I like the fact that the list view is more like a notepad where you can just keep typing. Many other task list tools make you hit a few extra keys to create tasks and most of the time you just need a simple todo list. It makes it easier to convince others to use it too for the simple stuff.
Beyond that, I don't like how their board view (Kanban style) is hacked on and doesn't coexist with the list view yet, and a lot of the more complex stuff is done better elsewhere.
"...ended up with managers who slowly lost their technical skills and essentially fossilized, and couldn't make rational tech decisions"
There's a connection here. A technical manager can't make reasonable tech decisions unless they do some tech work, but perhaps we just need to be more clear that what you want is a pure project manager to check off boxes.
I think a good tech manager still respects a bottom up approach most of the time, but should have enough experience to push back when the group is steering in the wrong direction. A generic project manager isn't going to do that.
I've had a primarily technical career so far and am working on switching to engineering management in the foreseeable future.
Once I'm done with that switch, I don't want to be frequently making technical decisions, rational or otherwise - that should be the job of the tech lead on my team, with input from everyone else.
I will, of course, need to remain technical enough that I can understand whether my tech lead is making good decisions, as you say. I'll also need my team to respect my credibility enough to know that I relate to what they're dealing with, and to be able to effectively keep them unblocked.
But none of this requires sustaining continued technical contributions within my day job past the initial transition period, at least not once the company is above a certain size.
One of the best managers I've ever worked under (indirectly) was not technical and didn't pretend to be. What she did know was people and organizations.
When have you ever heard of a large org making a re-org to solve real problems after substantial consultation and with anything close to universal buy-in? She managed that, and well enough that she correctly used arguments from the rank and file to explain the re-org to other parts of the company.
That's the kind of mentor I'll want to learn from as a manager.
> I will, of course, need to remain technical enough that I can understand whether my tech lead is making good decisions, as you say
A lot of stress has been created for teams I'm on by semi-technical managers chiming in. By telling yourself you'll remain technical enough, I'd encourage you to define what that actually means. Thinking you know stuff that you actually don't is going to be a huge pain in some one's ass.
I once had a boss who kept pushing for us to to do things in a certain way using a remote API, but the API client didn't support the features needed to do the things my boss insisted we use. The boss wouldn't allow for a discussion on extending the API client because he was 100% certain he was correct when he was in fact 100% wrong. I started looking for a new boss after that.
Completely agreed. Knowing the limits of one's knowledge and accepting feedback when one is misinformed are important skills. I believe I already do that and I certainly don't plan to stop.
If I have a competent tech lead under me, I wouldn't be pushing for a certain technical way to do things except if the requirement came from some external constraint like the business or another team, and I would accept the limits of technical possibility.
I might share my technical input if it happened to relate to my area of expertise in a way that wasn't otherwise sufficiently present, but I want my team to know their stuff, not to defer to my technical knowledge out of some personal need to be the expert. Also my input != final decision, with respect to technical decisions, if I'm not tech lead on the task.
Even if I had to push for or against something, I'd do my best to defer to my tech lead (i.e. not me) to actually come up with and lead the solution. It's not a manager's place to prevent a tech lead from conducting a discussion on technically how to achieve the goal within the applicable constraints.
> One of the best managers I've ever worked under (indirectly) was not technical and didn't pretend to be. What she did know was people and organizations.
I don't mean to create a debate around sexism in the workplace, but could this be because in general in the US, we expect males to have a big ego while for women its OK to be not have one? As a male, I've had trouble with my ego getting in the way pretty often but I try to recognize that and be better about it.
You're right about the general pattern in the US, but that isn't the explanation in this case.
She made sure there were plenty of technical managers under her (she was a VP). The problems that really needed fixing were organizational, not technical, and she did something that a manager with a more technical skew of skills might not have known how to.
The managers in that company who tended to be good and well liked didn't have a big ego regardless of gender, even if (as in her case) she was appropriately aware and confident of the areas in which she was strong.
That leads exactly to the situation you described below.
> "...ended up with managers who slowly lost their technical skills and essentially fossilized, and couldn't make rational tech decisions"
I recently left my job at a respected social network over my new manager lacking the proper technical skills yet not accepting more reasonable solutions.
