Dan Luu
patreon
Blog posts I'm not publishing
🕑 Added 2020-05-04 02:20:37 +0000 UTC- Nominal company values vs. actual company values
- This would be a list of companies with their stated company values next to what we can observe their values are from actual behavior, which might be things like "preserve the status quo", "an error must be taken to its extreme before it can be combated", "deny, deny, deny", etc.
- Correlation between physical attribute and title
- Scatterplots of various physical attributes vs. level, with data from different corporations, grouped by corporation
- Big company stories
- Startup stories
- Middle-management political tactics
- Description of classic moves like waiting until your enemy is on vacation and then taking half their team or slowly starving an enemy org of headcount until it collapses due to attrition, with links to actual examples from the "big company stories" post
- Net negative tooling
- Tooling so onerous or problematic that people generally regret using it, with concrete examples of the cost of the tooling as well as the cost of backing it out
- Bonus appendix: estimates of how much people were paid to create the tools
- The most overrated talks I've ever seen
- Why [redacted corporation name] has an unusually high rate of stories about abused employees
- A compendium of intellectually dishonest rhetorical techniques employed by widely read "thought leaders"
- Citing specific examples, of course
- Leadership anti-patterns
- With links to specific examples from "big company stories"
- The most flawed design docs I've ever read
- Only from systems that were actually built, citing examples of entirely predictable problems that resulted from starting with a flawed design
- The worst decisions I’ve seen senior managers promoted for
Comments
I think that some of these will need to wait until, say, 10 years after I retire. Others maybe until after I'm dead :-). I think many of these (e.g., overrated talks because talks tend to have a short half life, rhetorical patterns of thought leaders because people drop out at too high a rate -- of the most widely read programming bloggers from 2010, I believe none are really blogging regularly, with Jeff Atwood being an arguable exception, so most of the people whose style I analyzed probably won't be writing or tweeting or speaking anymore).
I can say a bit more about some of them, but I think that, for others, saying even a bit more would defeat the purpose of not publishing the post :-).
I'm very interested in reading almost all of these! Especially big co & startup stories
I definitely want to read some of these -- are you taking votes for which ones to expand on? :-)
