He admits the company will die if advertisers pull out, and his solution is to document it and let the world know that the advertisers were the reason the company died.
He seems to contradict himself. On one hand he says “fuck you“ to anybody pulling advertising like he’s throwing caution to the wind because he just doesn’t care, but on the other hand, he says the company is doomed if advertisers pull out, and that seems to really upset him.
So… Twitter is shutting down? There’s really no other plan other than blaming advertisers for pulling out, and ranting about how earth will judge them?
He's saying he'd rather let the company go bust rather than give into blackmail.
Which seems nuts to me. I mean they are not blackmailing as far as I can see, just not wanting to be associated with him endorsing anti semitic stuff and pizzagate conspiracies.
Many of us might feel that way internally or in private when we’re frustrated, but few would go up on stage, say that in front of the whole world and wait for applause afterward. Regardless of his political opinions or personal temperament, he seems to have lost touch with reality.
The reat of us who run businesses would say "oh, when I do X, I lose revenue. I will not do X anymore. Maybe I will do some anti-X and try to grow it instead."
What, no? He’s behaving erratically, flailing, and blaming everyone but himself for his failure as a leader. That’s not how we all act, and clearly narcissistic behavior. The sociopathy is evident the other day from his “graveyard” tweet.
He's responsible for his actions and words to his employees, remaining customers and co-investors. How's this behavior not sociopathic? he's not accounting for the impact to others.
I've been an engineering manager for a couple of years. I'm still expected to do 50% engineering and 50% people management. As the article describes, it is a struggle to do both well. I don't see this responsibility split changing in my current role. I do often wonder what it would be like to be 100% people focused, and whether or not I would miss engineering too much.
When my role first changed, I was very intimidated by doing one-on-ones. I never felt satisfied with the one-on-ones/catch-ups I had with the managers throughout my career, and I wanted to make sure I was doing a good job with that aspect of my role.
I initially did lots of research on how to do one-on-ones, but it was only after getting experience talking to people that I finally felt comfortable. I started getting some nice feedback from my lines, so I wrote some thoughts about how I like to do one-on-ones:
[link redacted]
I think good one-on-ones are very important to keep people happy and productive. I'd recommend any new engineering managers to spend time learning how to do them.
Regarding the advice in your link, how can an employee trust their manager when they're trying to get them to open up like a therapist, while at the same time gathering notes to use as "evidence" in an annual review? This is an inherent conflict of interests, and I've always regretted revealing any difficulties to managers. It usually comes back to bite me, as in "doesn't work well with others," or getting passed over for tech lead because I expressed doubts about my leadership abilities.
Speaking as another engineering manager, the advice in that link is pretty shallow. I think it encourages a rapport that feels efficient for the manager but is plain insubstantial for the report.
> I have found 30 minutes is the ideal length of time. Longer meetings tend to lead to us talking about normal day-to-day work, or going off topic altogether.
Compare this bit of advice to Andy Groves's, the former CEO of Intel and big evangelist of 1:1's:
> "I feel that a one-on-one should last an hour at minimum. Anything less, in my experience, tends to make the subordinate confine himself to simple things that can be handled quickly.” [1]
People need time to express themselves; to air their resentments, frustrations, disappointments, disillusionments. Cutting a report off before they can tell you what's really on their minds or in their hearts, does not seem like "quality 1:1 time" to me. Or at least not in the context of managing high performing knowledge workers.
It's kind of ridiculous for a company to 'expect' 50% engineering and 50% people management. It should be fluid and vary depending on the skill level of the team and the complexity and criticality of various projects over time. It shouldn't be fixed at 50% like some magic number.
Agree. For all but the smallest of teams, this just means being both a poor manager and a poor engineer.
Trying to balance this was one of my first mistakes as a manager. I was a roadblock to shipping things because of my limited coding bandwidth, and I wasn't spending enough time focusing on growing people, having career conversations, ensuring my org was structured for success, etc.
Finally putting down the keyboard was the key to me being a much better manager. Yes, I don't have the depth on every framework like I used to, but I still have over 15 years of hands-on-keyboard experience and the "engineering" part of "software engineering" is less about fluency in languages, but more about how to effectively set goals, mitigate impact of external dependencies, design for performance, etc. That knowledge is still very useful.
My hope is that those illustrate the 'spirit of the law' of taking both responsibilities equally serious. An issue is when middle management, so often comprised of literally minded number crunchers, interferes.
The agenda for one on ones should be driven by each direct report!
If your meetings are stale ask them to start setting the agenda. The time is for them, let them take the lead.
As a basic format, try 15minutes for them , 15minutes for you
The time for them should be whatever they want.
The time for you should be about directing them to what they should do next, understanding if they have roadblocks, giving feedback, identifying opportunities for coaching, and thinking about their long term progression.
Their concept is based on the idea that the key activities of all managers should be primarily focused on one on ones, feedback, coaching, and delegation.