Case in point: imagine you have an API endpoint you normally hit with your service, periodically. We make a GET request to this endpoint but it also supports POST. The parameter sent is q=<some_long_string>.
It comes to my attention that this long string can get over 1MB long, at which point it causes issues with our service.
I bring up in a meeting that we should just POST to this endpoint instead of doing GET at all times because the data could be larger than 1MB at times. Makes sense, right? Well, my manager without the proper technical awareness basically pushed for us to check if the query is larger than 1MB and POST if and only if it is larger than 1MB.
I gave my two weeks a week after that and made it very clear to the upper management that this manager was the reason I was leaving and I felt like I was being stifled by having a manager like this.
But your manager was doing what I said he shouldn't do which is butt in on technical decisions. You should have talked to your skip and your team mates about your manager stepping over the boundary. You should have also told your manager you wanted to switch teams. There are plenty of other managers who don't work like that.
While that would satisfy the immediate problem of not having to personally work for such a manager, it doesn't solve the problem that the company has such managers.
As long as the company has clearly defined the roles in the way I've described there is no reason to leave. There will always be outliers who are not working as intended. That's human nature for you. The real solution is to try and help those people understand their role better, and if that fails, then get rid of them.
I mean no disrespect, but if you quit every time you have to work with a bad/obnoxious/egotistical/incompetent/delusional manager (or project manager), you'll never remain long in one job.
yes, to you and the other sibling, i didn't mean one bad apple ruins the bunch. i assumed reasonableness of the GP in that he didn't experience once bad interaction and bail, and that he left out all those details for the sake of brevity. because you know, most people are (by definition) reasonable.
i thought it would have been too much to qualify my remarks but i see i should have.
i only meant, if this is the norm for a company, leave post haste.
thank you for challenging my comment, it was well deserved.
As others have said, a good manager shouldn't have got involved at all with this discussion beyond "figure it out!". Technical decisions aren't their job anymore. They are there to solve people and organizational problems now--not technical problems.
We don't want managers steering anything. That's either the job of the group or the tech lead. The manager is supposed to manage the team the same way a managers manages a baseball team. You get the right people, give them the right tools, and let them play the game.
Exactly, this feels right to me. A manager's job should be to keep track of things but without micromanaging too much (a good example was checking being able to build your team's code on occasion etc.) and also providing the tools and protection they need from upper management so that the team can play the game.
In my previous team, I essentially had the tech lead role in the team but that role wasn't acknowledged with a title, although the entire team was very aware of it.
Ended up getting too much friction with the new manager and I left.
I got a job almost simultaneously as I left. It is much shorter commute, it pays more and it is more exciting. However it is unfortunate I had to exchange 3.5 years of rapport I've built at a place for these.
The role of a project manager is to have someone who can represent the user. The project manager should be talking to users, soliciting product feedback, getting bugs filed, and feeding this to the team.
The role of a manager is to manage the people on the team. That means helping them grow their careers, help them switch teams if they find something that would be a better fit, promote the teams work, unblock people, give feedback on how team members are communicating, manage meetings and fill in for team members so they can spend more time coding that sitting in meetings.
Basically a people manager is like a boxing manager. He gets the champ into shape, puts him in to the ring, and cheers him on. When the champs not fighting he makes sure the champ can focus 100% on training.
I think you mean "proDUCT manager" – a project manager usually focuses on schedule, balance of work, bottlenecks, and maintaining (but not defining) priorities.
It's pretty common for an engineering manager to do project management, and to some degree it's necessary: people management and priority management are closely related.
This has always been a form of Luddism. Tech is inevitable.
I view tech similarly to how I view sex-ed in 2018: it's been proven that if you do abstinence only education then bad things happen (teen pregnancies, stds, etc...). Your kids are going to grow up to be adults with bad tech habits if you don't start teaching them how to use it responsibly and protect themselves early.
