I mostly agree with this. If you observe the KPI set used to run support teams, especially with large inbound you will see NPS used as a proxy for quality of resolution but folks mostly don’t respond to those prompts.
More interesting to support team managers are things like deflection rate (didn’t get to an agent) involvement rate (needed an agent) and eventually resolution rate (resolved issue). The last one in the absence of feedback is only a very weak proxy for a resolved issue.
If you consider customer support a cost center, you can guess how managers would optimize these numbers.
I don’t necessarily think there is much wrong with this - having a good product with excellent design, build and proactive support (docs, manuals, walkthroughs, proactive comms) - is likely very good for both customers and the business serving them.
I work mostly with Engineering teams, and consider slack inbound a pathology. Slack is great for collab in places, but it’s not a strong way to manage inbound, IMO.
The teams I’m responsible for make it easy for their stakeholder to raise issues, asks in a more deliberate, calmer way e.g. via GitHub issues or manager email. In exchange, we commit to mutually agreed response times on certain categories of business critical issues.
Generally, I don’t think it takes an ADHD diagnosis for slack inbound to completely kill your productivity, it’s a general problem. I don’t have ADHD but have strong empathy for how this must be a complete nightmare for you.
Perhaps have a manager put some structure on your inbound on your behalf?
It starts with a culture where I'm not sweating the fact that I haven't checked my Slack notifications in a while.
Slack is used like a kitchen sink in the two places I've used it - there is no easy way to determine what is urgent vs what can wait. One literally has to comb through all the red dots to filter them. If you believe channels solve this because you can create dedicated channels for the important stuff, very soon someone starts abusing the responsiveness on this channel to their selfish ends, first seeking an exception, and very soon making it a habit.
To top this, the Slack UX is literally designed to maximize the time one spends with it. I often find myself on Slack intending to either -
1. Check one of the important channels or
2. Recollect something someone shared that I now need to use
And before I know it, I'm responding to something that I didn't need to at this time. I often also forget why I came here in the first place.
Yes, email and ticketing are also pervaded by spam, but Slack is essentially a corporate sponsored, culturally accepted medium for noise and distraction with no easy way to apply controls.
You typically need strong leadership to define the constraints through culture, because the tool by itself isn't designed for this.
I am so fed up with this problem that I'm not going to mince words.
Nobody wants to be told they're disorganized and sloppy, but people outside engineering (especially sales and client people) are the absolute worst. They're the ones with the ADHD.
Engineers rarely have trouble with deep focus on work unless they're constantly being nagged by idiots who don't understand what they're costing the company.
There's a strong business case against the abuse of chat for "quick questions" or whatever other bullshit people are too dumb to figure out on their own if they just spent a few seconds more in thought before bothering anyone else.
Inbound = something that requires a response/action. Could be an automated alert that creates a ticket, could be a slack message from someone asking for something.
If you're not great with it every message can feel like an inbound and you're compelled to go cycle through all the channels and read everything whether it's immediately relevant or not.
I think the meaning of inbound here refers to work that is defined or asked of you or a team via Slack instead of via more thought-out and defined work.
Indeed, very much this. We spent some efforts structuring this at work and now we have 2-3 rules in place. First off, all requests for work and services are always issues either directly in the ticket system, or via mail to a central mail address. Nothing from chat will reliably trigger any work done.
However, we have defined a role "first contact". This role rotates on a weekly basis, and whoever is first contact has the job of monitoring some well-known channels for requests. They then act as a first level support pretty much, helping people to figure out how to best request what they need. They also handle mails that aren't automatically handled in the central mailbox.
The latter in turn enables the team to just ignore pretty much all chat notifications outside of the team. First contact person will ensure they are heard, and first contact person will also address high severity tickets directly to people after creation. And as much as that sounds like a slower process, it has improved our resolution times because people aren't distracted as much.
The best advice I can give is don’t treat it like an irreversible fork in the road or a path that won’t ultimately make you a better engineer. Find the right environment and give it a go!
Also Irish. +1 on your assessment here. The virulent strain narrative was peddled by the Irish government who went against medical advice and tried to deflect blame. The evidence doesn’t support the narrative.
I think the COVID-fatigue angle is quite interesting though. As critical as I am of the government they were under a lot of pressure from the populous to provide some sort of respite.
Isn’t this last bit in some sense a good thing? Representative government changing policies to reflect a shift in the population’s preference after ten months of dealing with these restrictions?
Representative government caving to demands when the demands are terrible, like in this case, is not a good thing. In that moment what is needed is enough guts to see the measures through and fend interest groups off. Loss of leadership and movement towards "the customer is king" politics is responsible for a lot of mistakes in the response to this virus.
If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people.
Which means believing that it's better to implement a terrible but popular decision than to override the will of the people.
So in this case, IF the majority supported lifting restrictions (and I'm not Irish so I have no idea what the public sentiment was), then the politicians did the right thing: They obeyed the will of the people.
Which also means that in this case, the people of Ireland f'd up and need to take responsibility for that, rather than blame the politicians who simply implemented their will.
