👋 Hi, I’m Drew. I mainly post insightful or humorous quotes and comments I find elsewhere on the internet. 🔗 www.drewrobson.consulting

Unless one can convincingly make the case that this technology will promote broad-based prosperity and solve real-world problems such as global inequity, the climate crisis, exploitation, etc., I will remain unenthusiastic about it.

So far every instance of moon-eyed 'transform the world' rhetoric coming out of these projects boil down to "we're going to make capitalists a lot of money by cutting labor out of the equation as much as possible."

To be fair, this is a capitalism problem rather than an inherent flaw with the technology itself, but without changes to our core priorities as a society, this seems to only exacerbate the challenges we're already facing.

ChatGPT is just the beginning: Artificial intelligence is ready to transform the world

We went full Kanban. Just put cards in the board and we will move them along to complete features. Purely sprint based agile development should be used for junior teams in my opinion but more experienced teams? Just do kanban. Hell, we do trunk based development without problems if you have a kick ass team.

Agile ceremonies are a massive waste of time, and if the team can’t communicate well enough asynchronously then your team is busted.

Is Agile actually dying

With Hasbro/Wizards, Netflix, and Peloton, I'm honestly starting to think most executives are idiots.

It's like they genuinely don't understand how the world works. They skate by on the cultural inertia of the company below them. But then they get horny for more money and think they can run things all by themselves, only to make the dumbest fucking decisions possible.

Silicon Valley needs to stop laying off workers and start firing CEOs

They've never believed in the First Amendment or anything else in the Constitution. Not even the Second Amendment (go ask the Black Panthers how much the right supports 2A).

When they talk about free speech, what they really mean is being able to spew any horrible hate they want and suffer no repercussions, not even social ones, for it.

They have one commandment, it's the only thing they have ever supported: "Rights for me, but not for thee".

'1st Amendment' Group Sues New York Times Over Unflattering Description

This is basically called the “Six Levels Down” problem.

Whenever there is a crisis or a problem, typically the person who can actually fix it sits six levels down from senior managers. What happens though, in reality, is that senior managers run around like a headless chicken trying to solve the problem, until they realize the person who actually can fix it was laid off a year ago in the latest round of budget cuts. So they go out and hire a bunch of consultants and contractors at twice the price who take five times as long to fix it. All because, as you said…management views employees as a number on a spreadsheet in a cost center, and not an invaluable host of institutional knowledge on how the company actually runs.

90% of senior management is useless. They’re only there because of ambition, the lack of empathy that allows them to make “tough” decisions like making blanket layoffs, and because they know which corporate bingo bullshit buzzwords to say during a speech to their bosses. The ones that are actually decent get burned out from all the nonsense they have to deal with.

An engineer laid off after over 16 years at Google said 'faceless' tech giants see staff as '100% disposable'

This is more about the way society views work. Entrepreneurs and Executives don’t “create jobs” instead they create systems which requires jobs to run the systems.

For example, the retail side of Amazon is an order fulfillment and distribution system. Jeff Bezos would be perfectly happy to have fully automated warehouses requiring no manual intervention.

On one side, these companies can bring tremendous economic growth. But can be ruthless towards the individual worker. However, it’s our society. We should have the governance in place to ensure there is a safety net for the individual.

An engineer laid off after over 16 years at Google said 'faceless' tech giants see staff as '100% disposable'

The VP will then blame the guilds failure on poor employee engagement instead of lack of management support, and begin an employee engagement initiative that promises to do whatever it takes to improve employee engagement and morale as long as it doesn't cost money or company resources or take time away from your normal business responsibilities.

For those of you in guilds: how do you get anything done?

they must have thought about this aspect, right?

Inertia and friction. Lopsided risk vs reward.

The company only think in terms of value. Does that new feature add to product value, company margins, etc. Add that new feature immediately, so it can improve quarterly financial reports.

"Developer experience" doesn't directly translate to immediate quantifiable quarterly financial reports.

Most devex happens because the very few, 10x, 100x devs get bored or tired of the stupidity, and does things to improve and automate dev processes. The very best that can improve devex quickly realize they can get higher salary and better roles at better companies, the they job hop ruthlessly.

Why don't organizations pay more attention to developer experience?

They're only angry about what they're told to be angry about. A few years ago it was immigrants and black people. Now it's gay and trans people. Next year it'll be non-christians or something else equally stupid. The people upset about this have no thoughts of their own, so if Fox and Newsmax don't tell them things, they'll just sit there in their own mountain dew fart sauna and beat their kids.

Lego boycott because of Everyone is Awesome.