Found 41 bookmarks
Newest
The Complex Problem Of Lying For Jobs — Ludicity
The Complex Problem Of Lying For Jobs — Ludicity

Claude summary: Key takeaway Lying on job applications is pervasive in the tech industry due to systemic issues, but it creates an "Infinite Lie Vortex" that erodes integrity and job satisfaction. While honesty may limit short-term opportunities, it's crucial for long-term career fulfillment and ethical work environments.

Summary

  • The author responds to Nat Bennett's article against lying in job interviews, acknowledging its validity while exploring the nuances of the issue.
  • Most people in the tech industry are already lying or misrepresenting themselves on their CVs and in interviews, often through "technically true" statements.
  • The job market is flooded with candidates who are "cosplaying" at engineering, making it difficult for honest, competent individuals to compete.
  • Many employers and interviewers are not seriously engaged in engineering and overlook actual competence in favor of congratulatory conversation and superficial criteria
  • Most tech projects are "default dead," making it challenging for honest candidates to present impressive achievements without embellishment.
  • The author suggests that escaping the "Infinite Lie Vortex" requires building financial security, maintaining low expenses, and cultivating relationships with like-minded professionals.
  • Honesty in job applications may limit short-term opportunities but leads to more fulfilling and ethical work environments in the long run.
  • The author shares personal experiences of navigating the tech job market, including instances of misrepresentation and the challenges of maintaining integrity.
  • The piece concludes with a satirical, honest version of the author's CV, highlighting the absurdity of common resume claims and the value of authenticity.
  • Throughout the article, the author maintains a cynical, humorous tone while addressing serious issues in the tech industry's hiring practices and work culture.
  • The author emphasizes the importance of self-awareness, continuous learning, and valuing personal integrity over financial gain or status.
If your model is "it's okay to lie if I've been lied to" then we're all knee deep in bullshit forever and can never escape Transaction Cost Hell.
Do I agree that entering The Infinite Lie Vortex is wise or good for you spiritually? No, not at all, just look at what it's called.
it is very common practice on the job market to have a CV that obfuscates the reality of your contribution at previous workplaces. Putting aside whether you're a professional web developer because you got paid $20 by your uncle to fix some HTML, the issue with lying lies in the intent behind it. If you have a good idea of what impression you are leaving your interlocutor with, and you are crafting statements such that the image in their head does not map to reality, then you are lying.
Unfortunately thanks to our dear leader's masterful consummation of toxicity and incompetence, the truth of the matter is that: They left their previous job due to burnout related to extensive bullying, which future employers would like to know because they would prefer to blacklist everyone involved to minimize their chances of getting the bad actor. Everyone involved thinks that they were the victim, and an employer does not have access to my direct observations, so this is not even an unreasonable strategy All their projects were failures through no fault of their own, in a market where everyone has "successfully designed and implemented" their data governance initiatives, as indicated previously
What I am trying to say is that I currently believe that there are not enough employers who will appreciate honesty and competence for a strategy of honesty to reliably pay your rent. My concern, with regards to Nat's original article, is that the industry is so primed with nonsense that we effectively have two industries. We have a real engineering market, where people are fairly serious and gather in small conclaves (only two of which I have seen, and one of those was through a blog reader's introduction), and then a gigantic field of people that are cosplaying at engineering. The real market is large in absolute terms, but tiny relative to the number of candidates and companies out there. The fake market is all people that haven't cultivated the discipline to engineer but nonetheless want software engineering salaries and clout.
There are some companies where your interviewer is going to be a reasonable person, and there you can be totally honest. For example, it is a good thing to admit that the last project didn't go that well, because the kind of person that sees the industry for what it is, and who doesn't endorse bullshit, and who works on themselves diligently - that person is going to hear your honesty, and is probably reasonably good at detecting when candidates are revealing just enough fake problems to fake honesty, and then they will hire you. You will both put down your weapons and embrace. This is very rare. A strategy that is based on assuming this happens if you keep repeatedly engaging with random companies on the market is overwhelmingly going to result in a long, long search. For the most part, you will be engaged in a twisted, adversarial game with actors who will relentlessly try to do things like make you say a number first in case you say one that's too low.
