Ep 5: Progressivism & Land Use Laws, Brag Documents and Raises, Scientific Papers
Ep 5: Salary, Brag Documents, and Delivering Value
👋 Happy Friday!
You're getting this email because you sometime in the last few years you asked to get emails from me, either as they relate to software development, random ranting on the internet, or rock climbing. (intermediateruby.com, josh.works, and climbersguide.co respectively, the latter being offline for the moment. 😬)
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If you're reading this email before you're done with work for today, I suggest skipping down to the section on software development, Julia Evans, read her post on brag documents, create your own brag document if you've not already, and make time every week or two to update it.
The amazing Dan Moore submitted an old post of mine to Hacker News. It did well, and I always enjoy reading the comments, and seeing people with orders of magnitude more experience than me suggest improvements or share funny stories. The title of that post is Change your MAC address with a shell script, and some funny stories cropped up in the comments, like this one:
My university required registration of MAC addresses for whitelisting & bandwidth metering. My enterprising roommate and I worked out that we could bypass all bandwidth limitations by spoofing the MAC addresses of machines in the computer labs as long as the machine was turned off. We eventually got caught for using something like 90% of the university's total bandwidth - the security admin was thrown for quite a loop when he tracked down the machines that were supposedly using all of the bandwidth and found that they were turned off at the time. Apparently it took some creative techniques to figure out where the traffic was actually coming from.Our punishment was something like two weeks with all internet access revoked (except for the use of lab machines for classwork), plus a written apology, plus a signed agreement not to violate the acceptable use policies again or else face the real punishment for what we did.The school administrator in charge of the punishment asked the security admin what we were downloading (this was when the MPAA/RIAA were cracking down hard on people uploading files on sharing networks), but the security admin had mercy on us and told her he didn't think it was relevant, thank god!
Housing and Urbanism 🏡🏫🚋🛣
Last time, I said:
So, what to do? Is there a graceful reconciliation here, between "don't re-build the Titanic" and "don't make old stuff illegal?
How "political" is housing and urbanism to you?
Or, phrased otherwise, do you feel like there's an intersection of "social ethics" and the rules/systems governing the buildings we inhabit?
Some of you will say "OBVIOUSLY!" and some of you will say "Maybe, but it's not something I've thought about much before."
I read two NYT pieces last week:
👉The Black Lives Next Door: A new generation of activists is trying to figure out where to concentrate its efforts. Residential desegregation is the final frontier.
👉 California Is [redacted]: If progressivism can’t work there, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?
I have too much to say on the topic to say it quickly or concisely, so I'll leave this section empty for now, other than a picture of a delicious restaurant in Golden that is illegal under modern zoning laws because it's too narrow:
(It's "grandfathered in", of course, but if the owner wanted to open up a similarly-sized restaurant in some other part of town, he/she would never be allowed to do so, and this is a travesty with Substantial implications.)
By the way, if you're in Golden (or ever passing through!) I'd gladly grab a sandwich from here with you, and totally nerd out about Golden, zoning things, etc! Here's the restaurant, here's my calendly page to book something automatically.
👩💻 Software Development-ish
Julia Evans is an amazing human. I've never met her, but I love reading what she writes, and the lovely illustrated guides she makes.
I've got a goal of personally helping folks I know grow their salaries by a (collective) $150,000/yr. I'll probably not hit that goal, but as of a week ago, I'd been involved with, or informed about, ~$50,000 in raises.
As of today, this figure now stands at $85,000 in raises that I've helped others get. (Thanks [redacted], [redacted]!)
Some of this salary increase comes from software developers, figuring out how to earn more money. Some of it comes from not software developers.
I've been privy to a rather large number of salary negotiation conversations, and helped people strategize around getting raises and promotions. What's a constant thread between all of these successful outcomes?
Tracking what one accomplishes
This concept segways to Peter Drucker's famous quote, "What gets measured gets managed."
One last hop gets us to the book Seeing Like A State (goodreads), (Scott Alexander's book review), which unpacks (in excrutiating and heartbreaking ways) the implications of this concept called "legibility", which can be loosely brought into this domain as:
legibility: the organization must make its employees and their activities visible to itself before it can appropriate reward and guide any plan for the general welfare.
By tracking what one accomplishes, one also accomplishes more of the kinds of things one tracks, and in tracking your accomplishments you begin the process of making these accomplishments legible to the organization you work for.
So, do you have a few minutes before you sign off for work this week? What did you accomplish today, yesterday, or Monday? If you think "well, I did something..." you should read:
👉 Get your work recognized: write a brag document
and then spend a few minutes jotting those accomplishments down in a brag document.
Most of you will say "that's a great idea Josh!" and then forget about this until the next time I mention a brag document.
Some of you will create a repeating calendar event, like this:
Those of you that make the calendar event? Statistically more likely that six months from now, you'll be benefitting from this document, as will the company you work for.
⁉️ Questions and Requests
I have a strange hobby of printing and reading white papers. Do you have any interest in seeing what I read, and getting notes/possible implications from what I read? I've got ten papers sitting on my desk right now. I'll list some interesting things about some of them.
Reply to the email with thoughts on if you think you'd get value from a detailed analysis on these papers. These papers have real value across many domains, but in particular "business domains".
Do you have a company credit card, and some money to spend investigating an idea to improve things like: hiring, employee retention, psychological wellbeing, developer tooling?
If so, reply to this email. My going rate for expanding on any paper I've read is somewhere between $5 and $5,000. You know your organization better than I, so you know the implications of these kinds of ideas, explained and applied:
🤓📊 A few Scientific Papers That, If Relevant To You, Are Valuable:
👉 Structural Holes and Good Ideas
A 30 page paper from 2004, by Ronald S. Burt at the University of Chicago, about work relationships that span business units/domains, and the disproportionately high value that comes from persons who can "broker" across the structural holes that exist in organizations.
👉 Hiring is Broken: What do Developers Say About Technical Interviews?
Tech interviews are more like implementations of the Trier Social Stress Test than anything else, and it's possible this is an extremely expensive mistake your company could be making. It's fixable. (I've got a few different papers on this topic.)
👉 The Psychological Conditions of Meaningfulness, Safety, and Availability, and the Engagement of the Human Spirit at Work
From 1998, Douglas May, Richard Gilson, and Lynn Harter dive deep on what causes conditions of psychological safety at work. Here's some 🔥quotes:
Managers should attempt to foster meaningfullness through the effective design of jobs
[...]
Managers should also work to establish employee perceptions of safety... specifically, it is important for managers to encourage employees to solve work-related problems, develop new skills, participate in decisions, treat employees fairly, be consistent in their actions, demonstrate integrity between their words and actions, use open communication, and demonstrate genuine concern for employees.
The entire paper boiled down to "managers should not act like sociopaths". I believe the authors mis-attribute the problem, though. It's not that managers spontaneously decide to be sociopathic, it's that they operate in constrained environments and are often required to be low-level sociopathic, just to keep their job.
It's a paper full of surprisingly hot takes that seems to have been nearly completely ignored in the 23 years since it's been published.
- Josh
PS I would link to the actual papers in question, and might in the future, but most of them are paywalled, and I have to use scihub to get them.
Scihub is "the first website in the world to provide mass & public access to research papers", but some persons believe scihub is illegal, unethical, immoral, and anyone who uses it should go to jail, so I'm not linking directly to the papers just yet. If you visited it, and punched in the title of any academic paper you want, you'll be able to download said paper.