A manager should multiply, not add, On the Normalization of Deviance, Answering machines, Tech's Reckoning
If you are managing a team of people that are transporting rocks from A to B and you spend one hour picking ups rock from A and dropping them on B, you added one hour of work. If you spend that one hour procuring wheeled carts so that people don’t have to carry rocks on their backs, you increased their performance by 25% (and happiness). One task makes you an adder, one makes you a multiplier.
Très court article. Y reconnaissez vous des managers ?
As testers, we must remain alert to any symptom, anything that seems out of place, a hissing sound, a grinding sound, an inconsistency, missing text, or a starter that sometimes doesn’t work.
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This — missing user data from a different day — seems to be evidence of a more systemic problem. To a tester, the fact that some message notifications seem to be displayed properly is unremarkable. The important thing is that some don’t.
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The Challenger flight is an excellent example. There are several references to flights that had gone before. The acceptance and success of these flights is taken as evidence of safety. But erosion and blow-by are not what the design expected. They are warnings that something is wrong. The equipment is not operating as expected, and therefore there is a danger that it can operate with even wider deviations in this unexpected and not thoroughly understood way. The fact that this danger did not lead to a catastrophe before is no guarantee that it will not the next time, unless it is completely understood.
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Dear testers, and dear developers: can work does not mean does work, and seems to work now does not mean will work later. A problem that appears briefly and seems to go away is evidence that we have an inconsistent system. That’s not an invitation to shrug; it’s a motivation to investigate.
Un article du fameux testeur Michael Bolton. Je crois que j’ai vu ce qu’il décrit dans chacune de mes missions. Sur la dernière, chacun des 30 composants du SI montre ce genre de signaux.
Google has been around for almost 25 years. That is an eternity when it comes to the digital world. And Google was not the first engine to go online: from AltaVista to Yahoo! to Lycos we had our fair share of search engines available to search the web. Right now, the search engine world is going through a weird phase. And that's because AI has descended upon us. Bing with GPT, Google with Bart, it seems like the AI revolution of search engines is inevitable.
But I'm wondering, at what point a search engine stops being that and becomes something else?
Un article ultra-court (vous venez d'en lire la première moitié).
Venture capital is the one that set these valuations, venture capital is the one that incentivized and propped up bad companies while letting others languish, and venture capital is the one that is refusing to invest as a result.
This is also being framed as a new problem, versus the natural result of over a decade of bad companies receiving ungodly amounts of money. Color raised $41 million for a niche social app in 2011 before shutting down a year later. Clinkle raised $25 million for their sound-based payments app in 2013, shutting down three years later because it never really had any kind of product to speak of, but not before creating the best/worst tech advert of all time. Theranos raised over $700 million for a non-existent product and its founder went to jail. WeWork raised over $20 billion, never turned a profit, and now has a market cap of less than $500 million — and yet its founder Adam Neumann was able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for another company.
Blue Apron, a meal kit company) that never turned a profit (outside of the pandemic), raised $193 million of venture capital, went public at a $1.89 billion valuation in 2017, has had to raise over $200 million of post-IPO funds, and as of writing has a market cap of $41.5 million. Its CEO said last year that profit is “only a goal over the long term.” The Honest Company, an unprofitable home goods store with little or no differentiation other than being founded by Jessica Alba, raised over $500 million of venture capital and was able to IPO for $1.4 billion in 2021. Its current market cap is under $160 million.
Venture has been incentivized for years to create shambling “growth” companies that can be acquired by big firms that don’t think too much about what they’re buying, or dumped onto the public markets. The problem is that the markets themselves — as rotten as their incentives may be — have shown an intolerance for the lack of basic business acumen that most startups seem to have. An alarming amount of venture capital isn’t being invested to create good or sustainable or reliable or even public-ready companies, but obtuse stores of value that burn cash and lock up talented tech workers looking to vest their stocks.
Tiens ça me rapelle un intervenant dans l'école dans laquelle j'étudiais. Il m'avait choqué quand il nous a dit en 2011 : "Devenez des serials entrepreneurs ! Créez des boites et revendez-les !"
L'article mentionné au début est pas mal aussi !
