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We celebrate the other option so why not celebrate child free lives? It seems like historically a lot of people have had to make this decision not by their own will or need. Showing people that they can have just as compelling lives as parents is a net-good.

Every parent “messes” up their kids life, its a matter of degree. Its part of the human experience.

I think I see what you mean in terms of everyone having life difficulties. But I disagree because of cases where bad childhood environment causes/exacerbates significant issues with kids' wellbeing, such as mental health disorders. This is not something that everyone experiences as "part of life" right?

> Partly, and I won't deny it, this is because of serious chemical changes that happened almost instantly when our first child was born. It was like someone flipped a switch. I suddenly felt protective not just toward our child, but toward all children. As I was driving my wife and new son home from the hospital, I approached a crosswalk full of pedestrians, and I found myself thinking "I have to be really careful of all these people. Every one of them is someone's child!"

One thing Ive observed about Americans is how less of this feeling exists, without having kids etc. Like why the f does he not care for pedestrians before having a kid? Did he believe that adult humans just apparated out of nowhere? I see this a lot in how people drive, too.

I believe it is a result of the hyper-indivialistic and hyper-capitalist society rather than something innate in the people. I do think Americans deserve (and should demand and build) a better system.


anecdotally every place ive worked at has switched over and never looked back.

Same. It's game-changing - leaps and bounds above every previous attempt to make Python's packaging, dependency management, and dev workflow easy. I don't know anyone who has tried uv and not immediately thrown every other tool out the window.

I use uv here and there but have a bunch of projects using regular pip with pip-tools to do a requirements.in -> requirements.txt as a lockfile workflow that I've never seen enough value in converting over. uv is clearly much faster but that's a pretty minor consideration unless I were for some reason changing project dependencies all day long.

Perhaps it never grabbed me as much because I've been running basically everything in Docker for years now, which takes care of Python versioning issues and caches the dependency install steps, so they only take a long time if they've changed. I also like containers for all of the other project setup and environment scaffolding stuff they roll up, e.g. having a consistently working GDAL environment available instantly for a project I haven't worked on in a long time.


2 things: First, you can (and should) replace your `pip install` with `uv pip install` for instant speed boost. This matters even for Docker builds.

Second, you can use uv to build and install to a separate venv in a Docker container and then, thanks to the wonders of multistage Docker builds, copy that venv to a new container and have a fully working minimal image in no time, with almost no effort.


been in the python game a long time and i've seen so many tools in this space come and go over the years. i still rely on good ol pip and have had no issues. that said, we utilize mypy and ruff, and have moved to pyproject etc to remotely keep up with the times.

uv solved it, it will be the only tool people use in 2 more years. if you’re a python shop / expert then you can do pip etc but uv turned incidental python + deps from a huge PITA for the rest of us, to It Just Works simplicity on the same level or better than Golang.

Then can they please figure out some way of invoking it that doesnt require prefixing everything with 'uv'

You can source the virtualenv like normal.

For any command, you can create an 'alias' in your shell config. That way you can get rid of the prefix.

Solved with direnv. Also - in my .bashrc in all of my (many) clients:

  $ type uvi uvl uvv
  uvi is a function
  uvi ()
  {
      uv pip install $@
  }
  uvl is a function
  uvl ()
  {
      uv pip list
  }
  uvv is a function
  uvv ()
  {
      uv venv;
      cat > .envrc <<EOF
  source .venv/bin/activate
  EOF

      direnv allow
  }

That would defeat the purpose of creating and expanding their brand.


alias in ~/.zshrc?

uv run bash/zsh/your shell of choice

I don't want software on my computer, that just downloads and installs random stuff. This is the job of the OS in particular the package manager.

You're welcome to live in the 90s dark ages, I feel this attitude and the shape of the old linux distros like Debian that laboriously re-package years-old software have been one of the biggest failures of open source and squandered untold hours of human effort. It's a model that works okay for generic infrastructure but requires far too much labor and moves far too slowly with quite a poor experience for end users and developers. Why else would all modern software development (going back to perl's cpan package manager in 1995) route around it?

Do you not use non-OS package managers?

If not, do you develop software with source dependencies (go, java, node, rust, python)? If so, how do you handle acquiring those dependencies—by hand or using a tool?


