In general Western society has effectively outlawed "shame" as an effective social tool for shaping behavior. We used to shame people for bad behavior, which was quite effective in incentivizing people to be good people (this is overly reductive but you get the point). Nowadays no one is ever at fault for doing anything because "don't hate the player hate the game".
A blameless organization can work, so long as people within it police themselves. As a society this does not happen, thus making people more steadfast in their anti-social behavior
Certainly, you are aware we literally had more crime back then, right? Additionally, we heaped shame on people who did not deserve it, like women and black people and gay people.
So what the fuck good does that do?
You know what actually changed? White collar crime stopped being a thing.
That's why the right way to do it is to have a hard deadline given to engineers, then the engineers cut whatever scope is needed to actually wrap something up by the deadline
My most productive team did no time estimates at all (short of very very rough project estimates i.e. "yeah I'll work on this project for at least the next quarter then we'll see"), and instead of spending endless time in planning meetings determining how complex a task was, we instead spent that time just doing the thing.
I agree it's best if working in isolation, but if you need to synchronise then estimations make sense.
If you need 3 months to implement something, and another team 1 week, and both need to be ready at the same time; then if you actually know those estimations the second team can wait until then and do something immediately useful in between.
Yes, then you must have a rough estimate for that. Or in the other extreme example - in the case of an outage, estimates must be much more precise (i.e. "we should have a workaround in ~30 minutes").
But neither case requires too much thought or discussion. My point was more that estimation ends up overwhelming time and energy, when you can just do the thing instead. I've worked on teams where we've spent more time arguing about how complex a task than it would've been for someone to crank out a solution.
I also don't mean engineers shouldn't collaborate, just that it should be more ad-hoc and not manager/tpm/scrum-master driven.
> Where I live in the US the major landowner(s) and local billionaire(s) ultimately controls these things
Idk exactly what you mean by `major landowner(s)`, but where I live, zoning and permitting is controlled by retired people who own homes and have all the time to show up to 2pm meetings on Tuesdays and demand nothing new get built to "preserve character". They are landowners, but they're certainly not billionaires. The young people who need housing are working and thus can't show up, thus nothing gets built, creating a flywheel of stagnation and price increases.
Have you noticed how Google search summaries have taken the shape of those annoying blogposts that take you through several “What is a computer program” explainers before answering the question?
I don't think corporate profits are the reason Apple has shitty UX because it's hard to argue how shitty UX correlates to higher profit, especially when it costs more to create a shitty UX than to keep the good one you already have.
I reckon it's more that some Apple VP has to justify their million dollar equity package by creating work for their org, because otherwise why should you still have a job?
Because that requires adoption. Devs on hackernews are already the most up to date folks in the industry and even here adoption of LLMs is incredibly slow. And a lot of the adoption that does happen is still with older tech like ChatGPT or Cursor.
It's funny how people complain about the rust belt dying and factories leaving rural communities and so on, then when someone wants to build something that can provide jobs and tax revenue, everyone complains.
How many people are employed at the average data center? A few dozen? Versus a steel mill, that’s nothing. A chicken plant in Nebraska closed down this last month. 3200 people lost their jobs. You think Meta will fill it with GPUs and the whole town will have jobs again?
Many more are employed while building it. And they will never stop building. It's modern version of rail. But instead of distances it will cover the area.
> Will local folks get those jobs to build the data center?
Yes. At some point the demand will be so high that imported workers won't suffice and local population will need to be trained and hired.
> And if so, what happens to those builders once the data center is built?
They are going to be moved to a new place where the datacenters will need to be built next. Mobility if the workforce was often cited as one of the greatest strengths of US economy.
So local people in town 1 who are getting these jobs to build the data center will then have to move to town 2 to build a data center there? What happens to the local people in town 2 who are also looking for construction jobs?
Local people in town 2 share the same fate that people in town 1 alread had. If there's not enough imported workers, from town 1 or elsewere people from town 2 will need to be trained and employed.
More and more data centers (and power sources) are going to be built at the same time so more and more workers will be needed. This is going to be THE job. I think there are going to be many similarities with the age when railroads were being developed. Hopefully with less worker deaths this time.
As if any taxes will be paid to the areas affected, and add to that the billions in taxes used to subsidize everything before a single cent is a net positive.
It's true that you can boil it down a lot. In fact, the book even has a checklist checklist that distills down the advice to one page. However it was overall a very quick read and the extra discussion really did further my understanding of the underlying principles that make a checklist good. I'd recommend reading the whole thing so that you actually make a useful checklist instead of a cargo-cult copy of an aviation checklist.
A blameless organization can work, so long as people within it police themselves. As a society this does not happen, thus making people more steadfast in their anti-social behavior
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