He/him. Web engineering leader deep in community building & education who thinks PHP-backed hypermedia is 💯🚀.
"Deal with evil through strength. But affirm the good in man through trust. In this way, we are prepared for evil, but we encourage good." — Master Kahn
| Homepage | https://lincolnwebs.com |
| https://linkedin.com/in/lincolnwebs/ | |
| My Project | https://github.com/linc/nitro-porter/ |
I am occasionally reminded I take "more vacation" than anyone else. It's unlimited PTO. I use 6 weeks.
1. It's a reasonable amount. Everyone else should take more. Fix that.
2. There is no neutral reason to say that. It's passive-aggressive, full stop.
3. Show me 1 thing that went less-good because of my PTO. Anything. Try me.
4. Not all PTO is vacation. 40% of mine is community service. Talk to me when you're doing so much for your community it requires PTO to sustain.
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I firmly believe that when someone tells you “their side of the story” you are not getting half the story, you now have 10% at best.
Overconfidence about this is how most miscommunication begins.
Getting to ‘half’ is an exceptional amount of work.
TBaaS: "Trust-breaking as a service"
My O'Reilly book: "Scaling Broken Trust with AI"
Buzzfeed article: "7 signs your existential dread is just the grief of broken trust at Internet scale"
An #LLM is bad tech because it both breaks trust and encourages the breaking of trust.
Everything in software development must persistently strive for the opposite or we have no chance of success.
Tesla's so-called "autopilot" turns off automatically a fraction of a second before a crash, so the driver might be blamed even though the driver has no time to respond. (It's been that way for more than a year since originally publicly documented by the NHTSA, this is clearly a choice someone made.)
(This is just one example out of many terrible things in their software.)
And while Tesla management clearly just loves doing terrible things, an individual engineer implemented this.
You don't want to be that engineer:
1. It's immoral, and a dereliction of your professional duty.
2. If your action ever goes to court, there will be some very expensive lawyers trying their best to make you the scapegoat and claim you are either incompetent or malicious, but you very definitely did this on your own.
When Volkswagen cheated on emissions, the CEO blamed... the engineers: "This was not a corporate decision, from my point of view, and to my best knowledge today. This was a couple of software engineers who put this in for whatever reason... some people have made the wrong decisions in order to get away with something that will have to be found out." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal#US_Congressional_Testimony,_October_2015).
And most of the time the things you'll be asked to do aren't as bad. I know someone who was asked by their manager to put a CE mark on products that were from the non-CE factory. These devices weren't safety critical, this wasn't going to kill anyone. But it's still fraud, and the incentive was still there for the company to make this engineer the scapegoat.
The engineer said "no"... and that was the end of it. Sometimes that's all it takes to enforce standards.
If "no" isn't enough, asking for something in writing (signed and dated) is a good next step. Chances are that will be the end of it, and meanwhile you can start looking for a new job.
Elon Musk is obsessive about the design of his supercars, right down to the disappearing door handles. But a series of shocking incidents – from drivers trapped in burning vehicles to dramatic stops on the highway – have led to questions about the safety of the brand. Why won’t Tesla give any answers?
The most concise leadership mantra I have ever heard is @rhappe’s: “Control is for amateurs.”
I choose hard mode every day and regret every time I failed to do so.
The problem with hiring competent leaders as software engineers is that they immediately sniff out when company leadership is off the rails and start asking pointed questions about it. 😅
I guess it would be less of a problem if I wasn’t allergic to both lying and causing anxiety.
If you do your best to manage humans thoughtfully (i.e. in ways that avoids exerting power/control over them) it never gets any easier, because the challenge is infinitely deep.
Today, once more, I commit to trying.
M. Arjuna
Nick Knudsen
Itamar Turner-Trauring
Phil Johnston