We can't have it both ways. We can't demand a government of the people, by the people, for the people, and also let ourselves off the hook whenever our collective decisions suck.
Maybe we, the people, suck at governing in a crisis.
> If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people.
What you are describing is leaning towards "direct democracy", which nobody tries to implement, vs "representative democracy" which is what we all experience. In the latter it absolutely is a feature that representatives will go against the preference of the majority at least some of the time.
> If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people.
Not necessarily. I think some people have said that democracy is designed to imitate revolutions without actually being violent: that if much of the populace is armed and not that many people have enough gear and training to make them enormously more effective than a random person with a gun, then "one person, one vote; majority wins" approximately reflects what would happen if there was a violent revolution, so people don't have much to gain by adding violence. If that's true, then appeasing the mob by letting them more or less get their policies implemented may be best even if those policies are not the best—because the alternative is risking a bloody revolution followed by the mob implementing their policies anyway.
The US government is based on the idea that "citizens" (note: lots of problems with the way they defined them at the time) elect people who make decisions on their behalf. It was designed to have more and less democratic institutions so that there would be block on the popular will.
They believed that the purpose of democracy was to be able to remove the people who ruled you, to ultimately prevent autocracy. They didn't believe every decision should be a plebiscite.
> If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people
Well, no.
If we believe in democracy, we believe that government must ultimately serve and be accountable to the people.
It's possible along with that to also believe that it is a bad idea for the crowd to have day-to-day responsibility for the detailed decisions of government (if nothing else because of the dynamics of extra-large groups a d the communications problems involved), which might motivate us to prefer that democracy be representative rather than direct, with a relatively small group, that it is accountable to the crowd, making decisions.
One way I look at democracy is that it’s the will of the majority + the rights of the minority.
It gets a little.. speculative.. once that minority in this case is “(future) victims of covid”. Not sure how to fully and clearly articulate the principle behind why we should give up a little impatience now, in a somewhat unpopular way, and how that is compatible with democracy, but I believe it is.
This is why democracies are usually republics versus direct vote democracies -- the will of the majority will always throw the minority under the bus. This is why you have laws, checks and balances against mob rule.
Uh, there was and is no "hindsight" involved here. The scientific consensus about coronavirus and how to fight it (wearing masks, lockdowns and contact tracing) was clear pretty shortly after the whole drama began.
The problem was politicians, not just in the US, didn't have the guts to tell and explain their citizens that. The governments that did (New Zealand) or had prior epidemics experience / a population with a high compliance rate/trust in government (Japan, Taiwan) fared pretty well, as did the governments that resorted to authoritarian scale (China, Vietnam, Thailand).
For what it's worth even European countries such as Italy showed that hard lockdowns were and are effective, but politicians chose to disregard that evidence and prayed for the second wave to never appear...
Right. The mask data goes back a century and very good studies were published re SARS and masks after mask data was discarded and ignored by many during that illness. Quarantines and social distancing aren't new, never were.
the hindsight is not about what we should "ideally do to fight the pandemic regardless of everything else". But if people really wanted it (for economic reason for start, you know poor people like being able to eat)...
Yeah, it’s really hard to be overly critical. You could argue the government did its civic duty here, public sentiment was overwhelming in favor of reduced restrictions.
Unfortunately, as detailed elsewhere in comments, enough of the populous didn’t respond in kind in fulfilling theirs - which is what the decision needed to work.
That said you could also argue this was predictable. Our diaspora are scattered about the globe, and coming home for Christmas is a common event and our UK border basically doesn’t exist. Similarly, folks who are originally from elsewhere in the EU flying home for Christmas then back.
Overlay the drinking/socializing culture, which hits its busiest period around December and watch the R number tip upwards.
Full disclosure: I agreed with this government decision at the time, but was quite surprised / shocked at the resultant case explosion.
I don't know about Ireland in particular. But my sense is Covid restrictions many places in the Western world have begun crude and unfriendly to the individual because that's what's simple, cheap and what doesn't cost businesses money (with the US the worst but not the only offender). The US still isn't requiring sick-leave, isn't requiring safe working conditions around Covid.
Basically, not considerate of people's situation until people are at the breaking point and then just opening the flood gates.
Also Irish. 100% agree with the both of you. I have a limited amount of sympathy for the government as Christmas is hugely culturally significant, but I think they did a poor job (especially the handwaving over flights from abroad that can be paraphrased as "we recommend that people don't come home for Christmas unless they feel they really need to") and what we're seeing now is largely CYA.
Agreed. To be honest the minute Fianna Fail came into government things slipped a bit and it feels like the pressure from business was allowed overwhelm the health advice. It was plainly obvious what was going to happen when they opened up. The annoying thing was that the last year was wasted by not increasing emergency capacity in ICU and getting the correct processes in place to create a fast roll-out of vaccination. Right now they are two weeks in a one one week delayed and only doing 40k a week at max.
