August 9, 2025

Daily Log Digest – Week 31, 2025

2025-08-02

ARR as an often abused metric

How Much Money Do OpenAI And Anthropic Actually Make? #arr #ai #startups #revenue

If you're an avid reader of the business and tech media, you'd be forgiven for thinking that OpenAI has made (or will make) in excess of $10 billion this year, and Anthropic in excess of $4 billion.

Why? Because both companies have intentionally reported or leaked their "annualized recurring revenue" – a month's revenue multiplied by 12…

…

These do not, however, mean that their previous months were this high, nor do they mean that they've "made" anything close to these numbers. Annualized recurring revenue is one of the most regularly-abused statistics in the startup world, and can mean everything from "[actual month]x12" to "[30 day period of revenue]x12" and in most cases it's a number that doesn't factor in churn. Some companies even move around the start dates for contracts as a means of gaming this number. 

ARR, also, doesn’t factor seasonality of revenue into the calculations. For example, you’d expect ChatGPT to have peaks and troughs that correspond with the academic year, with students cancelling their subscriptions during the summer break. If you use ARR, you’re essentially taking one month and treating it as representative of the entire calendar year, when it isn’t.

Sidenote: I want to make one thing especially obvious. When I described ARR as “one of the most regularly-abused statistics in the startup world,” I meant it. ARR is only really used by startups (and other non-public companies). It’s not considered a GAAP-standard accounting practice, and public companies (those traded on the stock market) generally don’t use it because they have to report actual figures, and so there’s no point. You can’t really obfuscate something that you have to, by law, state publicly and explicitly for all to see with crafty trickery.

These companies are sharing (or leaking) their annualized revenues for a few reasons:

• So that the tech press reports them in a way that makes it sound like they'll make that much in a year.
• So that the tech press reports a number that sounds bigger and better than the monthly amount. For example, calling a startup a "$100 million ARR" company (like vibe-coding platform Lovable) sounds way better than calling them an "$8.3 million a month company," in part because the number is smaller, and in part because, I imagine, it might mislead a reader into believing that's what they've made every month. Yes, saying the ARR figure does that already.
• So that investors will believe the company looks bigger and more successful than it is.

In any case, I want to be clear this is a standard metric in non-public Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses. Nothing is inherently wrong with the metric, save for its use and what's being interpreted from it.

2025-08-03

How to travel

How to travel #travel #tips

Janan Ganesh has a nice set of tips for travel

First, the journey itself. Carry-on is a mistake. The time saved in baggage claim at the other end isn’t worth the stress of finding overhead storage space. Even for business class passengers, with their dedicated lockers, it is still better to move around an airport unencumbered. This is meant to be a break, not arm day.

Beware the “authentic” experience. This is the ultimate intellectual trap. At least in countries with a decent-sized middle class, “real” life will be less distinctive than the visitor hopes or imagines. In much of south-east Asia, it is authentic behaviour to spend time in malls. First, because these are air conditioned. Second, because countries with fresh memories of being poor tend not to regard material consumption with ennui or distaste. By all means, in Bangkok, ride the canal boat. But don’t kid yourself that it is truer to local experience than taking mass transit from a suburban new-build to a nine-hour office shift. In a Gulf city, do visit the “old town”. But remember that it is the old town precisely because it is divorced from how lives are lived now. 

If an Asian visitor cycled through Paris in a striped top and an onion necklace, saying “ooh là là” at intervals, we wouldn’t think, “There goes someone who has mastered the local culture.” We’d know that real Parisians are doing banal things. But westerners, especially the educated ones, can make the same error of over-romanticisation in other places. It is the supposed suckers in the tourist traps who are often clearer-headed about what they want and are getting out of their trip.

It is a point that flows into the largest of all lessons about travel. Don’t expect it to be educational. At worst, it can go the other way, in that you over-index what you happen to see in person. (“I went to Russia and it was sweetness itself,” was a widely heard sentiment between the 2018 World Cup and the war in Ukraine.) It is better to be merely ignorant of a place than confidently wrong about it. If you travel a fair bit, those who don’t can go all sheepish and deferent around you. This advantage is unwarranted, which isn’t to say I make no use of it.