> Do you not use non-OS package managers?

Mostly no, sometimes I give up and still use pip as a separate user.

> If not, do you develop software with source dependencies (go, java, node, rust, python)? If so, how do you handle acquiring those dependencies—by hand or using a tool

I haven't felt the need to use Go, the only Java software I use is in the OS repo. I don't want to use JS software for other reasons. This is one of the reasons why I don't like Rust rewrites. Python dependencies are very often in the OS repo. If there is anything else, I compile it from source and I curse when software doesn't use or adheres to the standard of the GNU build system.


I hope you understand you are part of a very, very small minority.

Thanks for explaining your workflow. It seems predictable, but like it really locks you into one of the few (albeit popular) programming languages that has many/most of its development libraries repackaged by your OS. There are plenty of very popular languages that don't offer that at all.

Go and Rust, specifically, seem a bit odd to be allergic to. Their "package managers" are largely downloading sources into your code repository, not downloading/installing truly arbitrary stuff. How is that different from your (presumably "wget the file into my repo or include path") workflow for depending on a header-only C library from the internet which your OS doesn't repackage?

I understand if your resistance to those platforms is because of how much source code things download, but that still seems qualitatively different to me from "npm install can do god-knows-what to my workstation" or "pip install can install packages that shadow system-wide trusted ones".


Personally I run "apt install whateverineed"

I very much appreciate the sentiment - and agree that random crap (particularly some of the insane dependency chains that you get from NPM, but also Rust) in which you go to install a simple (at least you believe) package - and the Rust/NPM manager downloads several hundred dependencies.

But the problem with only using the OS package manager is that you then lock yourself out of the entire ecosystem of node, python, rust packages that have never been migrated to whatever operating system you are using - which might be very significant.

How do you feel about Nix? It feels like this is a nice half-way measure between reliable/reproducible builds, but without all of the Free For all where you are downloading who-knows-what-from-where onto your OS?


In general I agree with you. But not for software dev packages.

The package manager I use, apt on Debian, does not package many Python development repos. They've got the big ones, e.g. requests, but not e.g. uuid6. And I wouldn't want it to - I like the limited Debian dev effort to be put towards the user experience and let the Python dev devs worry about packaging Python dev dependencies.


What’s the point of constraining oneself to what is in the OS package manager? I like to keep my dependencies up to date. The versions in the OS package manager are much older.

And let’s say you constrain yourself to your OS package manager. What about the people on different distros? Their package managers are unlikely to have the exact same versions of your deps that your OS has.


> What’s the point of constraining oneself to what is in the OS package manager? I like to keep my dependencies up to date. The versions in the OS package manager are much older.

I favor stability and the stripping of unwanted features (e.g. telemetry) by my OS vendor over cutting edge software. If I really need that I install it into /usr/local, that it what this is for after all.

> And let’s say you constrain yourself to your OS package manager. What about the people on different distros? Their package managers are unlikely to have the exact same versions of your deps that your OS has.

This is a reason to select the OS. Software shouldn't require exact versions, but should stick to stable interfaces.


Don't worry, gramps, pip won't trigger your tinfoil hat.

Then don't use it?

Do you use pip?

Geospatial tends to be the Achilles heel for python projects for me. Fiona is a wiley beast of a package, and GDAL too. Conda helped some but was always so slow. Pip almost uniformly fails in this area for me.

Yup, the fact UV just installed geopandas out of the box with no issues blew my mind.

Im guessing that all the sudden interest in rocketry and drones is related to the war in the middle east? Because I have found that very interesting too, that a country as poor and as heavily sanctioned as Iran is managing to hold out the mightiest human forces the world has ever seen.

Only someone coming out of the US education system can have both the power to start such a war and the complete lack of knowledge needed to think it would go well...

> a country as poor and as heavily sanctioned as Iran

It's one of the oldest civilization in the world

It's not poor by any means, it's the 20th economy in the world

They produce as many engineers per year as the US, and they're not financial engineers or saas coders, fyi:

> mid-14c. enginour, "constructor of military engines," from Old French engigneor "engineer, architect, maker of war-engines; schemer"

Sanctioned for half a century means they developed other ways to live and survive


Model rocketry has long been a gateway drug to get kids interested in STEM subjects.

