This. I also wished we learned more about this in my CS degree college classes. Luckily, there is pretty good podcast series that helped me structure team leadership, management and other non technical skills. It is called: Manager tools.
Here is the list of all topics on politics [1] with intro to 101 series saying this:
"Your organization is MUCH more political than most of us realize. For those who know it's political, some say, I'm not going to play that game. Either state of being - not seeing the politics, or ignoring them, is unfortunate. Professional Life is HUMAN life, and that means it's emotional, and therefore political. Engineers, software designers, technical people take note: hate those marketing and sales people all you want, but they're gonna end up being your boss unless you recognize the value of political, or put differently, non-rational, decision making."
Seconding the Manager Tools podcast. I used to teach devs coming out of boot camps and half our time was spent on how to manage your manager.
IMO, schools of all kinds need to teach their students how power dynamics are in the real world, how most jobs are about navigating through difficult personalities, and how “being a professional” is not really about winning or losing, but how you play the game.
And look, I get that a good chunk of us would prefer to compartmentalize non-engineering work as much as possible. It’s just that knowing the rules is the best way to decide if you want to engage with them.
Personally, I’d aim for a new role at a medium or large sized company. Small startups are great if you want to wear a lot of hats and be close to the customer. Once a company starts getting around 50 people is when most of your job is abstracted through different fiefdoms of stakeholders, usually your project managers.
And at mega corps with 400+ people, most projects are being bolted onto a multi million dollar money printer. There’s so much more process to getting big changes out. But if you’re on the right team, you can build something novel and immediately have a market to test it out.
From reading the topic overview, that looks great, genuinely good. However, there are about 30 x 25m podcasts, or about 12.5 hours of listening to do. In written form I expect that to be about 2 hours of reading (probably less).
This is pretty opposite of the truth.
In the recent NPR podcast they talked about the fact that inventor of rapamycin practically cured himself of late stage cancer (given up to 6m of life, lived 5 years)
His cancer was nowhere to be found.
Then he decided to prove rapsmycin was the cause, stopped taking it, and died very shortly of cancer.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/dirty...
Even if it cures some cancers, it may cause others (skin and lymphoma according to the study above). And the inventor's story is an anecdote, not a study.
I'm not saying with any confidence that Rapamycin is a bad thing. I'm just asking a question, which I think is fair, considering the long list of strong adverse effects in higher dosages:
Yes, he talked extensively about rapamycin on the recent Tim Ferriss show podcast, in terms of its potential to extend lifetime. [1]
Also, scientist who has found this compound and saved it in his freezer to be used for transplants rejection problems, applied rapamycin on himself when he was given 6m to live prognosis based on late stage cancer he had. He lived 5 more years, and died short after he stopped taking rapamycin, to prove it was responsible for the cure. Amazing story.
There is pretty illustrative TV series for the management consulting, House of Lies [1]
Of course there is some comedy and all, but surprisingly solid and realistic picture of that business.
Good start for this vast and complex topic. One thing that pops out here as missing is Data Mesh [1]
It is emerging pattern for complex data management and data exchange between multiple products and product components/services.
Agreed for most what was said there.
Still, I find that people mostly use SLA as only thing important to track for alerting and incidents arousal. There is a lot of said about importance of defining solid SLI - Service Level Indicators which are aligned to SLO - Service Level Objectives
SLAs are usually given to external user of SaaS, not very useful for SRE team.
This brings back many memories.. I owe my early amazement of being able to "tell machine what you want and it will obey" to guys like that. Here is another nice piece that puts more context on that era and creation of Galaxija [1]
BTW, Voja Antonic left Belgrade few years ago, now living in US.[2]
Has designed a replica system, with some minor mods to allow for newer easier-to-get logic chips, and better compatibility with newer Z80 CPUs. He offers up the whole design for download - so anyone should be able to build one. I've bookmarked it... I'm definitely interested in making one to add to my retro collection.
> My other musing on this is that I've always wondered if there would be value in teams establishing an internship or low/mid level position for a technical writer to serve as a team librarian.
What if the communication tool can help to sort out communication messinnes and produce knowlege base as team uses it.
Like this one https://9mcollab.com/
Full disclosure: I am advisor to young team behind it
It seams to me that this bust of economy that is rolling has potential to be even more destructive than previous one of 2008. Brace yourself.
Here is good list of advices in case of layoff, it was posted in HN few days ago https://jacobian.org/2020/mar/13/layoffs-are-coming/
I highly recommend this series at least.
[1] https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/politics#