Wildebeest
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Nobody ever changed anything by remaining quiet, i…
Nobody ever changed anything by remaining quiet, idly standing by, or remaining part of the faceless, voiceless masses. If you ever want to effect change, in your work, in your life, you must learn to persuade others.
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Make everything OK
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Paris syndrome
A dozen or so Japanese tourists a year have to be repatriated from the French capital, after falling prey to what’s become known as “Paris syndrome”.
That is what some polite Japanese tourists suffer when they discover that Parisians can be rude or the city does not meet their expectations.
Oh, really? These people should steer clear of Russian then. If they need psychiatric help after Paris, they will probably just drop dead on the streets of Chelyabinsk…
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What’s in the room? A fear. Or two.
OK, you gonna hate me for this, but I just couldn’t resist and read one more question from the The Daily Post.
You’re locked in a room with your greatest fear. Describe what’s in the room.
I wanted to do a post like that for a while now. But thinking of my fears takes away for a long time and then I don’t know how to connect them all, with which one to start, and how to finish. And on top of that I get really scared thinking of all my fears. But, if I think in terms of the room, and I’m locked in there with my greatest fear, all of a sudden I see … just me. And that explains at least four big fears that I have:
- Fear of loneliness. That is probably my greatest fear. I am not comfortable with myself for long periods of time, and I constantly need people around me. I’d rather have the worst possible people next to me, than nobody at all.
- Fear of myself. This one comes and goes. But when it comes, it’s pretty scary, and, difficult to explain. But I do fear myself sometimes. For most time, I can control myself pretty well. (Feel free to disagree.) However once in a while I get into that mode where I have an almost out of body experience, watching myself from aside, doing something crazy. It’s almost never good or bad, just stupid. But having no control of it is scary.
- Fear of dentists. And I hear you jump up immediately, screaming – YOU ARE NOT A DENTIST!!! And you are right, I am not. But remember that this whole thing is hypothetical. There’s me locked up in the room with my greatest fear. Well, I am afraid of dentists. I’ve had more than a fair share of bad experiences and something snapped. I think I might be so afraid of them, that even if I become one, I’d still have the fear. And given that fear #2, I might just once have an uncontrollable desire to fix my own teeth. Isn’t that scary?
- Fear of the dark. Yeah, remember that room? Someone switched off the lights and closed the shutters too, so it’s pitch black. That alone wouldn’t throw me into a panic attack anymore – I used to be afraid of the dark a lot more when I was kid – but given all those other fears in the room, I would be pretty miserable.
OK, enough, as I said before, these thoughts get me scared. I should get of the Internet now and go hide somewhere with people and lights, and without dentists.
What are you afraid off? What would be in that room of yours? Answering ‘you’ is cheating. :)
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Would you?
Via xkcd.
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What does it feel like to lose a lot of money (quickly)?
Here is a Quora question that I got in the personalized weekly newsletter. I never had anything close to a lot of money, but I’m pretty sure that if a miracle happens and one day I do, I’ll lose them all pretty quickly. Thus, I was vaguely interested in the answers. However, the answer by James Altucher (most voted) was way more than I expected.
Then Internet stocks started to go down. This is ridiculous, I thought. The Internet is here to stay. I knew nothing about stocks or valuations or anything resembling rational thought. I doubled down. Then quadrupled down. Then 8-upled down.
From June 2000 until September, 2001 I probably lost $1 million a month. When anyone says, “this is ridiculous”, that’s code for, “I’m about to lose a lot of money”.
I couldn’t stop. I was an addict. I wanted to get back up to the peak.
I wanted to be loved. I wanted to have $100 million so people would love me.
I was the worst idiot. Writing this now I feel like slitting my wrists and stomach. I had 2 kids.
I felt like I was going to die. That zero equals death. I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been. I had lost all my friends. Nobody returned calls. I would go to the ATM machine and feel my blood going through my whole body when I saw how much was left. I was going to zero and nothing could stop it. There were no jobs, there was nothing.
Read the whole thing. It’s fascinating and impressive.
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Game of Thrones: Red Wedding Reactions Compilation
This is hilarious … The reactions I mean, not the episode.
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Scaling Teams and the Fight Against Human Nature
Human nature dictates that we:
- Form tribes to build identity and camraderie – yet in a scaling startup, this causes untenable, painful, progress-stopping inter-team rivalries.
- Invent a common enemy upon which we can heap blame and against which we can fight – sadly, inside the tribes that naturally form, there’s often a tendency to create that common enemy internally (it could be marketing vs. engineering or testing vs. production or sales vs. execs, or any number of others).
