Most job descriptions contain some version of "other duties as assigned", IMO with good reason.
No job description can realistically capture every responsibility; this language helps prevent bad-faith disputes when new tasks or responsibilities arise that aren’t explicitly mentioned but are 5 millimeters away from those mentioned and entirely reasonable to be considered as in-scope for an existing employee.
I think also it's the reality in most engineering roles that you will often have to pivot to new technologies, help out on unfamiliar projects using different technologies (e.g., work on the front-end for a bit when you're a backend engineer), etc. Some engineers aren't comfortable with this and it shows. This is how I understood the original comment, anyway.
I think most significant sized operations are built and succeed or fail based on the quality and leadership of the B players. You just can't find enough A players to build an entire [large] company of them and hopefully the C players contribute in a steady, no-drama fashion, leaving the B players* as the differentiating aspect of your particular company.
* - and the focus/determination/consistency with which you part ways with the D and F players.
> You just can't find enough A players to build an entire [large] company of them
The corollary to this is that too many real super star players can hurt a large company, especially if they're too close to each other. They need to be spaced out and inserted into the right places at the key moments when there are critical challenges they are uniquely suited to solve. Super heroes generally make lousy mayors.
Super heroes are able to conquer insurmountable Cthulu-grade existential threats. But that often involves doing things you wouldn't normally do and can cause collateral damage. Fortunately, such threats are fairly rare. Of course, many people who use the term "A players" are really just referring to "good people" not true super stars.
A wise F500 CEO once told me there were only about 20 such super stars in his >10,000 person organization but he shared it more with a tone of "thank goodness there's only about 20 of them" because identifying them and getting them onto the right problems was a constant challenge. He didn't think the organization needed more of them, it just needed to better manage and direct the energies of ones it had - and by direct, he meant "direct it outward" on a massive, high-value problem - not inward laying waste to the day-to-day structures that keep the org running.
This is under-appreciated, very rarely talked about, and spot on!
I am personally guilty of being far too lenient and tolerant in overlooking "hard to work with". Bluntly, as an engineer, I enjoyed working with a few particular "brilliant assholes" (as their brilliance was often but their AH nature rarely directed at me) and so I tended to tolerate them too much when I transitioned into leadership roles. I don't know if that was biggest mistake as a leader, but it was for sure in the top five.
> run a regression on comparable sales and take human judgment out of it.
It's extremely rare to find enough comparable sales of parcels of land only to run a regression on. In an intensely developed area, the overwhelming majority (like 98+%) of sales will be inextricably linked sales of land and improvements of that land.
I have some intellectual agreement with LVTs, but the practical implementation is daunting and it seems to make it much harder to appeal a bad assessment.
You wouldn't run the regression on parcels of land only. You'd run the regression on parcels of land + improvements, run a PCA on the various attributes of both the land (acreage, viewshed, proximity to amenities, transit access) and the improvements (square footage, # BR/BAs, year of construction, presence of pool, presence of deck) to determine which factors materially affect valuation, and use the regression coefficients to subtract that out. So for example, you might find that going from 1BR->2BR costs an extra $200K, going from 2BR->3BR costs an extra $600K, a 9-rated school is an extra $500K, etc.
Now you take a sample of sales within the area of the parcel in question, subtract out the regressed values for the improvements, and smooth & average it, and you have a rough approximation for the value of the land. It's not going to be perfect: it assumes that features are linearly independent, for example. But it should be close enough, and doesn't suffer from the same incentive problems as letting a human assessor put in values for those features.
When I was shopping for homes, I found several things: the city's records of improvements was comically disconnected from the ground truth (admittedly much of that was due to taxation of improvements which would wash out in the long-run) and that the inherent human judgment ("this one was done by a blind, half-assed house-flipper", "this one needs $100K of maintenance soon", "this one was last updated in 1970", "this one was designed and built by absolute master craftspeople", "this one is next door to a known problem house", "this school is a GreatSchools 9, but buyers believe it sucks") could swing the price between two spreadsheet-identical homes by 40%.
Either you need to bring in human judgment to account for those factors, or have enough data to hope that people will accept that these differences will reliably come out in the wash. If you could, Zillow probably wouldn't have lost around $1B robo-buying during a massive real-estate boom.
Could also introduce a mechanism for homeowners to correct the official city record, with documentation. Under a LVT the incentives would be in place for this, because undocumented improvements generally improve the structure value of the house, which homeowners are not taxed on, yet if the structure value is subtracted from the recent sale price it would reduce the land value, which homeowners are taxed on. (This is not the case with a straight property tax, where homeowners have every incentive to lie about improvements to avoid a re-asssessment.) And it's in the city's interest to have accurate records about the state of each home.
