andyidsinga

it seems the bar should be that high as that is what the hype has told us we would be getting. I'm OK with it being as good as the hype ...and when it isn't the companies that write the software and build the cars can pay for the damage

hmm... so, yeah, nothing about 1000 true fans theory points to it being an easy path. Making a living as some sort of creator is hard. The platforms & "the internet (tm)" just provide a plausible access to those fans vs old-media mechanisms.

disagree with some points here.

I watch many youtube channels with 100Ks of subscribers. Those creators are not out there spending resources getting an audience and those audiences are not coming from personal connections - the platforms are facilitating the connection.

Re : how "attempting to work in the art world" works : this is a very interesting subject/discussion - at what point is someone regularly publishing entertaining youtube videos about small engine repair "working in the art world"? When they get enough income to quit their day job or some lower bar - I dunno - both ? neither / never?

Re stardom: what you're saying is 1000 true fans != total number of fans/casual followers. Agreed.

this is very 2600 - nooice.

so, I've been near sea lions on the Oregon coast - the males can be large and many 100s of pounds (bigger than actual Lions!) and rather intimidating. This picture of the whale's mouth with a sea lion in it really puts into perspective how big the whale is.

I've read the cliff-notes version of first break all the rules. (its floating around the web). It has the list - and also interesting discussion of talent and having employees in positions where their talents are used. IIRC - it also suggests never trying to change people - which I've taken to heart in both work and personal aspects of my life.

I have two Australian shepherds - One of them was a puppy when I read the book about Chaser. So I decide to try to sort-of reproduce some of the author's experiments with my dog - and I'll be damned if it didn't work.

I didn't go to near the extent of the training John Pilley did with Chaser, but I did do the verbal only approach and put the toys in another room - and I was able to teach him to retrieve probably 5 or 10 toys by name. I was really amazed. I didn't do nearly as much training with the second Aussie - but she picked up on the whole game even quicker than the first dog (because she had a role model?).

Another thing I learned about this game/training : it really wears the dog out. After 20 or so minutes of playing "go find the toy" they dogs lay down for a nap.

(ps. doing "nose-work" games with dogs also wears them out)

I'm really glad this is coming back - I've bought it several times over the years and really enjoyed flying it. In more recent versions using the ATC and trying to make it as realistic as possible experience - flying around between nearby local airports.

From the article:

"If we could get more of them doing it, it would be great," he joked.

Karisoke's Vecellio, though, said actively instructing the apes would be against the center's ethos.

"No we can't teach them," she said. "We try as much as we can to not interfere with the gorillas. We don't want to affect their natural behavior."

I wonder if this "prime-directive" style rule might be something they consider changed - if there was a way to teach the gorillas to disabled various kinds of traps it seems that would be great.

On the other hand, I wonder what the side effects would be.. anyone?

Hmm - here's how I did the back of napkin math:

1,000,000 gross in a peak year.

say business is open 290 days of the year.

avg per day = 3448 euro

if average customer order spend is ~15 euro, that's ~230 orders per day that must be made to sustain the 1mm euro gross.

So - if the biz is open 6 hours (optimized around eating times) - that would be ~38 orders/hour.

Key Questions: for the average case : is 38 orders/hour OR 230 orders/day reasonable or not?

for the non-average case: can they make 2x the orders really busy days - i.e. what is the absolute peak orders than can make in a day?

I'm guessing this comment is tongue in cheek.

I've heard it before from folks who were putting themselves in the #1 category, and also, it appeared, exhibiting Dunning–Kruger effects.

Two things I've learned about deadlines #1 - never get into a fight with a superior about a deadline - think of the princess bride quote about land wars in asia.

Which brings us to #2 : look at them relative to what's important to your business. Much of the time a deadline isn't really a deadline at all - its a point in time to show progress in the right direction. With that in mind, i might say to the team - "what's important to this business is _______ , so lets be sure to highlight our progress on items a/b/c because they're key to ______. ..all this other shit in the backlog is #2 .. n that Alice and Bob want. Alice and Bob will get their shit when we get the important shit done (which might be never) [0]

What direction is important to the business? Well, hopefully the direction of solving a problem or delivering a widget to someone who is waiting to actually use it and hand over $ in exchange. If its something else its often your deadline playing chicken with someone else's deadline on the gantt chart and then its the old joke about two guys running away from a bear.

