People managers

It’s easy to read something like The Case Against Project Managers and find it convincing:

I see this compartmentalization creeping further and further into tech companies, something that has been viscerally apparent as I have been looking for work lately. Historically I have had interstitial roles between organizations, but the current hiring landscape is asking me to pick a category to slot myself into.

As we apply Taylor’s principles to job roles and responsibilities, it is unsurprising that the workers comfortably settle in to focusing on their assigned tasks, without much critical thought applied to whether or not the task should exist. I was asked in a job interview if I would want to attend planning meetings about a feature I’d be building, or if I’d rather just have tickets assigned me. It blows my mind that people would choose the latter.

But reality is a bit different. Unless you’re making an out of the box WordPress site for a local business, the days of a single person being the copywriter, designer, frontender, backender, and everything else are long past.

In every real-life case where I’ve seen a highly-opinionated developer want to do everything, the results have been less than stellar. There are accessibility requirements, localization, the navigation needs to scale inside a bigger website with dozens of other options. That’s not even touching the tech side of things. Good luck getting professionals, split across multiple teams, to synchronize and prioritize together without some sort of project management.

I sympathize with the feelings in the original post. I really do. I consider how even stitching together a simple website is becoming too complex. A few years ago I would have said I was pretty good with CSS. I see new fangled stuff like this @property demo, and I literally have no clue what’s going on. It’s gibberish to me, and I can’t even work my way backwards to figure it out.

But that’s life. Technology always grows more complex. The emergence of administrators and bureaucrats has been a trend since at least the dawn of agriculture. I don’t see much point in shouting at the wind over it.

There are more practical approaches. While I’m leery of DHH’s self-promotion, 37 Signals having no full-time managers is an interesting idea. Throughout my career, the best managers and mentors I’ve had have been practitioners with light management duties.

Like most things in life, there’s a happy medium between a sort of anarchist mantra of we don’t need any managers and the absurdity of babysitter type managers at a nearly 1:1 ration to workers in some companies.

September 06, 2024

Toxicity

This tidbit from a thought-provoking, if frustrating, article in the New Yorker about cutting family ties got me thinking:

The problem with calling someone “toxic,” Karl Pillemer, the Cornell sociologist, told me, is that “it’s completely in the eye of the beholder.” No one self-identifies as toxic. “It’s a label applied to someone by someone who is angry at the other person.” The term also forecloses the possibility of bridging the divide. “If you consider a family tie toxic, then there’s no reason anymore to try to work on it or to consider the other person as a human being,” he said.

That’s the problem with arcs that offer no redemption. You can work with, move past, and even go beyond things like rude, saying hurtful things, being inconsiderate.

Our social media narratives remove complexity and nuance, but real life is all about living with contradictions and complexity.

In “Rules of Estrangement,” Coleman devotes a chapter to the prevalence of psychotherapy—subhead: “My Therapist Says You’re a Narcissist”—and concludes that “therapists’ perspectives often uncritically reflect the biases, vogues, and fads of the culture in which we live.” In a culture that values independence, in other words, a therapist might advise a clean break.

And hence pop culture nudges people to extreme, simplistic solutions to the complexities of life and human relationships. What I like about these sorts of long, in-depth essays is that this theme is repeatedly examined from different angles without any real attempt to say what’s the right conclusion.

September 04, 2024

Measuring structure and organization

I find that most of the discussions about measuring the value of good writing to be frustrating. Yes, you can eke out a fraction of a percent more clicks on something with some flashy content, but then you end up in an arms race of overpowering CTAs and copy that’s been over-optimized with A/B tests that have left it feeling not human-written.

In the end, product and website copy is a mirror of truth for a company. If you can’t get management to agree about what’s important in a page navigation or what the goal of a page is, content is merely the symptom of a dysfunctional organization.

On top of all this, almost any text can use a good edit — not just a spellcheck and proofread, but organizing, removing, and clarifying. It seems like there’s finally a book making this case, at least judging by this review of “Writing for Busy Readers”:

The authors’ other points are less about writing than about design and informational packaging. Organisation matters: a redesigned summons issued by New York City police (for small offences on the street) reduced court no-shows by 13%.

