I have 2 KA2's, one for my personal and work rigs, respectively. I've honestly never had a problem with their noise level, they sound pretty much the same as any other modern and commonly available mechanical keyboard.
For shits-n-gigs I bought a Dactyl Ergodox from Oh My Keycaps, I'm still waiting on it to be delivered but I'm really stoked. I would never go back to a typical keyboard.
Literally the way to "manage" developers is to enable them to do good work, and then get the hell out of their way. The git logs, uptime, and slack messages are all the records you need for evals.
Oof, please no. Simple metrics like LoC, story points and number of commits are lazy ways to evaluate developers. And people will recognize this so the metric becomes the goal. Might as well replace managers with a bot. Good managers should be in touch with the full picture of their reports work and not rely on simple heuristics. That's what makes a really good manager.
> Simple metrics like LoC, story points and number of commits are lazy ways to evaluate developers.
I mean, looking through the git logs means you look at code contributions. If you're a software engineer, that's kind of, ya know, your entire jobs. You can get a lot from looking at someone's contributions, especially in code or documentation or slack responses. Volume doesn't mean shit though, that's the trick.
> Volume doesn't mean shit though, that's the trick.
Based on having studied lots and lots of open source projects, I can say volume has a very strong correlation with experience. The more people contribute, the more likely they have been contributing for a long time. A novice contributing a lot to me, can be a sign they are extremely good or they are trying to game the system or they don't know what they are doing and are constantly fixing previous mistakes.
My git logs don't represent all the code I didn't write. Solving a problem doesn't necessitate me writing the code, or even having code written at all.
Or do away with performance reviews entirely. In my entire career I've never once seen a review cycle that was a net positive, and more often than not they cause the best performers who normally don't care about such things to become disgruntled and leave.
As a manager they create perverse incentives especially if you have a high performing team (which you want to have) that all deserves a promotion but a limited budget. The incentive is to keep that low performer around so you have the budget to promote the others.
It's a systematized way for management to shoot itself in the foot. But for whatever reason we think something must be wrong if we're not giving and getting report cards at the end of the year. Waste of time and counter-productive.
I'm a VPE at a small-ish org (30 devs or so, currently), and I regularly skim through commit history and keep an eye on various technical chat (we're fully remote, so there's lots of chat). I don't think I spend more than 15 mins per week looking at git history, but that's very informative -- it is not enough to make robust decisions but it is good enough to spot issues once in a while. (I have written my fair share of code in the past, so that helps.) So it's like going to a book shop, reading two pages from a book and deciding whether I like the style or not.
Full disclosure: I'm trying to find a way to use development insights to help us develop software better, together.
I tried a lot and I mean a lot of ways to see if we could use git commits to help us better understand productivity, but I've found commits by themselves lacks a lot of context. Especially since some commits may never be merged.
What I've personally found so far, is that using pull requests is a very good way to help us understand development effort. By looking at pull requests, like the following for cockroach:
it is much easier to grok what everybody is working on or has worked on. Having studied a lot of open source projects, it is kind of shocking how some developers can move and manage so much.
As a side note, if you are wondering what the lightning bolt icon is for, it means another pull request is modifying a similar file. The left arrow means the pull request has a file that is not up to date with the target branch.
Perl was my first language too! Believe it or not, there's a ton of b*ch work that still needs to be done by interns at legacy tech that involves the language (looking at you Veritas, although this was a long time ago so who knows).
I'm grateful Rust now exists and is able to match, and even beat, Perl in regex text surgery.
So much this. I've had many conversations with interesting companies that have good pay and cool products, but recruiters/hr keep coming up with bullshit policies and processes that are just obnoxious and only serve to sort out the compliant from the competent.
A lot of this is employee incentives. I am strongly, strongly, strongly, incentivized to avoid mistakes over taking any kind of risk to make an improvement.
You now have power over that caviling, micromanaging boss of yours. Or the job that doesn't pay you enough. Or the gig that makes you come in the office when you can work perfectly fine from home.
Remember that productivity in America has doubled in the last 40 years, but wages have only risen by half. So sit on your ass a bit, get paid, then get a gig that respects your worth.
> You now have power over that caviling, micromanaging boss of yours. Or the job that doesn't pay you enough. Or the gig that makes you come in the office when you can work perfectly fine from home.
What about when I have all those things and still hate my job?
Or even less job for less pay (as the declining utility of money [and maybe reduction of tax rates] will leave you better off than the linear reduction in income might suggest).
Yeah, I basically had those things but was very bored by my job, especially after starting working from home. Luckily I managed to find a job where I still have those things but within a domain which is more interesting to me. So the answer could be: Switch industry/company.
