I’ve previously worked doing technology assessments in the M&A world and copyleft is a big deal there. I’ve had to comb through code (not always automatable) to find any copyleft code and then have had to sit through many meetings with lawyers trying to explain the risk and complexity involved. I’ve seen it tank entire acquisitions.
I used to use a system where each interviewer just wrote down two numbers, hidden from others, marks out of ten for attitude and aptitude.
Attitude encapsulated things like humility, willingness and desire to learn and share knowledge, etc.
Aptitude was more around the technical skills required to do this job but also the capability to learn new skills when required.
Those are pretty much the only two attributes I care about when recruiting.
Roughly it was:
6 - not quite there
7 - they have the att/apt required
8 - strong demonstration of att/apt
Etc.
Average 7+ across both attributes for all interviewers or they’re a no.
The weighting was slightly different between contractors and FTE but as a starting point for the debrief it worked well.
I’ve also heard, and like: “if they’re not a ‘hell yes’ then they’re a ‘hell no’”, which is a lot simpler.
> 6 - not quite there 7 - they have the att/apt required 8 - strong demonstration of att/apt Etc.
> Average 7+ across both attributes for all interviewers or they’re a no.
Measured against what, the general populace, or other professionals in the field? If other professionals, how could you possibly have enough of a sample size to make an accurate rating here?
You'd have had to have interviewed at least 20-30 other professionals of the same exact type and role.
I don't know what the expectations are, but I would personally not rate anyone 8 on both, unless they are an absolute rockstar that's destined for leadership roles. Just statistically, 8 on both is only 9% of people.
Is your company really that selective that you weed out 91% of people who made it to an in-person interview stage?
Nothing I don’t think. The average is of the two scores: attitude and aptitude. The average of the two must be at least 7.
Unless you’re taking about how each interviewer calibrates. In which case it’s common for interviewers to be coached on how to rate candidates. Your calibration indeed seems too harsh for this parents system
It can also be helpful to make sure interviewers can clearly say yes or no about a candidate. If you're not there, ask whatever you need to get there. If you never get to yes then it's a no.
It looks for knowledge islands and relates those to frequently modified code, to identify hotspot, or areas of high risk due to low knowledge distribution in areas of high change.
Another use is if someone hands in their notice you can easily see all the code that only they know, so your handover planning is mapped out easily.
I’ve never thought of it being used maliciously, it’s for visibility. It would be a shitty manager that would use it that way and if they’re already shitty then this tool won’t change that.
>I’ve never thought of it being used maliciously, it’s for visibility. It would be a shitty manager that would use it that way and if they’re already shitty then this tool won’t change that.
You are a member of the intelligence community of a country, let's call it Tussia, which has been locked out of the leading kernel for military hardware in the world. Let's call that Kinux.
You know that the guy down the office has started a project to fork that kernel for your countries own internal usage. You're an over achiever and want a promotion before he gets one. You call acquisitions for 8 female agents with special training for intimacy with nerds, you also make a back up call for 8 doses of polonium in case the agents aren't successful.
In case you think the above is fiction I know a CEO of a unicorn startup who got the first part of the treatment when he was looking for seed funding.
> I’ve never thought of it being used maliciously, it’s for visibility. It would be a shitty manager that would use it that way and if they’re already shitty then this tool won’t change that.
I've had three jobs where Pluralsight Flow was introduced. At two of them, the managers immediately started using the metrics for feedback, performance reviews, employment decisions. At the third, the developers saw this coming a mile away and refused to engage with or evaluate the tool.
Unfortunately, the absurd pricing of these tools means that people who approve them have to get some sort of ROI. Since they don't have a good way to measure productivity/output/knowledge silos, they instead turn to "Well Jose had less PRs this week..."
Excellent points about visiblity, as long as you can keep it in that domain.
But this always lurks in the near shadows:
>>I’ve never thought of it being used maliciously, it’s for visibility. It would be a shitty manager that would use it that way
Therein lies the problem, on both sides. It would just become another arms race, as the developers would use it to identify and move into target project areas/components to get themselves on the list of un-fireable workers. Ideally, the workers would ensure work together to ensure that the truck_factor was zero, i.e., none of them could be fired.
Of course all of this rapidly becomes a (nearly)complete waste of time, proving the blogger's friends original point: >>"My coworkers said it would immediately hit Goodhart’s Law. "
As others have said the C4 model is a great way to address a number of these issues.
I can’t find the right video at the moment but Simon Brown (creator of C4) gives a great talk about creating his DSL, Structurizr, for C4, which he developed during COVID lockdown (if memory serves). There are many videos on YouTube of Simon talking about “C4 Models as Code” so I’m sure any one of those will suffice.
The focus is on creating the model of your system architecture, from which the diagrams you extract are a specific projection of that model. Rather than a diagram be the main artifact. It’s a simple but very powerful concept that I’m always surprised isn’t more widely used.
Structurizr models can also be exported to display as ilograph diagrams, mermaid diagrams and more.
Also very much worth a mention is icepanel, a lovely tool for architectural model that implements the C4 model heavily.
