As a software engineer, it’s basically impossible to survive poor work-volume management. You can try cutting corners, making extreme tactical decisions, triaging your issues, whatever…but the burn-down chart does not lie. A strategic decision by management (or worse, executives) to ignore burn-down rates is basically irrecoverable.

As a manager, be honest to your executives and your reports. Given enough people in your team, there is no tactical decision that will make your engineers work faster. Your only real option is to admit early that your deadline is untenable, and replan by reducing features, or extending deadlines. Whipping your engineers to work harder has never worked, and will ruin their trust in you forever.

As an executive, allow your teams to honestly report their estimates, and respect their pace of work. Pressuring your managers to give you better numbers is lying to yourself, unless you’re willing to talk about what features you’re willing to cut.

• #FridayDevAdvice

One phrase that has been coming to my mind lately is or else what. We need to think hard about which institutions and characters we count on to enforce the laws, rules, and norms that we have agreed to as a society when someone breaks them, because in the past decade it’s evident that in many, many cases involving some particular classes of people, there isn’t anyone there.

Laws, rules, and norms only mean something when there are people who enforce consequences for breaking them. If you can be an insurrectionist, convicted felon yet to serve time, an “adjudicated rapist”, a habitual liar, and still get to be president, do laws really exist at all?

Any time someone intends to knowingly break a law, rule, or norm, the inevitable question of or else what runs through their mind. When the evidence of their observation leads them to believe the answer is “nothing”, then there’s every reason for them to proceed.

Honestly, the answer to or else what has always depended on one’s wealth, class, family tree, or other privileged attribute. But the grand progress of civil rights and human enlightenment has been in the struggle to continually narrow that gap, to levy the same just and equitable consequence on anyone who broke the law. Within this process, it’s inevitable that people in privilege be made to surrender their special status under force (sometimes a great deal of force—ask Louis XVI). People look for such events to know that the system is working well.

In order for a society to have trust in their government, they must see this grand struggle play out within the institutions: they must see concrete examples of how today has brought forth more justice than yesterday. When there is a lack of evidence of progress, people will eventually give up on their institutions and begin to look for justice elsewhere—or begin hatching schemes to exploit the flaw in the system for their own gain at the expense of others.

• #opinion
• #politics

For artists, authors, and students, I think it’s only a matter of time until someone accuses you of using AI in your art or essay, and you’d have to prove original authorship or else get disqualified or penalized. I think the best current defense against this sort of accusation is building evidence of the process of your work.

If you write, enable version history in your word processor, and remember to save periodically. If you draw or paint digitally, make sure history is saved (some programs do this by default). If you code, ensure you have version control enabled, with meaningful comments about each commit.

When an accusation comes because someone uses some overeager “AI detector” program, show them a playback of your process. AI is (at least for now) unable to recreate the creative journey that gets to the end result, and probably never will, because there’s no money to be made doing that.

Version history is your best defense today. Consider enabling it, especially when your grade or income depends on it.

• #opinion
• #AI

They are tired of seeing things change. They’re tired of pride parades, of drag queens, of non cis-het people expressing themselves. They’re tired of gender roles being challenged. They’re tired of seeing unfamiliar shades of skin everywhere; they’re convinced that there’s an invasion of foreigners.

They want psychological comfort, they want a return to their childhood “normalcy”, they want these troublesome characters to go away, they want their neighborhoods to look the way it did when they were young, they want to be macho men and pretty women, they want to fall back on their stereotypes and have everyone nod in agreement. In other words, they want to “make America great again”, and they’re willing to hire Trump to make it happen.

And to be clear, I think they are wrong, and they harmed themselves gravely with this decision, because they’ve empowered people who will exploit them. I don’t think they realize just how much they’ve been robbed. Their realization will come far too late.

Read more…

• #opinion
• #politics

I’m deeply saddened and disappointed to learn so blatantly that a huge number of my fellow US citizens do not have my back. They don’t really care about law and order; they don’t really care about accountability or telling the truth; they don’t really care about the welfare of anyone but cis-het men (and even then only the white and Christian ones). These may not be the reasons they profess, but they are the effective outcomes of their vote.

I’m saddened that they would rather burn this country—and the world—to the ground before they have to care about other people, and they would elect the worst possible man to prove the point.

I’m saddened that they will eventually and inevitably also bear the pain inherent in their choices, but they may bear it with pride, because more pain will befall others. They’re ok with being robbed, as long as others are worse off.

It seems that we USians learn primarily through disaster (and sometimes not even then). But it’s clear to me today that there’s a pretty big group of us who seem determined to choose destruction rather than care for another human being.

• #opinion
• #politics