I met the developer who was responsible when I was employed by Amazon. He was trying to reply to an email, but I believe it was a "reply all" (if I recall the details of the story correctly) and the list was massive. Meanwhile, people on that same massive list were also doing a "reply all" to submit their feedback or reply that the email didn't apply to them. Massive email storm resulted. He didn't give all the details but he was ear-to-ear grinning as he told us the story.
A key indicator I've seen in past companies was when "top skill" or "top manager" level people suddenly submit their resignation and then spend two weeks calmly walking around the office with an ear-to-ear grin. Not too long after that, whisperings of "Why?" start circulating. And shortly after that, I got an upbeat email from HR about "Exciting new company direction" and "Rethinking our core strategies for better customer alignment." In all seriousness, shake-ups and re-alignments are frightening and kill everyone's morale with fears of uncertainty.
I've been an avid reader almost my whole life. Since 2010, I've had a 90-minute commute to/from work each day. I can't afford satellite radio, and regular radio gets old very quickly. I initially started saving podcasts to my iPod and playing those, then I started ripping audiobooks from the library and listening to those. I also have an Audible subscription. That's three hours a day of "reading", per se, and I typically listen to 2-4 books a month that way.
I agree with the value of audio books! I have always been an avid reader (probably 20+ books a year) and I am the author of 24 books - but, when I started using Audible and listening to other audio books from the public library my 'reading' time increased a lot.
I enjoy reading blogs on the web and social media on HN and Reddit, but I find I generally get more from books on computer science, philosophy, spirituality, science fiction, cooking, etc.
EDIT: I would like to add that I also feel fine starting a book and not finishing it. This is especially true with technical books when I realize that only some of the covered topics are interesting/useful to me. This allows me to be exposed to more ideas.
How do you do find non-fiction to be on audio? The couple of times I tried it I found that all the unnecessary words give me too much time to be distracted. Works great for me for fiction, and I'm hoping I just had bad luck I'm my initial non-fiction selections ...
Technical writing/Technical Communication. Throughout my IT career, I've always been "the guy who documents everything". It's actually my favorite part of my job because I feel like I'm adding a layer of structure and peer reference to what is otherwise chaos and tribal knowledge.
would love to know your path into it. part of my job now is to mitigate the frictions between views of devs and users but not nearly enough for me. instead i have to code a lot (which i am not too good at).