If you do all 4 well then you will be able to grow your direct reports career and help them to better align their output with their career goals and also what the business needs them to deliver.
I'm also in the same boat but my split is 80/20 engineering/managing. It may be the product of whose on my team (many independent and senior level devs) but there are those who need more help/mentoring/etc.
Contrary to a lot of the other commenters, I feel like this team works but it may be a product of it being made up of these people rather than a broader generalization.
In League of Legends, you only require the following default key bindings on the keyboard:
(The following are crucial)
1. Q [champion ability]
2. W [champion ability]
3. E [champion ability]
4. R [champion ability]
5. D [summoner ability]
6. F [summoner ability]
(The following are less crucial, but almost required)
7. 1 [activate item 1]
8. 2 [activate item 2]
9. 4 [activate trinket]
10. B [teleport back to base]
Pressing numbers 3 and 5 through to 7 on the keyboard, by default, are to activate additional items, but it is very rare that you would have the need to activate more than 1 or 2 items in the game. I would say they are not required to be bound at all (or at least, I never press them).
Other useful keys to use in the game are Ctrl, Alt and Shift. They are modifier keys, which when pressed with the other key bindings or mouse clicks, allow the player to perform different tasks.
Of course, not all of this functionality needs to be bound to a key. Everything can be clicked with the mouse on the game's UI if need be. However, clicking the UI is rather slow, and I think it would be safe to say that a mouse similar to the Razer Naga would allow you to play League of Legends at a rather competitive level, with only using the mouse.
Without being told to use a VM, installing Linux, buying a Mac, and without settling for the 2.0.0-p481 release of RubyInstaller; is there any way for a user to install this version of Ruby on Windows?
I don't mean to come off as an ass, but just curious.
Why do you want to develop ruby (or anything else) with windows? Especially since most servers (where ruby is popular) are linux servers? All colleagues I've had running windows always seem to have to jump so many hoops that the *nix crows don't.
Also, no unix shell and package managers, how do you deal with it?
I have used Ubuntu and Mac OS in the past, but I am currently favouring doing all of my work on Windows. All of the tools I need run perfectly fine on Windows (and many of them, not on Linux at all), and it would be a hindrance to switch to another operating system.
It is only Ruby which is difficult to keep up to date on Windows. My question was to try and find a solution.
I have tried using a VM (VirtualBox and VMWare), but it is not a desirable work flow. I currently use RubyInstaller.
I'm guessing that you'll probably have to build it yourself. Are you sure you want to use it, though? I haven't installed anything later than 1.9.3 32 bit on Windows since I discovered that that was the latest version that Nokogiri had pre-built binaries for, and using it with anything newer would require me to figure out how to build it against that version. It seems that anything newer than that may be a minefield of bugs on Windows.
But it is still my preferred language for scripting and automation on Windows.
Thanks for the response. Ruby is the only tool I currently use in development on Windows which I have flagged as a potential problem to maintain in the future. Thankfully, Ruby is a rather small part of my workflow, so waiting on RubyInstaller is fine at the moment.
My question was more of a concern for the future of my current dev setup. I was hoping someone on HN would know of a better solution to install Ruby on Windows manually, without having to wait on RubyInstaller.
> Without being told to use a VM, installing Linux, buying a Mac, and without settling for the 2.0.0-p481 release of RubyInstaller; is there any way for a user to install this version of Ruby on Windows?
Yes, you can build from source.
OTOH, unless you want to develop windows-specific Ruby software (or work specifically on improving Ruby-on-windows), you are probably better off using a VM -- vagrant is your friend.
Fortunately this release does include a Windows release. The home page doesn't yet include a news item for this round of releases, but 2.1.3 is available on the download page.
Personally I'd just hold out for awhile until the community updates everything. I personally am waiting for Brightbox to update their Ubuntu ppa packages before making the switch, as that's what all my production Ruby apps are running on.
I am not sure what the relevant tickets were, but I know that Luis wants to release, but some bugs in 2.1 were holding him back. Best ping @luislavena on Twitter.
I have never used Cygwin before. Thanks for referring me to it. I am currently trying to find the simplest solution for keeping Ruby up to date with the current releases, but having a hard time doing so on Windows. I will experiment with Cygwin at some point.
As someone who is moving from the UK to HK in 3 months, with no job or visa secured, and attempting to bootstrap my (first) startup; this scares the crap out of me!
Are you moving to HK for a specific reason? As it's one of the world's most expensive places and although things are slowly improving it's not a particularly great place for startups.
Ya, HK is pretty much dominated by financial; no one goes there to work in tech, and there isn't much of a talent pipeline. Singapore, Bangkok, Shenzhen, shanghai, Beijing are better.
Coincidentally, I'm in HK on holiday going back to Beijing tomorrow. I'm suffocating in this small hotel room....my wife did a lot of shopping, though.
Curse you advertisers for ruining his company!