Looking at the other side

Things have been shuffling (again) at the company I work for.

This is particularly annoying for my team because upper management is constantly reassessing and changing our priorities and assignments.

One of the reasons I'm still here is that I enjoy working with my team. We know how to work together, we complement each other's skills well. All of them are more senior than me—one of them got his first job the year I was born. That's a good thing. I rather be the least experienced of a team so that I'm forced to level up.

So, with such a great team, if priorities change, we adapt swiftly and refocus our energy. Again, and again, and again.

Yesterday, we were told that plans are changing (again). Instead of working on the much-needed framework to replace the low quality and unreliable stuff delivered by our sister company in Sweden, we are now responsible for “Quality assure” the software that is planned to be deployed this Summer.

In other works, they expect us to somehow fix all the garbage delivered by the other company instead of building a new reliable solution by ourselves and then sever our dependency on them. They believe that's the safest approach, but, actually, that's the most risky.

During that meeting, I asked this manager: What exactly do you mean by QA? His answer was: “We still need to define it”.

QA is such a broad term that it means completely different things in different industries, companies, and even contexts within the same company.

When a manager asks for something, and then he is unable to explain the meaning of the words he uses, something is wrong.

On top of that, if he doesn't listen to what we have to say on the matter—we're the engineers who are going to build/fix the thing in the end—I know that's not going to end well.

Maybe it is time to read the pile of messages at LinkedIn again; I want to be out before the shit hits the fan, life is too short.

#Work

When you want to sell something, you can buy attention from the Big Tech platforms.

Attention is the currency of the Internet, and it is not even that expensive.

I know that because my brother and his wife run a side business. They buy ads from some of those companies (ehem ... Facebook ... ehem), and sells occur almost automagically. It amazes me how effective, efficient and targeted it is.

Sadly, many “users” of those platforms believe they are the users. No, the ad buyers are the actual users, the rest are the product. More specifically, their attention is being sold there, for peanuts.

So, since I don't have anything to sell, I'm not interested in buying eyeballs. But if I would need to draw attention to something I have to offer (something even as abstract as ideas), I'm not fully convinced buying attention this way is the best strategy in the long run.

#Daily #Technology

That's an accurate description of this blog.

And I like it that way.

Having hundreds (or thousands, or hundreds of thousands) of eyeballs reading what I write here would make me slightly uncomfortable.

Perhaps if I have something useful for a wider audience, I would bear the discomfort of the excessive attention, but not now, no.

I like to keep this as an obscure and quiet corner on the Interweb.

#Daily

It is correlated to my ability to relax.

Some days I lay down and relax profoundly by following my breath, falling asleep almost immediately.

Other days, I have troubles relaxing, and even when I fall asleep quickly, the quality of my sleep is poor.

What do I need to relax?

If I have to name only one thing, I would say the ability to let things go, particularly those which are clearly outside my control, or not worth the effort.

#Daily

After a hiatus that lasted three weeks or so, I cycled again during the weekend.

I moved one of my old bikes from strategic point A to strategic point B. Then, picked up the ebike from C's place.

On my way back to my friend's place, it was raining, a lot. Even hail for 2 km. or so. It sucked.

Arrive to a cold and empty flat completely soaked is suboptimal.

#Daily

I had this long list of draft posts here in write.as, they are all gone now.

Sometimes it is useful to write down your ideas and let them sit there for a while. You don't want to rush it, you can't undo words.

However, after a certain point, one must accept those ideas are not going anywhere anymore, the drafts become a burden.

If the ideas and feelings in those erased bytes remain in you, you should be able to rewrite them from scratch.

Or so my reasoning goes.

#Daily

Contracts need to be unambiguous. Writing something unambiguously is not easy. However, I feel all contracts are purposefully written in such a convoluted way to make them harder to understand. I wonder why.

Paradoxically, the convoluted language obscures the message it is trying to convey. Thus, multiple interpretations are possible.

If there is a disagreement between the parties, lawyers need to be hired to fight over the different interpretations of such contract. I have never been in such a situation, and I hope I never will.

Perhaps, if contracts were written in plain English, we wouldn't need so many (high-paid) lawyers. I don't know. Since contracts are mostly written by lawyers, it is not crazy to think they do it in a way that benefits the guild.

Things get more complicated when a contract is written in a language that you don't speak. You need to rely on shitty Google translations or your friend's help.

Why am I thinking about all this? Well, it seems that I'll spend a good deal of my weekend carefully reading a contract in Dutch.

#Daily

I woke up tired.

That usually means I'm stressed and the quality of my sleep takes a hit. When I lay down at night, it takes me a while to fall asleep.

I dream, a lot. Most of the time I don't remember the details, but I am sure I've dreamt a lot.

Today, I recall something, though. I was in front of my computer, reading a post with one picture and a single text line below that picture.

I woke up, it was 4:35 a.m. and I was puzzled by that scene.

Then, I fell asleep again, and I was there, in front of the monitor screen, reading the exact same post (same picture, same line).

Does that mean something? Maybe.

#Daily

Concentration makes life better.

If you walk, eat, sleep, ride your bicycle—whatever—in absolute concentration, your experience will be more colourful, more intense.

Conversely, if you go about life distracted, or let yourself be perturbed for long, life gets significantly worse.

Distractions might be a matter of life and death. Seriously, if you are distracted while driving, that might be incredibly dangerous.

That I learnt today.

#Life

Source

#Photo