Nope, this isn’t Downton Abbey. The further you go in competitive tennis, the tighter the community gets. Also, playing tennis and stringing rackets are two distinct skillsets. For elite players the strings are just as crucial as the racket itself. Check out this interview with the stringer who traveled the globe with Federer for 15 years, ensuring he had nine freshly strung rackets for each match.
Sounds very similar to the Seagull manager, described as someone who "flew in, made a lot of noise, dumped on everyone from a great height, then flew out again, leaving others to deal with the consequences"
To be fair the purpose of hierarchy is to delegate execution, and evaluating and communicating any nuance or challenge involved in aligning micro-executive realities with macro-strategic goals is the responsibility of senior management. So many people criticize Musk, and many criticisms are probably well reasoned, but IMHO the general line of criticism "he doesn't hang around to sweat the details" is exceptionally naive given the scope of his businesses. His job is perhaps 40% politics and macro-economics, 50% shareholder perception management, and 10% actual leadership.
I was curious too because reading from zero context, it sounded like a founder was in jail. Turns out "DJ OT" is their mascot, and the cartoon on the page makes a lot of sense.
I've definitely felt this problem! Web app development can feel like 'playing detective' and chasing down lines more than problem solving. I'd download right now but will it help debug chrome extensions?
Hey I just tried this out. Most of the content and features look "great" but the auto-generated crossword is a game changer. How come you don't mention this in the launch?
GPT-2 was launched in 2019, followed by GPT-3 in 2020, and GPT-4 in 2023. RAG is necessary to bridge informational gaps in between long LLM release cycles.
Whenever I was in a meeting with a former Apple employee who wanted to win quickly. Their next sentence always started with “when I was at Apple…” and ended with “Steve” yelling at someone or proclaiming “this better not break or everyone here is fired”
What's your advice to someone who lives this dynamic? I've experienced it, and felt it slowed down my career trajectory. I want to make a change in my story and will try my best to listen.
I've lived this dynamic as a manager. I've come to see it as a problem of "ownership" which obscures a larger problem of role confusion. When competent people try to be responsible & knowledgeable with work but lack control for that work to be done well. Think "engineers are ready to launch a new feature but the PM struggles with written English and can't draft an email." What do you do as an engineer?
There's a few usually bad options like drafting the email yourself, teaching the PM english, etc. Whatever is done, the best engineers I've seen know their job and their role, and can tell others. They balance their sense of responsibility with the reality of what they control. They price work outside of their job role, to be paid in political capital, e.g. a promotion.
If the professional does not define their role, other people will do it for them. If the professional avoids pricing, they're saying their time is free. That person get marked as a patsy or a cog. Someone who messes can be dumped on and who, thanks to corporate Pavlovian conditioning, gets work done without upsetting the status quo. The more messy the work is, the less control you have, the more time you personally need to sacrifice. It's a recipe for burn out, role confusion, and other people's ideals becoming your performance standards.
This speaks a lot to me. If an integration was new, or I'd never managed resources before, or worked cross-org in any way, I'd just pick it up. I'd even do the PM's job of interviewing the customers, validating if we were targeting real painpoints, and attempting to drive product direction.
Over a few years I worked on several projects, which all became the company's product suite. They all gained adoption, became very valuable and were sold to several customers, but they were not reliable. Even less so after they moved me off. But they were solving real problems, and customers were still happy, and so the company still kept them alive with bigger teams.
The company attained unicorn status, but I never really got ownership of any 1 project or product. I'd get increasing requests for help across the growing product suite, was able to help effectively, and simultaneously took on new feature development work.
In the latter part of my time there, I found out I may have been in the bottom quartile of pay for the team I was in, while being perceived as the top performer by coworkers.
I was in a slow 'burn out' but never fully checked out. Maybe because I think I rarely put in over 50 hours a week. Never touched comms during weekends.
I think I found myself in this situation believing it was "generally good." Both for me to learn more things, and for the company to succeed. Then I would be rewarded with promotions in the future. Although I had fun and felt some purpose, the fast career growth did not follow.
I was in the mindset to follow Sheryl Sandberg's advice “If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat.” But what ended up happening was the people who knew how to ask for better seats actually got them.
I made a UI that allowed call center managers to search through historical transcripts by keyword. Previously they clicked through a table of chatlog popups and CTRL+F'd for hours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sRSqSupzyM