Jud – Page 9 – Making Of Things

Into The Flood

By Jud | July 2, 2024 | Comments 0 Comment

A great example of “you don’t know until you know” is being responsible for hiring. It’s a non-trivial task, hard to get right, and absolutely essential to running a successful organization.

Look, I remember what it’s like to be on the other side of this equation. Reaching out to anyone who will listen. Sending your resume far and wide. Waiting. So much waiting. It sucks, no question about it.

But right now, with so many technical professionals on the job market, it’s been a little overwhelming to sort through all the interest in open roles, especially for an organization that’s not big enough for professional recruiters. I like to think I’m a pretty responsive guy, but it’s simply impossible to review and respond to every single email and LinkedIn message, let alone include personalized details about exactly why we made the decision we did.

I wish the above weren’t true, but it is. And I’m not willing to “solve” it by handing the reins over to AI. At least not yet, because hiring is not a formula. Like much else, it’s a human process, and in general, everyone is doing their best.

Straight Talk

By Jud | June 30, 2024 | Comments 0 Comment

Much digital ink is spilled on LinkedIn pontificating about hiring processes, what recruiters and hiring managers should and shouldn’t do, etc. There’s some truth amongst the noise, but I get a good chuckle when perspectives are shared with no basis in either data or experience.

This is especially true of management advice. If you haven’t actually been a manager, your opinions on how to do it are worth less than a byte stored in S3 (i.e. not much). Go give it a try and let’s talk again, eh?

Even if you don’t see yourself in such a role long-term, I recommend everyone do a tour of duty as a people manager if they can. You’ll gain valuable insights into what it takes do the very human work of running a business.

The Struggle Is Real

By Jud | June 22, 2024 | Comments 0 Comment

This week I got into a friendly debate about developer onboarding in two different fora (the Rands Leadership Slack and an in-person CTO Lunches gathering). My hot take: technical onboarding documentation is at best over-rated, at worst counterproductive, and most organizations shouldn’t give it much thought.

Before you pick up stones, hear me out. My logic is based partly on experience, and partly on a theory. The experience is that writing detailed onboarding steps takes considerable time, usually from well-tenured developers whose attention is better spent elsewhere. Keeping said documentation up-to-date takes even more time and is nearly impossible to do with a fast moving product. And having half-baked or incorrect instructions is worse than nothing for a new team member. Putting in all this effort just to save a little bit of onboarding time doesn’t make sense. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

But there’s more. My theory is that having an onboarding process spelled out in painstaking details actually robs the newcomer of the chance to build muscle through struggle, shortcuts creative exploration of how things could be better, and sets an expectation that “getting up to speed” means following a mechanized set of steps instead of self-directed discovery of a codebase and getting to know fellow team-members and their institutional knowledge through asking excellent questions.

Sure, this might mean some initial frustration. That can be managed. And it might mean a new developer is slower to begin delivering value. But my hypothesis is that once they do, they’ll be better prepared to provide broader and deeper value in the long run.

And besides, it’s likely your system isn’t as complex as you think it is, and you should be looking for the kind of people that can do their own problem-solving. If it takes someone many days just to get an app running, you’ve got more serious problems. Which makes me think this could make for an interesting interview exercise: “Here’s our code repository. Get it running in a fresh environment.”

Confessional

By Jud | June 12, 2024 | Comments 0 Comment

What they say: “I want to be respectful of your time.”

What they mean: “I’m tired of this conversation and want it to end.”

And by “they” I mean “me”.

One Day Closer

By Jud | May 30, 2024 | Comments 2 comments

My dad died ten years ago today. Hard to believe it’s been a decade, but time marches on no matter our feelings.

I’ve written about him before: how his early investment in a home computer forever altered the course of my future, how his prodding to my shy teenage self got me my first job (and a wealth of early life lessons), and how his constant encouragement became the bedrock of my sense of self.

But today I was reminded of something else he modeled: the value of just showing up. The man bent over backwards to be at every little league game, every band concert, every academic awards banquet, and so much more, usually with video camera in hand.

I’m not as good at it as he was, if I’m honest. But it’s an ideal I strive for, both personally and professionally. Do what you say you’ll do, be where you say you’ll be, pay attention, be engaged. There are no small things.

