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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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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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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Things are rather treacherous out there. In my neighborhood, we have new-fallen (unplowed) snow, on top of wet (now frozen) fallen, partly-decayed, slippery leaves that were never swept or cleaned up because nobody seems to deal with those here either.
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As has often been the case in my life, I was in a category of people who were not supposed to exist. I was that “Type II misfit.” How I got there is the story.
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In 1945, some still expected the world to go back to familiar pre-crisis reality. They would be disappointed, as will those who are waiting for “the good old days” today.
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