Bad Software Advice: Three Interesting Links #6
WARNING: This edition contains: Hyrum's Law, Documentation, incompetent management, remote work, and AI
Smuggling Documentation into Work
As someone who is sometimes mildly annoyed when I document things and then can’t get others to do so, I found a story about people trying to restore missing documentation to a company they used to work for - reverse corporate espionage - funny.
Success sometimes limits your options
There is no separate term for the type of technical debt that you create between you and another company with a bad interface or accidental behavior. Oh, actually there sort of is: Hyrum’s Law.
Something, something, remote work good|bad
Not that often that you find yourself referencing a single comment on Hacker News, but I thought this one was quite good on the remote work good|bad debate: (emphasis mine)
Yes, as a well-paid, introverted, technical contributor who is internally motivated by their craft, with the luxury to afford good working space and at a moment in one's life where home haunts feel secure and supportive, you can't beat it. Like any tradesman in history keeping up their own shop, it's really quite empowering. I've been doing it for pretty much all of a very long career.
But it's worth keeping in mind that there are a lot of implied constraints there, and that the industries that drive the society we live in often rely on making the best of people who can't meet all those constraints.
There are people whose jobs need them work with other people dynamically, extroverts who need to be around others with a common aim to thrive, people with compensation to meager to carve out an effective home office, people who need on-site facilities, people with chaotic or draining home lives, etc
It's very easy to talk about why remote work can be extremely rewarding for some, but the big picture of a business or an industry needs to balance a whole bunch of other concerns -- some intrinsic and some simply inertial.
It's just not a single, simple topic where we can project our own experience as if it was universal.
I think this is a great, personal, take, and find the remote work debate difficult because it is deeply personal. For years I was caring for an illness in my family and had to work from home, but never told anyone at work. Some people cannot work from home safely, do not have the space, and cannot stay alone and be mentally healthy. Others just want to maximize their rent. This is why we speak past each other so often, we are all holding our cards back.
Speaking of remote work, I’ve open-sourced by book: Navigating Remote Work, and made it free for all. Its a personal guidebook for developing the skill and systems to be successful working remotely, and is based on 17 years of mistakes.
Advantages of Incompetent Management
The main disadvantage of incompetent management is its definitional inability to set and achieve key goals, which can endanger the survival of the organization. Incompetent management can only thrive in situations where basic survival and even growth are somehow taken care of, and any major changes in that situation create an existential risk.
Well, that’s one way to look at it.
Unsolicited Book Review
One of my strategies to stop myself from going too far down the AI rabbithole was to read about:
AI ethics, or lack thereof
Ways that AI will ruin the world
Before learning how learn why not and oh no god no. The hope was that this would stop me from pursuing a masters in AI. While this strategy was not successful, it did expose me to a few scary books about AI that I’d recommend:
Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI : good catalog of areas in which AI can help, and areas where it is currently hurting and changing society, throughout the world.
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You : sort of silly book about how AI “solves” things and can be very wrong and funny.
Not with a Bug, But with a Sticker : adversarial approaches to AI, and ways you can make it fail that are quite unexpected.
Superintelligence : a dense book that has “WTF” written in the margins dozens of places if you buy it used.