I loved that system. One of my favorite techniques in the endgame was to attach a colony pod to a missile unit. You could then drop a city wherever you needed it behind enemy lines and get your injured units inside quickly.
The AI never could figure out how to deal with that strategy.
It's generally agreed that the Voynich Manuscript was written (and should be read) left to right. For example, margins are aligned on the left and uneven on the right, indicating that the writer started from the left.
> Maybe deployment isn't as hard as I'm making it out to be! That said, nothing easier than sending some packets to an IP address.
I think this might be the case. Get a USB zigbee dongle and spend ~1 hour setting up Home Assistant and you're more or less done. Adding a new device consists of clicking a button in HA to enable permission for devices to join and then powering on the device. It will discover the network and report the features it exposes.
You can control devices via HA over wifi. Plus HA gives you an API that you don't have to maintain and update as you add new classes of devices to the network.
You'll spend far more time repeatedly replacing batteries with wifi devices than you will with configuring HA once.
Edited to add: one nice thing I forgot to mention is that using HA for your own homebrew devices lets you keep a single consistent API for those and commercial devices. You can build a little ESP32 device with custom sensors, displays, etc. and control those exactly as you would with off-the-shelf products.
I really need to figure out how deep I want to go -- HomeAssistant is clearly the best off the shelf option. Maybe I'll set up HA first and then see if it really is worth trying to build something better.
I had the same experience moving from IC to manager. I didn't realize the amount of work that managers are doing that I didn't see and more importantly that they couldn't tell me about.
Retention is definitely one, but there's the flip side of dealing with poor performance. You can't announce to everyone that one of the team is on a PIP or struggling with personal issues. But a poor performer means that I'm doing a _ton_ of work to figure out how to fix the issue (whether that's spending hours every week coaching them, building all the long-term documentation that HR requires before we can fire someone, picking up some of their slack myself in the meantime...)
Coordination of people also takes way more time than I realized as an IC. If you meet with your manager once per week, that's an hour out of your week. But your manager is meeting with everyone on the team and a good manager is going to spend at _least_ as much time thinking and planning for each of those meetings as they spend in the meetings themselves even if everything is going well. They have to make sure nobody is accidentally working on the same thing or impacting someone else, talking to other teams, that sort of thing. That one hour out of your week is 1-2 days for your manager. Not to mention that they then have to go do the same sort of coordination with other teams.
You have something that blows up your week that you need to escalate once per quarter? Multiply that by the number of reports your manager has and that's how much time they've spent fighting fires this quarter. And they need to explain to their leadership what happened and why it won't happen again.
Etc. etc. It's not harder work, but it is very different work from being an IC. (On the other hand, being a manager has made me a better IC too. Everyone I've ever managed that was previously a manager themselves has this -- they know exactly what I need to know because they know what they needed to know, so our 1:1s go much faster :) )
One anecdote I have is that when I first moved to a management role, I told a colleague how happy I was that I'd finally have real control over my calendar. After he finished laughing (literally) he said "your calendar belongs to your team and you'll never be in control of that again". He was absolutely right: if something goes wrong or someone is unhappy, everything else moves aside so I can fix my team's problem.
I moved from IC to manager to director. Meetings in general are a huge time suck, and by the end of my tenure, I was basically triple-booked for the entire day every day. Every evening was an exercise in deciding who to piss off. And the emails! <Marvin/Android Voice>Don't get me started on the emails! :-) Finishing the twilight of my career as an IC consulting, and it's much better for me.
Bezos used to (supposedly, didn't work for him) have the habit to forward emails to reports (direct and further down), with just an added comment of "!" or "?"
"!" was "Do something about this"
"?" was "Can you please explain WTH?"
> Everyone I've ever managed that was previously a manager themselves has this -- they know exactly what I need to know because they know what they needed to know, so our 1:1s go much faster
Could you provide some examples of what managers need to know?
It's less about what I need to know and more about how I need to organize it. I get the same information from all of my reports, but the ones who were managers hand it to me ready to go where the others I get it from a conversation.
When I'm talking to my team, I need to know things like:
* Anything that is blocking them (and what they think will solve that)
* Any unexpected events, fires that are about to start/have started
* Progress on their tasks and any timeline updates
* Things they've heard from meetings with other teams that might impact what they're working on or other people on the team
The ICs who were managers previously tend to come to 1:1s with this already sitting in our shared document outlined roughly like I have above when we start our meeting. E.g.
* I'm waiting for Joe Bloggs to finish his API work before I can build the user workflow for X. He was supposed to be done last week but I'm still waiting. He's being very vague about the timeline and I need to know when this will be done so I can start work. Can you talk to him for me?
* Mary was out sick last week so didn't finish the design for Y. We're working on it now and she'll be done by Tuesday. I've put my work on Y on hold until then and am focusing on Z instead. It should still be done by the deadline.
* Status of Project Foo is...
* I had a sync with the database team yesterday. Did you know that they're planning to move everything to paper tape next quarter?
All of that would come out in a conversation anyway, but having it like this focuses it and puts it in context already (which is normally what I would need to do with that info).
The real difference is that folks who have been managers before tend to have a better understanding of what will impact the larger team or project, not just their part of it. I care about the individual too, but some of my brain is always on the bigger picture.
