Meetings are one type of forcing function. Anything with concrete, time-bound deliverables is a forcing function, too. In a well-managed organization with trained & competent staff, it should not require meetings to ensure progress.

Some meetings, especially one on one, can be useful. It's very hard to say no to someone you've met, especially when your only other interaction is over the phone, email or chat.

Recurring meetings, especially at the developer level, are a waste of developer time.

I always found it easier to walk around, get personal updates one on one and integrate the information.

That way I wasted only a few minutes of each developer's time, instead of boring them all for an hour per week.

> That way I wasted only a few minutes of each developer's time, instead of boring them all for an hour per week.

I've been in companies where a standup with 6 people takes 45 minutes.

The company I'm in finishes standup with 8 people usually within 10 minutes and often enough within just 5 minutes.

The companies have very different approaches to information sharing. The first wants in-depth information and for everyone to have opportunities to speak up to offer help. A true team effort is what they want. The second wants everything to be as brief as possible, so you can get back to doing what you're paid to do.

I saw a lot more "progress" at the second company. I also saw a lot less collaboration and more "oops we need to fix this now" happening too -- even into production.

The first company definitely did things a bit slower. But that slower generally translated to better quality software: software that generally worked correctly on the first try, or problems were at least caught before reaching production. When an issue did arise in production, it could be safely and quickly handled and rarely with downtime, because rolling back was part of the extensive test suite.

Coming to truly understand the differences between approaches has been eye-opening, and has seriously changed my biases about "how" to go about writing software on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. Collaboration is good, but you have to have buy-in from the developers for it to work well. That was key and it took a lot of convincing each developer of the benefits.

I do not envy the stress the partnerships, strat ops and infra teams must be perpetually dealing with at OpenAI & Anthropic.

I have found something similar. I am easily distractible and if I don't have a written task backlog in front of me at all times, I find that when Claude is spinning I'll stop being productive. This is disconcerting for a number of reasons. Overall, I think training young people & new hires on agentic workflows -- and how to use agentic "human augmentation" productivity systems is critical. If it doesn't happen, that same couple of classes that lost academic progress during covid are going to suffer a double-whammy of being unprepared for workplace expectations.

Fwiw, I haven't spoken with any management-level colleague in the past 9 months who hasn't noted that asking about AI-comfort & usage is a key interview topic. For any role type, business or technical.

Could you elaborate on your last point please? What level of AI comfort are hiring managers looking for? And what tends to be a red flag?

The last job I got (couple months ago), the main technical interview was a bring-your-own-tools pair programming style interview, AI included, where they gave me a repo and a README detailing some desired features to add and bugs to fix. I didn't write a single line of code myself; I talked through my thought process and asked questions about what to consider from a technical and product perspective, while steering Claude through breaking the tasks into independent plans, reviewing the plans, coaching it to add specific tests, reviewing and iterating the tests, and steering it while it wrote the code. I got an offer the next morning.

Apparently at least one of the other candidates just tried to get Claude to 1-shot the whole thing, which went off the rails, and left him unable to make progress.

Based on my sample size of 1, the expectation right now is absolutely that you can leverage these tools to speed up your workflow, but if you try to offload the entire thing to a single hands-off prompt it leaves them justifiably wondering why they should hire you to do something they can do themselves.

I'm not even sure it's Christianity that makes people less sad (I would argue that it isn't). It's the civic community that churches often create that breed purpose & happiness. Churches aren't the only types of communities that do this, but they're by far the most common.

I would suggest that grocery quality is higher in the suburbs than in the city, but restaurant quality typically isn't.

That's probably true but a lot of people don't really eat out at restaurants regularly.

Your labor costs are far lower than coastal US... and that was 10 years ago. Ten years ago in San Jose I got 5.5kW installed for $17k. Because it was that long ago, this is something like 23 panels.

There are so many Vietnamese restaurants in San Jose it's really more similar to the Hanoi recommendation: you just have to experiment until you find the ones that resonate with your personal tastes. I recommend searching reddit for "best pho in San Jose" -- you'll find a number of threads, many of which feature similar sets of restaurants.

You need to consider usage patterns as you evaluate the cost/quality value curve, though. $35 for a Jansport for a school kid who will brutalize their pack regardless is probably a much better value than a $130 Osprey that is objectively superior but which a teenager would still brutalize to death in 1-2 years of daily school use.

Fwiw, my elementary kid is on year 3 with her Lands End pack (which is way crappier than the Lands End / Eddie Bauer / LL Bean school packs from the 80s-00s), and my two older kids use Osprey Nebula packs in high school -- both also on year three. The Osprey packs are terrific, but would be overkill for a younger kid, and we purchased them mostly because our kids bike to school and needed something that would comfortable carry 20+ lbs of crap.

And my partner and I are on the other side of that, we have like 12 packs of every price point and size accumulated over the years, I have a couple 20 years old, and I can’t think of a single broken feature. Im gentle on all my stuff so I don’t need ultra rugged high quality and expensive gear, and I suspect most people don’t (granted kids can be diff).

I still have two Dana Designs packs I purchased in the mid-90s. They're going strong and supremely comfortable (one daypack, one backpacking pack).

I'm also a semi-pro (technically I'm a pro but it's just a side gig) photographer who uses DxO. I really like DxO for color & exposure, as well as denoise, but I've gotten supremely frustrated at it's lack of more sophisticated editing functionality. I'm increasingly considering an Adobe subscription just to have something with more effective AI masking -- DxO stinks for this -- not to mention small things like generative fill to simplify stuff like powerline removal.