What do they hold, exactly? Leaders are dead and keeps dying, good chunk of their military is defunkt, while "mightiest human forces" don't even have boots on ground.

I highly recommend you to open a few foreign newspapers and lurk in foreign forums, groups, &c. you're either misinformed or blind

> don't even have boots on ground

Anyone with half a brain cell knows this would be the biggest strategic, tactical and political blunder of the century

> What do they hold, exactly?

What they hold exactly is:

- middle eastern countries who've been greasing Washington's palms for influence and protection received 0 protection, it'll take decades to rebuild any trust here

- Americans deserted their bases in the region instantly, they are now damaged or destroyed, the US conveniently ask satellite image providers to delay the release of new data

- Lost a bunch (most?) of radars from their early warning system in the region

- US sailors seemingly set their own ship on fire to avoid deployment

- Depleted israel interceptor stocks, more and more things are passing through the dome

- the US spent 12b so far to fuck up Iran, Russia made 6b from the gas price increase in the meantime, big brain move

- the US pulling out of asia to send more shit to the middle east, eroding trust of countries like South Korea

- Israel support in the US is falling fast, in the EU it's gone

- the price of everything will slowly rise, because everything we use rely on gas one way or another, they've been sanctioned for 50 years they don't give a shit anymore.

- the US showing their complete lack of strategical vision, saying something on monday, the opposite on tuesday and denying they even said either things by wednesday


No, _I_ highly recommend you to open a few foreign newspapers and lurk in foreign (to whom?) forums, groups, &c. you're either misinformed or blind, based on these bullet points.

Stop reading r/iran or CNN or whatever bs you pump into your brain.

This war sucks but it's very far from "Iran is holding".


They're getting absolutely wrecked, but it doesn't mean it's good for the US. This is basically warfare 101, you can have a undisputed tactical victory and a complete strategic failure at the exact same time, in that case the tactical victory is bombing a country which is like 20 years behind in technology and spend 10% as much as the US on defense (wow good job!), the strategical blunder is that it did not achieve anything good for the short nor long term for anyone involved, if anything it helped Russia and China which kept being mentioned as the US arch enemies

Iranians don't like their current government much but they don't particularly like getting fucked up by Israel and the US either, especially when you kill 170 kids on day 1 and then lie about it on live tv. How did it go in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq? Yeah, not so good. It's always about "preventing wars" and "bringing freedom", but it ends up being "bringing wars" and "consolidating authoritarian regimes"


Time will tell.

The strait of hormuz is still closed, and a new government has not been installed.

From a conventional perspective Iran is by all means "losing" the war. However, the United States and the majority of the world desperately want the strait to be opened and have so far been unsuccessful in preventing Iran from blocking it. The US is also greatly interested in regime change, which has also been unsuccessful.


> The US is also greatly interested in regime change

Trump doesn't car about regime change. Just like in Venezuela, his plan is to kill leaders until there's one that can make a "deal" (whatever it means).


Agree with what others have said. And will add that under Trump US was losing soft power around the world. But attacking Iran accelerated that process significantly.

Most of our allies feel that they can give us the middle finger when we ask for help. More people around the world than ever before now think that US and Israel are the biggest threat to world peace.

This is new and uncharted territory for us. We will pay a bigger price for this over the coming years and decades than whatever we did to Iran.


Helps to have terrain around your country that makes it one giant fort

Except the tobacco part. Is this consumer grade or is it meant for industrial uses (organic pesticides etc).

Out of curiosity, it sounds like you're the kind of person that could easily find another job. Why slog it out until the end rather than quit/find a better gig? Genuinely interested because every time I've ended up with a manager like that my mental health has suffered so now I generally start planning my exit as soon as I'm stuck with a bad manager.

Ethically, if you do not agree with the company you work at, the optimal course of action if you can stomach it is to stay and do a bad job rather than get replaced by someone who might do a good job.

I have been in such a situation before, and while I was not able to coast along until the company went under, the time delta between me getting fired and the company going under was measured in weeks.