Power and Heirarchy

Pt4: Power Hierarchies #power #heirarchy

Loved this article, even though I only read the ChatGPT summary, which I am reproducing below

This article explores the nature of power hierarchies, emphasizing that rulers depend on key supporters whose loyalty must be maintained through resource distribution. It discusses how status and identity are deeply intertwined with navigating multiple overlapping hierarchies and how toxic power dynamics, such as those in cults, isolate individuals by cutting off other sources of status and identity.

Key Takeaways

• Power depends on maintaining loyalty of key supporters by distributing resources strategically.

• Status is relative and context-dependent, shaped by multiple overlapping hierarchies.

• Toxic power, like in cults, isolates individuals by restricting access to alternative hierarchies, causing trauma upon exit.

Theme Wise Breakdown

Misconceptions About Historical Power

The author reflects on their initial naive belief that kings ruled absolutely, only to learn that historical rulers had precarious positions dependent on keeping their councils and armies loyal. Using the example of Roman emperors, the author highlights the constant threat of being overthrown or assassinated if key supporters were dissatisfied.

Rules for Rulers: The Role of Keys in Power

Summarizing CGP Grey’s "Rules for Rulers," the article explains that rulers cannot govern alone and must rely on "keys" — people controlling military, finances, etc. The ruler’s primary job is managing treasure flow to keep these keys loyal, as keys can defect if rivals offer better rewards. This creates an incentive to minimize the number of keys to maximize loyalty, explaining why dictators purge former allies after gaining power.

The Fractal Nature of Hierarchies

Power dynamics repeat at every level: each key manages their own subordinates similarly, balancing resources to maintain loyalty. If a key fails to satisfy their subordinates, they risk being overthrown themselves, creating a fractal pattern of power maintenance.

Benedict Arnold: A Case Study in Key Loyalty and Betrayal

Benedict Arnold’s story illustrates the consequences of a key feeling undervalued. Despite his heroism, Arnold was repeatedly denied deserved promotions and recognition, leading him to consider defecting to the opposing side. This exemplifies how keys may overthrow or abandon leaders who do not reward them properly.

Status as Hierarchy Competition

Status is not absolute but depends on which hierarchy one is competing in. People gain status by possessing what others in their relevant social group value. The author notes that status is more visible when gaps between ranks are large (e.g., celebrities) but often subtle and overlapping in everyday life, leading to plausible deniability about rank differences.

Navigating Multiple Overlapping Hierarchies

Individuals simultaneously compete in many hierarchies, some large and some niche. People tend to care about status in hierarchies relevant to their social circles. The author shares personal examples from polyamory, where jealousy arises when others encroach on one’s status in specific hierarchies, but comfort is found in having unique advantages in others.

Identity as a Product of Hierarchy Competition

The author reflects on how much of personal identity is shaped by social positioning within hierarchies. Preferences and self-concepts often serve as strategies to secure social safety and status. Even seeming immune to status is itself a high-status position. The author acknowledges that identity is largely strategic but hints at some genuine aspects to be discussed later.

Formative Years and Hierarchy Selection

During development, people explore which hierarchies they can succeed in and gravitate toward those that fit their traits. For example, athletic ability might lead to joining a sports team, while personality traits might align with certain social groups. This process shapes social identity and status.

Status Competition in Everyday Life

Social interactions often involve subtle battles over which hierarchies to prioritize. People try to pull others into hierarchies where they rank higher by emphasizing their expertise or values. Avoiding low status in unfamiliar hierarchies explains why people stick to familiar social groups or niches.

Toxic Power and Cults

The author discusses cults as extreme examples of toxic power, where leaders isolate followers by cutting off access to all other hierarchies. This monopolization of loyalty prevents subordinates from gaining alternative sources of status or identity, making them more exploitable. Cults justify isolation as a gift or sacrifice for a greater goal.

