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> You don't have enough clout to make organizational-level changes. So process things that you see that are really inefficient, and you have some ideas how to address them? Now you've got to convince your manager and probably theirs, too, and they usually don't want to rock the boat.

As long as you are a go-to person, you have more clout than you realize. Spend your social capital while you have it and make changes. Also, making change requires allies but they don’t necessarily have to be in your direct chain of command. Lastly, to make a change in an org, just change. People will follow. Most people are not leaders, but you are. Act like it and you will see that you command far more respect than you think you do.


Practice makes perfect. Assuming AI adoption initiatives are well intentioned, it makes sense to reward people for being pioneers in their organizations. We’ve always done this. The difference this time around, is that we’re doing it with the support id those outside of engineering as well. Make the best of it.


This makes me feel a little better about this change. However, there are bound to be weird Edge cases.

Edge allows multiple profiles, are all always available to store passwords? Can your IT department block the use of personal profiles if you’re logged into a company profile?


The counter-counter-argument is that the messy part of human interaction is necessary for social cohesion. I’ve already witnessed this erosion prior to LLMs in the rise of SMS over phone calls (personal) and automated menu systems for customer service (institutional).

It is sad to me that the skill required to navigate everyday life are being delegated to technology. Pretty soon it won’t matter what you think or feel about your neighbors because you will only ever know their tech-mediated facade.


> It is sad to me that the skill required to navigate everyday life are being delegated to technology.

Isn’t this basically what technology does? I suppose there is also technology to do things that weren’t possible at all before, but the application is often automation of something in someone’s everyday life that is considered burdensome.


That’s right- technology does replace pieces of our everyday life. I fear what happens when social ties are what are replaced. For example, technology allows us to travel long distances while keeping in touch with our loved ones. What happen when the keeping in touch part is what gets replaced?


I'm not sure I'd agree with characterizing heavily asymmetric social interactions, such as customer service folks assisting tens or hundreds of people on the same issues every week and similar, a "necessarily messy part of human interaction for social cohesion".


It is well noted that it is very hard to get in contact with a human at Google when you have a problem. And then we wonder why Google never seems to understand its user base.


I don't think these two are actually related, and the automated contact options Google and other megacorporations provide were significantly behind on these developments the last time I tried interacting with them. Namely, e.g. Meta has basically no support line. There was even a thread here a few days ago chronicling that.


Talking to a human doesn't imply that management necessarily cares about you or your usercase. Automated help used to be categorically bad due to lack of technology. Now it has the potential to be good. The ability of the tech and the alignment of the process are entirely orthogonal.


> the messy part of human interaction is necessary for social cohesion

Also, efficiency.

I think everyone in tech consulting can tell you that inserting another party (outsourcing) in a previously two-party transaction rarely produces better outcomes.

Human-agent-agent-human communication doesn't fill me with hope, beyond basic well-defined use cases.


It is, in fact, all insulation. The technology, that is. It cuts out face-to-face, vid-to-vid, voice-to-voice, and even direct text as in sms or email. To the point that agents will be advocating for users instead of people even typing back to one another. Until and unless it affects the reproduction cycle, and I think it already has, people will fail to socialize since there is also zero customary expectation to do so (that was the surprisingly good thing about old world customs), so only the overtly gregarious will end up doing it. Kind of a long tailed hyperbolic endgame but, well, there it is.

Edit: one point i forgot to make is that it has already become absurd how different someones online persona or confidence level is when they are AFK, its as if theyve been reduce to an infantile state.


> how different someones online persona or confidence level is when they are AFK

It's an interesting thing I've noticed as well. At least in some cases it's due to constraints. Written communication invariably affords the opportunity to step back and think before sending. Many social contexts do not, making them almost entirely different skillets.


You seem knowledgeable in this area. I am slightly obsessed with this stuff ever since reading The Goal. Where can I learn more? For example, how can we use variability to create more profit? What are high-capacity queues?


One intuition for the variability argument comes from binary search, where you learn the most when you eliminate half the possibilities. You can apply the same logic to your product development or testing strategy by intending to fail more frequently. (In the testing context, this could look like testing at a higher level of integration.) This adds variability to the process but you will learn more and faster, which typically results in economic upside.

In terms of resources, Will Larson's An Elegant Puzzle hits on some of these themes and is very readable. However, he doesn't show much of his work, as it were. It's more like a series of blog posts, whereas Reinertsen's book is more like a textbook. You could also just read a queuing theory textbook and try to generalize from it (and that's where you'll read plenty about high-capacity queues, for example).


Thank you for this response really helpful. Generalizing from queue theory makes a lot of sense.


When everybody exceeds expectations then the expectations are too low.


I'm talking more about cases when there are (for instance) initially 4 "exceeds expectations" seniors out of a department of 50, and management really just wanted a max of 2. So they curve things more harshly until only 2 get "exceeds expectations."


Can you recommend any textbooks on marketing or another business subject?


Marketing Management by Philip Kotler is the reference.

For the rest it depends on what you need since they are very focused on one domain but for instance for accounting/finance: Cost Accounting by Charles Horngren, or Managerial Accounting for Managers by Eric Noreen is a must.

Strategor - English version by João Albino-Pimentel is amazing. A lot of tools to get started are there with very neat examples from the industry.

I have a few books that are great too. But if there is one to buy it could: The Personal MBA and then for each section get real education one way or another. From textbooks or anything.


Are there any self-hosted offerings similar to Durable Ojects? I like the idea of abstracting synchronization like this but enjoy being cloud agnostic.


Have a look at membrane - https://www.membrane.io


Maybe a Valkey cluster for simpler use cases? Although that's more like Workers KV than DO.


I wonder if temporal [1] could be used to create DO. Had anyone here tried it?

[1] - https://temporal.io/


Although I have not used it as DO, I have been using it for durable workflows for a few years. The cached results of the workflow activities could give the feeling but the latency to read and write would be a dealbreaker for many. There is a lot of overhead in writing the interface between application code and Temporal workflow (for example, you can have conflicting object IDs that can be configured).

Self hosting Temporal with a Postgres datastore is usually how I deploy it and it works great, but at that point I'd just write it to a Valkey store if I just wanted a easy DO interface.


That’s a cynical way of saying that maintaining relationships and trading information are the things of value. Accepting this will make any job more fulfilling- even with AI.


Both of you nailed it. I’ve always used the term “implied implementation” to describe the phenomenon where a description becomes prescription.


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