In hindsight I'd probably not do it again, it was hugely mentally taxing, and knowingly performing work in such a way that it provides negative value to the company (remember, the goal is to make it go under) is in my experience actually harder than just doing a good job... Especially if being covert is a goal.


Have you read the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual?

https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...


I've seen it, but I think it's got some places that it would benefit from more clarity. Can we put together a committee to improve and protect our processes from it? We could call it a task force if that's easier to sell to management.

This demands a tiger team.

I did not know the existence of this manual. It was a very interesting read! Especially after page 28 (General Interference with Organizations and Production).

> Ethically, if you do not agree with the company you work at, the optimal course of action if you can stomach it is to stay and do a bad job rather than get replaced by someone who might do a good job.

What...? In what way is it anything other than highly unethical to sabotage someone you have a contract with, because you disagree with them?


Plenty of historical examples of work environments where sabotage would have been the most ethical thing to do (and often you will only know in hindsight). But yeah in most circumstances a simple disagreement doesn’t warrant the psychological cost of such sabotage.

the psychological cost of such sabotage

Of course. One always needs to weigh it against the psychological cost of complying with unethical directions.


What do you mean...? Plenty to do what?

Your opinion of the situation is not enough to justify this course of action in 99.99% of cases and the residual 0.01% should not be enough to fuel your ego to do anything other than quit decently, and look for an employer that is more aligned with whatever your ideals are.

I repeat the insane statement that we are arguing over here: "Ethically, if you do not agree with the company you work at, the optimal course of action if you can stomach it is to stay and do a bad job rather than get replaced by someone who might do a good job."

This says: ANY company you work for and disagree with over anything: Don't quit! Sabotage [maybe people are confused about what "do a bad job" means, and that this usually leads to other people getting hurt in some way, directly or indirectly, unless your job is entirely inconsequential]. And that's supposed to be ethically optimal.

What the fuck?


I think there's a bit of confusion between

> (Ethically, if you do not agree with the company you work at), the optimal course of action is..

And

> Ethically, (if you do not agree with the company you work at, the optimal course of action is...)

The former, should've probably been phrased "if you do not agree ethically with the company you work at, the optimal course of action is..."

First example that comes to mind, about a movie that portrays ethical sabotage is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schindler%27s_List

I'm actually a bit unsure about what could be the motivations of someone who engages in sabotage *not* for ethical reasons


There's a _big_ continuum between disagreeing over something and an ethical hard line, it feels like a slippery slope to interpete a suggested approach for one end of that line as advocacy for applying that same approach to the other end.

A specific example will help.

Imagine I am working for a company and I discover they are engaged in capturing and transporting human slaves. Furthermore, the government where they operate in fully aware and supportive of their actions so denouncing them publicly is unlikely to help. This is a real situation that has happened to real people at points in history in my own country.

I believe that one ethical response would be to violate my contract with the company by assisting slaves to escape and even providing them with passage to other places where slavery is illegal.

Now, if you agree with the ethics of the example I gave then you agree in principle that this can be ethical behavior and what remains to be debated is whether xAI's criminal behavior and support from the government rise to this same level. I know many who think that badly aligned AI could lead to the extinction of the human race, so the potential harm is certainly there (at least some believe it is), and I think the government support is strong enough that denouncing xAI for unethical behavior wouldn't cause the government to stop them.


I have no clue why people are so confused here.

a) I understand the very few and specific examples, that would justify and require disobedience. In those cases just doing a "bad job" seems super lame and inconsequential. I would ask more of anyone, including myself.

b) all other examples, the category that parent opened so broadly, are simply completely silly, is what I take offensive with. If you think simply disagreeing with anyone you have entered a contract with is cause for sabotaging them, and painting that as ethically superior, then, I repeat: what the fuck?

c) If you suspect criminal behavior then alarm the authorities or the press. What are you going to do on the inside? What vigilante spy story are we telling ourselves here?


Some people in this thread seem to come from a place of morality where some “higher truth” exists outside of the sphere of the individual to guide one’s actions, and yet others even seem to weakly disguise their own ethics and beliefs behind a framework of alleged “rationality”, as if there was mathematical precision behind what is the “right” action and which is clearly wrong — and anybody that just doesn’t get it must be either an idiot or clinically insane. By which I completely dismiss not only opinion but also individual circumstances.

