I just started getting npm errors while developing something; I was like hmm, strange... then I tried to go down to isitdown. That was also down. I was like, oh this must be something local to me (I'm in a remote place visiting my gramps).
Then I go to Hacker News to check. Lo and behold, it's Cloudflare. This is sort of worrying...
Implementers are not babies and managers are not our mothers.
I think the management skill nobody talks about is how managers should realize they are part of a team and their focus should be on whatever the team's goal is, not in finding the perfect way to apologize. As the article says: "Your job is to ship working software that adds real value to users, to help your team grow, and to create an environment where people can do their best work."
I couldn't give a rat's ass if a manager doesn't apologize to me in a way that makes my eyes water, admitting his humanity in the process, if that manager doesn't insist on making the same mistake and getting in my way all the time.
The book referenced is not wrong, but it is too narrow. Repair isn't the core attribute of parenting. It's the core attribute of human relationships. This is generally accepted as common knowledge - it's not about the rupture, it's about the repair.
Good for you if you consider yourself so emotionally detached from work that you can let go of the fact that work relationships are still human relationships. However, you sit comfortably in the minority. Most people carry the human aspect of their work relationships into work. Ignoring that is step 1 of being a really bad manager.
This doesn't mean we don't set appropriate boundaries or avoid giving feedback. It does mean that a great manager navigates the nuances of work relationships and work itself. It also means a great manager will adjust their approach depending on the personal needs of each employee. For instance, if I was your manager and truly believed what you're saying here*, I'd just give you the brass tax feedback and keep everything about the work itself.
* And I don't. From my experience most people who take this stance have been conditioned that emotions are bad. We are big emotional bags of meat. The people I've managed with this mindset tend to be the hardest to manage. Eventually something hits their feels, they can't handle it, and the erratic behavior begins. I much prefer people who are forward with their emotions. When something happens they can vocalize it appropriately allowing me to address it. When they have feelings about feedback received, making a mistake, or doing something bad I can easily acknowledge and validate those feelings while maintain the feedback & boundaries.
Or, dont recognize own emotions. It is one of the symptomps of being on the spectrum - although the person have emotiona and their behaviour is affected, they cant name or recognize them.
The language around emotion often obscures the underlying reality that needs to be addressed. Emotions are the physiological manifestations of expectations and desires. (Emotion is etymologically related to motive.)
The person your responding to clearly has a desire to do productive work with minimal roadblocks. In one person the roadblock to that desire/expectation might manifest physiologically as depression, in another person as anger, and in another as detachment. Getting rid of the roadblock is what needs to happen regardless of how the emotion manifests.
This does not mean that emotions are not addressed, but that they are addressed primarily as signifiers of a mismatch between the world and one's underlying desires/expectations, not the thing itself.
Sometimes, the desire/expectation of an individual is counter to the good of the overall system and group of people. In this case, a good manager might start by explaining the larger situation so that an individual can update their desires and expectations through the additional knowledge. Then new thinking/perception shifts the physiological experience of those desires (i.e., emotions).
In other cases, the gap between desires/expectations and reality is too big to bridge, which means emotions cannot be resolved in the current context.
> Good for you if you consider yourself so emotionally detached from work
I am not. I enjoy doing great work and take pride in it.
> that you can let go of the fact that work relationships are still human relationships.
They are. And I get along with some people, and not as great with other people. But the people I get along with I go out usually, outside of work, whereas the ones I don't particularly vibe with are just colleagues.
> For instance, if I was your manager and truly believed what you're saying here*, I'd just give you the brass tax feedback and keep everything about the work itself.
I'm... usually in a pretty good human relationship with my peers, whether code monkeys or managers. So if you chose to keep everything about the work itself, we'd lose a part of our connection. But I wouldn't mind, I'd adapt.
Your last paragraph is a lot to unpack, especially trying to view myself objectively. But I will say that while I consider myself a person that is not afraid of their feelings; if I would come to you to address some aspect of the work to be done ("When something happens they can vocalize it appropriately allowing me to address it.") I wouldn't put a lot of emotional investment into this. This is what happened. I believe this would impact our whatever. Feel free to do with this information as you wish. At the end of the day I'm rowing in the boat as per the captain's indication.
I wonder though why you wouldn't believe that I get my emotional needs met from places outside of my direct contact with my manager. I have a great relationship with my family, with my friends, most of the times with my peers. I'm just not looking for emotional support in a manager and I'd like to think I've never been 'erratic' in the workplace.
I obviously don't know you, so take my last paragraph with a grain of salt. All I can do is relate what you wrote and my interpretation of it with my knowledge and experience.
Although, I don't make comment about whether you're getting your emotional needs met outside of work. I'm glad that you do - a lot of people out there aren't, and they are feeling really lonely.
> I couldn't give a rat's ass if a manager doesn't apologize to me in a way that makes my eyes water, admitting his humanity in the process, if that manager doesn't insist on making the same mistake and getting in my way all the time.
