When interviewing candidates I always enquire about their professional mistakes. Their reply often is the decider between hiring/rejecting.
I want to have colleagues who admit fault, be truthful about actions which lead to the issue, and learn from it. The learning includes organisations perhaps putting additional measures in place to prevent future issues.
One candidate told of a story how he was On-Call early in his career and was told situations happened so rarely, just to continue living life as normal.
Unfortunately for him, his pager went off at 02:00am while he was high as a kite on drugs - but felt he had to take action (mostly due to arrogance!).
He promptly deleted production data and things only got worse when he tried to rectify the situation.
Of course he was fired for his actions but ever since he's been stone cold sober when on-call.... just in case.
He learned a valuable lesson about professional responsibilities.
It’s funny how so many managers on this board are like, yeah I focus disproportionately much on this one factor. Why? Because my intuition and experience says so.
at highlevel, you must know what you're supposed to deliver, which can be extremely difficult when not everyone does (incl yourself) so people start to second guess things to 'get things moving' which can be a huge risk and potentially completely wrong.
Understand the actual problem , write it down and repeat back to get confirmation.
write down the (non)functional requirements from the stakeholders, the exact scope of work before doing anything, again repeat back to get confirmation,
In the murky world of greyness where people do not really know information or the full set of data, agree (again before starting work) on little subtasks/ plans to get the information (PoC)
Write down the Risks/ Assumptions/ Issues/ Dependences of your actions and again get them signed off
all this takes time and can be extremely boring relative to getting stuff done, so a lot of people just do stuff they think is right
I think that managers should involve themselves in that. I've worked with people who think that giving you a task and receiving an implementation or status report is their unique job. But when you want to flesh out the task and request for more information, they see you as bothersome.
I'm a divergent thinker and like to bounce ideas off other divergent thinkers, so I can work alone or with others, but/ ideally they need to be creative/ open
Once we have a list of ideas, then whittle the list down with the realist and pessimistic people of the group; until there's one obvious way forward or a couple of least worse ideas.
Generally most people are better at telling you what you can't do,
I've also found brainstorming isn't great for more "creative" thinkers. In a group setting it's easy to say "no that won't work" or not get buy-in on the spot, so ideas that aren't mainstream get shot down right away.
People like me also need time and space to think deeply about certain topics, and a brainstorming session has neither time nor space, so you're immediately limited in the ideas that are presented.
Those people aren't brainstorming; the rules should be that ideas get evaluated later, and that no idea is too outlandish, even if it "won't work". You write every idea down, and cull later, at which point people have had time to think about how something might get done, rather than simply to cancel it off the cuff.
+1. Brainstorming is a way to generate leads by leveraging diverse group of minds/experiences/skills. In a healthy environment, such experience may be even bonding for the team, as long as ranks and seniority are left at the door (which is not easy).
Just clearly write out the scope and purpose, timebox it, and collect/record the ideas, no judgement, not even attribution. Then the next time, see if anything converges, evaluate what can be done.
“as long as ranks and seniority are left at the door.”
100%. We had anyone who wanted to join, and nobody’s ideas were better than others. One of our most beloved features was one that our EA came up with in such a session, because she didn’t have the context to think it was hard to do. A few days later, we found an easier way to do it, but we’d never even have looked if it weren’t for the humility and collaboration in that room that day.
i am too...and i basically cant work at the same level if i'm just sitting alone by myself. so i _have_ to kick stuff aronud with people. unfortunately the longer i stay in the industry the less people are used to working this way.
I was royally pissed off when I suspected my brand new Lenovo laptop was acting strange. The only in the end to stop it was to reinstall the OS, I then later found out it was the superfish issue
The problem is more or less all hardware manufacturers do that. There's variations: some bundle only the Windows backdoor, some bundle Superfish, some bundle Intel/AMD's anti-theft and ME/PSP features. That society is ok with that is a huge problem to say the least.
And yet my CPU runs its own operating system (Minix) behind my back and reacts to undocumented secret commands i'm unaware of. Is the comparison that irrelevant?
I personally find the two questions awfully related: i'm buying hardware that performs operations without my knowledge/consent and answers to someone else's commands. Now one may genuinely believe there are valid usecases for this (i don't), but it's not exactly "whataboutism" as i'm definitely not trying to refute the original argument that pre-bundled malware is bad.
Although i personally consider hardware/firmware-level malware more troubling than OS-level malware which you can just wipe away by setting up a fresh system (which i recommend anyone to do when they receive a new machine, for related reasons).
I look at Boardgamegeek almost ever time I make a purchase of a game and to get ideas. To see what other peoples think, their reviews about the game and game play, strategy vs luck element, type of game etc
It's similar to imdb for movies, its a place full of opinions. I take everything with pinch of salt, but it's the best review site around
The more amateur reviews I've read on BGG the less I pay attention to them, honestly.
A big difference between movies and boardgames is that it's (for the most part) a group activity. And to make matters even more inconsistent, whether a group will take to a game or not will also depend a lot on who actually teaches them the game and how that person goes about it.
> whether a group will take to a game or not will also depend a lot on who actually teaches them the game and how that person goes about it.