In reality, which actions a person considers ethical and in coherence with their own values is highly individual. I can be friends or colleague with somebody who has a different set of ethics and circumstances than me. If I were to turn this into a conflict that needs resolution each time it shows, I would set myself up for eternal (life long) war with my social environment. Some will certainly enjoy that, and get a sense of purpose and orientation from it! I prefer not to, and I can find totally valid and consistent arguments for each side. No need to agree to reach understanding, and respect our differences.

Typically, people value belonging over morality: they adapt to whatever morality guarantees their own survival. The need to belong is a fundamental need; we are social animals not made to survive on our own.

The moment I am puzzled about another persons reasoning I can ask and if they are willing they will teach me why their actions make sense to them. If I come from a place of curiosity and sincere interest, people will be happy to help me get over my confusion. If I approach that conversation from some higher ground, as some kind of missionary, I might succeed sometimes, but fail most times, as I would pose a threat to their coherence, which they will remove one way or another.


Ah, but if there’s no higher truth, then you also can’t say that it’s wrong to sabotage your employer because of an ethical disagreement (or rather, you can say it, but it’s just your personal opinion). By condemning this course of action, the OP presupposes some sort of objective ethical standard.

"Don't struggle only within the ground rules that the people you're struggling against have laid down." -- Malcolm X

"If you're unhappy with your job you don't strike. You just go in there every day, and do it really half-assed. That's the American way. -- Homer Simpson

"To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral." -- Abbie Hoffman

Some might consider it unethical but others might also consider it immoral to not do what you're describing.

I guess you're fortunate enough to have only worked at places where your moral framework matched up with their business practices and treatment of the staff.

That isn't the case for most people. Most people are put into situations at one time or another where the people they're working for don't value them as equals, where the people they work for casually violate reasonable laws like product safety or enivronmental standards laws and what's worse these people will suffer no consequences for doing so.

No White Knight in shining armour is going to come from the government to shut them down. No lightning from heaven will strike them down. No financial penalty to dissuade them from further defection from society and the common man in the game that is life.

So what do you do? Do you do nothing? Just put your nose to the grindstone and keep working for the man? Do you quit, only to end up penniless and jobless, with poor prospects of an alternative, and even if you found one maybe it's 'meet the new boss same as the old boss'?

Nah, you come into work every day and you subtly fuck it up. You subtly fuck it up and you take whatever value you can extract.

They'd do the same to you.

They are doing the same to you.


> In what way is it anything other than highly unethical to sabotage someone

Ethics is more complicated than that. Is it unethical to sabotage your employer if your employed is themselves acting unethically?


Have we gotten so lost that “working against your enemies” is no longer something we aspire to do?

You’ve seen Schindler’s List, right?

Let's say you work for elon musk and are a decent person…

Why would you start to work for elon musk if you consider yourself a decent person, but him unworkable for? Have you not heard of elon musk beforehand...? Did you let yourself be employed with the specific goal of sabotaging the work, in what must be the least effective (but certainly very lucrative) coup possible?

What is it? Am I to believe this person is a chaotic mastermind? Or a selfish idiot? Or non-existant?


His reputation did not start out in the current state; if it had, I suspect he would never have been able to hold the importance/monetary power that he currently holds.

Changing one's mind about him can take a while.

With the benefit of hindsight, it certainly took me longer than I am happy with to change my mind about him; to be specific, I should have more radically changed my opinion of his personality when he libelled that cave expert in response to being told a submarine wasn't going to help, I should have recognised that only someone with a very fragile ego would react that way, that it wasn't just a blip on his record but something deeper.


> Why would you start to work for elon musk if you consider yourself a decent person, but him unworkable for?

Anyone working at Twitter at the time of its acquisition could have found themselves in such a position.


Assume you work for e.g., a cigarette company. A company responsible for many deaths by unethically adding highly addictive substances. By sabotaging the company you are making this world a better place. Ethically it's the right thing to do.

Or, assume you're hired by the Nazi to work in concentration camps. Ethically it's the right thing to do to sabotage their gas chambers.