Suffice it to say that, if you grin in just the right way and keep a straight face, there is a large class of person that will hear you say "Hah, you know, I'm just reflecting on how nice it is to be in a room full of people who are asking the right questions after all my other terrible interviews." and then they will shake your hand even as they shatter the other one patting themselves on the back at Mach 10. I know, I know, it sounds like that doesn't work but it absolutely does.
Neil Gaiman On Lying People get hired because, somehow, they get hired. In my case I did something which these days would be easy to check, and would get me into trouble, and when I started out, in those pre-internet days, seemed like a sensible career strategy: when I was asked by editors who I'd worked for, I lied. I listed a handful of magazines that sounded likely, and I sounded confident, and I got jobs. I then made it a point of honour to have written something for each of the magazines I'd listed to get that first job, so that I hadn't actually lied, I'd just been chronologically challenged... You get work however you get work.
Nat Bennett, of Start Of This Article fame, writes: If you want to be the kind of person who walks away from your job when you're asked to do something that doesn't fit your values, you need to save money. You need to maintain low fixed expenses. Acting with integrity – or whatever it is that you value – mostly isn't about making the right decision in the moment. It's mostly about the decisions that you make leading up to that moment, that prepare you to be able to make the decision that you feel is right.
As a rough rule, if I've let my relationship with a job deteriorate to the point that I must leave, I have already waited way too long, and will be forced to move to another place that is similarly upsetting.
And that is, of course, what had gradually happened. I very painfully navigated the immigration process, trimmed my expenses, found a position that is frequently silly but tolerable for extended periods of time, and started looking for work before the new gig, mostly the same as the last gig, became unbearable. Everything other than the immigration process was burnout induced, so I can't claim that it was a clever strategy, but the net effect is that I kept sacrificing things at the altar of Being Okay With Less, and now I am in an apartment so small that I think I almost fractured my little toe banging it on the side of my bed frame, but I have the luxury of not lying.
If I had to write down what a potential exit pathway looks like, it might be: Find a job even if you must navigate the Vortex, and it doesn't matter if it's bad because there's a grace period where your brain is not soaking up the local brand of madness, i.e, when you don't even understand the local politics yet Meet good programmers that appreciate things like mindfulness in your local area - you're going to have to figure out how to do this one Repeat Step 1 and Step 2 on a loop, building yourself up as a person, engineer, and friend, until someone who knows you for you hires you based on your personality and values, rather than "I have seven years doing bullshit in React that clearly should have been ten raw HTML pages served off one Django server"
A CEO here told me that he asks people to self-evaluate their skill on a scale of 1 to 10, but he actually has solid measures. You're at 10 at Python if you're a core maintainer. 9 if you speak at major international conferences, etc. On that scale, I'm a 4, or maybe a 5 on my best day ever, and that's the sad truth. We'll get there one day.
I will always hate writing code that moves the overall product further from Quality. I'll write a basic feature and take shortcuts, but not the kind that we are going to build on top of, which is unattractive to employers because sacrificing the long-term health of a product is a big part of status laundering.
The only piece of software I've written that is unambiguously helpful is this dumb hack that I used to cut up episodes of the Glass Cannon Podcast into one minute segments so that my skip track button on my underwater headphones is now a janky fast forward one minute button. It took me like ten minutes to write, and is my greatest pride.
Have I actually worked with Google? My CV says so, but guess what, not quite! I worked on one project where the money came from Google, but we really had one call with one guy who said we were probably on track, which we definitely were not!
Did I salvage a A$1.2M project? Technically yes, but only because I forced the previous developer to actually give us his code before he quit! This is not replicable, and then the whole engineering team quit over a mandatory return to office, so the application never shipped!
Did I save a half million dollars in Snowflake expenses? CV says yes, reality says I can only repeat that trick if someone decided to set another pile of money on fire and hand me the fire extinguisher! Did I really receive departmental recognition for this? Yes, but only in that they gave me A$30 and a pat on the head and told me that a raise wasn't on the table.