- Minimize the positives and focus on the negatives – that could be feedback from customers, internal critiques, manager reviews, product imperfections, or weaknesses in process. It’s so easy to forget that we somehow beat the formidable odds against building something that worked, something that attracted customers, something that scaled, and a company where hundreds of people really do want to work.
- Resist change at all costs – yet in a scaling startup, change is the only constant, and processes, procedures, formats, teams, and everything else has to change to be successful.
- Act emotionally, yet believe our decisions to be driven solely by logic - we tell ourselves we act rationally, but can easily prove that irrational biases rule our minds. This wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous if we could recognize these biases, but in another failing of human nature, we cannot – we cling to the notion that our decisions, unlike the rest of our species, are uniquely logical.
- Lose empathy as our numbers grow – tragically, when we need empathy the most (as an organization gets bigger and there are more people to consider and more complexities between them), our nature is to rescind it. It’s easy to empathize with a small group you see everyday, but much harder to extend that empathy to everyone in a larger group (especially those you may not know well).
- Create rules and process to prevent against repeats of singular abuses – the old adage of one bad apple ruining the whole bunch becomes more and more likely the larger a startup grows. Process can be wonderful, but sometimes we create a process just to ward against some bad behavior from a former employeee and, by doing so, ruin the company a little more for everyone. Use process to free and enable, not to punish and restrict.
- Irrationally romanticize the past – “Remember how things used to be? It was so much better three years ago when I first started here and…” -everyone at any organization, ever. But I remember three years ago. It sucked compared to today. Our ability to delight customers paled in comparison. Our ability to attract talent was in the toilet. Fear about our budget and our bottom line was a daily occurrence. 2013 is superior in so many ways and I know it, but even still find myself fondly remembering (or, rather, misremembering) back in 2010 when (in my human-addled mind) it all seemed so much easier.
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Coding, Fast and Slow: Developers and the Psychology of Overconfidence
This is an excellent take on why (we the) developers suck at time estimations. Basically, it boils down to two reasons: unknown details of the project and overconfendence.
First off, there are, I believe, really two reasons why we’re so bad at making estimates. The first is the sort of irreducible one: writing software involves figuring out something in such incredibly precise detail that you can tell a computer how to do it. And the problem is that, hidden in the parts you don’t fully understand when you start, there are often these problems that will explode and just utterly screw you.
And this is genuinely irreducible. If you do “fully understand” something, you’ve got a library or existing piece of software that does that thing, and you’re not writing anything. Otherwise, there is uncertainty, and it will often blow up. And those blow ups can take anywhere from one day to one year to beyond the heat death of the universe to resolve.
Read the whole thing, it’s worth it.
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Ergophobia – a fear of work
Ergophobia, (derived from the Greek “ergon” (work) and “phobos” (fear); also called ergasiophobia), is an abnormal and persistent fear (or phobia) of work (manual labor, non-manual labour, etc) or finding employment. Ergophobia may also be a subset of eithersocial phobia or performance anxiety. Sufferers of ergophobia experience undue anxiety about the workplace environment even though they realize their fear is irrational. Their fear may actually be a combination of fears, such as fear of failing at assigned tasks, speaking before groups at work (both of which are types of performance anxiety), socializing with co-workers (a type of social phobia), and other fears of emotional, psychological and/or physiological injuries.
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The Slap
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The trolley problem
The trolley problem is an ethical and psychological thought experiment. In its most basic formulation, you’re the driver of a runaway trolley about to hit and certainly kill five people on the track ahead, but you have the option of switching to a second track at the last minute, killing only a single person. What do you do?
Kottke has some thought-provoking variations. I’m sure this has been turned into a drinking game somewhere.
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On dental fear
Apparently, both dental fear and dental phobia are a thing, and not something I made up in my head:
It is estimated that as many as 75% of US adults experience some degree of dental fear, from mild to severe. Approximately 5 to 10 percent of U.S. adults are considered to experience dental phobia; that is, they are so fearful of receiving dental treatment that they avoid dental care at all costs. Many dentally fearful people will only seek dental care when they have a dental emergency, such as a toothache or dental abscess.
There’s a questionnaire in existence (Corah’s Dental Anxiety Scale) to diagnose it. I scored 17 out of 20, so, yeah – severe anxiety of phobia, but could be slightly worse. Treatment, interestingly, can combine both behavioral techniques, such as positive reinforcement, and pharmacological solutions such as sedation and anesthesia.
And, for those who want to explore this even further, Dental Fear Central is a good place to start.