Even ethically, this is only true if you think the ethics of the place are so bad that sabotage is warranted. That's not every place that you have ethical problems with.

To do that (and hide it), you have to become a dishonest person yourself. That is ethically destructive to you. So the threshold for doing this should be pretty high.


I don't think sabotaging a company just because you don't want to work with a certain framework and deploy it on k8s is a good idea.

Yeah, I could see this being true if there was really _nothing else_ I could possibly be doing with my time that is worthy. But there are a lot of worthy things I could be doing with my time.

Ethically perhaps but financially and mentally its surely better to start looking for a new role (at a different company) that is more in alignment with you, no?

Ethically, if you extend this reasoning, are we not obligated to find a position in the most morally repulsive organization we are aware of, and then coast?

yes, this is called 'effective altruism'

I think there is an implied "given the company you joined turns out to be nonethically aligned"

Yes, that's what I'm addressing with my comment above.

One could find a position in the most morally attractive organization they are aware of, and then work really hard.

well not coast, the intent is sabotage

Coasting you're already using resources that could be used more effectively.

If you actively slow other people down as well it's even better though.


As they say, two uneth’s make a thical.

I really wouldn’t want to be in this position. But it feels very motivating. It would sooth some difficult memories.

I can see myself putting in a lot of hours.

The willingness to be fired, in both good and bad situations, can be mentally freeing and an operational/political advantage. Many of us fail to push as hard as we optimally could, when we have too much on the line.


IMO, this is a good question and deserves a solid answer, so I’ll do my best.

Setting aside the “fixer” for the time being, I really enjoyed the work I did at Tesla. Tesla was the first company that gave me very high levels of autonomy to just own projects and deliver. It also pushed me to take on projects that I had previously wanted to do that I hadn’t been given a chance to work on before.

(Side note: At that point in time in my career, my thinking was that I needed to earn opportunities to work on projects at work to build skills that would enhance my career. I didn’t see the value in working on projects outside of work to build skills because I didn’t think those side-project skills would be valued by other companies the same as “day job” experience. I’ve since learned this isn’t true when it’s done right.)

I spent a lot of time at Tesla delivering value for a bunch of people who desperately needed it at the time, and the thanks I received from them was genuine. It felt very good to help others at Tesla out in a meaningful way, so I kept chugging along to the best of my abilities. Life was throwing lemons at me in my personal dealings, and Tesla was helping me make lemonade from a career standpoint. Besides, all the long work hours were a good distraction from the home life stuff.

In a lot of ways, it was a very fulfilling environment to work in, but it wasn’t for the faint of heart. People often quit within a month or two because the environment was too fast paced with too many projects under tight deadlines and projects quickly followed one after another. An environment like Tesla just doesn’t let up, so one has to figure out how to manage the stress without much support from others. Oftentimes, if you do need to let up at Tesla (or introduce friction in any sort of seemingly non-constructive way), that’s the cue you aren’t working out for the company anymore and it’s time to find someone to replace you.

Coming back around to the original question of why I stuck it out until the end. Just before the “fixer” was brought in, I was “soft promoted” by a director (no title change, but was given direct reports and a pay bump, the title change was suppose to come a couple of months later as the soft-promotion happened just before an annual review cycle). The director who soft-promoted me was someone who I got along with well and it seemed like things were going in the right direction in my career at that point. The director was in charge of a couple of projects that went sideways in a very visible way, and Elon basically fired the director after the second project went south, which is why the “fixer” was brought in.

When the “fixer” first took over things, it seemed like I was going to continue on the path that the director had originally laid out for me. The “fixer” said I was going to get more headcount and work on bigger projects, but this never materialized.

I really didn’t like working for the “fixer” after a while. IMO, it was clear they didn’t know what they were doing, they weren’t willing to listen to feedback, and I spent a lot of time trying to provide guidance to the “fixer”, but it wasn’t seen as helpful and I felt like I was spinning gears. My mental health did start to suffer as I got more burned out towards the end of my tenure there.

Eventually, I was tasked with hiring someone to be my manager and I saw the writing on the wall (sort of). I started to look for a new job just in case. At one point, I thought bringing in someone between myself and the “fixer” would be a good thing. I didn’t realize I was actually finding my replacement. Two days after my replacement was hired, I was let go (this was the 1:1 meeting where I was going to turn in my notice, but HR served me papers instead).

