> Honestly? Onboarding is hard. How are you supposed to do it? Everyone who has to go through it isn’t going to fix it, because they’re new and have their actual job to get to.
Give them time for onboarding (ie. don't expect them to do their "actual job" immediately) and empower new hires to fix things as they go along.
> empower new hires to fix things as they go along.
This _sounds_ like a good idea but I haven't seen it really work in practice since new hires are by definition the least empowered.
Often problems are not small and local either but caused by general hairiness of older systems / docs / tools.
It seems like this could be made more powerful by making it the explicit task of an onboarding buddy (ie. experienced employee) to drive improvements together with them.
It's a difficult problem because there is a disappearing stakeholder, once the new hire gets through the friction with some help the motivation disappears quickly. This means for bigger problems that once they have the power to change it they have bigger fish to fry.
> empower new hires to fix things as they go along.
Sometimes things are the way they are for a reason. "This is a regulatory requirement". "This matches the style of six million lines of code and redoing it isn't on our hitlist - in fact match this way going forward." "Yeah, the CEO got drunk and made a bet with another CEO that all new lines of code could avoid 'e' in variable names, so it's a hard rule that we write it n3xt."
I certainly think it's very valuable to get an outsiders impressions and the problems that they see being raised before they get used to stupid ways of doing things. There's a continuum between the new programmer deciding they're going to convert all tabs to spaces and patching a critical security hole they see because of an out of date library.
This is what I've seen works best. It catches holes difficult to see as someone already setup or familiar with the ropes. Ideally new hires can at least improve docs, if not the ramp up tooling itself.
Zillow does not have any fundamental control over the market. They do not have any obligation to show true prices. They are a private entity who happens to offer price estimates a service. Nobody is ever forced to buy or sell at that price.
I'm not convinced this is even a problem that needs to be solved.
If companies inevitable self-destruct from short-term management, that creates space for new companies to emerge with new approaches. Sure, there will be some noise/churn but overall I think it makes the overall ecosystem stronger.
Creative destruction is important, but some businesses are easier to replace than others. How do you create another Intel or Boeing? The start up costs are insane. Even beyond that, there's value in some institutions.
I mean if we really need leading-edge aerospace or semiconductors protected from the vicissitudes of the market, the government getting more directly involved seems like the obvious answer.
> And in some cases I've just granted PR authors write access and been like "there it's yours now." But none of these end states feel quite right; in all cases I end up feeling guilty and unsatisfied with how it turns out.
What feels wrong with this? Personally I'd much rather hand a project over to someone else than leave it completely archived.
It's the ideal outcome, I guess. But a number of projects end up just re-abandoned six months later after the person merged their own thing and pushed a release with it. I guess that's good for having moved it forward at all, but it certainly doesn't feel like a complete solution.
Unfortunately my experience is that most PMs are not sufficiently technical. They will often add more work by injecting useless processes and try to "demonstrate value" by coming up with new ideas without actually understanding the problem domain.
The best approach I have found is simply to add more automated gates/bots. If people have not done what the bot asks, there's no need to waste time/energy on them.
> > Unfortunately my experience is that most PMs are not sufficiently technical.
> Yeah. And I eventually came to realize: lazy.
Lazy is just one side of the coin. If someone's career is focused on unsexy hard work instead of halfheartedly "demonstrating value", the core problem is not that they cannot slack off. The core problem is that others can hold them hostage.
> People repeatedly demanding help in the github issues without even providing repro steps.
This is the biggest annoyance for me. There's a very clear issue template on my repos. It provides concrete, reasonable requirements (for example, post the actual config that broke!) yet people frequently expect support without filling it out. Even worse, they will make drive-by comments/demands on random PRs instead of opening an issue.
I am 90% of the way to adding "You have been banned from this issue tracker for wasting maintainer time. In future, make some attempt to do your share of the work." to the autoclose.
Depending on the userbase (e.g. end users from non-OSS ecosystems) and what you want to achieve you might just have to accept they are more used to talking to corporate support agents than filing bugs and learn to work with them. Autoclosing immediately puts the user into an adversarial position - better would be to have an automated reply for incomplete bug reports stating what is missing and that the information is needed for you to help the user to make it clear that filling it in properly is in their best interest as well.
Yeah, just copying to a preset on the playground. Whenever I try to reach out to Stack Overflow or get stuck on documentation, I'd open up Codex.
It's possible to set up an API to it, but it's not yet at the point where it's worth doing. I think it's possible to get Codex to write the script, now that I think about it.
If "impregnating someone doesn't make you a parent" then why does the author even want contact with her biological father? There is zero rational reason for them to have contact or a relationship except that she clearly does want one. I don't blame him for not wanting a random new family member.
It's perfectly rational to want to make contact with the person you inherited half your DNA from. I don't get from the article that the author was necessarily seeking a long-term, or otherwise deep relationship with their biological father.
I think it's perfectly understandable to want to make contact with him, but not necessarily rational.
If she doesn't want a relationship with him, why is she trying to make contact? (He's already given her medical info.) It's rather clear she does expect a relationship of some sort.
Either scenario is plausible. She may want nothing more than to spend no more than 2 hours over coffee learning about him. Or, she may want to kindle a long-term relationship. The author doesn't give us enough details to know one way or the other.
Dude's seed was stolen, he wasn't a donor, he paid to have it stored for future use. When he tried to use what was left it failed. So I cut the guy a break on this, he never consented to either sex nor was he a donor. I'd like to think I'd want to speak to her, but I haven't gone through any of that process.
Yeah, I completely sympathize with the donor. He didn't want this child and should not be forced to add another family member because the author (selfishly) wants contact with her father.
The author is also clearly in denial. If she "didn’t care about finding [her] biological father" she wouldn't have put tremendous effort into it (including writing this article).
I’m assuming you had the privilege of knowing your biological family, in which case it can be difficult to fully understand one’s motivation behind attempting to locate them.
“Anonymous” sperm and egg donors that are able to be found and contacted at least they knew they what they were signing up for in that 3rd parties would be using their gametes to have their own children. In this case, someone who had banked sperm for their use in the future only had it instead used in this situation.
This article brings attention to the dismal state of the fertility industry that has no professional accountability despite providing services to create new life. It is rather insensitive to trivialize what this person is feeling by calling her selfish for wanting to know who her father is as if it’s some luxury and lacking in empathy to dismiss these feelings by simply stating she is in denial. In addition to the trauma caused by learning that she was donor conceived, learning that clinic royally fucked up has robbed her of the opportunity to establish contact with her biological family due to the situation the clinic put her in.
My guess is that changing the DNS server is work - enough work that your brain can say "oh wait I kinda didn't actually want to go to that time-wasting site, did I?" and find something less soul-sucking to do. Maybe some kind of work you're glad to do, maybe some kind of amusement that leaves you feeling better than getting lost in an infinite scroll of Content.
Give them time for onboarding (ie. don't expect them to do their "actual job" immediately) and empower new hires to fix things as they go along.