I'm a senior generalist with a background in web and mobile (iOS) development. I have worked for multiple startups, including Neeva (acq. by Snowflake). Strong bias to action and experience taking products from 0 to 1. Cheers!
There's no magic solution to this, but more of a cause of a very wealthy country/economy full of bullshit jobs since there's more wealth to go around at that level than there are people needed to do the work which pays more than enough to ensure survival meaning people would rather not do their jobs if they could get away with it while still getting paid, which is basically a form of theft since you're not providing the service you agreed to do for money (imagine you paid plummers to fix your pipe and when you come home from work they didn't do shit but drink coffee and beer the whole day but still bill you)
The majority of the workforce don't like their jobs or the employer or the boss, but rent still has to be paid. Do you think people assembling cars for Henry Ford dreamt of assembling cars for a living in a factory in order for the incentive to align? Dom you think the garbage men picking up your trash had that as their life aspirations? No, but they do it for money. Or the pool cleaners? Or the bus drivers? Or toilet cleaners?
It would be cool if we all lived in some utopic society where everyone gets their dream job and does it for passion not money, and nobody ever does the shit jobs they don't want, but that's not where we ware.
We take jobs that aren't our passion because they pay rent and ensure our survival, and that's how our modern society functions. In exchange for the money, employers expect the jobs we sign up for get done. It's a fair trade that's the basis of our developed western society.
OKRs are a popular management philosophy and framework used by organizations to set and achieve goals. The concept was first developed by Andy Grove at Intel and later popularized by John Doerr, who introduced it to companies like Google.
Here’s a breakdown of the OKR framework:
Objectives: These are high-level, qualitative goals that the organization or team aims to achieve. Objectives should be ambitious, inspirational, and aligned with the overall vision and mission of the organization.
Key Results: These are specific, measurable, and time-bound outcomes that indicate the progress towards achieving the objective. Typically, each objective has 3-5 key results. Key results should be quantifiable, making it clear whether the objective has been met by the end of the evaluation period.
Let me stop you right there. Just because something worked for Google when they were a hot new start-up, doesn't mean it will work everywhere.
A lot of workers from many industries are sick and tired of consultants bulldozing by force down their throats various cargo-cult management techniques like SAFe Agile or the conjoined triangles of success into their jobs, but it's not a guarantee solution everywhere.
Every company is different, every org is different, every team is deferent, every employee is different.
Have you actually worked at an organization that used OKRs? Because I’ve worked at Meta and Google and the OKR process was a bunch of bookkeeping BS that never seemed to actually achieve the lofty goals set for it.
>Do you think the garbage men picking up your trash had that as their life aspirations? No, but they do it for money. Or the pool cleaners? Or the bus drivers? Or toilet cleaners?
Honestly, if I didn't have worry about paying "the rent" (or if those jobs paid enough to "pay my rent") I love to do those jobs. Maybe not full-time but I wouldn't mind occasionally doing them. In the utopic society you speak of, I'd be willing to share the responsibility of those jobs.
Is it a different issue? It's the employer trying to get more than what they are paying for, and I think it factors into the overall employer/employee relationship.
I predict in 10 years this type of surveillance will be standard and accepted in maybe 80% of knowledge worker jobs, especially as AI is integrated into their role.
Most folks I talk to outside of technology are getting increasingly frustrated by the state of the world; from retail employees to firefighters to middle managers.
Where you spend your time, and where you spend your money, is a vote for the future you want to live in. An increasing % of my social group is becoming hyper aware that they’re voting against their self-interest on a regular basis.
At the end of the day, they and their kids have to live in the world they build at their “job.”
Someone will build it, and people care about money (both income and cheap costs) too much for any sort of grassroots action against labor surveillance. It would only be prevented by labor regulations.
You are assuming an outcome and giving everyone in the system an "excuse" for showing up and doing this. That excuse is sufficient for them to destroy their future one decision at a time.
I also believe my statement is hyperstitious.
It creates personal responsibility for every individual actor in the system, and makes them way their votes for the future against the short-term gains of their actions.
I've seen people respond well to my hyperstitious stance.
I've had a phone operator for my local hospital drop a 4-figure unjust surprise bill by reminding them that they and their children also need to go to hospitals, walking them through what the system was doing to me and my family, and asking them if they were comfortable with that knowing they'll be on the other side of this phone call at some point.
I'm using this same philosophy with my local school district to drive meaningful change for handling cases where a teacher is caught abusing a student - and seeing positive results (though I'm not counting my chickens quite yet).
I'm using this same philosophy with my HOA to bring back community building events like potlucks and lemonade stands, things that have disappeared because of the liability of organizing them. (In our current low-trust society, a child needs to procure event insurance to run a lemonade stand on HOA property in case someone fakes a fall in front of their stand).
Regulations like these are great for crony capitalists and lawyers - they're awful for small businesses and families.
People simply doing the right thing because they believe it is the right thing is good for small businesses and families - and awful for crony capitalists and lawyers.
When it comes to our current society and driving the meaningful change most of us would like to see... I believe throughout history people have died on a hill for far less.
I'm in the camp of helping people see a better path forward, and I'm seeing positive change around me in my life when I deploy my philosophy. Your mileage may vary.
tl;dr: I believe your pessimistic take is a self fulfilling prophecy that reinforces people voting against their own self-interest one decision at a time.
Ok Good luck, I believe a lot of the mechanisms that fostered those behaviors make sense in a small community, where reputations and community bonds were crucial for well being, but we now live in the age of global capitalism, and global labor forces, and global competition. Those mechanisms don't scale so to speak but do enable you to win some local battles, and hopefully gain some friends/respect.
I don't think so, but do you think archiving digital conversations between remote employees and employees and customers doesn't show up on a number of regulatory compliance reports?
I agree.. I am sorry about the flippant comparison. It was probably unfair to scratch. My frustration with Scratch stems from watching kids (including my own) being taught it in school as the de-facto option and learning absolutely nothing about programming or anything useful in the process. Perhaps it is due to bad instruction.
For the amount of time and energy invested they would have been far better off learning a "regular" language like Python. Anyway just my 2c.
I don't think it should be stigmatized, I just feel that it's utility among older students, at least those interested in STEM, is limited. I've seen that with one of my own kids, hearing him complain about classes taught in visual block based languages being unable to switch to the coding based language to do things more efficiently.
>Harvard even uses Scratch in their CS50 course!
Even ignoring the 'appeal to authority' fallacy, I believe they only use scratch as an introduction to the concepts, it isn't even mentioned on the Harvard page for the larger cs50 class.
Unfortunately, that particular feature will require Spotify to give me additional approval, which requires 6 weeks (or more, unfortunately). I will try my best to add this as soon as possible.
Thank you for the feedback! I am currently exploring how to monetize while doing right by my free users.
Some more advanced integration with Spotify (Liking songs, for example) requires approval by the Spotify team which can take up to 6 weeks. I can gate this and additional cool stuff behind payment. Right now I am considering $2, but frankly, I am new to this so I am not sure how to price it. Any additional thoughts are welcome.
Remote: Open to remote, on-site, and hybrid
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Swift, Python, Java, JavaScript, SwiftUI, UIKit, Django, SQLite, MySQL, Node.js, React, AWS
Résumé/CV: https://garelick.net/resume
Email: jonathan at-symbol garelick dot-symbol net
I'm a senior generalist with a background in web and mobile (iOS) development. I have worked for multiple startups, including Neeva (acq. by Snowflake). Strong bias to action and experience taking products from 0 to 1. Cheers!