[0] Alice and Bob will get their shit when they start contributing items to the backlog that are aligned with what is important with the business.

EDIT: deadlines aren't inherently "bad" - especially when one is competing against others for something. The problem is too many points in time are made to look like deadlines and often by the wrong people. Imagine running a marathon, and someone is yelling at you from the sidelines : "run as fast as you can to the 4 mile mark!"

different problems here - if the production and scale are already well known and understood - there are, arguably only design choices to be made that fit into the existing tooling.

"the new chair model must fit into these production constraints"

"the new software must be written to fit into this system - JVM based, web interface ..."

These languages are very powerful, but they don’t scale.

The problem, it seems to me is that software developers often think: "what programming language do we really like && can continue to use for $long_time over $scaling_of_business".

When this is the case, business management expectation problems emerge regarding costs, maintenance and timing when the business scales by 10 or 100x. Early phase teams are lambasted for making poor decisions - and "adult supervision" ( i hate that term ) is hired to "fix things".

Thing is, the early "poor decisions" may not have been poor decisions at all relative to the business needs. However, since costs and retooling issues weren't discussed and planned for - the early team look like a bunch of fools/amateurs.

As software developers, we need to understand and communicate that the tools can we use to accomplish the needs for the business at one stage are different than those of a later high-scale stage. its OK, completely natural, and a requirement if we want to keep our jobs and grow with the business.

analogy: If a specialty carpenter is designing and building high end furniture with a set of well made brand-name niche tools and techniques they wouldn't expect that those same tools would be used if sales take off and 10x or 100x the number of units need to be produced. It would be understood that retooling would be required, people with expertise in those tools be hire and that there would be new costs involved. Also, the carpenter who starts the business with small scale tools isn't lambasted for being an idiot for picking those tools in the early phases. It would be quite odd to suggest that that person have picked tools and hired people for 100x production when they were selling single digit units a year.

that's really cool. We do "nose work" with our dogs just as a game for them. Its super fun to watch them find treats and toys we hide for them.

What I was most surprised about when we started is how the game sort of wears them out almost like a good run at the park. (we have 2 aussies and 2 silken wind hounds)

i have two Aussies - they're great and super smart.

after reading the book "chaser" - I trained one of them to distinguish several toys by name similar to what he had done in the book. it was a lot of fun and now he's always bringing me toys to play with. Interestingly he brings them at very specific times of the day when I'm most likely to play with him: morning while making coffee, and evening while cleaning up the kitchen.

this a great response to so many situations. avoiding sugar coating turds and fubaridness is key to being a good boss. Acknowledge the fubar situation - let the team chime in - then get back to facts and actions.

Corollary (to the whole article): act/do the way you expect others to act/do in a small set of areas that are very important to you.

I've often seen leaders/managers get upset about the little shit while not acting the way they expect others to act in the areas they care about.

My step dad and a few bosses I've had over the years are great at this; they jump in and start doing the work and its amazing to see others jump right in along side them. Also, and this is key: they jump in and work along side their own reports who are doing the right things (this is a powerful message to a team).

One boss and mentor (and now a good friend) - would write documents/presentations and share them with an employee: "hey, I'm doing this presentation to _______ , check it out. I'd like you to ramp up and next month take it over. I'll be happy to help if required"

One time, some people were arguing one day about how to test some software and hardware. Boss observes the argument and comes in the next day with a little circuit board he made to help complete the tests. The model within the team from then on was often "hey I built this thing to help with the _____ ..what do you think, will this help?"

Another example, eng boss in a standup : "hey, I like how you did that thing with ____ in the code, I'm going to fork that and try an experiment". Comes back a few days later "hey check out this branch.. its a way to do _____; You can see what I'm getting at - and maybe figure out how something like this can work in the main codebase ..food for thought".

for that case - rather than resort to the debugger - I've always went through the code, come up with a theory of operation and then and instrumented it with either print statements or a scoreboard style struct in some shared mem to validate.

interesting to see "low end disruption" in action a la Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma.

