My best work has been in places that are process-customer, but I’ve done well in process-product as well. I have not done well in people-dominated organizations.
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My cynical view is that the reason Facebook was so willing to pay “above market” salaries recently is they knew this was coming. They had to know, and they had to know that when the news eventually got out, the stock would tank. It’s easy to offer lots of money in a currency (company stock) that you know to be overvalued.
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I write using Emacs and LaTeX. I’ll grudgingly copy and paste to other formats because the organization demands it but I do better work with the simpler tool. Some people prefer to use Vim. They are Wrong, but less wrong than people who use Google Docs, Quip, or (angels and ministers of grace defend us!) Microsoft Word.
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Early on, I programmed on mainframes in COBOL… I’m sure I could do it again. But I’d be tossing away some highly valuable, broadly-applicable and current AWS skills. Want me to to that? As a spiritual pilgrim once said to a penguin: “cough up some dough, mac.”
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Never giving up at the things you were told to do was the essence of work in the industrial age. Giving up quickly on things that are more trouble than they’re worth is what it takes to be successful today.
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It’s been a busy year with a lot of changes, both Covid-related and otherwise. As is my custom, here’s my update for this circle around the sun.
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Being yourself matters as much as anything.
And be nice to the airline staff. They can really make or break your life.
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“Hey man,” I said in my native New York tongue, “You’re not gonna believe this, but I’m calling from Frankfurt…”
“What the FUCK are you doing there?”
It was a pretty good question.
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The joy of photography for me was never in the finished product, and certainly not the moment of capturing the image on film. The joy was in that painstaking work that it took to bring my vision of what the negative could be, into being on paper.
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