Coté

Here’s a writing thing that I suspect a lot of people don’t know about me. Everything starts with a Zero Draft. Every comics script starts as a Notepad file. Notepad is raw and unformatted and gives me permission, frankly, to be shit. Everything in my head about the job can just be vomited into monospace type, where it cannot possibly be sent out as finished work. Once I’m empty, the file gets copypasted into OpenOffice, which is where I write comics scripts, and I can start arranging stuff and picking at it and seeing what’s wrong with it. Everything from that point happens in OpenOffice, and the process forces me to write two drafts of everything.

warrenellis, from his http://orbitaloperations.com/ newsletter

Business as usual is the only way rigid organisations can operate; workers are shown only what to do, but not why they do it. They are not paid to make value judgements; in fact they are forbidden to do so. When circumstances change, someone with a bit of wisdom would recognise the fact and perhaps act differently, whereas the rest carry on doing what they have always done

http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/05/crawling_from_the_wreckage_essay_the_death_of_the_consumer/

More for the “why do white-collar people suck so much” file

It’s as if individuals behave with far more intuitive insight than firms.

http://www.asymco.com/2014/09/30/the-process-of-theory-building/ via Instapaper

I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break, etc. etc. Like many others, my career happened like it did because certain doors opened and certain doors closed. You know, at a certain point I thought it would be great to make film documentaries. Well, in fact, I found that to be incredibly hard and very expensive to do and I didn’t really have the courage to keep battling away at that. In another age, I might have been an academic in a university, if the university system had been different. So it’s all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time.

Alain de Botton. Thanks to Thomas Otter for recommending I check out this dude.

As a product manager, you need to be able to balance all the work against all the work. Maybe you don’t have an ops background, that’s fine – you probably didn’t have a [domain] background when you came to work either.  Learn.  A lot of the success of a SaaS product is in the balancing of features against stability/scalability work against compliance work… If you want to take the “I’m the CEO of the product” role, then you need to step up and own all of it, otherwise you’re just that product’s Director of Wishful Thinking.

http://theagileadmin.com/2014/09/30/scrum-for-operations-just-add-devops/

A very developer sentiment there: “learn.” I don’t think most white collar people think like that. They think of themselves as cogs in a process, not process hackers. Which is fine. As Bourdain says in his first book, he doesn’t want his line chefs being inventive, he wants them to cook the dishes the same way every time, and fast, and 50 of them at once. That’s IRL, not the delightful fantasy land us tech people live in where there is no set menu.