I used to provide several options with background and rationale to my boss.

One day, he said, with a slightly frustrated tone, something along the lines of : "Andy: you're providing what appear to be good options and detail here - but someone in a "senior" position should recommend a path forward. Don't just give me 3 options that I need to then go and figure out for myself."

from that point on I've always tried to provide a hard recommendation - and rationale that includes a sort of decision tree approach. "We start with ______ [with good reasons to do so] then if X comes to pass we continue with it and if Y comes to pass we can pick a a different path with another option I have as backup."

The result seems to often be a discussion more about the upsides/downsides and decision tree relative to the business the organization is trying to support (a good thing) vs technical merits of the options which the technical team is trusted to be well versed in.

"I watched this YouTube video on X, it was interesting because..."

"talked to my buddy who works for X they did this thing _____ ...big mistake"

"I've been collecting articles about ______, interesting trends X,Y..."

edit: another good one: "I went to meetup, talked to a bunch of people and heard some interesting experiences with _______"

Here's my strategy whenever I have 1:1's or hallway "walking conversations" with execs/GMs that are at least 2 levels above me:

1) try to teach them something new or interesting that has been learned that they can add to their box of tricks/intel that they can pull out later in other conversations. Include people/orgs that are involved. Include observed successes/failures.

The goal is that when they leave the conversation - they've learned something - and they've pegged you as someone who has something interesting to share.

2) avoid status reporting - that can move up through the regular chain of command.

3) discuss side projects or other things orthogonal to the immediate business - but that might be value to another or future part of the business.

4) avoid too much of the "idea guy" stuff - keep the things talked about to things that are real and tangible. I'v'e found that idea's that often seem grand and cool to me on reflection appear rather naive and unattainable.

..take all of the above with some salt - your millage may vary.

I've agree with the difficulty you describe - even with 4 hours of interviews.

I've come to the conclusion that one (or both) of the following might be best:

- a small take home project with a reasonable due date (say 5-8 days) that is representative of the kinds of work that is expected on the job. Then, a 1-2 hour code walk through and presentation. Candidate should expect to build, run, debug and describe the code and architecture, tools choices, show source control use etc.

- a 3 month probationary period with a fairly narrow starting role that all new hires expected to be able to code are required to go through; ex: fixing bugs on project X; ramp-up and demonstrate _______ and _______ on project Y.

Doing the take-home project is certainly difficult for some candidates who may have a hard time carving out time to do it - but the hiring manager can offer some flexibility here - and this seems like a much better approach than taking online code quizzes.

The 3 month probationary period seems like a way to detect other on the job performance or interpersonal skills issues that may be a cause for disqualification.

I wonder - along the lines of PG's prediction - if those startups will also be patenting their meat-substitute products and what effect that will have on the pendulum swinging back to non-patented real meat / animal products.

Here's the oregon masonic lodge faq: https://www.masonic-oregon.com/faq/

I'm seriously considering something like odd fellows (thanks for reminding me of them) - exactly for the non-work social and community aspects - but with a secular flavor ( I have some family members who are in the Lions club). A buddy of mine mentioned "mastermind" groups too.

(ps. fwiw - portland or)

I posted this because it provides a good framework for thinking about how to approach consulting projects with potential clients.

It seems especially relevant after having read this article & thread from a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19133026

oh man, that is funny. took me a second to see what is going on there.

It feels like I am missing something obvious

I'm not sure if you're missing something obvious ..this is HARD, I totally know what you're feeling like.

I was talking with a buddy other day ago (also a consultant); I was grumbling about how clients have "urgent" projects and then proceed to sit on the project proposal for a few weeks...

His response went something like this: "look, there are reason's why consultants are called in to work projects - and those reasons are not that they are well organized, well equipped, well funded ..etc etc". Oddly, that made me feel a bit better.