To your original point, if I was in a similar situation now, I would be planning my exit immediately instead of trying to make the best of a bad situation, but I had to learn that lesson the hard way.


Hey, thanks, that was quite interesting!

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how the "fixer", who sounds rather ineffective as an executive, came into this position, in what sounds like overall a rather effective organization.

I've been personally thinking quite a bit about what makes organizations work or not work recently, and your story is quite interesting to me as a glimpse into a kind of organization that I've never seen from the inside myself.


This is a good question, and it felt like nepotism. I do want to point out that this is all somewhat hazy memories from years ago when all of this happened, so take everything with a grain of salt (as usual). Also, a lot of this is going to sound like nepotism, which is most likely was, but this is hearsay from other people.

My understanding of how the "fixer" came into there position is a somewhat circuitous route. From my understanding (I didn't hear any of this directly from the "fixer" themselves, but other people who spent far more time with the "fixer" than myself), the "fixer" had spent about a decade out of the workforce prior to joining Tesla. My understanding is that they were raising kids while also dealing with aging parents. We'll just call this time the "fixer"'s work hiatus.

Prior to the hiatus, the "fixer" had moved into a small-team managerial role at a large, name-brand tech company during the late 90s/early 2000s. At the end of the hiatus, they leveraged some connections and somehow attained a director position at Tesla managing a team of about 30-40 people straight out of the hiatus.

From my understanding, the first team the "fixer" managed at Tesla didn't like working for them and after about 18 months, the team basically forced the "fixer" out. I'm not exactly sure what the team was doing to push the person out, but from what I heard, work basically ground to a halt for the entire team where they refused to work for the "fixer".

This was around the same time that the two projects went sideways that I mentioned, so the director I reported to was on the outs and the director's manager (a VP) was looking for someone who could step into the role. The VP somehow connected with the "fixer" and they worked out a deal where the "fixer" would lead the team on a 3-month probation period while the VP continued to look for someone to come into the position, while also giving the "fixer" a chance to earn the role.

(Side note: One other bit of context I want to provide is that the team I was on was about 50-60 or so people at this time right before the "fixer" came on. The "fixer" also did not have any sort of technical background and this team consisted of probably ~90% software professionals in some capacity. A lot of the conversations were very technical in nature, and the "fixer" did A LOT of delegating and "just tell me what decision you'd make and we'll do that" leadership.)

During this probation period, I thought the "fixer" actually did a good job getting a lay of the land, the social dynamics at play, and helped work out some inefficiencies. However, a lot of this improvement was done by bringing in consultants to do the deep dive, discover problems, and provide guidance to the "fixer" on how to address the problems.

Once the probation period was over, the consultants left and the "fixer" was in charge. Pretty quickly, the firings began and over the course of the next 5-6 months, more than 70% of the team under the "fixer" was replaced. At the same time, the team I was working for merged with another team, and the team size under the "fixer" shot up to about 100-120 people post-merge (I forget the exact number). The "fixer" also hired quite a few more people thinking more people get the same projects done faster.

To say the least, it was a pretty chaotic time because the entire team was under a lot of pressure with in-flight projects, not knowing if they were going to randomly be fired or not, new people to mentor/gel with, and lots of random projects being thrown at us.

About 6 months after I left, the "fixer" was fired and someone else who had extensive experience was brought in to right the ship. Per my understanding with people who were still working there about a year after the "fixer" left, the new person was very successful and had done a good job leading the team. Also, the person who I found to be my replacement stayed nearly 7 years at Tesla, so I guess I did a good job with that one.


Imagine the optics of a single destroyer/cruiser being on fire. It would shatter the myth of American naval power (some are arguing that this war already did that, which I tend to agree with).

Its weird to hear Atlassian being associated with productivity boosts of any kind considering the zillions of developer hours wasted trying to navigate JIRA.

Second this. Funnily, their AI is pretty good... recently I accidentally created a dupe ticket; linear AI realized that, labeled it as a dupe instantly after I created an issue. Fuck JIRA and confluence to hell.

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