Action Figure Daniel

Category: Reading

  • “The Staff Engineer’s Path” by Tanya Reilly

    • Staff engineering is ambiguous; companies are still trying to figure out the role
      • Levels below are for growing autonomy
      • Levels above are for growing impact and responsibility
    • “humaning” skills
    • Titles signal the quality of the person you are working with
    • Pillars
      • Big picture thinking
      • Project execution
      • Leveling up the org
    • Avoid “local maximum” to ensure paths are best for the whole org
    • TPMs focus on high-level coordination
    • https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Microsoft,Amazon,Expedia&track=Software%20Engineer
    • “Leadership” is not a distraction from the job, it is the job
    • Management is different from leadership
    • https://kind.engineering/
    • Make sure to understand [and clarify if necessary] your scope
    • “You don’t stay in your lane”
    • Question: Depth or breadth first
    • Things needed
      • Skills
      • Project management
      • Product management
      • People management
    • “Everything you do has a high-opportunity cost”
    • “You don’t plant grass in your only barrel”
    • Ask, “What do I do here?” then document it; review with your manager
    • Maps
      • “You are here”
      • Topographical
      • Treasure maps
    • “Respect what came before”
      • (There is a fine balance between respecting what came before and pushing to new successes)
    • Solve the problem, not just through code
    • Team and company culture
      • How much autonomy will I have
      • How hard will it be to make progress
      • Do I need to mind myself
      • Open or secret
      • Oral or written culture
      • Formal or backdoor
      • Allocated or available resources
      • Crystalized (promotions come in turn) or liquid
      • Power, rules, or mission
      • Being out of the loop means you do not know how decisions are made
    • Make sure your contributions fit into a larger narrative
    • Focus on improvement, not revolution
    • Eagerly give support to those trying to make improvements even if you disagree with their approach
    • Align goal with sponsors
    • Look for “objectives that are always true” (like covering costs or maintaining systems)
    • Make sure people feel okay to disagree
    • Ask, “Can anyone not live with this choice?” instead of, “Is everyone okay with this?”
    • Make sure everyone knows that things will get hard
    • Fish around for ulterior motives
    • Make sure to connect concepts so people understand the context
    • Add more nouns to be explicit on what is needed where
    • Beware of “bike shedding”
    • “Watermelon project” (all green on the outside but all red on the inside)
    • “Wrong gets corrected, vague sticks around”
    • Blockage
      • Understand
      • Explain
      • Find a work around
    • Three bullets and a call to action
    • “There is no such thing as a ‘temporary’ solution”
    • You do not need to be the world’s best
    • Own your skills and mistakes
    • “Radiate intent” so no one is surprised by your movements
    • Beware of junior engineers doing administrative work
    • Optimize for maintenance, not creation
    • Design to be decommissioned
      • Every system needs to be replaced some day
    • Success is when other people want to work with you
    • It is difficult to improve both management and technical skills
    • It is okay to swing between technical and manager roles

  • “The Dorito Effect” by Mark Schatzker

    • Heinz bought Weight Watchers
    • Obesity is the second most common cause of death
    • Type 2 Diabetes used to be called “Adult onset diabetes” but was renamed because so many kids have it
    • Flavor is the original craving
    • Flavor detection is the largest chapter of our genome
    • Chickens needs more than corn to live
    • Vitamins were discovered, revolutionized plant and animal growth
    • Young animals lack the flavor of adults
    • Fried chicken used to only need salt and pepper, now it needs all sorts of spices to flavor it up
    • “Further processing” is when we add flavor back into things
    • Chicken strips are in their way out because chicken nugget eaters are getting older and think strips are too tough
    • Carbs and water are replacing flavor while letting things grow faster
    • The importance of vine ripening is the energy to make sugars
    • Imitation vanilla started with pine cones
    • “Need states” track what people are looking for across demographics
    • Restaurant kitchens are more like prep areas
    • Raw meat and almost everything else has some flavoring
    • Natural vs artificial flavoring is about the extraction method, not the chemicals themselves
    • A hundred years ago, we used 0.5 pounds of spices per person per year, now it is close to 3.5 pounds
    • Flavor dilution is affecting almost everything
    • Food addicts crave food more and are satisfied lees
    • Substance abuse is a continuum
    • Making a narcotic more available increases addiction
    • The human nose was not meant to sniff but to taste food
    • Plants send caterpillar specific chemicals as they are being eaten
    • Flavor cravings are learned and can be connected with nutrients
    • “A little bit of something bad could be good”
    • Anti-oxidant pills do not do much
    • Flavors drive feels
    • Left with natural food, children naturally balance their diets on their own
    • “Throat burn” is a sign of good olive oil
    • Artificial sweeteners are not reducing calorie consumptions
    • Adding micronutrients confuses the body because we can no longer associate nutrients with food
    • Glutathione makes things taste better but only if paired with other things
    • The gut has taste sensors too
    • Most animals stop eating to avoid an overdose, not because they are full
    • Adding a fruity aroma to water makes it taste sweeter
    • Appendix
      • Where did the flavor come from?
      • Try different foods
      • Eat foods that you find satisfying

