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bigethan

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An EM and general tech enthusiast

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the way this displayed in the Reina Sofia is fantastic. it’s set in its own room that you approach from the side so you get this experience of turning a corner and boom there’s Guernica. Gave me chills.

Generically:

- shedding of responsibilities (no longer an expert)

- shedding of preconceptions (new people, new me)

- being new means that people are looking for you to bring your new perspective, which isn't always the case at an existing role

- working with all new people polishes management skills as you can't rely on built up relationships

And then there's the choices you make when interviewing about what kind of company culture/new manager/new team you're going to. Like, if I care a lot about DEI/4-day work week/etc, and my current company doesn't, do I want to work to make that happen (if even possible), or go to a place that also cares about that which allows me to learn and iterate on something that I care about.

Agree with all the advice that doing it internally will likely be easier (per the "When you're doing something new, don't do something new" maxim).

That said, changing companies can enable rapid evolution. It'll (potentially) make it easier to be the manager you want to be, as opposed to the manager they think you'll be. In many cases it's likely better to do it where you are, but wanted to advocate for the benefits of the alternative, it's not guaranteed to be worse.

My path involved switching to a combo IC & manager at a place where I was an experienced IC, but my skill as a manager didn't really develop until I switched companies.

Amazon Echo Spot 9 years ago

The speed of iteration on the Alexa product line is really impressive. Nine months ago, Alexa and Google Home seemed like two sides of the same coin. But now it feels like there's almost no comparison, Alexa is gonna do more and get the skills and features that fit my needs faster.

I'm a Google Home owner, so perhaps it's a case where the grass is always greener :-)

I disagree about the "fun" part having just gone through this with my first kid. I agree with the Dutch, swapping (at any point in time) adds an edge of unfairness to the process:

- In a situation where all decent schools are oversubscribed swapping 100% encourages (and rewards) setting up your school list strategically. Which helps out families that have the time to collect the information needed and sort their schools appropriately (we spent a bunch of time researching / planning here, but knew off other families who _really_ got into gaming the system)

- In one of the meetings where the slide you linked in [1] was displayed, they offhand mentioned that the swapping order is done alphabetically. When asked if kids with A* names will get better swaps they kinda ignored the question and moved on. But how are multiple tied swaps resolved?

- Also, from what we were told, the swapping doesn't respect the "lottery weight" that locals, poor test score neighborhood kids, or siblings get. If that's important, shouldn't it apply to all phases of the process? (I'm aware the math here might get out of hand)

I started out thinking that the swapping was a good idea, but when I saw how much it encouraged and rewarded strategy in building the list of schools I changed my mind. It's not a fair process. It's a system that rewards families that have likely already been rewarded by society.

This was the one that stuck out to me, though my take based on the tone of the article is that it's an easy way to pretend that you care, even if you don't. If you do have a caring process, this fits in just fine ("you doing ok? need anything?"). But if it's the only kind words you hear in the process it's sure to be weird.

Without shipped features or a trail of closed tickets to point at, what will be your measure of career success?

In my experience making a similar move, I initially made my gauge of success too dependent on others. I had to sit and think to create new metrics and measurements outside of what was currently done in order to show my success.

It was "politics" not "highly charged topics" - eg a post about javascript frameworks was fine. And I have no idea how to tell if it's over or not.