Was I the most highly paid senior engineer at that company? Yes, but only because I had insider information that four people quit in the same week, and used that to negotiate a 20% raise over the next highest salary - the decision was based around executive KPIs, not my competence!
#jobs#hiring#tech#work/productivity#work-life#bureaucracy#bullshit#culture#interviews#ethics#careers#business
·ludic.mataroa.blog·
The Complex Problem Of Lying For Jobs — Ludicity
The most hated workplace software on the planet
The most hated workplace software on the planet
LinkedIn, Reddit, and Blind abound with enraged job applicants and employees sharing tales of how difficult it is to book paid leave, how Kafkaesque it is to file an expense, how nerve-racking it is to close out a project. "I simply hate Workday. Fuck them and those who insist on using it for recruitment," one Reddit user wrote. "Everything is non-intuitive, so even the simplest tasks leave me scratching my head," wrote another. "Keeping notes on index cards would be more effective." Every HR professional and hiring manager I spoke with — whose lives are supposedly made easier by Workday — described Workday with a sense of cosmic exasperation.
If candidates hate Workday, if employees hate Workday, if HR people and managers processing and assessing those candidates and employees through Workday hate Workday — if Workday is the most annoying part of so many workers' workdays — how is Workday everywhere? How did a software provider so widely loathed become a mainstay of the modern workplace?
This is a saying in systems thinking: The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID), not what it fails to do. And the reality is that what Workday — and its many despised competitors — does for organizations is far more important than the anguish it causes everyone else.
In 1988, PeopleSoft, backed by IBM, built the first fully fledged Human Resources Information System. In 2004, Oracle acquired PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion. One of its founders, David Duffield, then started a new company that upgraded PeopleSoft's model to near limitless cloud-based storage — giving birth to Workday, the intractable nepo baby of HR software.
Workday is indifferent to our suffering in a job hunt, because we aren't Workday's clients, companies are. And these companies — from AT&T to Bank of America to Teladoc — have little incentive to care about your application experience, because if you didn't get the job, you're not their responsibility. For a company hiring and onboarding on a global scale, it is simply easier to screen fewer candidates if the result is still a single hire.
A search on a job board can return hundreds of listings for in-house Workday consultants: IT and engineering professionals hired to fix the software promising to fix processes.
For recruiters, Workday also lacks basic user-interface flexibility. When you promise ease-of-use and simplicity, you must deliver on the most basic user interactions. And yet: Sometimes searching for a candidate, or locating a candidate's status feels impossible. This happens outside of recruiting, too, where locating or attaching a boss's email to approve an expense sheet is complicated by the process, not streamlined. Bureaucratic hell is always about one person's ease coming at the cost of someone else's frustration, time wasted, and busy work. Workday makes no exceptions.
Workday touts its ability to track employee performance by collecting data and marking results, but it is employees who must spend time inputting this data. A creative director at a Fortune 500 company told me how in less than two years his company went "from annual reviews to twice-annual reviews to quarterly reviews to quarterly reviews plus separate twice-annual reviews." At each interval higher-ups pressed HR for more data, because they wanted what they'd paid for with Workday: more work product. With a press of a button, HR could provide that, but the entire company suffered thousands more hours of busy work. Automation made it too easy to do too much. (Workday's "customers choose the frequency at which they conduct reviews, not Workday," said the spokesperson.)
At the scale of a large company, this is simply too much work to expect a few people to do and far too user-specific to expect automation to handle well. It's why Workday can be the worst while still allowing that Paychex is the worst, Paycom is the worst, Paycor is the worst, and Dayforce is the worst. "HR software sucking" is a big tent.
Workday finds itself between enshittification steps two and three. The platform once made things faster, simpler for workers. But today it abuses workers by cutting corners on job-application and reimbursement procedures. In the process, it provides the value of a one-stop HR shop to its paying customers. It seems it's only a matter of time before Workday and its competitors try to split the difference and cut those same corners with the accounts that pay their bills.
