Link – DV

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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.

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Technical debt is not a thing

Dmitri Vassilenko

· May 31, 2022 · 2 minutes to read

Technical debt is not a thing

So, in order to strategize – to decide what work to do in what order – we need to estimate, at the very least:

t: The amount of value that will be created by doing a given task
P: The amount of labor required to do the task

“Spend at least 20% of our time paying down tech debt” is not a principle. It’s an excuse to substitute our arbitrary personal taste for a realistic, evidence-based appraisal of cost and value.

I like the push to actually quantify tech debt and its repayment. 20% feels like a way to avoid thinking critically about the time investment.

“Technical debt” is just what we call it when the deferred value takes the form of a decrease in our team’s velocity.

There’s more to tech debt than just reduced productivity. There’s impact on users, such as due to inconsistent or slow functionality. There’s impact on the business due to higher security risk or breached SLAs because time-to-resolution is longer. There’s morale impact to employees, which reduces retention, etc. etc.

One way is to adopt the simple model of a time horizon. Suppose a team declares the following as their goal:

To produce the most value possible over the coming year.

This team has a time horizon of 1 year. So, when there comes a proposal to make a particular improvement to their productivity (be it a process fix or some automation or whatever else), they can estimate:

How many hours of labor it will take to implement
How many weeks it will take to complete that labor
How many hours of labor it will save them over the year (the remainder of the year, that is, after subtracting the weeks spent implementing)

In this way, productivity investments can be evaluated each on their own merit, rather than being lumped together into the “technical debt” pile.

While it’s useful to always have a time horizon in mind for any work, I don’t think this would actually solve any of the problems the author lists here. Whether the time horizon is a quarter, a year, or five years, direct work is likely to squeeze out all the indirect work, especially if they’re compared as equals. As flawed as 20% rule is at least it acts as a sort of “protection” against feature work completely consuming all the planned time.

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Community Safety and Ignoring the World

Dmitri Vassilenko

· May 31, 2022 · 1 minute to read

Community Safety and Ignoring the World

Instead, it provides a framework for quickly and effectively making decisions that protect users and the community, in ways that are predictable enough to be trusted by the community. Once we think about creating such a framework, we realize that this is the kind of model where the more useful data we have to help form our point of view, the better a decision-making process we can create. If we understand our challenge to be how to rapidly gain sufficient context with which to make an informed decision, then it becomes obvious we should consider a user’s behavior off-platform.

I appreciate the focus on community here as opposed to individual people or corporations.

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A Brief Introduction to Technical Writing

Dmitri Vassilenko

· August 16, 2020 · 1 minute to read

A Brief Introduction to Technical Writing:

They’re scanning the page for specific words, phrases, or code snippets that will point them in the right direction.

the developer isn’t visiting the docs to admire the writing capabilities of the person who wrote the doc; they’re visiting the docs to help them do something.

While copywriting is used to persuade a user to take a certain action, technical writing exists to support the user and remove barriers to getting something done. Good technical writing is hard because writers must get straight to the point without losing or confusing readers. It requires a familiarity with the subject matter, the ability to listen and observe, and a deep understanding of the reader.

Great short intro to tech writing. This is an area I value immensely, and yet constantly deprioritize. So much thought and care goes into good tech writing that it’s almost unnoticeable when done well; you just feel more effective.

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America, This Is Your Chance

Dmitri Vassilenko

· June 9, 2020 · 1 minute to read

America, This Is Your Chance:

More than 95 percent of arrests every year are for nonviolent offenses like loitering, fare evasion and theft. Some are arrested for selling loose cigarettes (which resulted in Eric Garner’s being choked to death by the police) or minor forgery (which resulted in George Floyd’s being suffocated to death by the police).

People are right to wonder — is this justice? Can’t we design alternative approaches to poverty, drug abuse, mental illness, trauma and violence that would do less harm than police, prisons, jails and lifelong criminal records?