Right, the incentive just has the opposite sign now. Find a way to take basement storage and turn it into just barely legally qualifying as bedrooms and bathrooms, even though every human would immediately classify and value it as if it was ordinary basement storage. Same with the living room/den/family room. In a lot of places you’d just need to make a small back-to-back closet and ensure egress is met (or grandfathered as-built) and they’d legally be able to called bedrooms. My 4 BR, 2.5 bath house becomes a 7 BR, 3.5 bath place, saving the new buyer (or me) on land taxes forever, making them (or me) willing to pay more to do that pointless remodeling.
“Why does this basement hallway have 4 half-baths and 4 tiny bedrooms full of shelves, 2 bedrooms right off the main entry, and no living room? Taxes.”
I just can’t see how to eliminate human judgment from the valuation process of the parts when humans are unavoidably the ones valuing the combination.
It comes back to "AI" meaning "aggregated intelligence" rather than "artificial intelligence". Statistical valuation approaches basically mean replacing the judgment of one assessor with the aggregated (through some smart averaging process) value of many purchasers. Aggregates are much more robust to both manipulation and misjudgment than the individual data points used to make them. Ergo, simply replacing one person's judgment with thousands of peoples' judgment will make the process more accurate.
Assuming that works for the determining of the standardized, publicized assessment method, I think it stops working as well when people look at the published assessment method and have huge incentives to find ways to boost the assessed value of improvements, thus reducing the value assigned to the land when they appeal based on the notion that the arms-length purchase for the combination was $X and the publicized value of the improvements calculates out to $Y, therefore leaving only $Z for the value of the unimproved land.
Actually, now that I think about it more, the output of the model would have to be a direct estimate of $Z (rather than an estimate of $Y, which is surely easier), making some of those concerns moot when the most recent sale was long ago (but not for new transactions).
I still can't figure out what the appeals process when the model gets it wrong (or is perceived to be wrong) is going to be based on. It seems like we're likely to end up right back at "human judgment", though perhaps that of an actual judge trying to interpret the parcel's value taking into account the model's output and the arguments of the plaintiff land owner instead of a city assessor trying to argue comparable sales with a land owner, which is a process most everyone can wrap their head around and have a pretty good feeling how they'd fare if they took it all the way to court.
- Take the most recent sale prices of all neighboring parcels within a quarter mile
- Take the land-area weighted average price per square foot
- Assess the given property as its land area times that average
Practically, this can be assessed without ever visiting any of the properties, and there are no games for either the assessors or the owners to play to manipulate it.
Each neighbor serves as an example of the potential use (and therefore value) of local parcels. Yes, your hole-in-the-ground gets taxed the same as a skyscraper of the same size. Have you considered building something useful on it?
(Yes, as usual, parks, churches, and other non-economically-extractive community amenities would be exempt from _paying_ the tax, but that doesn't change the assessment)
It’s simple, hard to game, and executable which puts it ahead of many other ideas on the topic.
But: Land above a subway station or in a main business square is worth A LOT more than the same amount of land 1300 feet away. Waterfront land is wildly more valuable than the land just across the street. In districts with front setbacks, corner lots are less valuable per square foot than mid-block lots.
And I’d really hate to own a normal mini-skyscraper 4 blocks away from the skyscrapers overlooking Central Park and have my building’s land be valued as the average of the sum of all the units overlooking the Park.
But your “dumb” idea is smarter than most I think.
In most places, registered cars are taxed but unregistered cars are not, so classic/museum or inoperative cars can be owned without paying the government a fee every year. (This makes sense/feels fair to me. Registered cars are expected to be used and the use of cars costs the government significant money and has externalities on the public. Unregistered cars mostly do neither of those things at least no more than a bunch of shoes.)
My kids are teens. We have an analog clock on the wall in the dining room.
It's shocking to me how many of their friends over for dinner (who are all on the "definitely not dumb" part of the distribution) either cannot read it at all or can read it only with obvious/significant difficulty.
> I called their support line for a lost card, and had to go through to second level support because I didn't have the app.
What’s the alternative? The bank sending out a debit card to anyone who calls up and says “I’m @kristov, trust me…”
You were not able to served by the standard path, because you couldn’t authenticate yourself via the standard mechanism. You still got service by an alternate path. No different from opting out of the airport scanner; it takes longer and is a little less convenient, but you still get service.