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Money vs. happiness
It’s been said many times that you can’t buy happiness with money. The Washington Post runs the article about the research that begs to differ:
Not only did the extra income appear to lower the instance of behavioral and emotional disorders among the children, but, perhaps even more important, it also boosted two key personality traits that tend to go hand in hand with long-term positive life outcomes.
The first is conscientiousness. People who lack it tend to lie, break rules and have trouble paying attention. The second is agreeableness, which leads to a comfort around people and aptness for teamwork. And both are strongly correlated with various forms of later life success and happiness.
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Self-driving cars’ unexpected side effect …
Slashdot links to a rather unexpected prediction for the time when we are all driven by the robot cars:
“At least one expert is anticipating that, as the so-called ‘smart’ cars get smarter, there will eventually be an increase in an unusual form of distracted driving: hanky-panky behind the wheel.”
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“I’ve never had a goal”
I found the blog post “I’ve never had a goal” over at Jason Kottke blog interesting. There is a quote from Jason Fried, the founder of Basecamep (aka 37signals):
I can’t remember having a goal. An actual goal.
There are things I’ve wanted to do, but if I didn’t do them I’d be fine with that too. There are targets that would have been nice to hit, but if I didn’t hit them I wouldn’t look back and say I missed them.
I don’t aim for things that way.
I do things, I try things, I build things, I want to make progress, I want to make things better for me, my company, my family, my neighborhood, etc. But I’ve never set a goal. It’s just not how I approach things.
Also, Jason Kottke’s therapist advice:
For the longest time, I thought I was wrong to not have goals. Setting goals is the only way of achieving things, right? When I was criticizing my goalless approach to my therapist a few years ago, he looked at me and said, “It seems like you’ve done pretty well for yourself so far without worrying about goals. That’s just the way you are and it’s working for you. You don’t have to change.”
I myself don’t set goals either. But I’m yet to reach that “you’ve done pretty well for yourself” part. Wink.
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Simon Sinek on Millennials in the Workplace
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Programmer Interrupted
Slashdot runs a thread on “Are Remote Software Teams More Productive?“. The original post links to a few research references that, unsurprisingly, show how expensive interruptions are to programmers, and how unprepared we are, as an industry, to deal with this problem. I particularly liked a rather in-depth look at the issue in “Programmer Interrupted” article.
Like you, I am programmer, interrupted. Unfortunately, our understanding of interruption and remedies for them are not too far from homeopathic cures and bloodletting leeches.
Here are a few points, if the article is too long for you to handle:
Based on a analysis of 10,000 programming sessions recorded from 86 programmers using Eclipse and Visual Studio and a survey of 414 programmers (Parnin:10), we found:
- A programmer takes between 10-15 minutes to start editing code after resuming work from an interruption.
- When interrupted during an edit of a method, only 10% of times did a programmer resume work in less than a minute.
- A programmer is likely to get just one uninterrupted 2-hour session in a day
And also this bit on the worst time to interrupt a programmer:
If an interrupted person is allowed to suspend their working state or reach a “good breakpoint”, then the impact of the interruption can be reduced (Trafton:03). However, programmers often need at least 7 minutes before they transition from a high memory state to low memory state (Iqbal:07). An experiment evaluating which state a programmer less desired an interruption found these states to be especially problematic (Fogarty:05):
- During an edit, especially with concurrent edits in multiple locations.
- Navigation and search activities.
- Comprehending data flow and control flow in code.
- IDE window is out of focus.
Overall, not surprising at all, but it’s nice to have some numbers and research papers to point to…
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On Impostor Syndrome
David Walsh shares some thoughts on an impostor syndrome. I’m sure anyone in the tech industry can relate. I certainly do.
“Impostor” is a powerful word but that’s how I have felt during all of my career as a professional web developer. I feel like I’ve learned every day of the ride but I feel like I’m way behind. I feel like people see me as something of an expert where I see myself as an accident waiting to happen. I’m a complete impostor. A fraud.
Apart from the honesty of his feelings, I like his ways of snapping out of it. They do work for me too:
- Look at your (hopefully decent) employment history and know that, on a basic level, you’re much more wanted than you’re wanted gone
- Log onto the IRC channel of a skill you feel comfortable with and answer questions of those asking
- Realize that people who consider themselves “experts”, and don’t go through waves of self doubt, are idiots that are so arrogant to not know what they don’t know
- Remember the last time a non-developer friend asked you the most basic of computer-related questions
- Perform any simple exercise in the JavaScript console
- BLOG! The worst thing that can happen is someone corrects you and you learn something out of it
- Review your code and find little nits to fix
One other thing that helps me, is this bit by Joe Rogan:
He talks more generically about life, but I think it’s equally applicable to technology knowledge as well.
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More Pages to Explore .....
