yah - our weekly 'all hands' seems to basically be: The Marketing Team marketing the marketing team to the rest of the company.
It's frustrating; and worse, we've had our CEO several times send group messages to scold people for having their camera off, or worse (my sin), camera on, but obviously doing work and not paying attention. It's pretty gross.
Massive corporations are usually very risk-averse, and you end up just mostly being a ticket-monkey. The problems you're tending to solve are mostly pretty boring - unless you're a rock-star and they've hired you to do cutting edge R&D (and in this case, can be the coolest and most rewarding gig out there).
But at startups, there's always a shit ton of interesting problems to solve (usually too many by too few people - depending on the stage). This frees me up to be creative, and also to pick and choose my priorities.
As far as your specific complaints:
- 'I can't bare (sic) the devs that go out of their way to work weekends without being asked'; IMO this depends on personal disposition, and also team culture, and sadly, it's hard to find a place to work where they don't try to force people to burn out one way or another. This does kind of suck when you've got team members that do this and kind of fuck things up for everyone else.
- 'I can't bare (sic) the endless meetings, constant micromanagement'; Again, this is mostly team culture, and how teams are organized, and there are ways to fix this, but in my 25+ years of experience, once an organization heads down this path, it's very difficult to fix. It's the route to becoming ineffective as a group, and it is soul-crushing to be a part of this. I'd encourage anyone in this situation to get out of it ASAP. Complaining will never ever fix it. Micromanagement, of course, is 100% just incompetent managers. Which is also difficult to fix.
- 'bringing the stress home to my family'; I think this is more of a personality issue with the individual. 10 years of therapy, and I wasn't able to make headway on this. Some jobs were absolutely worse than others. Personally, when I've had management who goes out of their way to compliment my work verbally, this goes a long way to relieving my anxiety and stress. It's very helpful and costs the company next to nothing. But at the end of the day, even those companies, I've had to deal with either company failure or layoffs (which is a form of company failure), and that just validates why I'm stressed. So it comes down to how you deal with that stress, and the only way I can see it is to be independently wealthy so you don't need to work in the first place. That's just my internal rationalization though.
>And trust me, confidently believing in fiction is much much worse for effective planning
Absolutely TRUE - and this becomes a political problem in some organizations, depending on whether you're around people who can handle hearing the truth (whether they just don't want to hear bad news, or whether they don't understand complex webs of interdependencies that can cause time estimates to be wrong).
Oh, yes, that book was great. The helicopter one is pretty unique, and there was another one that is VERY simple to make, and you end up making a flying-ring, and that plane actually performed beautifully. It flew straight and fast; wasn't much for long slow glides, but it never failed to impress people - especially with it's simplicity of construction.
The problem was; he also used very thick impasto-style brushstrokes. With Oil Paint, this often takes a long time to dry (and leaves a physical texture which will be visible if you overpaint that).
Some of Van Gogh's paintings are so thick, that underneath an outer layer of dried paint, there's still liquid paint trapped underneath, which may not dry for another hundred years.
But yeah, he was known for re-using canvases, as were many impressionist and post-impressionist school painters.
Will this internal drying of the liquid paint affect the looks of the painting in any way? ie will the painting look different in 100 years than it does today, assuming it is kept perfectly preserved and untouched in the ideal environment?
No, but it can lead to trouble when the painting is re-framed or cleaned because any kind of manipulation of the canvas can crack the paint. This is specialist work (especially on paintings with this kind of value) so they're in good hands but the problem is much less pronounced with thinner layered paintings.
For months I had to drive my Yarris up and down a pretty rough track - no gravel, full of potholes, just hardened earth and stones.
The Yarris with its little go-kart wheels handled it like a champ, even if I'd bottom out almost every single time. Even climbed up it fine provided you kept it above 25km/h all the way :) Took to a mechanic later and he said the suspension and undercarriage were fine.