Not sure if you're genuinely asking because there are a dozen proven ways to verify identity or residency either digitally and physically without being locked down to 2 mobile OSes owned and controlled by 2 American companies.
Exactly, as was demonstrated by GGP's "had to go through to second level support". That seems perfectly reasonable to me, yet seems somehow objectionable to GGP.
"Can you believe that I had to prove my identity to the support group in charge of requesting replacement cards in order to get a replacement card?!"
"Uh, yeah, that makes total sense; what part of this tale of woe is surprising or interesting?"
Off the top of my head: going in-person to the bank, email, phone call or sms to a number that you previously informed to the bank (say when opening the account), otp a la authy or aegis. None of these require you to be on google or apple's walled garden.
> Since 2020, the rate of bank branch closures in the U.S. has doubled. The majority of those closures come from large and very large banks, contributing to an overall 5.6% decline in total bank branches nationwide since the start of the pandemic.
Nor did GGP's approach require them to be in google or apple's walled garden.
That's exactly the point: there's an easy and common method that many people choose to use, but there is still a perfectly working method for people who choose to not use apple or google.
the part you are missing is that this is the situation for now. Emphasis on for now. Google are already moving to restrict what software your phone can run i.e. they control your device.
Please, don't be so obtuse just for the sake of argument. Any rational, well-informed person can wee where this is going.
I think the upthread argument is the weak one in that regard. "See how terrible it is that banks offer a new method to get more convenient service for people who have an Apple or Google device? Because I choose not to, I had to use a perfectly viable method that people relied upon for decades and that still worked just fine."
That's an example of how the banks are continuing to accommodate customer preference, not the other way around. As to "where this is going", ATMs and debit cards are nearly pervasive and, yet almost 60 years after their introduction, I can still choose to bank with a teller if I insist on not having a debit card.
What’s the alternative? The bank sending out a debit card to anyone who calls up and says “I’m @kristov, trust me…”
Are you under the impression that this wasn't a solved problem for the half-century before "apps?"
Yes, there was some tiny fraction of fraud, but it's not like adding all these layers upon layers of technology has fixed anything. The difference is that instead of getting ripped off by one of the people in your own town, anyone anywhere on the planet can rip you off now.
slightly OT, but where can you opt out of the scanner?
Every time I've tried they told me I won't be allowed through security unless I subject myself to the scanner, despite me protesting that they can search me however else they please.
Anywhere that US TSA runs the AIT scanners, you can opt out of them*.
That is domestic US airports plus airports like Toronto and Dublin where you, for practical purposes, clear into the US on foreign soil and land in the US as a domestic flight.
* - I think this only doesn't apply if your boarding pass got tagged with the dreaded "SSSS" enhanced screening tag, but that's a fairly rare corner case for most passengers.
My understanding, which may be wrong. It's been a few years since I did this dance.
You can opt out of the millimeter wave radar.
Opting out means you go through a metal detector, a 20-second pat-down and perhaps a hand swab for explosives sniffer.
If you have SSSS on your boarding card, that means the pat-down, hand swab and digging through your carry-on luggage happen whether you opt out of the mmwave or not.
It's clear that you can opt out of AIT (mm wave) scanning if you don't have SSSS and uncertain otherwise.
From the TSA website, https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/factsheets/technology , "Most passengers have the opportunity to decline AIT screening in favor of physical screening. However, some passengers will not be able to opt out of AIT screening if their boarding pass indicates that they have been selected for enhanced screening."
This (and other interventions) will help to the extent that they cause more housing to be built.
If they will more than another change, it will durably improve housing costs. If it doesn’t make more housing, but only changes how it’s bought and financed, it’s probably just noise and distraction.
I wonder if it’s ever been tried and, if so, how those economies and populations are doing as compared to the exploitive systems that Microsoft and FAANG workers are forced to endure.
Yes, communalism (that's the name, for those who were wondering) has been tried. In the USA, the Hutterites are one such example. They are generally regarded as doing very well economically.
The more interesting question is: Can communalism work without the community having a deep attachment to the idea? The Hutterites achieve that through religion, but if you threw a group of random people together into a similar economic situation without some kind of strong belief system would they endure or would it quickly devolve back to what we see in the broader economy?
No job description can realistically capture every responsibility; this language helps prevent bad-faith disputes when new tasks or responsibilities arise that aren’t explicitly mentioned but are 5 millimeters away from those mentioned and entirely reasonable to be considered as in-scope for an existing employee.
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