Trauma of Leaving Cults

Leaving a cult is traumatic because individuals transition from a narrow, controlled hierarchy to a vast world of many hierarchies where they lack status or skills. Betrayal by trusted leaders compounds this trauma, as does the loss of identity and social support.

Frame Control and Hierarchy Manipulation

Cults use frame control to keep followers within their hierarchy by denying legitimacy to outside influences. This control is a form of power that prevents followers from recognizing or accessing alternative sources of value and status.

Final Reflections on Status, Anxiety, and Identity

The author connects social anxiety to low status, noting that rising in status reduces anxiety and increases confidence. They also question how much of the self is constructed through social strategies versus genuine preference, concluding that identity is mostly strategic but not entirely so.

Dating Like a Savarna

Dating Like a Savarna | The Swaddle

I found a reference to this article in the book Meet The Savarnas, which I began reading last week. The book is wonderful and a must read, especially for folks who are oblivious to caste (due to their privilege) or haven't been exposed to anti-caste literature.

One of the most hallmark features of Savarna culture is its distinctive sameness, which is exemplified in the world of online dating.

A certain aesthetic language and cultural sensibility have come to be positioned as markers of taste and refinement – to the exclusion of people who don’t or can’t adhere. It’s unrecognizable as particularly Savarna culture because of its ubiquity: whether it be the lanky boy with a head full of curly hair who busks at Church Street in Bangalore, the spoken poetess who is perennially in a bindi and a saree handed down from her grandmother (which she never fails to mention), or the Djembe-carrying shayar sahab who runs his own drum circle in Pune and quotes Juan Elia in Urdu (because Faiz is too mainstream after the CAA/NRC protests) – it’s an aspirational aesthetic. One that draws heavily from US popular culture and White, Western social imaginations and that, through unspoken codes, belongs exclusively to Savarnas.

These archetypes gather on the servers of Hinge, Bumble, and Tinder, where romance, belonging, sex, and intimacy are all wrapped up in the neoliberal technocratic promise of an app that can deliver it all – especially if you pay the extra money for a premium upgrade. But in a caste-segregated society, technology is no match for what a thousand generations of social conditioning have normalized.

Decades of half-hearted reservation implementation has nonetheless, against all odds, created a very small class of SC/ST/OBC youth who have had a similar quality of education and exposure to pop culture as most urban elite Savarnas. Although these micro-communities also end up in the dragnet of dating apps – because there is no caste-based filter on the apps yet (something that is sure to come as more Dalit and Bahujans get on it) – their experiences on these apps are still different. Ultimately, speaking the same pop culture language and smooth English gets you only so far and no further.

I remember a few years ago, a close friend had matched with a Brahmin girl. Their conversation had organic chemistry and she decided to come to his place. The first thing she noticed upon entering his flat was a portrait of Babasaheb near the doorway. “Ey, why do you have this? Bhimtas have this in their homes” was her immediate reaction. He froze at the slur but somehow managed to tell her that she was correct about why the picture was there. It then dawned upon the girl that he was not Savarna. She exploded with anger and accused him of trying to “trick” her into a relationship, of not being fully “honest.” As she poured her derision and fury upon him, he stood there silently, with his head hung and burning with a shame familiar to all marginalized caste folks. Traditional patriarchal power tropes in reverse, she threatened that she would call her brothers and they would come to beat him up. He begged for her forgiveness. She softened and then patronizingly counseled him to not try and dupe Brahmin girls like this. He agreed cringing inside, but hoping to avoid any further untoward scene. She made him book her an Uber to take her home. He stayed off dating apps for years after that out of internalized trauma that he did not dare unpack.

2025-08-04

Are we in an AI Bubble

The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now) #ai #bubble #economy

I’ll just repeat that. Over the last six months, capital expenditures on AI—counting just information processing equipment and software, by the way—added more to the growth of the US economy than all consumer spending combined. You can just pull any of those quotes out—spending on IT for AI is so big it might be making up for economic losses from the tariffs, serving as a private sector stimulus program.

