Short-form insights you can read in under 5 minutes.
In my career, I’ve learned to focus on an outcome I can influence and that I care about - building craft or helping people (coworkers, customers) - shape that into a purpose and measure achievement against it. I’ve had the privilege and luck to be rewarded for it.
Operating and growing a values and purpose guided organization is the biggest opportunity for personal growth in my career. Fortunately, our company is populated with truly brilliant, empathetic people and were doing it together. Mistakes aplenty but our time to learn is a force.
This is a gray area but in this particular case I feel the crime involved didn’t rise to the urgency where it outweighs the damage to trust in the contact tracing app.
“…men had the same outcomes regardless …women experienced better outcomes if the procedure had been performed by a female surgeon…
This result has real-world medical consequences for female patients… more complications, readmissions and death…”
No way to “predict” the specifics of omicron but as far as the trends: 1918-1919 Spanish flu pandemic came in three surges. https://buff.ly/3aKJBbJ
To alpha geeks, let’s stipulate your arguments up front: 1. You don’t understand the concern. 2. The dictionary definitions of words constitute their only meaning. 3. It ain’t broke so don’t fix it 4. We are wrong and you can explain it to us.
Team values and practices can be taught in schools and in the workplace. The cost of making tech teams figure it out for themselves is needless waste and harm, othering, failure and attrition. But by all means, don’t change because it’s going so well.
Technical thought leadership can be embodying and explaining a simple but counter-intuitive belief in different ways over and over again so that, occasionally, a small percentage of listeners truly comprehend it in ways that inspire them to improve their professional lives.
Expand your definition of who could benefit or be harmed by your work. Don’t assume it’s in your job description to trade the wellbeing of some to profit others.
Craft is deliberate practice towards mastery in order to create beautiful and useful things. Activities aligned to outcomes aligned to purpose.
I shouldn’t assume all universities throw tech students into group projects without teaching them about biases like false attribution error, behavioral anti patterns like micro aggressions, foundational activities like team and project lift offs. Does one?
Reviewer: “Tracing the code, this nested if statement is unreachable.”
Coder: “Let me explain what a state machine is.” (Grabs reviewer’s keyboard) “I’m pretty good at this if you want help.”
If one of these two is a man. The other a women. Hazard to guess which is which?