I saw Simon talk at a conference in Sydney about 10-15 years ago and heard about C4 for the first time in that talk, it’s been one of the most influential talks I’ve been to in my career as it made a lot of fuzzy things in my head all start to come together in a way that just made sense.
I’ve never seen modeling tools widely used. When it’s attempted it’s always a top-down initiative that always addresses management concerns, but always creates more risk for developers without generating value for them, and it never takes off outside of being a box on a process list to check off. Developers promptly stop using these tools as soon as their use is no longer enforced.
The long term destiny of models is that they will always diverge from the code, sometimes in ways that matter. In that situation, the best model of the code is the code it’s self because it’s a model that you can rely on. You can certainly update the diagrams, but that’s a priority call vs. what else you’re doing, and it doesn’t always win out over other tasks.
Some enterprising tool developers will make modeling tools that will generate code, therefore linking the diagrams and the model to the development of the code. When this is employed, it’s complex and it’s never a perfect implementation. Generated code can be buggy, or it may not do what you want. It may be a significant effort to make the models generate the code that is needed, and you may find your self further developing the code generation tools to generate the code you want. I’ve never seen this have a good benefit to cost ratio.
The problem with any of these tools is that they solve only one part of the puzzle. Take Structurizr for example, it doesn't automatically create the diagrams for you or notify you when it detects architectural drift (and automatically update the diagram).
Others miss other pieces of the puzzle, such as having a list all your APIs, all your system docs in a single place (ADRs, reqs, etc.), connecting to your repos, etc.
> Take Structurizr for example, it doesn't automatically create the diagrams for you
The Structurizr DSL is designed for manual authoring (which is what most people tend to do), but there's nothing preventing you from writing some code (using one of the many open source Structurizr compatible libraries) to reverse-engineer parts of the software architecture model from source code, binaries, your deployment environment, logs, etc.
> or notify you when it detects architectural drift
If you do the above, there's then nothing preventing you from writing some tests to notify of architectural drift, etc.
Thank you, but by that argument, I could that for any diagramming / whiteboarding tool. The point is having a tool that reduces work for me and does these things automatically.
> Thank you, but by that argument, I could that for any diagramming / whiteboarding tool.
In theory, sure, but the majority of diagramming/whiteboarding tools are not easily manipulated via code/an API. Structurizr is a modelling tool, and the model can be authored by a number of methods ... manual authoring, reverse-engineering, or a hybrid of the two.
> The point is having a tool that reduces work for me and does these things automatically.
I do hope that we will see some tooling that can do these things automatically, but we're not there yet ... fully-automatic (as opposed to semi-automatic) comes with some serious trade-offs.
I gave up on Google a couple of years ago. I used DDG for a while but often had to jump back (!g) to Google for some things.
Now I pay for Kagi (been a year or two) and there’s no going back for me. I hardly ever even need to scroll down to find what I need, it’s just there. Saves me so much time.
I use excalidraw for almost everything. Brilliant tool. I already mentioned it in another response in this thread but using excalidraw inside obsidian via https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin has been a game changer for me.
Zslot has put an incredible amount of work into it and it extends excalidraw to have a lot of additional capabilities. You can also use it within Obsidian canvas for some of the flow stuff you mention but you could very likely just use the plugin.
Zslot is constantly updating it too so you get new features and updates almost every other time you open it. Amazing work done there.
I remember seeing a demo of this kind of robot (theoretical at time I think) when I was at university. One of my lecturers was trying to develop them for use in things like brain surgery. That was 25 years ago and I do occasionally wonder what happened in that field. Will have to dig into this a bit more…
The UK tabloid rhetoric serves as a strong reminder to me why I left the country and have no desire to ever live there again. Brexit was a resounding sledgehammer driven nail in that coffin. Every single day I am happy I left and all this does is reinforce why. UK journalism has a weird mixture of some of the best and some of the most toxic in the world.
I feel we're the reverse of the Americans in some ways, from what I understand their TV news is completely rabid in the same way our tabloids are but their newspapers are relatively level-headed whereas our TV news (particularly from the BBC) is pretty level-headed but our newspapers are just raw, unverified polemics probably the most toxic in any free country.
I don't think I could leave for good though, I think I have something of George Orwell's frustrated attachment to the place.
> from what I understand their TV news is completely rabid in the same way our tabloids
Your understanding is flawed. Cable news ( fox,cnn,etc ) is rabid, but broadcast news ( abc, nbc, cbs ) is more serious and 'professional'. Especially the nightly news.
> but their newspapers are relatively level-headed
Once again it depends. The wall street journal ( more professional ) to the ny post ( more rabid ) which oddly enough are owned by the same company controlled by the same foreigner who answer to the same elite.
The rabid-professional or the left-right dichotomy is an illusion because the media pretty much is controlled by the state/elite. They appear to be superficially different on silly cultural matters but fundamentally agree on the important stuff.
So, pray tell, where did you go that you deem free of toxic press? It surely isn't anywhere in Europe or the US. Certainly, couldn't be China, South Korea or Japan. Definitely not Australia.
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