Just because productivity has doubled in 40 years doesn't mean that people have been twice as productive.
Also salaries and wages aren't dependent on how hard you work. It is how much value you bring to a company (and how easily you can be replaced).
About 15 years ago .NET programmers were getting much higher rates than they are today in the UK (at least in London). The last time I looked node, go, AWS and other things were much more highly paid.
The fact remains that the bargain has changed over the last 40 years, with the bulk of the benefits of technological change not reaching workers. Now it is becoming common for even well-paid jobs to move to an assumption of no annual raise.
And employers currently whining about lack of employee loyalty just make me laugh.
Fact remains, here we are. Employers do not hesitate to take ground when they have the advantage, which is usually. Use yours while you have it.
> The fact remains that the bargain has changed over the last 40 years, with the bulk of the benefits of technological change not reaching workers. Now it is becoming common for even well-paid jobs to move to an assumption of no annual raise.
Tell me why should technological change benefit workers?
> Fact remains, here we are. Employers do not hesitate to take ground when they have the advantage, which is usually. Use yours while you have it.
Sure. I run my own business and I am a consultant \ freelancer. I am my own employer.
>Tell me why should technological change benefit workers?
Technological benefits make individual workers more productive, allowing them to be exploited for more profit. If you don't understand the economics or incentive of the situation, there's no reasoning you out of a box you didn't reason yourself into.
> Technological benefits make individual workers more productive, allowing them to be exploited for more profit.
It also makes harder jobs easier and in some cases allows someone unskilled to perform a job that a only a more highly skilled person could do. Thus someone is easier to replace and thus cheaper.
> If you don't understand the economics or incentive of the situation, there's no reasoning you out of a box you didn't reason yourself into.
I understand it fine. Technological advances is a double edged sword with regards to Labour. It may create whole new industries while destroying old ones.
> Tell me why should technological change benefit workers?
Because who else is technology for? What’s the point of having technology if it doesn’t benefit 99% of the population? What you’re describing is the plot to Elysium.
You’re missing the point: the world is producing twice as much now and employees are only getting 50% more. So business owners and shareholders are getting a disproportionate benefit of technological advancement. You might say: why do employees deserve to make more money because productivity went up when they’re not working any harder? Well why do business owners deserve to make more when they’re not working any harder either?
> And in a labour shortage, the value that someone brings to the company increases :)
Sure. However that won't last forever. It will drive companies to innovate away your job. I go for a McDonalds breakfast after my bike ride on a Saturday and the checkout staff are basically non-existent now. They instead have self service touch screens.
> Demand a doubling of pay to match productivity increases. The power is in our collective hands.
Why? The productivity increases might be for other reasons. Automation (many jobs have effectively been automated away), outsourcing to other countries.
Also I am not a socialist so don't include me in that nonsense thankyou.
If jobs being automated or outsourced away explained it then you'd expect to see a similarly dramatic reduction in workers... but instead people are employed at a similar rate, are more productive, and are being paid less... so who's benefiting from automating and outsourcing exactly?
Depends what they mean by Productivity. Other things can be productive other than Labour. Also it still doesn't mean you should be paid twice as much.
If I can hire 3 unskilled workers for less than the price of a skilled worker that is twice as productive as a single unskilled worker. I would just hire 3 unskilled people.
I find that I get all my needs for social interaction through work and family, and even that can be too much. I have to spend large swaths of the day just being by myself, and I typically use that time for the things I want to do; reading books, learning Russian, trying new technologies. These are all solitary pursuits, and I like that I can do them in my own way at my own pace.
I guess my roundabout way of answering the question is that I simply got comfortable being with myself. I like me, I think I'm pretty cool. I know I'm not perfect but I have a lot of self love. Combine that with the desire and grit to always be working towards self improvement, plus a wife and kids, and I find that my day is filled to the brim with joy, love, and excitement.
> I have to spend large swaths of the day just being by myself
> plus a wife and kids
I find, since having a larger immediate family, I have few opportunities to be by myself. Are your kids older? Does your spouse put more time into daily things or the kids?
My wife understands my introversion and that I need time to myself. We have a sort of agreement, she could be a stay at home mom but she also is going to take the majority of the child-rearing, I make and manage the money in our home.
One of the reasons I love working from home is that I actually spend more time with my kids. It's not a chore and I don't have to set aside specific time to do so, it just happens organically.
What has helped tremendously is outsourcing a number of chores. I've hired people to clean my house, maintain the yard, etc and it's really freed up more time. Now I have plenty of bandwidth to devote to family, along with all my other hobbies and intellectual pursuits.