To add on to this I like things organized as:
- things you need my action on
- things you need my input on
- things you think I need to be aware of that may need my input/action later
Given that there are plenty of people on the spectrum working in IT a promotion can be a devastating blow to some.
The thing you've mentioned about poor performance resonates a lot with an unfinished text I have about generation lost to covid.
For me shaping a new team is all about forming bonds between teammates. Living in eastern europe it usually involves a lot of drinking together. :)
The end result is that you have a team that cares about each other, and if someone has a bad day for whatever reason (sick cat, kid misbehaving at school, hangover or divorce) the rest of the team will be happy to fill out and carry on as a unit. If something bad will happen the team will indicate the bad apple and you'll know when to step in.
Even though my first daily job in 2006 was an online first company I was very sceptical when covid started. It takes a lot of thought and preperation to have your org ready for an online work, and setting up zoom calls is simply not enough. I took hiatus as I felt I was not able to form a functional team based on skype calls. I missed some money but I think the history somehow proved me right.
I'm not going to lie, this is what I feel work from home and distributed teams has made hardest.
It's not that it can't be overcome, but it has to be done intentionally rather than organically. And that's a whole task a manager needs to add to their list of responsibilities.
> I missed some money but I think the history somehow proved me right.
Maybe, but I will say that having the norm be "unless you hang out in person your team can't bond" is an out for some people to excuse not being friendly or empathetic. Friendly people are friendly no matter the medium.
I've had managers hand-wring over getting people to hang out, and it's like: okay, I've drank beer with this difficult person that you hired, can they stop being an asshole in chat now?
My point is, if you're forming a new team from people that never seen each other and they communicate during random zoom calls the chances they will grow a real bond are very slim.
People will join the stand up call saying routine like "hello yesterday no blockers", proceed to grab a random task from the backlog and call it a day.
Meanwhile in the office people will have a casual chat over a coffee, go for a smoke, grab a lunch together and maybe even hang out after work on their own accord. When someone shows up late for office saying "crap my kid is really sick" it's more likely that someone else steps in and say "hey, it's fine, I'll do the deploy for you today".
When someone asks for that in a group chat people may miss it, and honestly, who cares about random set of pixels on your screen.
Not to mention that in the office, if you're not an asshole, people will stay with you after work and be willing to teach you how to work with that new library or system. I'm not seeing that organically happening in full remote structure where you can't really put a face behind a name.
Like I've said, I worked for fully remote companies long before covid happened, but everytime those companies invested a lot of time and money to get people together and do random meaningless stuff. Heck, when I joined Wikia in 2006 they flew us all from all around the world for basically two weeks vacation so we just could spend the time together and to get to know each other.
> My point is, if you're forming a new team from people that never seen each other and they communicate during random zoom calls the chances they will grow a real bond are very slim.
The NATO phonetic alphabet was one of the highest reward-for-effort things I've ever learned. It doesn't take long to commit to memory and become proficient with and the amount of time I've saved on repeating spelling (or even just "A as in apple, M as in Mary" nonsense) over the decades has added up.
It's clear enough that even people unfamiliar with it previously can follow it when you're using it to spell something and by design it's clear even over poor audio connections (or in a noisy server room).
It honestly should be taught to everyone in elementary school.
My experience has been the opposite. The number of customer service representatives I speak with that simply can't comprehend the NATO phonetic alphabet never ceases to surprise me, somehow. More than half the time I'm nearly finished with my last name ("foxtrot india november charlie hotel...") when my interlocutor just says "whoa whoa whoa, what?" and I have to fall back to the annoyingly slow and frustrating "eff as in foxtrot..." form while effortfully disguising my palpable disappointment. It's just one more way for humanity to disappoint me.
that's literally the point.... it is really hard to confuse bravo with Victor, or Quebec with uniform no matter how crappy the ambient noise environment
At a guess it's to avoid a conflict with Yankee over a noisy channel. (I.e. if you hear "[static] ank [static]" did you hear "Frank" or "Yankee"? "Foxtrot" prevents that conflict.)
It's not just denials. This is anecdotal but my company moved from Aetna to UHC starting in January, and there are already dozens of threads in our internal slack about drug co-pays jumping 10-100x, despite the UHC rep's assurances that the plans were equivalent with what we had before.
Imagine you're a 10 year old in a typical suburb in the US. There might be a pet dog or cat around if you're lucky, but nothing even at the level of a goat or chicken, let alone something wilder.
Your nearest friend is two-three miles away. Not walkable at your age for sure. Maybe bikeable, but your parents watch Fox News and know that sex slavers from the city are on constant patrol for juicy morsels like you, so you stay in the house. (Even if your parents have a basic grasp of statistics, your neighbors don't and will call CPS before you make it a block from your door, if a "block" even existed for you.)
Genuinely, what would you do in this situation? This is _normal_ for a depressingly huge number of children in the US. There's school and there's the video games in the basement.
Adults can drive. There are no other options for kids.
You might be surprised at how many salespeople are also introverts. Through years of being an (introverted) sales engineer, I've learned that outgoing socialization can be tough even for salespeople. Some of the most successful sales people I've worked with need to go quietly recharge for a day after a ton of meetings, just like I do. The biggest differentiator there is that the ones who can't manage it with a smile don't last long.
Relationship building in sales, like all skills, can be learned, even if it's draining.
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