Help them find good content. Have days where no tech is allowed on the weekends, but don't keep them away from it completely. Give them time to unwind with tech and choose stuff themselves, just as you probably do. Teach them about privacy and the problems that can come up with tech so they know how to deal with it themselves. Teach them that too much tech isn't good for you and you need to do other things too.
Monitor what they're watching and make sure you talk to them when things get out of hand. Expect to have some occasional issues, and treat them like you would an adult: are they sad? Is something going on at school? Is the tech affecting their ability to do other things at the time?
Eventually your kid is going to use tech. Teach them early how to be responsible with it.
I don't think it's accurate to call this a form of Luddism, when the whole point of the article is that it is specifically Silicon Valley technologists that have come to the conclusion that this tech is a net negative for children.
The first 3-4 people mentioned in that article were connected to Facebook and Youtube, so "no shit" comes to mind when you think about them having a questionable relationship with tech and their own decision-making. Part of an education for anyone should be to understand why those two sites specifically can be problematic even if sometimes useful.
It's not Luddism, because the "tech" in question here isn't technology but consumerism via consumer technology. When everything is abstracted how it is nowadays, the technological aspects are hidden from the end user. Teaching your kids to tap on a touchscreen doesn't constitute technology. Neither does knowing how to use an online search engine, or resource like, say, wikipedia. All of that an abstracted package that just happens to utilize technology on its backend, which the end user doesn't require to know or understand. All that is required is memorization, to familiarize oneself, mostly of UI elements and how all this abstraction links and works together. To be against the growing societal trend that fosters a dependency on these resources and the habits that form with them isn't to be against technological advancement.
And how are you supposed to teach kids about privacy when most consumer technology from the get-go is privacy harming? If you buy a child their first smartphone, do you tell them to not use SMS because it's plaintext, to not use any of the popular communications apps because they're owned by FB or whoever else, or to not use their phone at all because of cellular location tracking? How to you explain to them they can't watch Netflix on the TV, because the TV isn't allowed to connect to the internet to prevent it phoning home? No, convenience trumps all, and we all know the current state of things is that even if people are made aware of privacy issues, they'll disregard them if even slightly inconvenient.
There is no responsible way to "teach" consumer technology, at least not the way you mention. I mean, how exactly is the generalization "too much tech isn't good" relevant to technology? This is just common sense, it applies to everything. If kids are staying up late reading comic books and subsequently performing poorly in school, this is no different than the habit of staying up late on your phone. And, I reiterate, the latter has nothing to do with technology but with consumption. You either foster a (ever-growing) dependency in them, or you don't. And as you write, the former is inevitable, but then so is a lack of privacy, and so are the bad habits that are inherent to consumer technology.
I agree with you that consumerism is at least one of the important issues, which is why generic "tech is bad and scary" articles are still a form of Luddism. It's not addressing the actual issue, as you said. You're sort of making this either/or case rather than a connected whole.
Your kid is eventually going to have a communication device. You have to embrace the dangers of that and teach them about the issues they'll face and the compromises they'll have to make when using it. That doesn't mean you disable Netflix, but that does mean you can teach them about how the internet works, how companies make money off advertising and data, and that there are still ways to protect themselves to reduce risks. Your 2nd paragraph is all things I cover with my kids.
"No, convenience trumps all"
No, this is not what we should teach our kids. Compromises may be acceptable, but that doesn't mean convenience trumps all. One other avenue to explore is how our government can and should do more to make it harder for companies to abuse people in the name of convenience. That's not something that they do a good job of now, but hey, better education for people is part of the point we're discussing. Luddites don't even know the right questions to ask.
"There is no responsible way to "teach" consumer technology"
I disagree, but also don't think we have a choice. Either you learn better ways to teach your kids about tech, or you'll continue to have a system that abuses tech.
"This is just common sense, it applies to everything."
Tech risks are not common sense though outside Silicon Valley. I agree some of the tech problems are more about consumerism, in general, but there are plenty of issues that aren't just that. Avoiding tech won't stop those particular issues.
"And as you write, the former is inevitable, but then so is a lack of privacy, and so are the bad habits that are inherent to consumer technology."