To me, this is just screaming bubble. I’m sure I’m not alone. In fact I know I’m not alone. I’m thinking especially of Ed Zitron’s impassioned and thorough guide to the AI bubble; a rundown of how much money is being poured into and spent on AI vs how much money these products are making, and surprise, the situation as it stands is not sustainable. Worrying signs abound, and not least that so far, the companies benefitting most from AI are those selling the tools to simply build more of it (Nvidia, Microsoft), or who have monopolies through which they can force AI tools onto users en masse with limited repercussions (Google, Meta). Consumers routinely evince negative sentiment towards AI and AI products in polls, outweighing enthusiasm. And meanwhile, what I’d say is the only truly runaway, organically popular AI product category, chatbots, largely remain big money losers due to the resources they take to run.

As such, these massive valuations feel fishy. I asked Ed for his thoughts on Microsoft’s $4 trillion earnings report. He said:

Microsoft broke out Azure revenue for the first time in history, yet has not updated their annualized revenue for AI since January 29 2025. If things were going so well with AI, why are they not providing these numbers? It's because things aren't going well at all, and they're trying to play funny games with numbers to confuse and excite investors.

Also, $10bn+ of that Azure revenue is OpenAI's compute costs, paid at-cost, meaning no profit (and maybe even loss!) for Microsoft.

Look, I’m no prophet, clearly. I’ve predicted that we were probably witnessing the peak of the AI boom nearly a year ago, and while I think I was right with regard to genuine consumer and pop cultural interest, obviously the investment and expansion has kept right on flowing. It’s to the point that we’re well past dot com boom levels of investment, and, as Kedrosky points out, approaching railroad-levels of investment, last seen in the days of the robber barons.

I have no idea what’s going to happen next. But if AI investment is so massive that it’s quite actually helping to prop up the US economy in a time of growing stress, what happens if the AI stool does get kicked out from under it all?****

2025-08-05

stay on your phone

stay on your phone - by Adam Aleksic - The Etymology Nerd #social-media #phones #dumb

The No Phone Person is an elusive creature. They tend to be educated, upper-to-upper middle class, and endearingly pretentious. They’re off social media, will answer emails a few times a week, and usually have a “dumb phone” that can only take calls and texts. When they’re not at “phone free parties,” they’re probably frolicking in a meadow or something. Good luck finding them.

As much as I hate to agree with a Silicon Valley billionaire, though, I think the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is correct in identifying this as a form of “reality privilege.” A blue-collar single mother working two jobs is not going to have the time or energy to seek out in-person events or alternative forms of media. She’s going to put her kids to sleep and have thirty minutes to scroll TikTok before going to bed and then returning to work the next day.

This disconnect is turning non-algorithmic time into an upper-class status symbol, which I find highly concerning.

For one, it’s the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand and pretending like the algorithm doesn’t exist. Whether you like it or not, our culture is still being shaped by these platforms, and they won’t go away by themselves. All of our music and fashion aesthetics are either defined by or against the algorithm, which means that even the “countercultural” tastes of the No Phone People are necessarily influenced by it. Engaging with algorithmic media—in a limited, deliberate manner—is thus important to understanding your experience in society as a whole.

Not engaging, meanwhile, makes you vulnerable to being blindsided by sudden social or political shifts. Each Reddit argument and YouTube comment war is an epistemic basis for understanding the current state of cultural discourse. If you ignore those, you lose touch with reality as most people experience it.

If you have “reality privilege,” and you care about society, don’t just disengage; use your privilege. Educate yourself, and stay online strategically. Broaden your being-in-the-world so we can eventually fight back. And then you should totally go listen to that new record you just bought.