Workday reveals what's important to the people who run Fortune 500 companies: easily and conveniently distributing busy work across large workforces. This is done with the arbitrary and perfunctory performance of work tasks (like excessive reviews) and with the throttling of momentum by making finance and HR tasks difficult. If your expenses and reimbursements are difficult to file, that's OK, because the people above you don't actually care if you get reimbursed. If it takes applicants 128% longer to apply, the people who implemented Workday don't really care. Throttling applicants is perhaps not intentional, but it's good for the company.
#work/productivity#reviews#bureaucracy#burnout#jobs#tech#software#business#ux#history#data structures
·businessinsider.com·
The most hated workplace software on the planet
How Perplexity builds product
How Perplexity builds product
inside look at how Perplexity builds product—which to me feels like what the future of product development will look like for many companies:AI-first: They’ve been asking AI questions about every step of the company-building process, including “How do I launch a product?” Employees are encouraged to ask AI before bothering colleagues.Organized like slime mold: They optimize for minimizing coordination costs by parallelizing as much of each project as possible.Small teams: Their typical team is two to three people. Their AI-generated (highly rated) podcast was built and is run by just one person.Few managers: They hire self-driven ICs and actively avoid hiring people who are strongest at guiding other people’s work.A prediction for the future: Johnny said, “If I had to guess, technical PMs or engineers with product taste will become the most valuable people at a company over time.”
Typical projects we work on only have one or two people on it. The hardest projects have three or four people, max. For example, our podcast is built by one person end to end. He’s a brand designer, but he does audio engineering and he’s doing all kinds of research to figure out how to build the most interactive and interesting podcast. I don’t think a PM has stepped into that process at any point.
We leverage product management most when there’s a really difficult decision that branches into many directions, and for more involved projects.
The hardest, and most important, part of the PM’s job is having taste around use cases. With AI, there are way too many possible use cases that you could work on. So the PM has to step in and make a branching qualitative decision based on the data, user research, and so on.
a big problem with AI is how you prioritize between more productivity-based use cases versus the engaging chatbot-type use cases.
we look foremost for flexibility and initiative. The ability to build constructively in a limited-resource environment (potentially having to wear several hats) is the most important to us.
We look for strong ICs with clear quantitative impacts on users rather than within their company. If I see the terms “Agile expert” or “scrum master” in the resume, it’s probably not going to be a great fit.
My goal is to structure teams around minimizing “coordination headwind,” as described by Alex Komoroske in this deck on seeing organizations as slime mold. The rough idea is that coordination costs (caused by uncertainty and disagreements) increase with scale, and adding managers doesn’t improve things. People’s incentives become misaligned. People tend to lie to their manager, who lies to their manager. And if you want to talk to someone in another part of the org, you have to go up two levels and down two levels, asking everyone along the way.
Instead, what you want to do is keep the overall goals aligned, and parallelize projects that point toward this goal by sharing reusable guides and processes.
Perplexity has existed for less than two years, and things are changing so quickly in AI that it’s hard to commit beyond that. We create quarterly plans. Within quarters, we try to keep plans stable within a product roadmap. The roadmap has a few large projects that everyone is aware of, along with small tasks that we shift around as priorities change.
Each week we have a kickoff meeting where everyone sets high-level expectations for their week. We have a culture of setting 75% weekly goals: everyone identifies their top priority for the week and tries to hit 75% of that by the end of the week. Just a few bullet points to make sure priorities are clear during the week.
All objectives are measurable, either in terms of quantifiable thresholds or Boolean “was X completed or not.” Our objectives are very aggressive, and often at the end of the quarter we only end up completing 70% in one direction or another. The remaining 30% helps identify gaps in prioritization and staffing.
At the beginning of each project, there is a quick kickoff for alignment, and afterward, iteration occurs in an asynchronous fashion, without constraints or review processes. When individuals feel ready for feedback on designs, implementation, or final product, they share it in Slack, and other members of the team give honest and constructive feedback. Iteration happens organically as needed, and the product doesn’t get launched until it gains internal traction via dogfooding.
all teams share common top-level metrics while A/B testing within their layer of the stack. Because the product can shift so quickly, we want to avoid political issues where anyone’s identity is bound to any given component of the product.