Or about needing management to decide on what the real goal of a piece of copy is rather than hedging bets on everything:

Keeping messages to a single idea—or as few as absolutely needed—helps ensure that they will be read, remembered and acted on. Reducing the number of possible actions has the same effect, too: a link in an email (from, appropriately enough, Behavioral Scientist magazine) attracted 50% more clicks when it was solo than when it was sent alongside a second, “bonus” link.

I have a feeling this book is mostly stuff I already know, but it might be worth a read in order to have some references for the things I keep repeating about writing.

September 02, 2024

AIdolatry

Navneet Alang’s No god in the machine: the pitfalls of AI worship is the sort of long, meandering read that I enjoy.

Before I quote some of points that resonated the most with me, the larger context is that our decline of the humanities, philosophy, and religious studies have made our society ripe for the arising of cheap pseudo-religions and messianic movements. Without the deeper vocabulary in the humanities, most critics of the AI movement are left with primitive one-liners screaming that AI is racist or whatever.

Alang makes this point about the larger ideological context:

The idea of an exponentially greater intelligence, so favoured by big tech, is a strange sort of fantasy that abstracts out intelligence into a kind of superpower that can only ever increase. In this view, problem-solving is like a capacity on a dial that can simply be turned up and up. To assume this is what’s called “tech solutionism”, a term coined a decade ago by the writer Evgeny Morozov. He was among the first to point to how Silicon Valley tended to see tech as the answer to everything.

The idea that there is a worldly, technological solution to everything is a radical philosophical position, which many have unquestioningly adopted.

Another deeply held assumption by the AI crowd is a deep mind-body dualism, which traditional religions have been debating and mostly rejecting for thousands of years:

So much of what produces will and desire is located in the body, not just in the obvious sense of erotic desire but the more complex relation between an interior subjectivity, our unconscious, and how we move as a body through the world, processing information and reacting to it. Zebrowski suggests there is a case to be made that “the body matters for how we can think and why we think and what we think about”. She adds, “It’s not like you can just take a computer program and stick it in the head of a robot and have an embodied thing.”

And the conclusion:

When the systems that give shape to things start to fade or come into doubt, as has happened to religion, liberalism, democracy and more, one is left looking for a new God. There is something particularly poignant about the desire to ask ChatGPT to tell us something about a world in which it can occasionally feel like nothing is true. To humans awash with a sea of subjectivity, AI represents the transcendent thing: the impossibly logical mind that can tell us the truth.

Lingering at the edges of Clarke’s short story about the Tibetan monks [The Nine Billion Names of God] was a similar sense of technology as the thing that lets us exceed our mere mortal constraints. But the result is the end of everything. In turning to technology to make a deeply spiritual, manual, painstaking task more efficient, Clarke’s characters end up erasing the very act of faith that sustained their journey toward transcendence. But here in the real world, perhaps meeting God isn’t the aim. It’s the torture and the ecstasy of the attempt to do so. Artificial intelligence may keep growing in scope, power and capability, but the assumptions underlying our faith in it – that, so to speak, it might bring us closer to God – may only lead us further away.

August 15, 2024

Fighting your tools

One phrase struck me from a post on Pixel Envy:

These are likely developers and other people who are more technologically literate placed in the position of increasingly fighting with the tools they use to get things done.

Especially since my company switched to Outlook, Teams, and the the related Microsoft house of mirrors, I spend an inordinate amount of time bogged down in basic admin work.

Beyond Microsoft, every product is pushing their, larlgely useless, AI feature down my throat. I don’t need to see anything about AI in Notion, Figma, or the translation CMSes I use. It’s rare to see a modern app designed for power users and well documented.

At some point our computers ceased being tools we own and control and have become marketing machines for software companies. We’re paying to see ads now. This will only become evident in hindsight, but my guess is that we’ve passed peak productivity.

August 10, 2024