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DNS is a database.

I still believe Scrum is a fad and yet companies have been spending obscene amounts on to push it down developers' throats for decades now.

Scrum spending is very rare IMO. No company I have worked at pays anything for scrum.

Because they think that a lot of people will want to get in on the historically massive and well-known companies, which would lead to outflows if the index doesn't pick them up fast enough?

It will lead to outflows either way. And I say that as someone who has been an Index fund evangelist for years, strongly considering selling my index funds to build my own collection of companies that I believe in long term.

So why not just stick to the roles we agreed on when buying in?


That seems ≈impossible in a world where you're running arbitrary, Turing-complete code. A modern consumer machine can do so many different things—often a bunch at a time—that there is always a massive amount of space to hide bad behavior.

There might be some way to design a system from the ground up to avoid this problem (some kind of declarative, capability-based security?), but retrofitting that onto an existing behemoth of a system does not really work.


What if it's interest rates?

I'm amazing at how anybody can discuss any questions about the tech job market without addressing the end of zero-interest rate policy. "It's interest rates, stupid" ought to be the first thing we consider, and stuff about AI/remote/etc only comes in when we have a specific reason to consider it.


I guess we'll know for sure when they come down again

ZIRP will never happen again

Will you or someone else be able to explain why not?

Part of the idea—which requires non-trivial effort from the leaders to build up sufficient trust—is that people should believe that their proposals (for their own work) are accepted by default. People don't have to wait for their idea to be accepted, but they have to communicate enough so that leaders can surface specific issues or mismatches only if they have them.

Wartime is exactly when centralized control breaks down the hardest, because conditions start changing incredibly fast and communication breaks down. There's a reason the phrase is "fog of war" and not "fog of peace"!

In management, what it means is having to repeatedly make decisions that are in the best interest of the company, but not necessarily in the best interest of the people on your team. This could mean needing to fire people, conduct layoffs, merge teams together and remove redundancies, strip a manager of their direct reports or reduce their scope, replace a leader, drive a major re-org that changes people's jobs in ways they may not like, shut down an entire project or team that isn't succeeding even though it's very popular or well-liked in the organization, own a technical decision that hurts one or two teams but helps the overall organization enough to offset it, etc.

Counterpoint: Name a great victory where top leadership mattered very little.

Or, for that matter, a massive upset where top leadership did not truly contribute significantly.

The "fog of war", AFAIK, tends to refer to general breakdown of communication (as you noted), but even fully localized control (terrorist cells, I suppose) are not highly effectual without coordination and informed assessment of the overall picture. The horrific triple (almost quadruple) attacks of 9/11/2001 would have been greatly diminished, probably by 2/3, if the attacks weren't centrally coordinated.

Wartime is exactly when centralized control is most needed.


Leaders can matter—a lot—even if they do not exercise granular, top-down control. They can provide the right context and motivation, articulate high-level aims, resolve issues and create the kinds of systems and cultures that do not need explicit direction.

A great illustration of this idea in context is Andrew Gordon's book on the Battle of Jutland, The Rules of the Game[1]. He mostly contrasts the leadership philosophies in the British Navy shortly before and during the Battle of Jutland. The British Navy became very top-down and procedure-oriented during peacetime, which did not generalize well to operating in battle.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/354137.Rules_of_the_Game


WYSIWYG pretty consistently leads to visual and structural messes. It's only going to "beat" everything else if you don't care about quality.

Most people don't—and don't have to—care about quality for their short, simple documents, but that is neither good nor inevitable, and it's always worth trying to do better.


Living in a cookie-cutter suburb full of parking lots and strip malls is not, in fact, a higher standard of life than living in a small town in Europe. The fact that we've somehow convinced ourselves that it is says absolutely nothing good about American postwar culture.

My guess is that they're currently nowhere near robust or effective enough to make that realistic. They need to bootstrap somehow, if only get good enough to convince hotel management that their approach will be realistic in the future.

This is my take too. Hotels wouldn't be happy if a robot knocked a water jar on the carpet, or scratched a wall, but a home owner? We're doing it for free and you asked for it!

Hotel's girl management might be more undertanding than I assume, though.


>girl management

autocorrect glitch?


Haha, yes, meant to write "hotel management". I'll update the answer to fix that.

in that case they could operate the robots remotely just like self driving cars sometimes

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