970s and 1980s."
I never used a nerve stimulator — or US — for brachial plexus blocks during my career (I retired in 2015). I guess I was just so used to doing it the way I learned back in the Dark Ages that as long as I got good results, I kept on keeping on.
Also, if you're doing a locum in some backwoods hospital in a small town in Virginia, you're unlikely to find a working nerve stimulator, much less a portable ultrasound.
I suppose this is why they have a mandatory retirement age for airline pilots.
Cool! Thanks for the perspective. They found a Vernitrol (basically copper kettle) at an older hospital I do a side gig at that was set up for cyclopropane and some other agent a few years ago; I pointed out that you could still do anesthesia with it today if you fixed a couple of broken pieces. Neat to look at even if it didn’t have the circular slide rule to determine through-kettle and bypass flows at each temperature.
There's a fundamental point missing in this analysis. That is the difference in skin in the game and upside/downside game theory dynamics for people involved. An early "founder" by definition has a lot of upside and very little downside and have a lot of ownership. And hence they behave in a particular way. They are actually taking very little risk.
A late stage founder or a professional manager ceo has amassed stuff that they can lose more easily than stuff they potentially can gain. To continue to behave in the same way, they must be willing to take a lot of risk. And a lot of normal people don't want to take such risks.
Only really crazy people – be it a founder or a professional manager – will disregard game theory dynamics and work against their own apparent self-interest and take huge risks. And they tend to expect people around them to take similar huge risks along with them. We call them unreasonable people. And only really unreasonable people can make huge changes in society. This is by definition true because only such people will behave in an outlier manner, and if they do so with a huge amount of capital and power in their control, they can change societies in big ways. If we think that is working well, we celebrate them; and if we think it is horrible, we write cautionary tales about them. It is possible to have both perceptions to be held by different groups of people at the same time.
All the rest about hiring good people and letting them do etc is all just details of dynamics emanating from this unreasonable risk taking ability a person can manifest. I don't believe this can be turned into a playbook that can be taught in a management school. Management schools already teach how to take risks such that downside doesn't befall on the person who went to management school and instead falls on others. Everyone can subconsciously sense this about MBAs and hence the reaction they get. As companies become big and have a lot of external players with skin in the game (aka stakeholders) who are at a distance, they want these MBA types to manage that risk in such a way that it doesn't befall them. That's fundamentally very different from a founder who is not at a distance, but within. Still, founders also do the same when it is them vs their employees. In this aspect, it is all relative.
"often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground."
That's not low risk, that's higher risk. Letting the founders continue in Founder Mode can be both lower risk, and higher expected value, at the same time.
> hiring good people and letting them do etc is all just details of dynamics emanating from this unreasonable risk taking ability
I think not. Instead, the founders have unique insights: in the product, in the business domain, in the people in the company - which lets them do Founder Mode things a professional CEO cannot.
Sth else:
> only really unreasonable people can make huge changes in society.
> That's not low risk, that's higher risk. Letting the founders continue in Founder Mode can be both lower risk, and higher expected value, at the same time.
It depends on how the founder and their investors perceive risk. If they have the risk appetite to stay in founder mode at scale, even when they have a lot to lose, then they do. But most don't. That's my point. And so, they take the advise to derisk for themselves – they take some money off the table, they hire professional managers and delegate, they take their new found time and money and put it elsewhere.
Since you asked for warnings about what not to do, here's one – don't share passwords! With shared accounts, you won't be able to tell who did what. If it is an important thing to which you are sharing passwords and bad thing happens, due to user action that is either accidentally or maliciously, you won't be able to find out who exactly did it and take corrective action.
This made me wonder about postgres. Is Postgres at risk of being taken over by some corporate? What can we learn from all these free open-source databases that has gone enterprise commercial.
That is a valid concern, see what happened with Redis or MySQL. But I think (while valid) it's very unlikely. Postgres can't be "bought". A company would need to start building an own version and make it better than the still existing open source version. Then they would need to convince people to pay for it. Not a good business idea.
Also, food in general wasn't poisonous. And if those royals actually lived even a modestly healthy life (not drinking too much, not using lead based makeup, or their doctors poisoning them with mercury etc), then they could easily live a lot longer.
If you are IT team for a large impactful organization, you have to control updates to your organization's fleet. You cannot let vendors push updates directly. You have to stage those updates and test them and then do a gradual rollout to your whole organization.
Plus, for your critical communication systems, you must have a disaster recovery plan that actually helps you recover quickly in minutes, not hours or days. And you have to exercise this plan regularly.
If you are crowd strike, shame on you for not testing your product better. You failed to meet a very low bar. You just shipped a 100% reproducible widely impactful bug. Your customers must leave you for a more diligent vendor.
And I really hope the leadership teams in every software engineering organization learn a valuable lesson from this – listen to that lone senior engineer in your leadership team who pushes for better craft and operational rigor in your engineering culture; take it seriously - it has real business impact.
2. In iOS, turn off background permission to all Google apps. (You can do this for most apps without loss in functionality). Then, turn off location permission all apps. For maps, give it location permission to "allow while using" only.
This is the least intrusive you can get to. Beyond this, you can also use different google account for different google apps to minimize data mingling. Further beyond that, you can just stop using google apps.
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