We’ve found that when teams don’t have a PM, team members take on the PM responsibilities, like adjusting scope, making user-facing decisions, and trusting their own taste.
What’s your primary tool for task management, and bug tracking?Linear. For AI products, the line between tasks, bugs, and projects becomes blurred, but we’ve found many concepts in Linear, like Leads, Triage, Sizing, etc., to be extremely important. A favorite feature of mine is auto-archiving—if a task hasn’t been mentioned in a while, chances are it’s not actually important.The primary tool we use to store sources of truth like roadmaps and milestone planning is Notion. We use Notion during development for design docs and RFCs, and afterward for documentation, postmortems, and historical records. Putting thoughts on paper (documenting chain-of-thought) leads to much clearer decision-making, and makes it easier to align async and avoid meetings.Unwrap.ai is a tool we’ve also recently introduced to consolidate, document, and quantify qualitative feedback. Because of the nature of AI, many issues are not always deterministic enough to classify as bugs. Unwrap groups individual pieces of feedback into more concrete themes and areas of improvement.
High-level objectives and directions come top-down, but a large amount of new ideas are floated bottom-up. We believe strongly that engineering and design should have ownership over ideas and details, especially for an AI product where the constraints are not known until ideas are turned into code and mock-ups.
Big challenges today revolve around scaling from our current size to the next level, both on the hiring side and in execution and planning. We don’t want to lose our core identity of working in a very flat and collaborative environment. Even small decisions, like how to organize Slack and Linear, can be tough to scale. Trying to stay transparent and scale the number of channels and projects without causing notifications to explode is something we’re currently trying to figure out.
#startups#business#product strategy#companies/Perplexity#ai#search#future#project management#job-titles#business/hierarchy#tech#examples#work/productivity#workflows#tools
·lennysnewsletter.com·
How Perplexity builds product
The cult of Obsidian: Why people are obsessed with the note-taking app
The cult of Obsidian: Why people are obsessed with the note-taking app
Even Obsidian’s most dedicated users don’t expect it to take on Notion and other note-taking juggernauts. They see Obsidian as having a different audience with different values.
Obsidian is on some ways the opposite of a quintessential MacStories app—the site often spotlights apps that are tailored exclusively for Apple platforms, whereas Obsidian is built on a web-based technology called Electron—but Voorhees says it’s his favorite writing tool regardless.
#platforms#startups#tech#tools#work/productivity#tools/knowledge-tools
·fastcompany.com·
The cult of Obsidian: Why people are obsessed with the note-taking app
Inside the AI Factory
Inside the AI Factory
Over the past six months, I spoke with more than two dozen annotators from around the world, and while many of them were training cutting-edge chatbots, just as many were doing the mundane manual labor required to keep AI running. There are people classifying the emotional content of TikTok videos, new variants of email spam, and the precise sexual provocativeness of online ads. Others are looking at credit-card transactions and figuring out what sort of purchase they relate to or checking e-commerce recommendations and deciding whether that shirt is really something you might like after buying that other shirt. Humans are correcting customer-service chatbots, listening to Alexa requests, and categorizing the emotions of people on video calls. They are labeling food so that smart refrigerators don’t get confused by new packaging, checking automated security cameras before sounding alarms, and identifying corn for baffled autonomous tractors.
#ethics#ai#capitalism#tech#platforms#internet#work/productivity
·nymag.com·
Inside the AI Factory
How the Push for Efficiency Changes Us
How the Push for Efficiency Changes Us
Efficiency initiatives are all about doing the same (or more) with less.  And while sometimes that can be done purely through technology, humans often bear the brunt of efficiency initiatives.
When Zuckerberg says the organization is getting “flatter,” he means that more non-management workers will have to take on types of work—coordinating, synthesizing, communicating, and affective tasks—that managers used to do. For many, that means a significant intensification of a style of work that is not for everyone.
becoming more efficient and productive seems to hold positive moral value. It goes into the plus column on the balance sheet of your character. But this moral quality of efficiency acts to turn us each into a certain kind of person. Not just a certain kind of worker, but a certain kind of voter, parent, partner, mentor, and citizen.
