Tag: work
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find your customer
Compensation theater: Everyone cares about the compensation (base salary, bonus, and stock). That’s the data they care about, but where did this pile of compensation come from? Who decided how big it is? And how is it allocated? It is a long, complicated, and large process that began over a year ago. Every meeting I…
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🤖 Findings and CIO Retention Guide: Gender, Priorities, and Exit Triggers in High Tech
Original: Beyond the Pipeline: A Gender Lens on Priorities and Exit Triggers in the High-Tech Industry by researchers at The Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo, Communications of the ACM. Summarized by Claude AI on July 2, 2026. The Findings Men are far more committed to staying. 44.9% of men selected “no intentions to leave” vs.…
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When management is the bottleneck preventing enterprise AI ROI.
Right now, many companies already have the technology they need to go much faster. The blocker is company systems that are mostly designed to prevent things from happening. The power is centralized and all the team members are treated like a risk vector. Exhausting approval cycles, super tight boundaries on roles, unbreakable title-based hierarchies, and…
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When to use AI for writing, and when it’s totally acceptable
If you’re dyslexic and just trying to communicate more clearly in writing, or you’ve got a bullshit job and you just want to get your bullshit job’s bullshit tasks out of the way so you can move on to more meaningful endeavors, or at least move past the day-to-day slog that permeates your workday and…
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“Greedy work” refers to jobs in which earnings are convex in hours – meaning that working longer, more continuous, and less flexible hours is rewarded disproportionately rather than proportionally. {Summarized by the robot.} And, from Claudia Goldin: Greedy work can be defined as a job that pays disproportionately more on a per-hour basis when someone…
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Survive the next meeting
This is a mode I catch myself in where all I’m focused on is getting through the next meeting. “Getting through” means running out the clock so that it’s over, getting out of it without any new work, and especially without “getting in trouble” for something. Obviously, this is bad most of the time as…
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A meeting is not work, it’s talking about work.
As always, if you want your people to get more work done, interrupt them less and invite them to less meetings. This applies to all people, not just programmers. A meeting is not work, it’s talking about work. 🔗 Meetings and interruptions are still the biggest obstacles for developers, even with AI
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“rust out,” the new “burn out”
The never ending quest to keep doing what you’re good at and get better at it…rather than making another PowerPoint about what you worked on last week. // “One of the biggest contributors to rust out is spending your energy in places that don’t align with your unique talents and skills. In my own experience,…
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Moral Deskilling: why you spend more time on admin than your actual job – I think what this is saying is: when you build a system of work where the people doing the actual work (“workers”) do not have quality control over their work, you mistrust them. Therefore you need more managers to oversee them.…
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The luxury of saying no. – “Most people don’t get to say no. Not really. They’re not debating whether to use AI on principle. They’re trying to figure out how to keep their job without surrendering their judgment or drowning in tasks that keep multiplying while headcount shrinks. For most people, using an LLM isn’t…
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Dark Leisure – ”in many orgs, there is too little incentive to pass on these productivity gains by telling your manager: “i found this neat tool that lets me do 8h of work in 3h! give me more work!”” // Some “real workers of the world unite” vibes.
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No Rules Are Implicit Rules – The European view on enlightened American management policy: “Greg, I hate to bring it to you, but working for ten fucking hours a day is not the normal hour. I don’t care if you live in America or not. The section continues with other “grand” examples of managers taking…
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Modern Work Fucking Sucks. – Attack of the SaaS productivity apps. // Maybe it’d be better to just use one suite of tools: Office 364 or Google Apps, i.e., the #defaultslifestyle. // It’s easy to fall into the habit of planning and showing progress in work instead of just doing the work.
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The employment effects of a guaranteed income – “1.3-1.4 hour per week reduction in labor hours.” // Yes, and: if we buy into the premise that a lot of work is Bullshit Work, this isn’t enough, we need more like six to 8 hours of wasted time to convert to living, not sitting in inefficient…
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White-Collar Work Is Just Meetings Now – The Atlantic – “Gloria Mark of UC Irvine has found that workers require an average of 25 minutes to return to their original task after an interruption. By this measure, a 30-minute meeting is, for the typical worker, best thought of as a one-hour detour.” // For 25+…
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9 Questions to Help You Figure Out Why You’re Burned Out – This is concise and good. Yes, and: what to do? How do you determine when you are “too good” of a worker, sacrificing yourself for the good of the company without proper compensation? “Too good” here means that you yield a high profit…
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About my studio – Working from home, artist edition. (1) no commute saves time and means booting up into work is faster and frequent: “there is also an advantage to not having a separate studio outside your home. When I did rent a studio in the past it meant that all my artwork in progress…
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Inside TSMC’s Phoenix, Arizona expansion struggles – Rest of World – Sounds like a shitty place to work! Long hours, sometimes filled with low value work. The TSMC people must think Europeans are insane. In contrast, for the American work-culture, this feels like a “thank the unions” story.
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What junior/senior developers and CTOs need to know about internal developer platforms
This is from last Fall at the SHIFT conference, but it still holds up: Relative to your interests Why Are Pants So Big (Again)? – tl;dr: you can wear comfortable jeans again. // “There’s constancy, I thought, and then there’s becoming a relic of yourself” And: “If you zoom out far enough, all the paroxysms…
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Why We Glorify Overwork and Refuse to Rest – One of the better explanations of what’s probably wrong with me: “It’s the most reliable way to feel a sense of his own worthiness — and to avoid difficult emotions.”
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