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Silicon Valley may not be fixable
I’ve come to an upsetting conclusion about Silicon Valley. There’s always been a hold-out hope that I’ve had that it could be fixed, and the balance of power restored to where it belongs (lifelong...
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Cheap votes: political degradation in government, business, and venture capital.
I’ve written a lot about how people in the mainstream business culture externalize costs in order to improve their personal careers and reputations, and the natural disconnect this creates between them...
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Can “Agile” break the Iron Triangle? Can open allocation?
I’ve written a lot about the MacLeod-Gervais-Rao model of the corporate organization, which I’ve dissected at length starting here. This exploration is going to start with many of the same ideas,...
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Tech hiring, poker, and (not) playing to win.
If you’ve been around this industry for long enough, you’ve heard plenty of hiring managers complain about the difficulty of attracting and keeping good people. Often, you hear excuses that bear no...
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Are Haskell engineers second-rate? (Answer: no.)
Before I risk offending anyone with my provocative title, I’ll give away the answer: it’s “no”. However, there’s an interesting discussion to be made of this. Not to pick on Haskell or Erlang or...
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It might be time for software engineers, especially in Silicon Valley, to...
Should software engineers unionize? Two years ago, I would have said “no”. In fact, I did say “no” two years ago. At the time, I was unduly influenced by the negative reputation of unions in this...
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An insight on how to fix technology’s Damaso Effect
I’m going to start this analysis by focusing on a negative pattern of behavior that seems unrelated to technology’s Damaso Effect. The Misogyny Loop I know someone (I’ll call him “Stan”) who’s about 30...
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This comment was censored by Y Combinator’s Hacker News.
The news topic was Alan Eustace’s recent skydiving record. The Hacker News comment thread is here. My comment is here. The link may not work. Here is the text of it. Maybe this is cynical but I dislike...
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Leadership is not a stepping stone
This line of thought was inspired by a tweet from Carter Schonwald: Soo… I guess pre series b companies depend on engineers to over estimate the value of equity In exchange for salary discount?...
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The back-channel culture, Silicon Valley’s war on privacy, and the juvenility...
One of the more execrable Silicon Valley institutions (and it’s not like there’s a shortage of moral failures in the contemporary Silicon Valley) is the “back channel” reference call. This is when a...
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On the supposed aversion of software engineers to “the business”.
There’s a claim that’s often made about software engineers, which is that we “don’t want anything to do with the business”. To hear the typical story told, we just want to put our heads down and work...
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2015
I haven’t written much lately, in large part because I am trying to change course in terms of what I write about. A change of focus? Over the next year, I’d like to steer my focus toward more technical...
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There is no “next Silicon Valley”, and that’s a good thing.
I recently moved to Chicago and, a couple weeks later, found myself reading this article: Why Chicago Needs to Stop Playing by Silicon Valley’s rules. I agree with it. I also want to speak more...
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Why high-deductible medical insurance often doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.
“There was a friend of mine growing up, call him Tom, whose father was a health insurance executive. Once a month or so, he’d come for dinner and sleep over because his Dad was just in a foul mood,...
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Hypochondria isn’t what people think it is, and the U.S. medical system makes...
Trigger warning: discusses panic attacks and health problems. Use caution if you’re sensitive to health anxiety or panic. I suffer from health anxiety, often called hypochondria. In addition to...
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Open-plan offices, panic attacks, all in the game.
I’ve been waiting to write this piece for years, just because I’ve never seen an industry be so hazardously wrong about something. Here we go… I’m a programmer who suffers from panic disorder, and I...
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Yes, I’ll defend Daylight Saving Time
For those unfamiliar with U.S. timekeeping, we “lost an hour” of sleep last night, at least for those who slept according to clock time. Immediately after 1:59:59 in the morning, it was 3:00:00. We...
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Never Invent Here: the even-worse sibling of “Not Invented Here”
“Not Invented Here”, or “NIH syndrome”, refers to the tendency of organizations to undervalue external or third-party technical assets, even if they are free and easily available, when it is taken to...
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Sand Hill Road announces Diversity Outreach Program
I’m pleased to announce that I’ve succeeded in coordinating a number of Sand Hill Road’s most prestigious venture capital firms, including First Round Capital, Sequoia, and Kleiner Perkins, to form the...
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Abandon “sorta high”/”P1″ priority.
It’s fairly common, in technology organizations, for there to be an elaborate hierarchy for prioritizing bugs and features, ranging from “P0″ (severely important) to “P4″ (not at all important) and for...
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