When I was a small boy I used to spend hours playing the “war” card game. The thing about this game is, it’s totally predictable and deterministic - each player gets a shuffled half of the deck and cards are extracted one by one in order. No chance or skill involved whatsoever and the result is completely determined by the pack you were dealt - we could just as well determine the winner by a coin toss.

In Israel it occasionally happens that someone declares himself “king of the Jews”, “messiah” or even the “reincarnation of Jesus Christ” - it’s quite common and has been dubbed the “Jerusalem Syndrome”. We have quite a few of these prophets, along with a healthy supply of self proclaimed gurus, rabbi’s and cult leaders with their respective followers. We also have a horde of state endorsed religious nutcases (Israel does not have separation of church and state) with varying degrees of psychosis.

One of the repeating motifs of recruiting in the software industry are mantras of “talent”: “We recruit the best talent”, “talent attracts talent”, “we value talent” and so on. Some companies have so called “head of talent”, “talent acquisition”, “talent development” professionals on their payroll - basically a re-branding of HR. With the amount of conversations, conference talks and hype going on around talent, you would expect people will have an answer to the question “what is talent?

One of the things that struck me the most when observing managers at work, and in particular newly instated managers, is how managers become more and more out of touch with the realities of work. There’s actually a lot of research on that from quite a bit of different perspectives. Safety research for example has interesting things to say about “work as imagined” and “work as done”. This doesn’t happen over night of course, but rather a slow process - and I found it has a lot to do with the shift from doing and experiencing to planning and monitoring.

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. Dwight D. Eisenhower What would you give for the ability to predict the future? a lot I presume. Knowing the future (and being free to act on it) can make you rich, successful, almost indestructible. What would you give to know the future with 90% probability of being right? well, if you can participate in the lottery every week 90% pretty much guarantees success, definitely valuable.

No, engineers don’t suck at time estimates - and generally speaking humans are better estimators than what most people believe. This seems rather surprising given all we’ve heard about the problems of bad time estimations, projects going overboard, etc and of course, your personal experience with software time estimates. But if people are really bad at estimation, how does that fit with our obvious evolutionary need to make quick decisions based on partial data?

Have you ever walked into an office and saw a huge flat screen on the wall displaying a dashboard with pretty graphs, or some other nice visualization showing some important looking numbers? Back when people still frequented offices, many had them. But have you ever wondered, what are they for? No engineer is looking at them, because when you are looking at data you want to interact with the data, zoom, pan or apply some filter.

From meetup groups to job listings to titles on LinkedIn, full-stackers are all around. but for a term so prevalent it is surprisingly ambiguous. What is a “full-stack” developer? What does she do? What is the scope of her work? Does our company need one? Practical questions I imagine have crossed the minds of many VP R&Ds and CTOs. It would have been nice to have a common definition, but human languages is dynamic and evolves, so fragmentation and ambiguity are part of the game.

Since I’ve abandoned Facebook my primary source of tech news has become Twitter and this week my feed is raging with two seemingly unrelated security/privacy incidents: Zoom’s zero day and Superhuman’s email tracking scandal. I write “seemingly”, because despite these being two very different companies operating in two different markets (Zoom in video conference calls and Superhuman in emails), building very different products (Zoom is all about jump in, jump out - Superhuman is a workspace) these incidents stem from the same fundamental fault: The telephone experience.

A few months back, the twittershphere rumbled on how wrong it is that conference speakers are not paid. In tweets and blogs, people have called out for conferences to pay speakers travel expenses and even pay them a fee for their work in preparing and delivering the talks. As an example, this article on medium.com. Initially, I was taken by the arguments: If someone is travelling from afar to speak, their costs should be reimburse.