Cory Doctorow on AI Assistants

Pluralistic: AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot (04 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow #ai #assistant

on automation blindness

It's not like people are very good at supervising machines to begin with. "Automation blindness" is what happens when you're asked to repeatedly examine the output of a generally correct machine for a long time, and somehow remain vigilant for its errors. Humans aren't really capable of remaining vigilant for things that don't ever happen – whatever attention and neuronal capacity you initially devote to this never-come eventuality is hijacked by the things that happen all the time. This is why the TSA is so fucking amazing at spotting water-bottles on X-rays, but consistently fails to spot the bombs and guns that red team testers smuggle into checkpoints. The median TSA screener spots a hundred water bottles a day, and is (statistically) never called upon to spot something genuinely dangerous to a flight. They have put in their 10,000 hours, and then some, on spotting water bottles, and approximately zero hours on spotting stuff that we really, really don't want to see on planes.

So automation blindness is already going to be a problem for any "human in the loop," from a radiologist asked to sign off on an AI's interpretation of your chest X-ray to a low-paid overseas worker remote-monitoring your Waymo…to a programmer doing endless, high-speed code-review for a chatbot.

on the economic and labor implications of AI assistants

The AI bubble is driven by the promise of firing workers and replacing them with automation. Investors and AI companies are tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) betting that bosses who can fire a worker and replace them with a chatbot will pay the chatbot's maker an appreciable slice of that former worker's salary for an AI that takes them off the payroll.

The people who find AI fun or useful or surprising are centaurs. They're making automation choices based on their own assessment of their needs and the AIs' capabilities.

They are not the customers for AI. AI exists to replace workers, not empower them. Even if AI can make you more productive, there is no business model in increasing your pay and decreasing your hours.

AI is about disciplining labor to decrease its share of an AI-using company's profits. AI exists to lower a company's wage-bill, at your expense, with the savings split between the your boss and an AI company. When Getty or the NYT or another media company sues an AI company for copyright infringement, that doesn't mean they are opposed to using AI to replace creative workers – they just want a larger slice of the creative workers' salaries in the form of a copyright license from the AI company that sells them the worker-displacing tool.

AI companies are not pitching a future of AI-enabled centaurs. They're colluding with bosses to build a world of AI-shackled reverse centaurs. Some people are using AI tools (often standalone tools derived from open models, running on their own computers) to do some fun and exciting centaur stuff. But for the AI companies, these centaurs are a bug, not a feature – and they're the kind of bug that's far easier to spot and crush than the bugs that AI code-bots churn out in volumes no human can catalog, let alone understand.

The New Yorker on Longevity Science

How to Live Forever and Get Rich Doing It | The New Yorker #longevity #anti-aging

This is a good overview of the current landscape of longevity science and its proponents.

Our bodies, technically speaking, are just really fucking complicated. The Buck’s Eric Verdin told me, “Peter Diamandis says we’re thinking linearly in an exponential world, and we’ll be able to solve all these problems. But the biological problems to solve also get exponentially harder as you go deeper.” Even the indicators are baffling. Hearing loss has been linked to dementia, as has failing to floss. An impaired sense of smell is more strongly predictive of all-cause mortality than heart disease. And the mysteries do multiply the deeper you go. People who have four organs that are “youthful” for their age are much less likely to experience kidney disease or arthritis, yet those with seven youthful organs—which must be even better, right?—have a greatly heightened risk of diabetes and Parkinson’s.

In trying to live longer, we’re fighting our own imperfection: every time a cell divides, a few thousand mistakes can be introduced into its DNA. We’re also fighting the entropic forces—time, gravity, and oxygen—that ravage pretty much everything. The authors of a seminal paper in Cell distinguished twelve hallmarks of aging: such signs of impaired self-regulation as DNA instability, mitochondrial dysfunction, chronic inflammation, cellular senescence (when burned-out cells start oozing toxic sludge), and stem-cell exhaustion. Though the authors noted that all twelve hallmarks “are strongly related,” they could not establish whether the indicators were diverse expressions of one fundamental process or whether they evolved independently.