But this is part of the point, while for you that might not matter, your manager cannot assume this. Other people DO care.
One of the ways your manager can mess us is by assuming you don't care about that...
In my stints in managerial roles, I was mostly focused on the work to be done. I haven't gotten bad reviews, on the contrary. So I'm making the mistake of assuming that focus on work to be done is more relevant than focus on how to approach each individual.
Maybe that's why? I know rich people (truly rich, not your upper middle class or rich as in I got a couple mils of net worth), in developed countries (West and Northern Europe) and to be honest your points, apart from being tangled and repetitive just so you can get 5, don't reflect their reality and are just a setup for your last politically charged line.
I'm sure with tens of millions of dollars in your hands, you'd wait for that 20 minute doctor's appointment for 3 months, then another 8 for your MRI. Especially when your kid gets sick god forbid.
Have you tried googling "baal son of el"? I have no idea on who Baal is, or El, but the discussion sparked my curiosity and that's all I needed to do in order to answer for myself the question "where are you getting this from?".
I've built a local (for my country) news aggregator that basically clusters news and summarizes them based on multiple sources and gives me the rundown of the most important things, and things that can be found between conflicting sources. It's mostly a pet project for myself as it doesn't seem to have a lot of stickyness without the clickbait.
I gave the 'product' to friends and some of them told me "oh, you should do it like ground.news where I can see left, center, right". This idea turns me off so much. Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee. Just give me the information that's there in most sources and it's probably be going to be close to some objective overview of the situation.
> Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee.
Because at the day information can be political.
>the information that's there in most sources
While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information.
> Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee.
>> Because at the day information can be political.
Umm. Yes. Which is precisely what placing it left / center / right amplifies.
> the information that's there in most sources
>> While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information.
Sure, it's another bit of information. I think more important are the facts. Did this actually happen? If so, what happened? The tl;dr of what happened should give me a pretty good idea, without having to become a reporter myself, especially if covered by both sides.
I think this is more of an issue of an union, than the 'argument to moderation' or 'false balance' might appeal to. If I'm left, and report or something and you don't. That's probably high noise. If you're right and report to something I don't. That's probably high noise. If we both report on something, and we report differently on 80% but we have the same 20%. I'd say that 20% is high signal.
What if we cut out the left / center / right ideas and just take as many sources as we can? Then extract what's common between them. Wouldn't that have some sort of higher signal to noise ratio than any single viewpoint?
Of course, I'm willing to accept I'm wrong. From my personal experience so far, I'm much less inclined to extremes than I was since starting to use this system.
Ground.news also gives the information that is present in only one side, which is just as high signal – if not higher – as showing the overlap IMO. They have a feed for “stories with equal coverage” and “stories covered mostly in left-leaning sources” and “stories covered mostly in right-leaning sources.”
I'm seaching for 'equal' on the home page and finding no results, nor for 'feeds'. Could you help me identify those locations? It's always confusing to me when I go to their home page and would appreciate it. I think the equal coverage might be what I'm actually looking for.
Ground news tells you the bias of publications that have published the news item not the slant of the news item itself. It lets you see how much news gets completely ignored by the right and left (the right is way worse) when it isn't favorable to their cause. It's also really interesting to sample both sides and see how wildly the facts get slanted as you get further from center.
I think I understand this feature pretty well. What I'm arguing for is taking the common information between all news sources (without having to place them in left / right / center) is much higher signal to noise.
Honestly your paranthesis that "the right is way worse" is already too political for my taste. It makes me feel dumb for even writing this reply. Alas, these are my thoughts. News should be news. What happened and when. Not some attack vector against a group of people or another.
Given that there are at least as many things happening as there are humans, how do you suggest the people serving as “news sources” avoid editorial judgment when deciding what’s newsworthy and what it means?
Let's say that The Rebel Times has a headline "Member of the Imperial Senate on a diplomatic mission boarded and arrested without cause" while the Empire Daily reports that "Leia Organa, part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor, taken into custody". Following your process, the "what" is just that Leia was arrested.
Then, the Rebel Times says "Moisture farmer with magic powers joins fight against Empire", but the Empire Daily has "Moisture farmer joins fight against Empire". the common whats are just that a moisture farmer joined the Rebel Alliance, which is true, but much less consequential than if he had magic powers.
Later, the Rebel Times says "Secret Empire super-weapon destroyed at the Battle of Yavin", and the Empire Daily publishes... nothing because they don't want to admit defeat. There's no common information between these stories (because there is no second story), so looking for common whats would conclude that nothing happened.
If the process of analysing the news accounted for the fact that the different outlets are interested in presenting different whats, it could conclude that the fact that the Empire Daily published nothing about the third story doesn't mean that it didn't happen. In the second case, if it could account for the Empire wanting to suppress information about the Force, the conclusion would be that Luke joining the Alliance is somewhat more of a big deal than otherwise. Even in the first case, it might realise that the fact that the two sources don't agree about Leia doesn't mean that one side isn't right.
