lsinger

Much worse.

Does advanced search help P2s retain their discoverability

In my experience that's a strong yes, that works really well. I've been able to get helpful context on previous projects from a few years ago with none of the people still around just by search across all our P2s.

Especially the beginning where she recounts how she enrolled in a computer science university program without owning I found super interesting. I wonder if one could still pull that off today — there surely are still people without computers and smartphones, maybe not for financial but ideological reasons?

I’d say “one eighty-four” but of course the problem is that in german we mix up the order of the tens and ones.

And in fact so does English — it’s twenty-four but fif-teen (five ten, not ten five). In german we do that until 99 (nine and ninety).

Eggs are sold in packs of ten here (Germany).

Oh, and also packs of six. :D

Oh, hello there, co-author! :D

Wrong link? That’s a Japanese music album. Lovely but probably not what you meant?

It will probably be in ~20 years. :)

"Owning" it makes a difference in so far as that I can now be absolutely certain that no issue will be handled by the landlord because there isn't one. Definitely increases my perceived agency.

The kids are 6 and 9. I think they just feel more comfortable in the more compact living space.

Another anecdote.

Me, my wife, and our two kids recently moved.

Previously we lived in a large house that looked “special” — old but in good shape. Lots of wood and 4m ceilings. That was a rented place.

By chance we found a house smaller and not special at all — a mass-produced townhouse, basically — that we were able to afford buying. For a few us-specific reasons we really wanted to buy a house instead of rent it, so we went ahead.

I was a bit scared that it would be a let-down. A downgrade. The house would be less special. I would feel less special. I was certain I would regret it, but it made sense for the family.

The opposite happened. It’s a much nicer experience. The house feels more cozy and more modern. The kids have suddenly lost all problems sleeping in their rooms by themselves. They go play in their rooms. They never did that in the previous house. And being a townhouse, there’s a bunch of similar families around — suddenly the kids have friends.

I work remotely so there’s not a huge difference work-wise. But I’m much happier and more relaxed knowing the kids are happier and more relaxed.

He also founded the company that sells the food for this treatment:

Longo is the founder of and has an ownership interest in L-Nutra; the company's food products are used in studies of the fasting-mimicking diet. Longo's interest in L-Nutra was disclosed and managed per USC's conflicts-of-interest policies. USC has an ownership interest in L-Nutra and the potential to receive royalty payments from L-Nutra. USC's financial interest in the company has been disclosed and managed under USC's institutional conflict of interest policies.

I’m a freelancer, so this might not be a generalizable answer, but for every Euro I make, I pay about 0.3 Euros in taxes and health insurance.

The latter, it’s based on a percentage of your (taxable, I think) income, capped at what I’m paying (percentage-wise I’d be paying more if it wasn’t capped).

FWIW, there’s no notion of “in-network” or “out-network” here.

Example from Germany:

I pay 860€ per month for health insurance, which covers me, my wife, and our two children. There’s no deductible. Everything is covered, except for tooth replacements that are covered only at between 20% and 50% I believe. You’ll never get a bill from a doctor or hospital in Germany, except for those tooth replacements.

The most I’ll pay is a small copay for drugs, usually about 5€, but only for adults — drugs for kids are covered 100%.

Probably a bit simplified, but the above has been my experience so far (I’m 40).

The documentation alone is great — it helped me learn things about CSS I had been kind of using but had never fully grasped.

What Got Done

There are several paid SaaS apps and / or Slack bots that do this. It’s a viable niche, but has gotten somewhat crowded in the past few years. Earlyish example: https://iDoneThis.com (worked there 2014/2015)

It’s a relatively known piece of “wisdom” from storytelling:

“The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.” [https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/jacqueline_woodson_882873]

You can repeat a generalization over and over again. It sounds right — but it doesn’t stick. You can’t translate it into your own practice. You learn the words, but not the intuition.

Telling concrete stories helps us learn the intuition, too.

This simple framework helps me format my thoughts for presentation:

- What is the problem?

- Why is it a problem? (Eg, Business impact, impact on customers, etc.)

- What are we doing about it?

- What consequences do we expect (or do we already see)?

Depending on the medium, do a sentence, a paragraph, or a page for each.

Some more information on how Automattic hires:

- https://automattic.com/work-with-us/how-we-hire-developers/

- https://www.andyserong.com/2019/07/25/switching-jobs-and-app...

- https://danq.me/2019/08/30/automattic-00/

I haven't met a colleague at Automattic who quit a job for the trial. And, for what it's worth, my (anecdotal) gut feeling tells me that we have quite a few people with dependents -- kids, sick parents -- apply, work, and succeed here.

Work is mostly asynchronous. Not sure if that came through properly. If you have about 90 minutes time every evening you can go through the trial within a month.

Why go through all of that for an extra $250/wk?

You wouldn’t. If you’re interested in the job and Automattic are interested in you, you can do a trial. Because it’s a non-trivial time investment, they offer a small compensation.

If Google flies you in for a full day interview, do they pay you a full day’s salary? Or, any salary at all? They don’t.

I don’t think that companies in general have really figured out hiring. I liked the trial at Automattic much more than whiteboard coding and theoretical architectural discussions.

And it also helped me find out whether I would like to work there — it’s a trial in both directions, really. For the applicant it’s a much better way to figure out whether they like the company and its people than, say, things a recruiter tells you on the phone.

I can’t find the study right now, but there was one that evaluated predictors of job performance and found that only work samples and general cognitive ability were really usable and reliable measures.

As far as I know the hours are just a rough guideline, and then also used for billing. When I did my trial it was OK to do more or less, depending on what worked for me.

In the end, the trial’s outcome is more determined by results — what you did and how you did it.

I’m not sure about the source of the number, but I assume that that’s WordPress sites hosted by Automattic itself.

In the US, for example, it works a bit differently: everyone lies, and everyone knows it, but nobody wants to offend or confront anyone, so the results are mostly the same. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

<3

Can you make this available on other countries' stores as well? Specifically I'd love to see it on the German iOS AppStore.

I'd love to subscribe to something like that to get exposure to different, interesting foods. But I'd prefer something healthy — I wonder if there's something like that.

... or negative results are a lot less likely to be accepted for publication.

Oh, now I see they actually interviewed John Britton from GitHub on that. I don't buy this completely, though:

"But as far as...we don’t have a set, like, this is the way, right? There are multiple ways to use GitHub in the classroom, and it depends on what goal you’re trying to achieve."

Same is true for software development, yet they promote the GitHub Flow. Find the practices that work for 80% of the people / contexts!

Interesting. Interviewee can't use GitHub for their class because the servers probably are in the US: "Copyright is a big issue. For instance, we are working with a novel. In Canada, that novel is in public domain so it can be accessed online, but not in United States."