  • “Shifting the Monkey” by Todd Whitaker

    • “Monkeys have shifted to the wrong peoples’ backs”
    • Don’t let monkeys move
    • Ask
      • Where is the monkey
      • Where should the monkey be
      • How do I shift it to where it belongs
    • Treat everyone well
    • Protect your best people first
    • Assume good intentions
    • Ignore excuses
    • Try to not have barriers between you and someone else
    • Give targeted feedback for underachievers
      • (This is to prevent them from spiring under your feedback)
    • Try to not threaten
      • Only threaten when you mean it and can act on it
    • Let them know how peers are responding
      • (A little bit of peer pressure is nice 😁)
    • Ask if everything is all right before jumping into questions
    • “Give anonymous public praise”
      • So people acting good get praise and people acting poorly become generally jealous
    • Focus on correcting behavior, not changing minds
    • Efforts matter more than results
    • Offer to talk outside of working hours to filter “nonsense” requests
    • Give permission to not volunteer (especially to high achievers)
    • “Discover” errors together with good employees
    • “Treat everyone well but not equally”
    • Let people resent you but not your best people

  • “Seeing With Fresh Eyes” by Edward Tufte

    • Autocorrelation, serial correlation, bang-bang duplicate,  or pseudo-replications are when a piece of data follows another without new measures
    • There is a difference between having questions to be solved by a database and poking around a database looking for interesting answers to question
    • Early screening boosts “survival time” in useless ways
    • Adjust measures to avoid errors rather than modeling them away
    • “Guide to Bad Data” by Chris Groskopf
      • Values missing
      • Zeros replace missing values
      • Data missing that you know should be there
      • Rows or values duplicated
      • Total differ from aggregates
      • Suspicious values present
      • Spreadsheet have 65536 rows or 255 columns
      • Margin-of-error to large or unknown
      • Benford’s Law fails
      • Too good to be true
    • Fix bad names immediately
    • Survivor bias: “Most medieval castles were made of wood”

  • “Time Travel” by James Gleick

    • Concepts of time travel started in 1914
    • 1876 was the first record of a centennial celebration
    • No one pondered the future or the past until the 20th century
    • New (remote) lands filled the roles of time travel in fiction
    • We should not think about time as the same as space
      • We cannot freely move through time like we can through space
    • “What the balloon does for space, the time machine does for time”
    • Prior to clocks, time was relative based on the setting
    • Newton has to define time so acceleration could happen
    • “If the speed of light is fixed then time cannot be.”
    • The Olympics replace starting pistols with speakers to ensure everyone can hear the signal at the same time
    • “Souls cannot move that fast so one needs to wait”
    • We are always looking into the past
    • All time was local until the train
    • Is the arrow of time because of entropy?
    • “You cannot stir things apart”
    • In many Latinx cultures, you look forward to the past and back for the future
      • (This makes a lot of sense because you observe the past, in front of you, and cannot see the future coming behind you)
    • Eternity is “outside of time”
    • Nostalgia originally meant “homesick”, not wanting a different time
    • In 1955, we redefined “a second” from a fraction of a day to an independent time frame
    • A nano second is about the length light travels a foot
    • Mental Time Travel let’s us project forward and back over time
    • “Now” is generally 2-3 seconds lumped together by the brain
    • We need at least 1/10th a second to accurately differentiate the order of two events