Refusing to accept a culture of optics is tantamount to not understanding optics though. The reality is that if you work on any kind of product, optics do matter - the perception of something working is often just as important as it actually working.
It can't possibly be "just as important" - in some cases, I will accept "almost as important", but any situation where the optics are "it works" and the reality is "it doesn't work" is eventually going to come crashing down on someone's head.
If it doesn't need to work, then it doesn't matter and the optics also don't matter. Of course, it might be more important for your promotion that the optics are correct, no matter what the ground reality is, and the crash could come down on someone else's head instead of yours, but in this scenario someone who is against a culture of optics rather has a point.
If you shipped and nobody important enough knows, then you haven't shipped in the eyes of the most important people.
I'm the first person to agree with you that it sucks that optics are important. But they are. You can definitely ship shit with great optics and get a promotion and be far away before that shit hits the fan.
But if you ship the greatest thing since sliced bread and nobody notices, then you might as well not have shipped at all.
Lots of things are popularity contests. It’s very difficult to escape when you’re in it, but they always fizzle out, leaving remarkably little behind. Your promotion at Enron has no meaning today, but at least the little string parsing library you wrote may still be in use and someone is happy about it, decades later.
The point is that your impact isn’t defined by a McKinsey trained head of HR who gamified a career ladder for you, or the opinion of “important people”. In fact, what impact means depends on where and (crucially) when you measure it.
Some professions have longer reward cycles than a human lifetime. Great writers, artists and thinkers are often recognized posthumously. Doesn’t mean everyone should write poems, but we shouldn’t exacerbate a culture where you’re useless if you can’t charm your closest mediocre middle manager. Life is more.
Oh absolutely agreed on lots of things being popularity contests. And I don't like that fact either.
It's still important unfortunately.
Your promotion at Enron still has meaning today because it bumped you up the career ladder early on in your career and your next job after that was a step up from that etc. 20 years of elevated salary because you climbed the career ladder early adds up to real dollars in your investment accounts.
Do I like it? Absolutely not and I am trying to stay at the level I'm at right now for as long as I possibly can, because my job is not entirely a popularity contest and still has real good software engineering and actually building software that real people use and love in it. If I "climbed" any further all day every day would be a popularity contest. But I do recognize that being allowed to continue building that software requires (as in "it's important") to take part in some of these popularity contests.
(talking paid work wise here - if you're OK to live in a basement doing meaningful open source work that will outlive you for the rest of your life and it makes you happy, then power to you - not most people's reality)
I see your point, and I agree. I think it comes down to weighing strategy, tactics and values. Values can really only have impact once you have some form of influence. And tactics can be necessary to establish yourself, even more so in a world increasingly governed by micro-algorithmic engagement and short termism. But it can also be dangerous in the sense of perpetuating values you don’t agree with, not least within yourself - a tactical win but a strategic failure. Some people pull it off - like Dave Chappelle, getting “fuck you money” early and staying real.
The problem is, it was basically useless. The main use case for heart rate monitoring is continuously throughout the day/night, or during exercise. A watch is very good at this. An optical sensor on the back of your phone is not.
Periodically checking your heart rate by holding your phone in a specific way is not a useful feature for that many people.
+1. If a phone has a stopwatch, you can get your bpm at a given moment with a finger and a multiplication (or patience). Given the limited real estate on a mobile phone it's crazy to devote any space for something so trivial.
For me, just having something that you can check 1 time per year is much better than nothing. The anecdote: I was working two heavy manual labor jobs 7 days per week and felt absolutely fantastic, glowing with power. Turned out the heart rate at rest was 180 lmao. Like a rabbit. Took a few days off, it dropped below 70.
It should decline some 60 sec after physical activity. I think I measured after 10-15 minutes. Fatigue, dehydration, lack of sleep, a diet with lots of coffee. I just added those to the todo list. I went home to sleep (and confiscated the heart rate meter), the next morning it was around 100 bpm which is still terrible shape. Over the day it sunk to 80, over the 2nd day to 70, 3rd a bit lower. Back at work it would barely elevate. The moral of the story: Don't work out 11 hours per day for 6 months straight.
"Still, if exposed to the high humidity present in some parts of the US (less common in Italy)"
Italy is basically a massive peninsula and some islands - it's quite humid! The humidity in Parma itself today is 65%, which is the same as Miami, Florida today and more than New Orleans. it's fall in Italy, and in Palermo it's 80% humidity, in Bergamo 84%, Bologna 83% etc.
"there is not, and never has been "a tragedy of the commons situation"
I kindly invite you to visit the kitchens of undergraduate house-shares. I think you may soon appreciate there are "tragedy of the commons" situations happening all the time :)
Perhaps the expectations on students are a bit unreasonable?
"Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next."
Reading Crime and Punishment alone is estimated to take about 11-12 hours at 300WPM. Then consider your average student is taking 4 or 5 classes per semester? If they all assigned that much reading, that would be 60 hours a week of just reading, not even including time to process what's being read, or write assignments, revise etc.
It was common to get at least a book's worth of reading a week for the humanities oriented classes at my undergrad. Always fun seeing the freshman morale sink a few weeks in when they realized they had to either skim aggressively or do ~10-20 hours of reading.
Of course, those suckers got to avoid the hard science lab time, so good for them.
Rule of thumb for my college classes was 3 hours of outside work for every hour in class. So 3 hours of lecture per week = 9 hours of problem sets, reading, etc. That was 50 years ago.
Were those classes actually reading all of Pride and Prejudice in a single week, or were they skimming and then using prior skill and knowledge to conduct discussions on the book?
>All professionals I've ever talked to seem to agree that videos are a terrible form of reference information
It really depends. For most software things, I'd prefer to have written documentation. If it's purely for reference, then yes I agree text is better.
For working on my bicycle or car, often I like watching videos because you pick up on little ways the pros make the jobs easier - for example, the steps might do a poor job of describing the angle and movement of tyre levers, but it's easily understood via video (just an example).
As a result, it can be a much richer experience when you are building skills as opposed to just following a checklist.