"What" is often a matter of definition and framing, especially if you also want news to include "to what effect" which is not always black-and-white. "Why" is an answer that also must be answered, but will often come through a political lens. News cannot be free from a political lens if "why" and "to what effect" are considered, and probably can't be free from some element of a political lens even if just sticking to "what".
> if you also want news to include "to what effect"
I don't. I want to be able to draw my own conclusion as to the effect of what happened might be.
> News cannot be free from a political lens if "why" and "to what effect" are considered, and probably can't be free from some element of a political lens even if just sticking to "what".
I have no interest in the "why" and "to what effect". I have an interest into "what" so that I can draw my own conclusions.
Though thank you for your thoughts, it helps me understand the people calling for political sides better.
> I don't. I want to be able to draw my own conclusion as to the effect of what happened might be.
That's fair BUT do you see how this is a decision that a) won't always have a clear line of demarcation and b) reflects an internal mental model of news that likely isn't universal?
For example: let's say someone reads a news article that titled "Trump Won't Rule out Military Intervention in Greenland" (god help us, a real story). Maybe you get all the "what" you need from the headline. I would argue though that omitting contextual information about "Why does he want Greenland?" is irresponsible and bad journalism. Many others might argue that in a duty to inform readers, they should collect statements from people who understand international relations to discuss implications of such a stance.
Another example: insurance rates are rising for coastal properties in Florida. That's the "what", but there is no honest, legitimate exploration of the topic if the journalist doesn't explore "why", because the "why" of this story if also a "what" of the many contributing factors. Since that "what" will necessarily include climate-related topics, it is now considered "political" by many. And in this instance, exploring "what effect" this is likely to have on homeowners, renters, and businesses seems a core element of the phenomenon.
> That's fair BUT do you see how this is a decision that a) won't always have a clear line of demarcation and b) reflects an internal mental model of news that likely isn't universal?
a) I think there's a clear line of demarcation to the "what".
b) I can see how this isn't a universal mental model, I just fail to see why the "why" makes for a better one.
> irresponsible and bad journalism
I honestly don't see how left / center / right fixes this. If there's no consensus between tens / hundreds (and I'm in a small country) sources on the actual thing that lead up to the what, I don't see why that should be included. Else the news would just be (for example, not political affirmation) "Trump Won't Rule out Military Intervention in Greenland[...] as loss of key trans-atlantic partners considered less valuable than securing arctic trade route".
> Another example: insurance rates are rising for coastal properties in Florida. That's the "what", but there is no honest, legitimate exploration of the topic if the journalist doesn't explore "why", because the "why" of this story if also a "what" of the many contributing factors. Since that "what" will necessarily include climate-related topics, it is now considered "political" by many. And in this instance, exploring "what effect" this is likely to have on homeowners, renters, and businesses seems a core element of the phenomenon
Honestly it's the same thing, if 80% of covered news sources point out to a why as climate change, sure. If only the left (or right, or center) ones do and they're not a solid majority. I don't particulary care. I care more about the "what".
Again, this might tie into the mental model more than anything but the whole left / center / right divide seems political and high noise to signal ratio to me.
Fair reply, and reasonable people can disagree. But there is just one thing I wanted to reply to:
>> irresponsible and bad journalism
> I honestly don't see how left / center / right fixes this.
Well, it doesn't. Those are labels we have affixed to things, because those are the lenses through which society sees "debated topics." But those lenses are applied to real things, that are really happening.
That you discount climate change because right-wing publications don't engage with it - despite the overwhelming preponderance of evidence - then you've just made yourself more susceptible to propaganda, not less. The omission of information is just as political as the inclusion of it.
A relative was a high level local political figure. His quip was always “if you want to know what’s important that is going on, look for what isn’t in the newspaper.”
Any issue I’m deeply familiar with that gets reported is almost always missing lots of meaningful information. There isn’t really competition for most news, so there’s no incentive to follow up.
Publishers have biases, and their sources have agendas.
I have some "internal" web apps that I use for myself, and while I do use Remix which is a framework that allows me to use React, I just use SSR and HTML default form controls as interpreted by the browsers, minimal client side processing and almost no styling.
I love it so much compared to the "modern" cruft. It's responsive by default because I don't really style it. It has a high signal to noise ratio.
I wouldn't change it for the world, but I've been told multiple times I'm very much in the minority.
Last I applied to a job posted on Who's Hiring, they had me fill a self recorded video interview on some platform. And do some coding exercise with screen sharing. Then send it to them. I've never gotten any sort of reply back, positive or negative. Felt like a clown. Won't be using that again.
Then I go to Hacker News to check. Lo and behold, it's Cloudflare. This is sort of worrying...