Whew boy do I have some stories that might shatter your view of trader joe's being a good company.
Prime example: my store captain, Jeff, got busted having an affair with a crew member that he was a direct supervisor of. Granted, Jeff was an asshole from the day I met him, he did everything he could to hold up my (and many others) promotions and pay raises just because he could, but the thing that got him finally fired was dipping his pen in the company ink.
I was personally denied safety equipment multiple times, like lift belts and new blades for my box cutter.
I know of a another store Captain that got fired for kicking out customers that weren't wearing masks when they tried to come in.
TJ's is extremely anti-union and anti-union propaganda is posted all over the employee areas and handbook.
Trader Joe's corporate will turn a blind eye to ANYTHING, as long as a customer doesn't complain or it doesn't open up the company to some kind of liability. It was a super cool company up until about 20 years ago when Bane took over as CEO. Since then it has been a cavalcade of hiring shitty management and unsustainable growth. TJ's has lost it's original weltanschauung and Joe Coloumbe would be horrified to see how the company is run now.
I don't understand the first item, it seems unlike the others.
As I understand it, the reason you're not supposed to do what Jeff did, is because of exactly what you say in the next sentence - favoritism and bias, that undermines morale and leads to a dysfunctional team and good people leaving.
That first paragraph sounds to me like you are not connecting the affair with the "assholeness" and you think it's bad he got fired. Which doesn't go with everything else you write.
If your point is that they waited too long to do the right thing, well, that doesn't seem like systemic evil to me, even if there is other proof they aren't a "good company". I wouldn't put it in the same category of all the rest of the stuff you describe.
Everybody knows about the allegation that TJs wouldn't let people wear BLM apparel, right?
>As I understand it, the reason you're not supposed to do what Jeff did, is because of exactly what you say in the next sentence - favoritism and bias, that undermines morale and leads to a dysfunctional team and good people leaving.
My reading was that the poster was indignant that it took the actual outing of the affair to bring about change, when the actual workplace problems caused by them were evident beforehand.
Sure, I'm kind of saying that if they were slow to take action, but nonetheless did, then that is consistent with an ordinary mediocre corporation run by human beings, in my mind, and not evidence of being distinctly evil. In point of fact, I know stuff like that goes on elsewhere.
So putting it first was unclear to me in its implication.
> It was a super cool company up until about 20 years ago when Bane took over as CEO.
Your experience is the opposite of mine working for the company. Many of the most kind and competent managers I've had were from there.
But... I left the company 15+ years ago so things might have changed a lot since then. I will say that the stores were run pretty independantly back then so I wouldn't be surprised if experiences varied quite a bit.
It's certainly a well-worn path from "founder builds great company" to "founder sells out" to "new management are assholes" to "company goes down the tubes."
What's worse, it's not always apparent from the outside. But I don't really know if TJ is going down that path, and you haven't presented clear evidence that it is.
I wonder if that's a regional problem. Here (Michigan), TJ's employees seem happy, and appear to be very well treated.
As opposed to employees at Kroger - which is unionized (UCFW). But workers there appear darn scarce, often unhappy, and sometimes volunteer tidbits on just how horrible management is. And it felt weird just how much "help wanted" signage Kroger had, even pre-pandemic.
Kroger and Kroger owned stores turn over employees like crazy - I have several friends who’ve described really horrendous conditions. I don’t think there’s a lot of benefit in their union, that or it was so awful before that even bad conditions were better. Grocery store revenue increased greatly during the pandemic but workers still had to fight tooth and nail for PPE, and never got any amount of hazard pay. Ask anyone who is/was considered an “essential worker” what that actually meant sometime. The answer: less than nothing.
That cashiers still have to stand up has always been the bellweather to me about whether a grocery store takes any care of their employees.
I’m sorry you had a bad experience! For me, TJs was by far the best place to shop during the pandemic.
Strict capacity limits, a clearly marked, spaced queue outside the store, and they’d wipe down the carts right in front of you so you knew it was clean. Masks were ubiquitous on customers and employees. It was relief to shop there compared to other stores.
The comment you're replying to was an employee, not a customer! It sounds like the main point is that TJ exploits its employees and is willing to turn a blind eye to their wellbeing in order to make a good experience for customers, which isn't a healthy strategy.
Employee have experiences too? For the most part, if you are making the space safe for customers, you are making it safe for employees. Their specific complaint was a situation that was safe for neither, and doesn't align with what I saw when I shopped there.
For shits-n-gigs I bought a Dactyl Ergodox from Oh My Keycaps, I'm still waiting on it to be delivered but I'm really stoked. I would never go back to a typical keyboard.