I encourage you to still share your ideas and thoughts. It doesn't need to be as a blog, but in general. :)
Don't censor yourself out of fear of what others might think or misunderstand.
Many may get confused and some might not like it, but there may also be a small group of people who understand, which if you fall silent couldn't be reached.
I echo the parents sentiment - I don’t need to be there for a one hour meeting while 12 people give a perspective on a topic, but if you make the wrong decision I will say no.
My job as a higher level manager is to ensure that whoever is there on our behalf avoids stupid decisions being made, and if I can’t delegate that then I need to go myself. Sometimes its unavoidable, and sometimes politics prevail but 95% of the time making my priorities clear to my team and being consistent in my them has the correct outcome.
This can lead to weird dynamics. A lot of workplaces, no one seems to have direct power (or incentive!) to say "yes" to anything but lots of people (including 3 teams you weren't even aware existed) are able to "provide feedback" or say no.
This leads to all progress being achieved very slowly if at all, or by using the element of surprise and then seeking forgiveness.
While I know your heart is in the right place, as someone with a reporting structure on both sides, I can tell you that this kind of handholding is the entire reason they keep making bad decisions. You must let people fail, and from there your entire job is ensuring that winding back that decision is the responsibility of the people who made it. Few decisions are irreversible, and everything will almost always work out in the end despite how it feels at the time -- but letting people fail, then making them clean up after themselves, is possibly the absolute best teaching method out there.
I think you’re reading into a hip fire comment here - I’m not saying I’ll override any decision you make that i disagree with. Simply that if push comes to shove my team should feel empowered to make a decision and bring it to me for “ass covering” knowing that I will challenge them on it if I disagree, but also feeling confident that they know how I’ll feel about it before they make that call. I trust them to do this without me there.
Blindly allowing someone to make a bad call without questioning it is as bad as overruling their call without any explanation!
> And then you risk people making stupid decisions, which you have to fix later on, because you didn't attend the meeting.
If you are the one responsible for the work to fix something, you need to be the one driving the meetings or pushing alternative communication.
This is why all of the generic “just say no to meetings” advice is useless: It’s all dependent on the context. You can’t just decline meetings from your boss’s boss without good reason, for example.
A lot of snarky internet advice about saying “no” at the office is just people venting or doing imaginary role play. In a real office you have to push for communication, pull details out of people, identify who you need to report to and who you can safely decline.
If you get in a situation where you’re declining meetings and the responsibility for content of that meeting lands in your lap, you have made a severe misjudgment. These things are easy to clarify with a little proactive communication, but you get nowhere if you just say “no” or send off a singular “agenda plz” email and then forget about it. People are busy. You have to push and make it clear what you need from them, following up if it doesn’t come.
I’m not sure if this is more bad advice, but it seems like we’d all be better off if people just shared their experiences, rather than trying to proscribe them for others: you telling me to decline meetings is worthless, but you describing how you did, and what the effects were has value.
> Your head might not be, but you might find yourself being unhappily cleaning up a mess for months
From my experience it is going to happen regardless of whether you pay attention or not. People will fuck up, period. Compulsively being hypervigilant will drive you insane.
As a manager or even a technical leader, your head IS on the line, it just might not seem so obvious.
Rollout delays, customer debacles, etc all shape your image to promo panels.
If you’re just a junior engineer, it’s not like it will be held against you, but you certainly missed an opportunity to demonstrate ownership and make a name for yourself as one of the 1 in 20 people who aren’t NPCs.
Someone explicitely asked for your input, you refused and they fucked up. Your head might nor roll, but you won't be unscaved either. If it's not as your responsibility, it will be by the size and impact of the fuckup.
IMHO it'l should be the same approach as any other human communication: not everything can be fixed, and at some point you'll need to compromise.
Some people talk slowly, will you refuse to listen to them if they don't speed up to some given wpm ? Some take time to come to their actual point. It might be utterly uncomfortable, but if they actually tend to have very good points, you'll probably bear with it.
You are correct that caring is important - but it also isn't your responsibility at the end of the day. If you don't care you're doing it wrong - if you let it eat you up inside whenever anything goes wrong you're also doing it wrong.
Work-life balance is mostly talked about in terms of time commitments but there is also an emotional commitment you need to balance. It's unhealthy to be too far in either extreme and, especially folks that are naturally empathetic, should be more wary of falling into the trap of overinvesting in a workplace and suffering mentally for it.
I fully agree! Can also recommend to everyone to take a similar course or use self-study material on the topic. Understanding the lowest layers makes you a better software engineer, as your mental model of a CPU/PC gets sharper.
The past week, I've implemented a Markdig renderer that outputs / renders into a Migradoc document, which can be converted to PDF. For the limited used case it works quite well and I'm currently looking into open sourcing it with some other MigraDoc related stuff under MIT.
Justified text isn't exactly a standard Markdown feature though. I guess Markdown converters are in general not easy, since there are so many dialects and at best people just mix in pure HTML, requiring a HTML renderer as well.
Anyways, if you're interested in the Markdig to MigraDoc renderer, let me know.
wkhtmltopdf repository has been archived on GitHub. Maybe if you're lucky, someone will make a fork, but it's quite hard for a fork to get traction and retain some user base / not to be immediately discarded as well.
Qt WebKit is, compared to Chromium, quite light-weight at 30-40MB. However it's still quite large, compared to say MigraDoc + PDFsharp at 1MB. Truthfully, if there was a well maintained project using it, I'd have actually considered it.
Though Qt WebKit also moves you into the murky water of copy-left licensing, as Qt is released under LGPL. With the setup of using a shared native library, this should work, but might still not be something everyone wants to touch.
People don't just share their stargazing plots "for fun", but because it has meaning for them.
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