There will always be risks and compromises with interacting with tech. Going back to my sex-ed analogy, there are also risks with sex, but we learn to wear condoms and practice safe sex to minimize those risks. This idea that we can't teach safer risk mitigation strategies for tech also is silly: ad blockers, privacy blockers, better password and identity management, how and when to share personal information, government and legal interventions. All of these are things that affect tech use and should be taught.
You're suggesting more or less what people are doing.
Yet you sneer at it, calling it Luddism.
You missed the point. It's not that there's FUD around tech. It's that the people who understand tech the most (see the headline) are restricting children's access to it more than you (the general reader) might realize.
We try and do all this - the hard thing I find is what limits to put in place and how when they do find stuff that feels less worthwhile or on the addictive side, which they obviously do. It's actually harder than it sounds I have found to set time limits - particularly with siblings as they play together, look over eachother's shoulders etc. and if your daily schedule isn't completely regular due to other activities. We've gone for making one day at the weekend screen-free but it often feels like that isn't enough.
I use a food analogy when talking about tech consumption with my kids, so I'm fine with occasional junk food so long as they're keeping a well rounded diet and getting exercise. It takes some work to get there, but so far, so good.
We have a pretty standard schedule:
- Tech off at 6pm every night and during dinners
- After school till 6 is basically free for all time if they don't have other obligations, which I count as decompression from the day. They hang out with neighbors too.
- Weekends we allow tech, but only if it's educational programming or they're creating something (arts, crafts, stop motion, game programming), so it's a bit more strict.
> Children receive abstinence-only education on driving until they turn 15 or 16.
Nonsense. It is commonplace for children to be introduced to driving gradually, from a young age. They are made familiar with it in an observer capacity from approximately the time they are born. Children typically learn to manage unpowered vehicles like tricycles and bicycles within the first few years of their lives—often as soon as they're physically capable of riding them. There exist low-powered electric (toy) vehicles specifically designed for use by young children; for those a few years older, bumper cars and go-karts are popular amusements. There are even places where one can go (with parental consent and supervision) to practice driving real vehicles on private property.
The one thing they aren't permitted before age 15 or 16 is legal permission to drive proper vehicles on public roads. However, adults who haven't passed the driving exams are subject to exactly the same restrictions. Those restrictions are in place not because it is felt that driving is harmful for children but rather because their lack of experience would pose a safety risk for other users of the roads.
Introduction to tech should still be age appropriate and have constraints. That's different from avoiding it completely. Some apps should be limited and it should be pointed out why to the kid so they understand the dangers.
We know there are problems with ads, privacy, and subtle ways our "free" apps try to gain our attention. Kids are more capable than you may realize of understanding those issues too, and the sooner you work WITH them to learn those issues and how to counter them, the better.
Having said that, if a parent doesn't have a healthy relationship with tech themselves, they're going to have a hard time teaching their children.
I mean, you still have to go and actually learn how to drive once you turn 15-16 before anyone actually gives you a license/their car. People put a lot of time into that. There's also the fact that too small of a child physically can't see out of the front window.
Driving is a much smaller scope than technology. If you restrict the development of technology skills, when you eventually reintroduce technology it will take months or even years to catch up to peers that have been using technology for their entire life.
You have more faith in human rationality than I do at this point. Making his content harder to get will reduce his legitimacy. Con men and frauds should not be treated with respect or debated. Also, Jones specifically used his platform to abuse people, so this is not just about being full of shit all the time.
>Making his content harder to get will reduce his legitimacy.
The hegemony trying to shut up someone's political speech only decreases legitimacy across people that were never going to believe him in the first place.
For everyone else, the conspiracy theory that The Powers That Be don't want anyone to hear his message just became conspiracy fact thanks to YouTube, Apple et al.
Jones is going to whine about being a victim regardless, since that's part of his character. He should be treated the same way nazi websites are and make it harder for him to make a profit off his bullshit.
As I said though, he used his platform to abuse people and should have been banned a long time ago, regardless of his lame conspiracy theories.
You and others didn't read my last sentence and keep hiding behind childish free speech absolutism. Jones specifically used his platform to abuse people. He should have been banned a long time ago. This isn't just about his conspiracy theories.