Definitely agree on this. I was teaching a few different people at different times how to play Wiz-War over the holidays (I had recently made my own copy from a printables PDF I found on the BGG site since it's not really for sale), and I definitely took different strategies with my twelve year old son than I did with other people that I was teaching, because I knew more or less how much they might put up with in being screwed over by the game (because a lot of the fun of that game is screwing people over or getting out of being screwed over), and how much I dawdles after I did so to give them opportunities to find a way out of their situation. That seemed to work well, I think the people I taught the game to enjoyed it, and I could definitely see how someone more interested in winning could give someone a really shitty first experience in that game.
Interesting anecdote. I feel like this is probably the area of boardgame that has progressed the least. In some sense the YouTube channels that do full rule explanations is a way of remedying this, sure, but that also feels quite.. odd to break out the iPad during a social gathering.
Coup and Resistance, while both games of deception and social engineering, differ in how their deception plays out.
Coup’s deception is confrontational. On every turn you facedown an opponent and challenge them to a guessing game directly. The game relies on you deceiving others to perform actions optimally. If no one lies or no one confronts anyone’s lies, the game ends very quickly.
Resistance’s is less confrontational. Your goal is to evade detection and deceive the group as a whole. In addition, not everyone needs to lie. If you aren’t assigned the role of a spy, you are spared the act of deceiving the group.
I have found that this results in two polar opposites of player groups. A group of players who aren’t confrontational in nature find Coup lackluster because everyone just settles into an optimal or suboptimal strategy and the game ends without much fanfare.
Resistance on the other hand, bores players who want to challenge each other. Be dealt the wrong role and they find themselves just sitting around for 15 minutes. Yes the accusation and voting rounds provide some entertainment, but it just isn’t the same.
This is all anecdata of course. I like both games, and admittedly I might be stuck in some kind of local maxima due to my own personality and personal history defining the kind of people I play games with.
As a final parting thought: Coup with a mix of highly confrontational and pacifist players also never goes well either.
each company is different,
from my experience it would depend on the severity of the fix, and the severity of the issue. the problem would get resolved by any means ie temporary sticky plaster if necessary.
Another team would then assess and analyse the root cause from a company wide perspective and then assess the risks, costs and impact and then make any modifications (possibly redoing the temporary fix, and fixing it properly)
Real issue, a call center main telephony system and one of the management servers kept crashing causing over 1400 call center people to stop working. Temporary fix was to re boot the servers every 4 hours causing minor pain, but the call staff was up and running.
After a whole stupid week of the engineers not being able to find the route cause it was escalated extremely high and our team was brought in and we found the root cause in seconds (literally)The servers was VMs and the engineers hadn't checked the physical ESX server they were hosted on. another VM on the box caused the server to go unstable (ESX not configured correctly).
BAU project set up to audit/ report and fix all the ESX servers in the company for other stupid config issues
I'm no where near an expert and I'm not a big fan of software patents,
on the subject of prior work, and just thinking out loud, but I wonder if USPTO could set up some rules whereby the person asking for a patent has to do some sort of search for prior art, in order to get the patent
and if they don't or do it badly/ not to the rules, then a penalty is applied, financial or immediate ban on patients?
There is no requirement that one looks for prior art. 37 CFR 1.56 requires that an applicant disclose pertinent prior art that is already known to the applicant or his lawyer and disclose prior art that the applicant becomes aware of during the application process.
> In nonprovisional applications, applicants and other individuals substantively involved with the preparation and/or prosecution of the application have a duty to submit to the Office information which is material to patentability as defined in 37 CFR 1.56.
> but I wonder if USPTO could set up some rules whereby the person asking for a patent has to do some sort of search for prior art, in order to get the patent
Disclosing prior art, and how your patent builds on and is different from it, is part of the patent application process.
> and if they don't or do it badly/ not to the rules, then a penalty is applied
That penalty is the patent is completely invalidated.
In theory, but in practice getting a patent invalided is a fraught and unreliable process. The courts have been generally deferential to the the USPTO decision, which may be a problem if some examiners have allowed patents to go through on the assumption that the courts can fix it later if they get it wrong.
In my experience on psychedelics, I was observing myself freaking out in third person from a calm conscious perspective. I remember asking and thinking to myself that it was strange and funny that I was freaking out because this is all just temporary.
(freaking out might be a strong term, but my heart was racing, I was breathing heavily, shaking/shivering, etc, but still laying relatively still)
So to me the weirdest thing about an out of body experience was that I could observe my brain in a similar way to how I observe my hand right now. I can move my fingers around, and the hand is definitely part of me, but my hand does not feel conscious. So when having this experience it felt like my consciousness moved out of my head to the room and that I was observing how my head was processing thoughts while still being somewhat in control of those thoughts.
I've just signed up to the equivalent in the uk called government gateway
you have to provide information and details from two of the following: Passport, last tax submission or driving licence
the sign up to the internet healthcare system used by my doctor seemed to be run by a 3rd party (not happy) needed general information and a picture of my passport or driving license. I declined, because it's a third party and I could not be bothered reading the large list of ways they will likely sell your data and partially because I don't need my doctors info online
I have made a couple of huge ones - luckily I kept my job