Social theorist Kathi Weeks argues that the responsibilities we feel toward work—and I’ll add our responsibility specifically to efficiency and productivity—have “more to do with the socially mediating role of work than its strictly productive function.” In other words, the stories we tell about work and our relationships to it are actively creating our “social, political, and familial” stories and relationships, too.
A Year of Efficiency is bound to make shareholders happy. But what does it do to the humans who create the value those shareholders add to their portfolios? A Year of Efficiency might mean you can fit in more social media posts, more podcast episodes, more emails, or even more products or services. But how do you feel at the end? How has your relationship with yourself changed? How has your relationship with others changed?  Who do you become when efficiency is your guiding principle?
It’s worth questioning the moral quality we assign to efficiency and productivity in our society is healthy, or even useful. And it’s worth asking whether efficiency and productivity are really the modes through which we want to relate to our partners, children, friends, and communities.
While I certainly won’t deny the satisfaction of learning how to do a task faster, I do think it’s worth interrogating the way efficiency comes to shape our lives.
#work/productivity#culture#capitalism#tech#startups#metrics v humanities#companies/meta
·explorewhatworks.com·
How the Push for Efficiency Changes Us
How DAOs Could Change the Way We Work
How DAOs Could Change the Way We Work
DAOs are effectively owned and governed by people who hold a sufficient number of a DAO’s native token, which functions like a type of cryptocurrency. For example, $FWB is the native token of popular social DAO called Friends With Benefits, and people can buy, earn, or trade it.
Contributors will be able to use their DAO’s native tokens to vote on key decisions. You can get a glimpse into the kinds of decisions DAO members are already voting on at Snapshot, which is essentially a decentralized voting system. Having said this, existing voting mechanisms have been criticized by the likes of Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, the open-source blockchain that acts as a foundational layer for the majority of Web3 applications. So, this type of voting is likely to evolve over time.
#web3#DAOs#business#tech#trends#work/productivity#business/models#public-life
·hbr.org·
How DAOs Could Change the Way We Work
You Will Never Be A Full Stack Developer | Seldo.com
You Will Never Be A Full Stack Developer | Seldo.com
Every software framework you've ever used is in the abstraction game: it takes a general-purpose tool, picks a specific set of common use-cases, and puts up scaffolding and guard rails that make it easier to build those specific use cases by giving you less to do and fewer choices to think about. The lines between these three are blurry. Popular abstractions become standardizations.
#dev#career#web#work/productivity#frameworks#internet#trends#tech
·seldo.com·
You Will Never Be A Full Stack Developer | Seldo.com
What comes after Zoom? — Benedict Evans
What comes after Zoom? — Benedict Evans
If you’d looked at Skype in 2004 and argued that it would own ‘voice’ on ‘computers’, that would not have been the right mental model. I think this is where we’ll go with video - there will continue to be hard engineering, but video itself will be a commodity and the question will be how you wrap it. There will be video in everything, just as there is voice in everything, and there will be a great deal of proliferation into industry verticals on one hand and into unbundling pieces of the tech stack on the other. On one hand video in healthcare, education or insurance is about the workflow, the data model and the route to market, and lots more interesting companies will be created, and on the other hand Slack is deploying video on top of Amazon’s building blocks, and lots of interesting companies will be created here as well. There’s lots of bundling and unbundling coming, as always. Everything will be ‘video’ and then it will disappear inside.
the calendar is often the aggregation layer - you don’t need to know what service the next call uses, just when it is. Skype needed both an account and an app, so had a network effect (and lost even so). WhatsApp uses the telephone numbering system as an address and so piggybacked on your phone’s contact list - effectively, it used the PSTN as the social graph rather than having to build its own. But a group video call is a URL and a calendar invitation - it has no graph of its own.
one of the ways that this all feels very 1.0 is the rather artificial distinction between calls that are based on a ‘room’, where the addressing system is a URL and anyone can join without an account, and calls that are based on ‘people’, where everyone joining needs their own address, whether it’s a phone number, an account or something else. Hence Google has both Meet (URLs) and Duo (people) - Apple’s FaceTime is only people (no URLs).
