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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • In a former workplace, we had a process that was close enough to what’s recommended in the blog, and it worked well. Really well even, there were hardly any ego clashes, everyone would negotiate a consensus and we had “spike” tasks in our sprints so that we can take the time to think about and research complex problems.

    And then the fire nation attacked…

    A director left the firm and they hired someone from Amazon. He said that we should have a “bias for action”, and got rid of this process, and a lot of other stuff we had going for ourselves using other such catch phrases.

    Getting him as a director was probably the worst thing to happen as we were under pressure to deliver stuff quickly all the time, and we’d then have to rework most of the shit because of missed requirements, or tools used not being insufficient for the task at hand etc. He was okay with it though, because “we delivered (shit) quickly”, and “our efficiency went up as indicated by the team velocity charts”.

    Pretty much the entire team had left the company in ~1.5 years, and customer satisfaction metrics were in the gutter when I left.

    I don’t know if he misunderstood “bias for action” and implemented it badly or if that’s genuinely how people at Amazon operate, but I won’t even think of joining AWS. Fuck that noise.



  • I live in Toronto, and I don’t have a car. I use buses and subways for most of my commute in winter. Along with these options, I use rideshare (public bicycle rentals) in every other season. There are people who bike even in winter but I’m nowhere close to that hardcore. I’ve spent maybe $250 on uber for dire situations in the last one year - that would’ve been a monthly auto insurance payment.

    I waited for a bus for around 20 minutes in -18°C a few weeks back. The biggest problem was that I had overdressed so I started sweating and had to unzip a layer.

    An important fact that people who have only ever lived in suburbs miss is that you don’t have to commute thaaat far thaaat often when you live in walkable cities. My cousin who lives in a suburb, drives for ~20 minutes to get to the closest big box store. I have 5 options groceries in a 1km radius and one of them is just one block over. So, I don’t even need a bus for groceries, let alone a car. We have seniors who definitely shouldn’t be driving walking around with grocery carts on the sidewalks. So, reducing car dependency improves mobility - not the opposite.