As a tech lead or eng manager, you so frequently get request from above or from other teams to drop what you are doing and work on this thing they need, *now*.
During my 4 years at Uber after asking these questions, 9 out of 10 times it turned out it wasn't really urgent:
1. "What is the impact of this work you're asking for?" If the impact is unclear: sorry, but we can't do the work. Why would we?
Just this question made the requester realize half the time they just think it's urgent, but don't know what the work will actually result in.
2. "Do you have a spec that is agreed with stakeholders?" A writeup answering the "why" and the "what" that is signed off by relevant business folks.
I've seen so much engineering work thrown out as later the business goes "that's not what we wanted, why didn't you tell us?"
3. "We're not committing to any work before we have done a rough estimation."
With #1 and #2 done, many stakeholders will come and say "drop what you're doing, this is a 3-day work we need ASAP."
Hold your horses. You don't make estimates: the team doing the work does...
4. Make the cost of dropping what you're doing very clear.
This cost is always forgotten by the person coming with the request. But it's a relevant one: wrapping up work, onboarding to the new work, then later onboarding to the old work. Plus a hit on morale for a sudden change!
Uber has some very hectic times when there were reasons we needed to do some new work ASAP. Like a regulation change that means the company would be banned from operating in a region if not building something.
Even in such a place, most "urgent" things turned out to be noise.
The way I always approached these requests was to educate the person coming with them, and have them realize their work is actually not as urgent or as important or as impactful of what the team is already doing.
Doing so meant building empathy both ways, and less hard feelings.
A huge upside of this approach: when committing, you *can* commit with a very high certainty that you will not be interrupted with your work.
The alternative: take on this "super urgent" work, then someone else comes along saying " I need you to drop what you are doing *now*..."
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Today, one of the “smart” locks stopped working. There’s power: just no functionality. Physical locks removed so residents like me locked out - from our downstairs storages. No one answers the phone on a Sunday.
Residents outrage brewing to ditch the vendor and “smart” locks.
Apparently, this week, this same lock was down for 12 hours thanks to a problem on the vendor (server) side without the vendor noticing (they remotely reset it after they got the messages in the morning residents left at night.)
Amazed how such vendors have any business at all.
The irony here is none of us locked out residents wanted a smart lock that has no manual fallback (exactly because of this kind of scenario.) But in a weird dynamic with home owner associations, the final decision+vendor choice was made by someone else… ignoring this concern.
I feel that lots of GenAI businesses are digging the graves of their greater industry.
Got an email that was clearly machine generated, w some fake compliments, baiting me to reply. Turns out this was sent by a GenAI SaaS doing just this.
In response, I ignore cold emails more.
The company in question is called "Respona." Blocked their whole domain, as I know only to expect these AI-generated emails.
By this startup optimizing for their short-term revenue (with GenAI-generated spamming at scale) they are slowly destroying their original market.
It's a bit like robo calling in the US. Because it's so prevalent, almost everyone I know silences unknown callers. This means that the former channel of calling up people doesn't really work anymore. Any business doing phone-based marketing slowly goes out of business.
Who ever decided at Apple that it's a good idea to ship "Reactions" as an OS-level feature on Mac, with no way to turn it off, on when you use e.g. external cameras as well.
It crashes some apps, fantastic (and no way to turn off across the system, only per-app, for some apps)
I understand this gimmicky feature being part of eg iOS. But why ship it *on Mac,* and give the user (the admin) no option to say "no, I don't want this junk firmware-level feature turned on on my camera feed?"
Since when does Apple know better how people want to use their Macs?
To those suggesting the "camera" icon on the top bar allows turning this off: yes, for some apps! But not for ones that want to control the camera.
Specifically, these gestures now crash Elgato Camera Hub, that (probably?) didn't add support for this API
Learned that a major YouTube channel - Techlead - admitted he has been issuing fraudulent copyright strikes to any and all videos criticizing him. This is a big deal because channels with 3 strikes get deleted: for good.
Does YouTube know about this? They do for sure, now.
It’s always hard to tell if the right people at a company are informed of conduct that breaches terms and conditions.
Now, 2 large channels shared the details in a way that is impossible to escape the attention of the YT copyright strike team. Video #1:
Video #2:
The copyright strike system is so strict at YouTube to ensure rules are followed. But the loophole of being to issue fraudulent copyright strikes with no consequence allows for bullying behaviour like this sad story with Techlead.
Anecdotal, but when I talked with a software engineer who recently left OpenAI, that person shared how they are joining a new startup that feels like it's "OpenAI, but 3 years ago" (meaning it has large growth ahead of it)
Unsaid was how growth is not as fast as 3 years ago
This single 2021 article caused more meetings across tech companies in the Netherlands (and Europe) for engineering leadership and HR than anything I've published before or after.
I'm aware of several that revamped compensation (increasing ranges and/or equity) as a result:
The article:
The timing was innocent (I left Uber shortly before & had a few months to think about this topic, and publish without worrying about corporate's feedback.)
Engineering managers, directors and above used this article to make the case on data from the salary benchmarking companies HR was paying (eg Mercer, Radford etc) had a woefully outdated view of the market, and why their numbers were leaving the "top" tiers out of benchmarks.