I think also we allowed ourself to be "ah sure we can't do that here" compared to New Zealand. The short term economic aspect of things blinded us. If you were coming to the country as the case in the NZ, you should be in mandatory hotel quarantine which all the strict rules in place as needed. With the exception of essential services like hauliers. Every one says in Ireland things can't be done, they can be and people will die because we weren't brave enough to make tougher calls. We would be in much better shape if we had of. Don't get me started on the mess up North throughout the whole thing.
Ultimately though this is about people taking individual responsibility. It's frustrating everyone blaming the government, I have many friends in frontline services and the irresponsibility of some over christmas was crazy. People's friends and family are suffering for it now.
Any Irish response or strategy is gonna be hobbled by the Northern Ireland lax response. We can't just shut the NI border, either legally or politically.
I’m surprised this book didn’t come up sooner, it’s a fantastic book.
To my knowledge the only book mentioned here that takes the time to define technical leadership and present models of leadership suited potentially to different circumstances.
I might add ‘The art and science of doing engineering’ by hamming and recently republished by stripe.
The more leadership or management books I read the more inclined I am to respect Taleb’s approach of looking for old timeless material rather than what’s new or hot.
Most of what Gerald Weinberg has written qualifies IMO. Tom DeMarcos books also.
While I agree with your advice in the general case, I also find the author's data point interesting and compelling. Receiving 2 offers from 7 interviews with only 16 applications is a good rate in software engineering as far as I am aware.
It's also worth pointing out that the cover letter mentioning "rare programmer" ultimately led to an interview and an offer according to the author.
It depends. For the types of companies he was applying to - yes.
For your standard experienced “enterprise dev” in most major US cities outside of the west coast and NYC, pre-Covid the demand was so high and so few experience developers come on the market, you could usually find a job in less than a month depending on if you were looking for the “right job” or the “right now” job. That’s been my experience since 2000 with the exception of the years between 2008-2010.
Of course that’s if you do enough resume driven development and have a strong network of former coworkers and local recruiters.
So true, excessive ego is really problematic on an engineering team. There's a thin but very real line between confidant and egoistical. And most hiring managers err on the side of caution when seeing potential red flags.
Maybe I was a little terse in my response. Humility often comes hand in hand with a growth mindset and a real eagerness to learn. Not hiring for that limits the long term upside of the hire ie you get what you get right now.
Is that what humility is? I find the word so confusing (non-native English speaker). When I look at the definition of it [1], I can't see that it means a growth mindset and a real eagerness to learn.
From the definition that I read, could as easily mean having a mindset of that whatever you know now is something one should be grateful for, and you don't always need to push yourself so hard.
Anyways, thanks for pointing that out. I find it much easier to think in terms of growth mindset and a real eagerness to learn.
[1] : freedom from pride or arrogance : the quality or state of being humble
accepted the honor with humility
The ordeal taught her humility.
Toxic people absolutely demolish morale and productivity. The effects are strong enough that even a hint of egotistical behavior is enough to put you out of the running (for good reason).
Got it, thanks. Still, I am reading it with more generous eyes I think. It seemed to be used to contextualize their communication skills. Not as ”I am better than most”, more like ”I have this unique trait that you might value”.
You're absolutely right we could be doing a better job of managing expectations for what will happen next.
Right now since this is still in beta its pretty manual process but here is roughly what will happen:
- We review how you describe your ideal role and make sure we have enough information to know what kinds of companies to reach out to
- We create a blinded version of your resume (remove you contact information so no recruiters contact you directly)
- We search for companies/jobs that match your preferences and reach out to them to ask them to provide an estimate
- You'll have a google doc shared with you with estimates from different companies. This will be updated in real time as we get estimates
- You can decide to use your report just to better understand your market rate, use it to ask for a raise with your current boss, or connect with any of the companies that provided an estimate you would be interested in working for
Hope that helps! Feel free to reach out to matt@tellmewhatimworth.com if you have any more questions/comments/etc
If you’ve got a copy of my resume, even if you remove my name/email/phone number, I feel like it would be pretty easy to figure out who I am.
Especially, if people have interesting or unique work experience. Say they founded a startup or they are the author of a popular OS library. Even a niche product, finding the principal author is usually just a search away.
Only if your resume is super-mundane would it offer a modicum of privacy (and who wants to hire that?)
Purely on this basis I am not offering them my details. They will he persisted behind a login and this data is guaranteed to be sold to recruiters, once OP wants to make money from it.
If it was more legit it wouldn’t require the sign up form it has.
We share blinded resumes (no contact information included) with the companies that provide the estimates and receive a finders fee from companies we have a recruitment sourcing agreement established with.
That being said you are under no obligation to speak with any of the companies that provide you a salary estimate.
2200 on food per month, utter nonsense. 380 on baby kit per month for children in preschool? Nonsense.
Recently moved to SF with family of 4, combined income of about 130k less than this and living well including private elementary schools and preschool.
Don't need a car here, even with a family.
We furnished our place with a bunch of stuff folk were giving away for free
