I'm personally not from the US, but rather from a city that ist often cited as an example for counteracting irrational prices on the housing market, Vienna. (Back in the 1920s, when rents for a new home where found to be unsustainable by meeting 25% of an average worker's wage – or what may be deemed more idyllic conditions nowadays –, the city decided to invested massively into communal housing.) Having said that, I think the major problem is that homes have been turned into assets and that the short term monetization of these assets, as in short term limited contracts and Airbnbs, is a major danger to established communities. (Depending on where you're coming from, this may be even a good thing, like in flexibilization of the work force, but it is somewhat disastrous for the general living conditions and social climate, even the buildings themselves – as there is no long term interest on the side of their inhabitants –, and only adds to general displacement effects.)
I don't always agree with their proposed solutions, but their data tends to be pretty irrefutable. Suburbs are weak to negative tax revenue areas and absorb money from the cities which are strong tax generating entities--especially when the infrastructure maintenance costs come due 20-30 years after construction.
There was also an article (probably in the LA Times) about two towns close together out on I-5. One of them threw in with the city systems and one of them didn't want to get annexed and stayed apart. The one that remained independent was shocked at how expensive maintaining their infrastructure was--to the point that they did things like leaving roads as gravel because they couldn't afford blacktop. Unfortunately, I can't cough that article up anymore with how bad Google has become.
And this really seems like it's going to keep going that way in Austin. Any time I'm driving around, I'm passing under-construction apartment and condo buildings all over town. It's nuts. On my regular commutes, I pass probably 10-20 buildings, and just within a mile of me, there's maybe 5 multi-hundred unit buildings that are nearing completion.
Of course, because there are so many bedroom communities surrounding NYC. The people looking for a cheap place to stay when visiting NYC just stay across the river. Also, for AirBnB being "basically banned" there sure are a lot of them you can book!
Definitely not low carb, no. I have a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast 4-6 times a week :) My diet is pretty consistent though. I know how that oatmeal will respond to insulin 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% random quirks I can just deal with by feel & a finger prick to confirm. The thing I'm most strict about is I only allow myself to have about one "bad diabetes meal" per week. So that's like any restaurant food, or doughnuts, or pizza, or whatever. I mostly only eat home made meals, my wife & I both love to cook. But those aren't low carb, just whatever we feel like cooking that week.
I walk about a mile a day, to the bus & back for work and a bit for leisure and to get up from my desk. Otherwise I don't exercise.
You don't need to train on pictures of canine golfers to make highly convincing pictures of dogs driving golf carts on Mars. https://imgur.com/a/EIWUJYp The AIs are extremely good at mixing concepts.
Unknown. For example, I have heard most offenders abuse their relatives, and I don't expect synthetic material to have any impact in this category.
Also, the only way to find out if this has any effect at all (positive or negative) would disgust and outrage many, as that test would require having a region where it's forbidden and a control group where it's allowed and seeing which is worse.
I'm not sure how many people would try to lynch mob (let alone vote out) whoever tries to do that, but I'm sure it's enough that exact numbers don't matter.
My guess is that offenders abuse relatives because they are easier to access and manipulate, not because there is a true preference there. More a crime of opportunity than a pursued goal.
The primary point of standup is to make sure the team gets face-time together every day to talk about their shared workload. Humans are social creatures and getting everyone together for a few minutes is a pretty high ROI activity.
Standups could make sense in a team that isn't operating well, but in a well-functioning team, everyone is having these sorts of discussions with each other during the natural course of each workday anyway. Standups are unnecessary then.
My experience with standups is that they're almost entirely worthless. They're rote and performative and rarely, if ever, provide anything that was missing.
It's still valuable to share information about progress and impediments with the whole team. Alice and Bob may have some blocker that they've been communicating about, but Chris wasn't a part of those one-on-one conversations, so the standup gives him some valuable context about what's going on with the rest of the team. Maybe his work depends on something Bob was supposed to complete today that's going to take a few more days, or maybe he's encountered a similar problem before and has some advice, or maybe he'll remember the issue when something similar pops up later on. Alice and Bob would have resolved the blocker themselves, but this helps make sure the information is shared across the team in a way that simply moving cards on a kanban board wouldn't communicate.
I've begun to believe that all of this ceremony is driven from an unspoken belief that well functioning software teams are a myth.
sure it would be great if people raised issues themselves instead of skulking. were proactive, took pride in their work, engaged joyfully with their collaborators, and developed real consensus and velocity.
but that's just a fairy tale. developers are generally useless, stubborn, lazy, petty, and fundamentally disorganized. lets not shoot for the moon and try to get them to work together. lets just dumb the whole thing down to try to get _something_ out of them.
I disagree. Especially with remote teams, standups are how I find out that other people on the opposite end of my team are blocked on something I can easily help them with, or that they're doing something that has implications on my own work. I communicate with some people continually. There are others I'd hardly see if it weren't for standups.
> There are others I'd hardly see if it weren't for standups.
If that's a problem, it's a sign that the team is not functioning well. Standups can be a band-aid for the issue while a real solution is being developed, but it isn't a long-term solution in and of itself.
I think the routine maintenance is key for staying well-functioning. The problem is that once things are not functioning well it may be too far along to fix.
