Everyone needs a safe space. Conservatives have turned the phrase into a derogatory term (as they tend to do with all manner of empathy-based language), but I think a safe space is a requirement for human growth.

Learning, self-expression, and study can only happen when there is sufficient safe space for someone to drop their guard and focus their intellect on a problem. Flow state cannot occur when you’re constantly looking over your shoulder, watching your language, or censoring your output.

I found that my pace of learning new skills has slowed in the past decade. I’m sure some of it is due to age, but I bet a lot of it is due to the erosion of psychological safety at large, and a (well-founded) suspicion that some portion of those I meet are actually OK if I or my loved ones were to suffer, and they are ever more bold about it.

Without a safe space, there is no trust, no play, no creativity, no growth. It’s imperative that we curate and defend our safe spaces.

PS: I know I’m conflating psychological safety with safe spaces, but to me they are the same thing; the differences lie in whether you’re invoking safe spaces as a slur, i.e. to refer to a space where no one can be criticized, which is really a straw man argument.

• #opinion

Do your best to resist cynicism, because cynicism destroys nuance, and almost everything valuable in life exists inside nuance.

Resist saying cynical things like “who cares about privacy; your data is already out there”, “who cares about stopping climate change; it’s already too late”, “who cares about voting; we don’t have a democracy any more”, and any number of similarly simplistic, thought-destroying nonsense.

Cynicism is faux-intellectualism. It’s attempting to impress people with rational-sounding generalizations that lead to absurd, defeatist behavior. It’s a claim of “being real” while being too lazy to think through the problem. It’s feeling superior by kicking a table on which someone else is doing their homework.

Nuance exists even during a crisis—it’s arguably even more important then. Things can always get worse, and things can always get better. Working to make things better is worth doing. Feeling smug and telling people to give up is not; it’s the asshole’s easy way out.

• #opinion

As we wrap up Biden’s tenure, I can’t help but be utterly disappointed that he had powerful tools at his disposal, and used almost none of it to prevent the ascent of Fascism.

He allowed the Supreme Court to remain full of Fascist agents, even after they decided that a president was immune from prosecution, a patently absurd idea.

He did effectively nothing as Netanyahu destroyed Gaza and its residents.

He did not put pressure on Jack Smith to quickly bring charges against Trump despite a four year window, essentially running out the clock and allowing an insurrectionist to get on the ballot.

He did absolutely nothing that matters to help Harris win the election.

Could Biden have pulled any of this off given the divided Congress? Maybe not, but he could have tried. And he certainly could have used his bully pulpit to drive national conversation and build grassroot support.

Instead, we got an Absent President, who silently made life great for shareholders.

Was Biden a bad president? In any other era, no. He was an exemplary administrator. He got the economy restarted after Trump Episode One put it in the shitter. He appointed Lina Khan to the FTC, a great fighter for the interests of the people against corporate hegemony. He likely did a thousand good works we didn’t even hear about, keeping this nation rolling, and mostly doing right by us. And of course, compared to his predecessor, he’s an absolute saint and superstar.

But as a president installed in the aftermath of a failed insurrection, during a global resurgence of Fascism, overseeing a nation awash in a storm of disinformation financed by our enemies, with the people crying out for justice and accountability, he was an abject failure. Fascist agents made steady progress while he worked his desk job. He did the opposite of rising to the occasion: he pretended it didn’t happen.

• #opinion
• #politics

Ed Zitron’s piece The Rot Economy should be mandatory reading for anyone curious about the environment in which tech companies exist today.

Venture pumps millions or billions of dollars into ideas that might sell a product or a service, but ultimately resemble things that can be sold to other companies or put on the public market for a profit higher than what was paid on a per-share basis. I once suggested that Silicon Valley conflated “making great ideas work” with “making ideas I like work,” but on consideration, many of these companies aren’t even things venture capitalists like - they are things that resemble things that they can sell. Do I genuinely believe that everyone who invested into the Web3 grift was a strident believer in the brave new decentralized economy? Hell no. They just went where the winds blew — or where they seemed to be blowing.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/

The Rot Economy

At the center of everything I’ve written for the last few months (if not the last few years), sits a cancerous problem with the fabric of how capital is deployed in modern business. Public and private investors, along with the markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the concept of what “good” business truly is, focusing on one metric — one

www.wheresyoured.at

This opinion piece rings true to me. I have acquaintances who are “pure investors”—they will buy anything from crypto to Gamestop to copper billets as long as they think they can double their money in short order, and they are eternally searching for the next tech IPO to buy into. They do not care what these companies even do, nor whether they are sustainable, nor their net effect on employees, society, or the environment. There is a single axis on which they place all possible investments: money go up—yes/no.

Read more…

• #technology
• #opinion

As a software engineer, it’s basically impossible to survive poor work-volume management. You can try cutting corners, making extreme tactical decisions, triaging your issues, whatever…but the burn-down chart does not lie. A strategic decision by management (or worse, executives) to ignore burn-down rates is basically irrecoverable.

As a manager, be honest to your executives and your reports. Given enough people in your team, there is no tactical decision that will make your engineers work faster. Your only real option is to admit early that your deadline is untenable, and replan by reducing features, or extending deadlines. Whipping your engineers to work harder has never worked, and will ruin their trust in you forever.

As an executive, allow your teams to honestly report their estimates, and respect their pace of work. Pressuring your managers to give you better numbers is lying to yourself, unless you’re willing to talk about what features you’re willing to cut.

• #FridayDevAdvice