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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: February 2015

Links for February 28

It’s been a month since my last link blog post. That’s terrible.

Why is Google interested in owning the entire “.dev” top level domain?

Business Insider has a long piece on the downfall of Fab and its CEO. He turned a bad idea (yet another social network) into a good idea (flash sales of interesting goods) and then implemented a strategy that wasted tons of money and ultimately killed the company. Strategy matters.

It seems like everyone in the analytics infrastructure world is talking about stream processing. Martin Kleppmann’s post is a good starting point.

Will Yager explains why Go is not a good programming language. My main takeaway was that I don’t know or use any good programming languages.

The government can compel companies to disclose information about users and then prohibit them from reporting that they have done so. However, they are able to report that they have never been subjected to such a request. Such statements are referred to as “warrant canaries.” The EFF’s Canary Watch tracks companies that have issued these warrant canaries.

Jocelyn Goldfein explains how to ask for a promotion. Her blog is an excellent resource for all things HR-related in tech.

Branko Milanovic explains why human capital is not actually a kind of capital, and why the use of the term is harmful.

Jason Punyon’s explanation of what went wrong on the Providence project at Stack Exchange is a useful dose of reality for people making technology choices. The kinds of mishaps he describes are incredibly common and rarely discussed openly.

Don’t pile on

Originally I was just going to post a link to Jon Ronson’s New York Times piece on the tendency of people on the Internet in general and Twitter in particular to pile on. His piece is mostly about Justine Sacco, who famously posted an offensive (and possibly widely misconstrued) tweet before her 11 hour flight took off, and landed to potentially the most epic pile on in recent memory.

I had lots of thoughts when reading the piece, but one of those thoughts was that Sam Biddle is an irresponsible jerk. In fact, when I was done reading the piece, I wanted to tweet that Sam Biddle is an irresponsible jerk. The truth is that I don’t know whether he’s a jerk or not, and my opinion of him and his work is ill-informed and irrelevant. I didn’t even read the Gawker posts that were referenced in the article, and yet I was eager to pile on Sam Biddle to call him out for piling on Justine Sacco. I’m not sure what impulse that would have satisfied, but it wasn’t a healthy one.

This week, everybody’s piling on Vivek Wadhwa. I can see why, too. I agree with just about everything everybody who’s piling on is saying. I don’t think it’s healthy, though. Stating your principles and defending them is difficult and meaningful. Joining a herd of people piling on the jerk of the day is cheap and easy. Let’s not.

Engineering management homework: define CTO

Two attempts to define the job of a CTO, one by Camille Fournier, from Rent the Runway, and one from Greg Brockman, from Stripe.

The bottom line from Camille:

My advice for aspiring CTOs is to remember that it’s a business strategy job, first and foremost. It’s also a management job. If you don’t care about the business your company is running, if you’re not willing to take ultimate responsibility for having a large team of people effectively attacking that business, then CTO is not the job for you.

Greg’s post is more about how to adapt within your job to say happy and productive in a rapidly changing company. One thing’s for sure, it sounds like Camille is probably writing a lot less code than Greg.

I think that Camille’s description of a CTO is actually a solid description for any engineering management job, at the scale at which the manager works. Managers should be thinking about the business strategy for their team, and should take responsibility for applying the resources they can muster toward that business.

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