When Snap launched, there were already infinite ways to share images, but Snap asked a bunch of weird questions that no-one had really asked before. Why do you have to press the camera button - why doesn’t the app open in the camera? Why are you saving your messages - isn’t that like saving all your phone calls? Fundamentally, Snap asked ‘why, exactly, are you sending a picture? What is the underlying social purpose?’ You’re not really sending someone a sheet of pixels - you’re communicating.
That’s the question Zoom and all its competitors haven’t really asked. Zoom has done a good job of asking why it was hard to get into a call, but it hasn’t asked why you’re in the call in the first place. Why, exactly, are you sending someone a video stream and watching another one? Why am I looking at a grid of little thumbnails of faces? Is that the purpose of this moment? What is the ‘mute’ button for - background noise, or so I can talk to someone else, or is it so I can turn it off to raise my hand? What social purpose is ‘mute’ actually serving? What is screen-sharing for? What other questions could one ask? And so if Zoom is the Dropbox or Skype of video, we are waiting for the Snap, Clubhouse and Yo.
#platforms#tech#work/productivity#future#mental models
·ben-evans.com·
What comes after Zoom? — Benedict Evans
Embracing Being a Generalist.
Embracing Being a Generalist.
Generalists can pursue broader themes, questions, and lenses which, across their interests give them a deep perspective from breadth.For example, a specialist is someone who is obsessed with chess and spends their waking hours practicing, playing, and studying.A generalist is someone who is obsessed with the idea of game-play, and has researched and gone deep on sports, childhood psychology, board games, and philosophy.
Embracing being a coordinate on the map for a point in time is about allowing yourself to be seen as something specific. Generalists can feel trapped by that but the truth is being specific, and being on the map for others is a way of being in service. If you never pin yourself down (just for a time) you miss the benefits of being connected or in service.
#Identities#Tech#Design#Academic#advice#work/productivity
·caffeine.blog·
Embracing Being a Generalist.
New Productivity — Benedict Evans
New Productivity — Benedict Evans

On bundling and rebundling services

The main takeaway from this is that we are now seeing a new wave of productivity companies that are unbundling and rebundling spreadsheets, email, and file shares into a new, more structured workflow. This is being done through vertical two-sided marketplaces that connect service providers with their customers, as well as through collaboration-first web applications. Additionally, we are seeing LinkedIn unbundled in the same way as Excel, creating a new wave of company creation. All of this is being driven by the fact that everyone is now online and expects to be able to do everything with a smartphone.

there are dozens of companies that remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, light-weight databases, forms, and some kind of collaboration, chat or information-sharing. All of these things are unbundling and rebundling spreadsheets, email and file shares.
LinkedIn tried to take the flat, dumb address book and turn it into both structured flow and a network of sorts. But by doing that for everyone, it has the same problem as a spreadsheet, file share or email - it’s a flat, lowest-common-denominator canvas that doesn’t capture the flows that many particular professions or tasks need.
There’s clearly a point in the life of any company where you should move from the list you made in a spreadsheet to the richer tools you can make in coolproductivityapp.io. But when that tool is managing a thousand people, you might want to move it into a dedicated service. After all, even Craigslist started as an actual email list and ended up moving to a database. But then, at a certain point, if that task is specific to your company and central to what you do, you might well end up unbundling Salesforce or SAP or whatever that vertical is and go back to the beginning.
every application category is getting rebuilt as a SaaS web application, allowing continuous development, deployment, version tracking and collaboration. As Frame.io (video!) and OnShape (3D CAD!) show, there’s almost no native PC application that can’t be rebuilt on the web. In parallel, everything now has to be native to collaboration, and so the model of a binary file saved to a file share will generally go away over time
an entire generation now grew up after the web, and grew up with smartphones, and assumes without question that every part of their life can be done with a smartphone. In 1999 hiring ‘roughnecks’ in a mobile app would have sounded absurd - now it sounds absurd if you’re not. And that means that a lot of tasks will get shifted into software that were never really in software at all before.
#Tech#Design#Academic#Trends#work/productivity#tools/CRMs
·ben-evans.com·
New Productivity — Benedict Evans