“Boss-ology 101: The Art of Managing Upwards” and other links…
Slow Leadership: “Managing the boss is a set of skills every subordinate needs to learn to be happy and successful. Poor leaders may believe that they are calling all the shots and need no nudges and assistance from below, but this merely proves their arrogance and blindness to reality. A major part of the definition of most truly disastrous bosses is that they try to control everything themselves and never listen to their subordinates.” I referred to this article in “An IT Fundamentalist Speaks: The Middle-Management Time-Elapse Memory-Erase System” here in the kinté space.
“The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number at Microsoft”
O’Reilly Radar: “In cases where we were giving what was a significantly degraded experience, the data moved to significance extremely quickly. We were able to tell when we delayed people’s pages by more than half a second, and it was very obvious that this had a significant impact on users very quickly. And so we were able to turn off that experiment. So the reasoning that we did it was it helps us make a strong argument for how we can prioritize work on performance against work on other aspects of the site. I mean, I’m the performance guy; I don't like hurting end-users in terms of performance. But if it helps me make a good, strong business argument to make other changes that will improve the experience for all of my users, for all time to come, and it means that a small segment of users for a small period of time will experience what we think will likely be a negative thing but we're not sure, it was a test worth running.”
“Hey, Lose the Pedantic Negativity”
Think Vitamin: “It’s as if we’re all just waiting to attack instead of encouraging creativity and politely mentioning tweaks that could be considered. …I’m fairly thick skinned and I can take negative comments, but a lot of creative people can’t. They would rather not blog/tweet/etc than be publicly criticized. I think we should, as an industry, consider that we’re stifling creativity and innovation by the band-wagon bashing that often occurs when folks launch something new.” These cute, little, bunny-rabbit observations that has so many self-described “liberals” asking sincere questions fail to reach real, ultra-conservative fundamentals: war is based on a deep, core consciousness that is renewed and reinforced by the warlike culture. To ask a deeply warlike person to lose the “negativity” is an ironically warlike request—like ordering a soldier to “drop” what she is doing and man the anti-aircraft guns. There is a deep, deep cultural reason why an American song like “Amazing Grace” is so, well, amazing to some properly assimilated people—the first thing this song is saying is that grace is amazing… asking people who are raised by wolves of war to be graceful human beings is disrespecting the immense God-complex that houses them…