2025-08-06

What the heck is ADHD

What the heck is ADHD? #adhd #mentalhealth

A good article summarizing the latest research

As a result, the field began to fracture into specialized theories. You can roughly place these theories of ADHD into four buckets :

1. Executive dysfunction. One of the earliest and most enduring views. ADHD involves difficulty managing internal control systems like planning, remembering what to do next, or stopping an automatic response. This explains impulsivity and disorganization, but not motivation issues or mood swings.

2. Delay aversion. This view proposes that some symptoms of ADHD arise not just from difficulties with cognitive control, but from how people react emotionally to waiting. Delays don’t just feel boring but can be unbearable. This can lead to choices that prioritize immediate relief, like quitting a task early or avoiding anything that involves waiting.

3. Default mode interference. The brain has a default mode network that becomes active when we’re not focused on the outside world. In ADHD, this system seems to stay active even during tasks, creating interference – like background noise interrupting a conversation. This might help explain those mid-sentence lapses or zoning out during simple tasks.

4. Dopamine models. ADHD has been linked to how the brain handles dopamine, a chemical involved in reward and motivation. In many people with ADHD, the brain appears less able to anticipate rewards or maintain interest over time. This can make long-term goals feel flat and distant.

And to complicate things further, theories of ADHD operate at different levels of explanation:

• Genetic: ADHD has a strong inherited component. No single gene causes it, but many genes each with small effects seem to contribute to it.

• Neurobiological: Brain networks involved in attention, timing, and reward seem to behave differently in ADHD, sometimes more variable, less connected, or slower to mature.

• Cognitive-behavioral: ADHD traits affect how people think, learn, respond to feedback, and regulate effort.

• Environmental: Stress, trauma, classroom and work demands, sleep, and parenting style might all interact with ADHD traits.

• Evolutionary: ADHD traits such as hyperfocus, hypervigilance and hypercuriosity might have once been adaptive in nomadic, high-stimulus environments, and might have become mismatched to modern life.

Today, most researchers agree that ADHD isn’t explained by any single mechanism. Instead, we see integrative frameworks that suggest ADHD arises from multiple interacting systems, shaped by genetics, brain development, and environment.

So... is ADHD a thing? Yes and no.

So yes, ADHD is a thing. But it’s likely not one thing. It’s currently a useful label for multiple, interacting processes that vary from person to person, giving clinicians a way to support patients, educators a lens to support students, and researchers a map to explore.

The explosion of theories isn’t a failure of science but a sign of a complicated, deeply human condition we’re still working to understand.

The real question isn’t whether ADHD is “real.” The question is: can we get comfortable with that complexity so people can find what actually works for them?

2025-08-08

affinity

affinity - bookbear express

The idea that affinity can free you is simple. But people have complicated relationships with knowing what they actually like. Yesterday at dinner J used a metaphor for having the wrong job that went, Sometimes people think they should play basketball because they like dribbling. Which I interpret as, It’s very easy to think something is right for you because parts of it are pretty awesome. But what about the other parts? And what’s the main part, the crux of it all? Do you like that? You can like dribbling and shooting and passing and not actually like basketball.

the power of immediacy

The Imperfectionist: The power of immediacy #burkeman

In collecting all those articles and bookmarks, I’d been engaging in what the Substacker Harjas Sandhu, in an insightful post, calls “hoarding-type scrolling”. The hallmark of this behaviour, he writes, is “saving good posts for later instead of reading them now… I feel like a squirrel looking for fat nuts to stash in my little tree hole. The strangest part of it all? I have more saved content than I could possibly consume in the entire next year… thousands of hours of thought-provoking pieces to read and videos that might actually change how I see the world.”

The most obvious problem here, of course, is that you far less frequently get around to actually reading or watching – and thus letting yourself be changed by – the ideas you encounter. But the other problem is that it generates a huge backlog to slog through – so that even if you do get around to reading or watching, you’re no longer responding from the place of aliveness and excitement that first drew you in, but from a duller sense of obligation to clear the backlog, extract the important bits, and move on to something else.

