Posts

Code is not literature Interesting thoughts on code reading and how we should educate ourselves by exploring code that we didn’t write, from Peter Seibel.

Who Killed Net Neutrality? This is the most important tech story of the week, and everybody has chosen to write about it. This just happens to be the one I’m linking to. It’s by Tim Wu on the New Yorker’s Elements blog.

Former New York Times executive editor (and current columnist) criticized a straw man version of cancer patient Lisa Adams, arguing that she is: … the standard-bearer for an approach to cancer that honors the warrior, that may raise false hopes, and that, implicitly, seems to peg patients like my father-in-law as failures. He then added: Steven Goodman, an associate dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, said he cringes at the combat metaphor, because it suggests that those who choose not to spend their final days in battle, using every weapon in the high-tech medical arsenal, lack character or willpower. ...

I had one of those “reading your own obituary” moments this morning when I picked up the New York Times. In an article about how banks are trying to change the customs that coerce junior employees to work nights and weekends, the writers bring up the increased competition from the technology industry. Here’s how they put it: Though the prospect of a large salary and experience in finance still draws many college graduates to the industry, some ambitious students are considering other career paths, including those in the technology industry, famous for its employee perks like free oil changes or staff masseuses. ...

Tim Bray: Software in 2014 Solid summary of where things stand right now. Update: Sam Ruby follows up.

University of Rochester computer science professor Philip Guo has written a great post, shining a light on the bias in the computer industry in favor of people who look like him (or me). In it, he explains how he has gotten the benefit of the doubt in situations simply because he looks like what people expect a computer programmer to look like. It’s a first-hand account of what John Scalzi talked about when he wrote about straight white males playing the game of life on easy mode. ...

Felix Salmon: Netflix’s dumbed-down algorithms Good piece on the evolution of the Netflix user experience, necessitated by the transition from the “rent movies by mail” model to the streaming content model, and the licensing fees for streaming content online. I find that Netflix is OK if you just want to watch something, and mostly terrible if you want to watch a specific thing. The Netflix experience has been changed to discourage you from attempting the latter. ...

Camille Fournier: 2013: The Constant Introspection of Management Nice post on the hard parts of being a manager. One thing I’d add is that as a manager, the mistakes you make all too often have an impact on real people, an impact that’s impossible to undo. If you put someone on the wrong project and they spend six months not really learning anything, that’s six months they can never have back. It’s a tough job. ...

John D. Cook has a post on one of my favorite management topics, when to delegate. My thoughts on delegation are probably fairly radical. The first principle is that if a project strikes me as interesting to work on, I must delegate it immediately. Managers almost never have the bandwidth to tackle interesting technical problems, it’s the nature of the beast. When I delegate projects, I can remain engaged to a degree that allows me to learn and to hopefully add some value, without stalling progress because I’m too busy dealing with the other million distractions that are part of manager life. I tend to stick with working on the tasks that are too boring or repetitive to bother delegating to other people – they’re generally about the right size to get out of the way when I’m between other things. ...

Katie Siegel: It’s Not “Too Late” for Female Hackers Paul Graham’s comments in an interview behind the paywall at The Information (and unflatteringly excerpted by ValleyWag) have been the subject of much discussion this week. Siegel’s post gets at what was really problematic about them. I’m one of those people who started programming at age 13, and it has always been easy for me to advocate hiring people like myself, for exactly the reasons Paul Graham gives. Siegel ably makes the point that this line of thinking is unfair to everybody who doesn’t fall into his select group, but I’d argue further that it’s also just bad business. More on that later. ...