(Oh, and yes, I am wearing a Star Wars tie at my high school graduation, thanks for noticing!)

All Will Love Me And Despair

By Jud | May 22, 2024 | Comments 0 Comment

A joy of my life is hacking around on APIs so I can automate things that would otherwise be manual. I’ve done it with Ticketmaster, American Airlines, WordPress (i.e. this blog), the AWS Product API, a payment page, a physician search API, a bunch of internal Amazon tools, and now (I’m happy to say) Tableau.

Deep in the land of San Diego, in the fires of his MacBook, the Developer Jud forged a Python script, and into this script he poured his creativity, his manipulations, and his will to dominate all APIs.

One script to rule them all.

One by one, the free websites of the Internet fell to the power of the script. There were some who resisted… but the power of Chrome Dev Tools could not be undone.

Like Molasses

By Jud | May 1, 2024 | Comments 0 Comment

I aggressively unsubscribe from email lists in order to get to Inbox Zero. Which isn’t an end in itself, but part of a broader strategy of radical responsiveness. I’ve been pretty good about doing so with my personal email, but my work email has gotten a bit out of hand.

So the past week I’ve been working on that, for my own email address and several shared addresses and aliases that come my way. It’s tedious, but progress is being made. However, I’m regularly baffled by the number of sites that report that unsubscribe isn’t instantaneous. Today I was quoted “5-7 days”, and I’ve seen as much as “2 weeks”. Why? What could possibly take that long?

Anyone out there in the ~~spam~~ email marketing business that can explain it to me?

Artifactory

By Jud | April 12, 2024 | Comments 1 comment

The other day I scanned and posted a gift I’d gotten from some co-workers. When leafing through the folder it was in, I found a few other fun artifacts I thought I’d share:

First, a certificate I got from my fourth grade teacher. It’s an objective I still aim for:

And second, an invite I got for helping support the underlying voting platform:

I’ve tried to do a better job recently of documenting my career experiences, not just the work-related items, but the fun stuff too. This week wasn’t so bad, even if the town isn’t my favorite:

Keep It Real

By Jud | April 5, 2024 | Comments 0 Comment

I did tons of hiring during my time at Amazon. I haven’t done as much in my new role, but that’s starting to change (any open roles I’ll put on my LinkedIn profile if you’re interested in checking them out).

There’s a lot I could say about the work of both identifying good candidates and presenting yourself well when you’re looking for a job. But I’ll keep it brief today.

First, when it comes to resumes, I could not agree with this advice more.

And second, during interviews, my number one thing: tell me what you did, not what you would do. Unless I specifically ask for a theoretical answer, I want to hear actual stories of actual work and actual outcomes. Experience is evidence.

Played The Fool

By Jud | April 4, 2024 | Comments 0 Comment

I’m not into pranks, giving or receiving. Maybe it’s just because my years are limited, but I don’t generally appreciate being inconvenienced in ways that waste my time for no reason other than humor. It’s a bit like an individualized corollary of the broken window fallacy.

Because of the above I get somewhat hypersensitive around April 1. I feel I’m generally good at sniffing out the BS, but I got taken pretty hard this year, cleverly enough that I have to tip my hat.

So a website I visit regularly posts periodic brain teasers. The one on April 1 sounded innocuous enough. The gist:

Start with a number. If it’s even, divide by 2. If odd, multiply by 3 and add 1. Repeat enough times, and you’ll end up with 1. Prove why that’s the case for any starting number.

I’m a sucker for that sort of mathy puzzle, and I spent a decent amount of time throughout the day noodling on it. Well, here’s the deal. Known as the Collatz conjecture, this convergence to one is famously unsolved, described on the Wikipedia page as “an extraordinarily difficult problem, completely out of reach of present day mathematics.” Lovely, so you’re saying this Ph.D. dropout is unlikely to solve it?

To be fair, I should have known. Numeric conjectures that intermingle addition and multiplication are notoriously complex, despite their apparent simplicity. I used to joke that a life goal was to solve Goldbach’s conjecture, which states that every even natural number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers. Apparently I said this enough at my first job that when I left, they gave me this fill-in-the-blank certificate as a gift:

It’s a good reminder that it’s the “easy” stuff you have to worry about most. It’s never five minutes.