This makes sense, because I think the reason we engage in all this hoarding behaviour is that it’s a more comfortable alternative to the uncomfortable intensity of actually living. To take an action is to risk that it might fail, or that it might succeed; that it might lead to big changes, or no changes at all. And it means using up a chunk of your finite time, and maybe also money, instead of just continuing to add to the list of things you potentially could do — which stretches off into the infinite future, where mortality doesn’t apply.

beauty as an average

My scar makes beach outings an ordeal. How can I care less about it? | Well actually | The Guardian #beauty #standard

Averageness is “the most important aspect” of one’s understanding of beauty, said Dr Neelam Vashi, an associate professor of dermatology at Boston University’s medical school, on the Apple News in Conversation podcast. It refers to how closely any given face or body matches that of the average person within their population. “Our population could be me looking at 1,000 images,” Dr Vashi explained. “What my brain does is looks at all of them, and then it makes a prototype [of beauty] in my head.”

Thanks to the prevalence of filters, photo-editing technology and AI-generated imagery, people’s prototypes now reference digitally altered inputs, said Vashi. This means scarred, middle-aged skin might not fit your brain’s idea of attractiveness, or even normality.

The good news: brains are malleable! Vashi cited a 2009 study in which researchers squished and stretched the faces of storybook characters and found that, after viewing altered images, children’s sense of what was beautiful subtly shifted toward the distortions.

So start with some amateur exposure therapy. Go to the beach! Go to the pool! Go to a communal spa or a nude spa (Korean spas, known as jjimjilbangs, are my personal happy place). Notice different bodies, faces, skin types, textures – not to compare, judge or objectify, but to observe.

Doing versus Delegating

Doing versus Delegating - by Matt Basta - Basta’s Notes

When we frame our successes and failures not in terms of the code but on the outcomes of the project, delegating gets more intuitive. If you’re evaluated on outcomes, you’re being measured on literally anything that goes into that project, not just time spent writing code.

Maybe you wrote some specs. Maybe you met with people about requirements and constraints. Maybe you talked with stakeholders to address details that don’t make sense. Perhaps you updated the roadmap to avoid extra work caused by a parallel project. All of these things matter just as much as the time spent coding, if not more. If your coding output is the bottleneck for your projects being successful, it’ll be valued more highly than the other skills. But if you’re a Senior engineer working towards Staff+, it’s understood that your coding skills are essentially at a point of diminishing returns.

You can instead spend your time doing things that help other people spend more time coding, and writing that code faster:

1. Offering domain expertise to other engineers
2. Making sure folks aren’t blocked 1. effectively communicating project details and context 2. code reviews 3. answering questions 4. connecting people across the company to address mismatches 5. pointing out drawbacks
3. Avoid problems (and avoiding time sinks) 1. making sure everyone is working in the same direction 2. making sure the output of the project is well-understood by stakeholders 3. making sure the project sufficiently addresses the problems it intends to solve
4. Tracking other projects with similar requirements or shared work 1. avoiding duplicated effort 2. avoiding conflicts between the projects
5. Effectively spinning up other engineers on a project and distributing work (multiplying efficiency)
6. Ensuring prerequisites are met
7. …endless other items…

You can be the fastest coder in the west, but if these things aren’t done well, the project is probably going to go poorly. And if they are done well, the project will be done faster with others than if you did it yourself.

Tacit knowledge in programming

On bad advice #programming #software

Programming practices are mostly tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge isn't easy to share. An expert will relate some simple-sounding rule of thumb, but then grilling them on specific cases will quickly uncover a huge collection of exceptions and caveats that vary depending on the specific details of the situation. These are generated from many many past experiences and don't generalize well outside of the context of that body of experience.

Trying to apply the rule of thumb without knowing all those details tends to result in failure. Phrases like "don't repeat yourself", "you aren't going to need it", "separation of concerns", "test-driven development" etc were originally produced from some body of valid experience, but then wildly over-generalized and over-applied without any of the original nuance.

The way to convey tacit knowledge, if at all, is via the body of experiences that generated the rule. For this reason I find much more value in specific experience reports or in watching people actually working, as opposed to writing about general principles.