hypothes.is

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TBM 44/52: Dissonance, Diffusion, and Debt

· October 27, 2022 · 2 minutes to read

TBM 44/52: Dissonance, Diffusion, and Debt

A person (A) keeps asking their manager (B) for a much-needed tool. The manager hits their limit and shifts the load to a purchasing manager (C), who they know will not reply. C has adapted to protect themselves from directly saying No. A eventually resigns themself to not getting the tool and lets their work degrade. C knows they didn’t approve the tool but successfully reframes the issue as one of “tightening the purse strings during a downturn.” This shifts some burden to C’s manager (D). D promises that the issue will be resolved during the next budgeting cycle (shifting the load to the budgeting cycle).A hits another limit—they aren’t proud of their work anymore—and finds another job. This then puts newfound pressure on B, who reframes the whole thing as a “well, A wasn’t a team player!” The person B hires next is less likely to complain about tools.

Great example of an emergent quality of a system. Probably no one’s explicit purpose was to manage out people like A, but through other more explicit goals it becomes the function of the system anyway. Those goals may be something like “ensure Bs are highly utilized” or “keep budget approvals to a minimum”.

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Descriptive engineering: not just for post-mortems

Dmitri Vassilenko

· October 27, 2022 · 1 minute to read

Descriptive engineering: not just for post-mortems

Prescriptive engineering is when you say, “What are we going to build, and how?”, and then you execute your plan. Teams with strong prescriptive engineering capabilities can deliver high-quality features fast. And that is, of course, indispensable.

But prescriptive engineering is not enough. As surprises emerge, we need to spot them, understand them, and explain them. We need to practice descriptive engineering.

I see this as basically reliability engineering, but perhaps the advantage of Descriptive Engineering as a new term is that it reframes SRE work as the job of all engineers.

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The future of literature is video games

Dmitri Vassilenko

· June 13, 2022 · 1 minute to read

The future of literature is video games

What Disco Elysium proves is you can take an RPG, abstract away all the bullshit about swords and dragons and killing hundreds of bandits (those nameless NPCs who in the game world don’t have families, sisters, mothers), and still have a workable game. That the standard trope of an RPG protagonist being a hobo murderer who just loots corpses to sell their stuff to buy weapons to kill more people to loot more corpses, is not a cosmic inevitability for games.

This game is both familiar and otherworldly, resulting in a strangely uncomfortable yet fun experience. Also, aside: I want to write a paragraph like this one day.

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Not My Job

Dmitri Vassilenko

· June 13, 2022 · 2 minutes to read

Not My Job

Gaps can happen in many shapes and sizes, and you need to recognize when a gap needs more senior leadership attention instead of trying to absorb them all. In those cases, you should be working on properly communicating the gap and its risk to the business (and risk to which part of the business) and NOT attempting to solve everything.

I’ve definitely fallen into this trap many times: trying to fix everything, accomplishing little, burning out.

Assessing whether what you are doing day to day needs to be an intentional process, something you and your manager re-assess routinely and compare to your goals and the organization goals.

100%. So simple, yet so difficult.

This is a nuanced issue, and I’m not ready to write too much about it yet. I think there’s a Staff+ failure mode where you continue to operate as an experienced IC while refusing to step outside of your comfort zone or choosing not to engage with work that you don’t know exactly how to do. Individual performance reviews play a role there. At the same time I think it’s important to choose your focus wisely, so that whatever it is you do choose to do actually gets done well.