So it’s like saying why should married couples have routine date nights because if they were well functioning, they wouldn’t need to schedule. The point is to function well and it’s a useful technique.
But since in a well-functioning team everyone knows where everyone else is already, there is nothing that can be said in a standup that isn't already on everyone's radar.
Maybe I'm just unusually fortunate to have mostly worked on well-functioning teams.
I think that there is separation between intentional knowledge transfer and accidental. It's great as an opportunity for accidental knowledge transfer, where one developer didn't know she could ask for help by another developer. Or that task can be picked up because it hasnt changes the status yet( not released) but other can start working if needed.
yeah, getting alignment across the team and doing a vibe check at the cost of ten minutes seems pretty reasonable to me, the questions are basically just variants on "how's it going?"
They are too specific, formulaic, and reek of management tactics. If you mean, "how's it going?", say, "how's it going?" As the wise Dr. Seuss said, "I meant what I said and I said what I meant."
Hows it going is too vague for many. Every ask a kid what they learned at school today? The answer is always "nothing", or silence. You need to ask a different question to get a good answer.
Which is one reason look for and ask different questions - if may break someone out of a rut.
If you answer "fine" to "how's it going" at standup, you aren't doing your job. It's not the prompt that needs to be specific, it's the engineer. If there are follow up questions, those can be asked, but asking the same three specific but thoughtless questions is just like having a form you have to fill out any time you make a change.
Yeah but that's to be expected because they are kids. If your coworkers act like children, that's a problem; they should act like adults because they should be adults. What's easy usually isn't what's right.
It’s not acting like children. It’s acting like humans.
If it’s easier to tweak questions or retrain everyone on my team, me included, I’m going with the easier path every time.
In this case easy is right because the specific question isn’t what’s important. What’s important is the community, discussion, and information shared.
I don’t think so. People know what the purpose of a standup is. You don’t even need a prompt to get one going, just have everyone go around in a circle and talk. They will do it automatically. Isn’t this basically the point of the article?
The primary purpose is provide highlights that can be sold as stories for management.
If you are looking for a social event that's what happens at lunch over an hour while sitting not a 5 minute standup where everyone is trying to say just enough so they can get back to work.
It's sad the standups are considered a social event. Back in the good old days you finished your work chilled on a cheap startup couch while two others played ping pong and you chatted. Or you met up a bar after and threw darts. What have we sold ourselves lately?
> The primary purpose is provide highlights that can be sold as stories for management.
Speak for yourself. My team has a small window of overlapping time zones and it's a valuable opportunity to get everyone together and sync on all our projects. But our work is all loosely interrelated, so that's actually something we need to do.
It's not a "social event" in the sense that you all get to hang out and make friends. It's a social event in the sense that it's an opportunity to verbally engage with your colleagues in a group setting.
I agree that standup makes little sense on a team of people who are all working on unrelated projects. The silliest thing you can do here is assume that what works for you will work for everyone, and what doesn't work for you won't work for anyone.
My company makes a big point in work-life balance. We can meet up in a bar to throw darts at most 2 times per year - anything more and we are impacting family time. Lunch is a good social time, but that is personal time and often better spent meeting with people not on the team (some always go home, some meet with old team members...) Your team should meet during your normal 40 hour work week (or whatever hours you work) for team social time.
Meeting up over lunch doesn't work for remote teams. Nothing worse than eating while on camera. No thank you, I've tried and it's really not great. Especially if you have a hybrid team where some people are in the office eating together in a conference room and some are remote solos, the dynamics get really weird.
One of the biggest benefits to a synchronous standup is you know everyone has showed up and is available to discuss work stuff. With remote teams and flexible schedules, having a hard sync point helps people communicate better, even if it's just "hey, let's stay on the call (or start a new one) for an extra 10 minutes to sort this out" instead of spending hours or days in async communication.
Fly everyone to one place so they can do this. Twice a year is good - enough that it is a good vacation/team building exercise, not so much that people feel like they are married to their job not their spouse.
Sure, we get it. But when you add forced rituals to the mix (such as the very worst: coerced standing), it ends up being just numbing and grating, especially over time.
And when it gets to the point where you can just tell that most people are mouthing something to check boxes, while checking out, internally -- in that sense, it basically defeats the intended purpose.
I also do not see any value in the current questions; individual status should be communicated with in a tracking tool.
The standup is a chance to get everyone together, raise and share any issues or clever solutions or whatever, maybe get a 'feel' for status, and tell some jokes. It should be short, maybe extremely short sometimes.
Probably any program that does not depend on doing RPE 10 efforts. There's this cringe video segment of his where he confidently states that the grindy last few reps are the ones that matter, which has no scientific basis.
But as a novice, you can progress linearly for some time and it's viable, as long as you know when to tap out. And then you might as well start with something more long term altogether.
My observation is most lifters can't assess RPE/RIR if they don't start with an intensity driven program that forces failure as part of progression. Much better to learn how the feeling of grinding early on with baby weights with low injury chance.
True, but I would say - if you're serious about it - once you've graduated from Starting Strength programming you are already very strong, which is the goal.
Switzerland had a very active and well trained military during both World Wars. In fact Swiss neutrality is at least partly rooted in the historical role of Swiss mercenaries -- it was a lot easier to sell your mercenaries if you weren't involved in the war.