I use Zoho and like it quite a bit. It's free for up to a certain number of emails per domain (5 I think?). Surprisingly, its spam filter hasn't been noticeably worse than Gmail's for me.
Palmer Luckey has always been an interesting case to me since I can't figure out how a guy smart enough to build the stuff he has can be so incredibly dumb and out of touch with humanity when it comes to stuff like this.
That mantra some of you repeat to yourselves all the time only gets you so far. The lack of self-awareness is probably part of how this mess got started in the first place.
Sad but true. :( Empathy and maturity (intellectual or otherwise) develop independently of technical skills. A lot of people need to confront a lot of failure and not getting what they want out of life before they feel compelled to look in the mirror. If I was considered a VR wunderkind at such a young age and had so much early success with a cutting-edge company like Oculus, I would probably also be cursed with thinking I'd figured it all out already, and that my challenges were all external and business- or engineering-related.
Another way to think of it is as another variant of "success hides failure", although in this case it's his business successes hiding his personal failures from himself. It's like the pattern of conceited or arrogant people so often being deeply insecure- ironic but sad, and really obvious from the outside looking in, but not at all apparent to the individual.
I've worked mostly remote for over 20 years, both as an engineer and a business owner. I wouldn't give it up for the world.
However, simple fact: not all people are cut out for it. Some perfectly fine engineers are better in an office environment with other people. Sometimes an office environment is LESS distracting for those people, not more.
It also depends on where they are in life: A person with toddlers is going to have a better work life if they can get away occasionally. I had my own struggles with this and had to work through the new environment.
So, both are good and can work depending on when and where your life is at, and neither is perfect.
+1. I'm the exact opposite. I've been offered remote jobs a couple of times, but there's just something about going to an office, talking with people in real life, even getting interrupted during work is something i tend to like. Working from home, or even from a co-working space doesn't make me happy.
A lot of the things mentioned in this manifesto are perfectly valid for non-remote work as well. Making sure knowledge is written down, shorter and fewer meetings, 'results of work over the hours put in' seem useful in any work setting.
I tend to lean more towards the classic introvert where too much interaction will tire me out after a while, but I make sure to spend time with people I care about on the weekends to balance things out and that's usually the right balance. My week is devoted to work and taking care of the kids, which I love too.
I still go through peaks and valleys of how much outside interaction I'm craving though.
I completely agree with this. Probably due to being much earlier in my career, I haven't yet learnt how to separate my personal life from my work life well. I use the office and my commute to form a boundary, which works very well so I have a good work life balance, but as soon as I work from home I either get much less done, or I get much more done and have no free time. I hope to improve at this, in 10 years time (when I hope to own a house/have a family/etc) I'd hope that I'm working from home 1-2 days a week _every week_, but I'm not there yet.
I've been working remotely for the past half year (same job and same place, I just started doing it remotely) and I was a little afraid of that: mixing my personal and professional time.
For me at least it turns out that the fear was completely unfounded, before I always got in at roughly the same time and always left at the same time, leaving the laptop and phone on the office. Now while technically the laptop and phone are always accessible I've found that I've no problem in keeping my working time within a very strict schedule, normally I start at ~8.00 and usually at 16.00 almost exactly I'm logging out, plus the phone goes automatically into do not disturb mode until the following morning, effectively recreating my office working routine. Your mileage may vary of course but I was surprised at how easy it was to completely separate my activities and preventing them blending together.
The struggle never really goes away and you have to accept that. You will have peaks where you're excited about something and super productive working late and then valleys where you go weeks feeling way less productive.
Life will find ways to make you have to change your strategy over and over, but I think that's more about being human than anything to do with where you decide to work.
I've had the keyboard replaced twice for the exact same issue, the "B" key kept repeating. I'll probably have to pay extra if it happens again, but already you I've lost about days waiting on the repair since they have to ship it out.
I prefer to use an external keyboard when I can, but that can't be avoided all the time.
Beyond that, I don't like how their board view (Kanban style) is hacked on and doesn't coexist with the list view yet, and a lot of the more complex stuff is done better elsewhere.