Atrine

I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate.

I would be surprised if they did this, and if they did, use it for implementing any sort of meaningful change. Plus I would not put faith in leadership to being able to interpret what this really means because they are so out of touch with how things are going. Discussions with upper leadership is heavily reviewed and curated as a means to avoid getting called out and stay under the radar. They all have a skewed view of what's going on with the teams that build and this data wouldn't feed into it in a way that would be meaningful.

Likely what they will do is keep track of stuff like regretted attrition, hiring numbers (once they get back to hiring), Connections results, project/goal delays (the well established orgs are all aggressive about tracking dates along with goals to see how things are going).

a lot of my colleagues have started working at 9 am and log out at 5pm pronto

I think this is a great thing. This is long overdue there. It's too common for employee's personalities to be all Amazon all the time. I've been to many social events over the years where I'm told to not bring/invite anyone from my Amazon circle because all they can do is talk about Amazon.

It used to be my favorite social media platform, but I quickly deactivated my account on Christmas and then deleted the app.

The major problem is that Threads will surface and even recommend (via your Facebook feed as well) threads that people you follow have responded to. Great in theory, but on Christmas Day I opened up FB to find it recommended this highly toxic anti-gay post in the middle of all my friends' posts about the holiday. It was because someone I follow on threads took the bait and commented on this post.

I've had far too many instances of this sort of behavior in my life and the only options available were to unfollow everyone, constantly block these abusive actors, or leave. For me, it was absolutely not worth staying, despite the up sides.

Imagine a scenario where Photoshop would scan images you uploaded for copyright material and then refuse to work if it determined image contained any copyrighted material or characters (even if it was just a fan drawing you did).

YouTube does this. I have many friends that perform classical piano in their spare time. They record themselves playing a piece that's 200+ years old then put it on YouTube where it gets flagged saying some big record label owns the copyright for it because it's similar to a recording they put out.

Leave work slightly unfinished for easier flow the next day

Years ago a sr. eng on my team would find root causes to bugs late in the afternoon and then just go home. When asked why, they said that they knew exactly what they were going to do first thing in the morning and that it got them straight into the flow state for the rest of the day.

I like this example better because understanding a root cause and not having it fixed is more concrete than "slightly unfinished" which is too vague for me to measure.

I said no to low-impact tasks.

This oversimplification is terrible advice.

I've seen many people refuse "low impact" work that's just flat out required for things to operate. Talking about keeping systems stable, working on tickets while they are on-call, and generally doing things that make work easily transferrable to others. These people that "refuse low impact work" end up being terrible teammates a lot of the time.

Great ideas.

I sneak in advanced things into lectures and preface it with "for students that are more advanced or have more prior knowledge in the subject..." I usually see the more advanced students perk up and the other students exhale and zone out a bit to rest their brain. Seems to work fairly well.

Imagine Ford paying someone to make five car-designs, ending up using one of them and ultimately losing full control over the remaining four...

Yeah this isn't a valid comparison in the slightest. Artists using work for their public portfolio doesn't mean that they can use the work for other employers or in other contexts. Not sure how you made such large leap here.

While some of the commercial reasons for keeping game art under wraps make sense, many artists working in the video game industry say they're subject to a power imbalance, even in full-time studio positions, that sees the bulk of their work locked away in vaults, where not only can fans never see them but where artists can't share them either, not even in professional settings like job applications or portfolios.

This is actually a pretty big problem. My cofounder and I run a small video game studio and we worked with our lawyers to figure out how to protect artists as well as the company in a way that seemed fair. What we came up with was a general blanket rule that if an artist's work gets used in any public way (promo materials, game launch) then they can use that work immediately for their public portfolios. In the situation where it's not released we have end dates in the contracts for when they can use their work in their portfolios.

Someone who just happens to be a smooth talker shouldn't be earning more than someone else. If they actually bring more to the table, that is why they should earn more.

I love this mindset, in my experience it's a hard problem to solve.

Smooth talkers tend to fall into a few different categories that give them a leg up in negotiations - being part of a majority (usually straight male in engineering) or narcissists. (And yes, I'm oversimplifying things here just to get my point across.)

Everyone else? Some will be able to advocate for themselves, but others (especially under-represented groups) can easily downplay their worth. I've seen multiple times when women especially are trying to please the hiring manager/company and 'be flexible' in what they take. Other times it's from people outside of the U.S. where cultural expectations are different. To fix this we need people to have enough self-worth/self-esteem/trust to push on what they are worth and/or the company needs to act as an advocate on behalf of the employee. I've seen both be pretty tricky to figure out over the years.

I have a different reaction as I find this information useful. The lower range tells me if it's even within what I'm targeting. And if I get to an offer stage and I'm at the lower end of the spectrum, I would want to know why.

I'm sure there's a substantial population that this redesign was successful for, but it's nobody I've talked to.

I think the measurement of success in this case has less to do with the customer's feelings about the product and more about people understanding and using the full feature set of Slack. All the new features they've been adding in just kind of floated by and we never used them. Either they were embedded in the middle of a series of steps we already had habits around (so we just ignored them) or they were so subtle that we didn't see the point in trying them out.

In other words, the problem they were really trying to solve was around scaling the product with all the features they had. That's likely where measurement of success will take place.

We kicked off the project in earnest with a three-day in-person onsite for design, engineering, product and program leads. With the prototype as our guide, we started to sketch out the path to production. Which teams would need to be involved? How quickly could we move? When might we start bringing customers into the process? Which questions were most important to answer first?

"When might we start bringing customers into the process?" Seems like this should be much earlier in the process, no? Sure relying on automated metrics to help guide your process was part of the path, but if you aren't really talking with customers and figuring out what your needs are, your designs are going to be more biased towards how Slack operates and the culture of Slack.

Cyberbullying? Eating disorders? Majority of their time on social media? Increase in medication usage? Cutting? Depression? Suicides?

There are plenty of things to measure. Just pick one and stop trying to play this ridiculous game of "what about-isms".

Was it the union that was the problem or was it that you were working for a Dinosaur that hadn't been required to operate in today's high-tech world? Experience has shown that AT&T and Disney are the same sort of thing when working in tech, yet they don't have unions. But what they do all have in common - they are old companies that formed well before the internet.

This isn't what I took away from it. It's basically your environment really dictates a lot of who you are and what you become. From my experience, this is absolutely the case.

I find Cal Newport and the world around him very interesting. He's a CS computer geek that plays arm-chair psychologist in all his popular work. I've often wondered where his abilities breakdown and I think the article nails it:

"While there are many opinions and resources on how to best regulate overstimulation and overcome digital addictions, Newport’s directive is refreshingly simple: get rid of those things that are overstimulating you."

Really what this is saying is that there are many opinions and resources backed by research and psychological study that has complicated answers. And that Newport's solution is so simple is that it almost equates to "feeling depressed? Don't!"

So yeah, while Newport has interesting ideas and can boil things down for us techies to get behind (sometimes), he doesn't fully know what he's talking about. He's not really a trained psychologist and clearly doesn't understand things at a deep level. He's basically talking to people that are like him rather than people at large.