Love it. I used to tell people I was a magazine columnist and get into the most amazing conversations despite the fact I wrote about software engineering. When I would tell lay-people I was a software engineer, conversations always devolved to "Can you fix my broken windows machine?"

No expert on carpal, but after decades of keyboarding, started having hand issues. Took a while to figure out ... swapping a rectangular table for oval in the kitchen combined with WFH laptop. Straight table = no problem; curved table = hand pain. Took six months to heal up once I realized.

Self-confirming bias. After a while all your best employees would love blue, it's what they all have in common, so clearly that's what you should look for. (All your worst employees would love blue, too, but maybe those are just the ones that deep in their hearts didn't love blue enough?)

The types of questions you ask in an interview creates a signal. I would react negatively to a personality test. Do you really want to only hire people who have a positive reaction to personality tests? What if your process was to ask people what their favorite color is and then only hire "blue?"

SF Gate reported an estimate of as many as 100,000. SF Standard reported 50,000. I haven’t heard anything official. For comparison 50,000 marched in the 2024 SF pride and one million attended. 100,000 were in the women’s march in 2017.

Published recipes have become more precise over the years. Older recipes presume the reader has more experience. But coleslaw is not baking, precision is unnecessary, a flaw even. The less experienced the cook, the less likely they are to own a scale. What does 10g of carrot look like? New problem.

Some people’s primary experience of remote is the most extreme and difficult form. For example with team members in SF and India there is a maximal distance, maximal time difference, plus cultural or possibly language differences. Three orders of magnitude harder for communication.

“Two positive non-work interactions per week” is minimum to build trust. Forgot where I heard this, but I’ve used this guideline for a long time. In-person, this comes for free. Remote, you have to deliberately engineer these interactions. Doing this authentically is a learnable management skill.

For comparison the recipe from culinary textbook “On Cooking,” fifth edition p 1077 reads: cook sugar until dark brown caramel … remove from heat … slowly add butter and cream

“Butterscotch caramel sauce” ChatGPT tells you to melt the butter first in various prompts for this which will result in a burnt mess. Melt the sugar first, finish with the heat sensitive ingredients.

It seems like there may also be under-reporting in these statistics. www.bostonfed.org/publications...

Thanks for responding. Surprising clear trend with respect to education and age, but perhaps it may not follow from most are higher educated to “most are highly paid?” www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-econo...

What is your source for the assertion that most two-jobbers are highly paid?

And that’s how the board of our HOA operates. Tried to move to Google sheets. people kept asking, “which version of the sheet is this?” I’m like “the newest one, it’s always the newest one. That’s the point.” They also print out web pages and sheets and pass them around at meetings.

I was on a team that built custom ERP for $1b annual sales company for 1/10th the cost of typical commercial ERP. Primary reason was so the software was designed to fit a very specific business vision rather than having generic commercial software dictate business process. Very successful.