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Articles to Read.
12 Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory
I’ve used the term *Feature Factory *at a couple conference talks over the past two years. I started using the term when a software developer friend complained that he was “just sitting in the factory, cranking out features, and sending them down the line.”
How do you know if you’re working in a feature factory?
Rapid shuffling of teams and projects (aka Team Tetris). Instead of compelling missions or initiatives, teams deal in feature and project assignments. Chronic multitasking and over-utilization
Success theater around “shipping” with little discussion about impact. You can tell a great deal about an organization by what it celebrates
No connection to core metrics. Infrequent discussions about desired customer and business outcomes. Team cannot connect work to key business and customer satisfaction metrics. Impossible to connect iterations to “what matters most”
Obsessing about prioritization. Mismatch between prioritization rigor (deciding what gets worked on) and validation rigor (deciding if it was, in fact, the right thing to work on). Prioritization rigor is designed exclusively to temper internal agendas so that people “feel confident”. Lots of work goes into determining which ideas to work on, leaving little leeway for adjustments and improvisation based on data. Roadmaps show a list of features, not areas of focus and/or outcomes.
No tweaking. Once work is “done”, the team moves immediately on to the next “project”, leaving no time to iterate based on qualitative and quantitative data
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The Cancer Industry: Hype vs. Reality
Cancer medicine generates enormous revenues but marginal benefits for patients
First, some basic facts to convey the scale of the problem. Cancer is the second most lethal disease in the U.S., behind only heart disease. More than 1.7 million Americans were diagnosed with cancer in 2018, and more than 600,000 died. Over 15 million Americans cancer survivors are alive today. Almost four out of ten people will be diagnosed in their lifetime, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Cancer has spawned a huge industrial complex involving government agencies, pharmaceutical and biomedical firms, hospitals and clinics, universities, professional societies, nonprofit foundations and media. The costs of cancer care have surged 40 percent in the last decade, from $125 billion in 2010 to $175 billion in 2020 (projected).
The best way to measure progress against cancer is to look at mortality rates, the number of people who succumb to cancer per unit of population per year. The risk of cancer grows with age. (Although childhood cancer gets a lot of attention, Americans under 20 years old account for less than 0.3 percent of all U.S. cancer deaths.) Hence as the average life span of a population grows (because of advances against heart and respiratory disorders, infectious disease and so on), so does the cancer mortality rate. To calculate mortality trends over time, therefore, researchers adjust for the aging of the population.
With this adjustment—which, keep in mind, presents cancer medicine in a more favorable light--mortality rates have declined almost 30 percent since 1991. This trend, according to cancer-industry boosters, shows that investments in research, tests and treatments have paid off. What boosters often fail to mention is that recent declines in cancer mortality follow at least 60 years of increases. The current age-adjusted mortality rate for all cancers in the U.S., 152.4 deaths per 100,000 people, is just under what it was in 1930, according to a recent analysis.
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Paper Straws Turned Me Conservative (satire!)
A put my full support behind the overwhelming majority of liberal policies and initiatives. In fact, there are many times where the Democrats don’t go far enough in pursuing racial, socioeconomic, gender, and environmental justice. But let me tell you one thing that I just can’t come to accept: paper straws.
Paper straws are definitely well-intentioned, but it’s impossible to get over how ineffective and disgusting they become after two or three sips of a drink. My experience using these virtue-signaling, annoying, and useless straws has led me to switch out of the Democratic Party, or “The Party of the Paper Straw,” as I like to call it, and into the other side of the aisle, which sticks with plastic.
The straw started off just fine, serving its purpose with integrity and a zeal for environmental justice. However, around three sips in, things were funky. Rather than the overwhelmingly bitter, powerful, and downright sexy taste I was used to, I tasted hints of something else. Just as it dawned on me that the world was definitely going to end in 12 years, my latte warped into something different, something foreign.
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The Horrifically Dystopian World of Software Engineering Interviews
My phone goes off.
“Hello, this is Jared.”
“Hi there. I’m calling about a phone interview with Giant Search and Advertising Company.”
“Yes! I’ve been looking forward to our call!”
“Yes. Can you write an algorithm to find the Kth highest value in a binary tree?”
I pause. I am completely blanking. I haven’t seen one like this before. The blank Google doc stares back at me with the cursor blinking in slow motion. I cobble something together as a first pass.
“Can you write a test case for this algorithm?”
Sure. I could possibly do that if I wasn’t completely hazing over and my inner ego was not melting under the blazing fury of a dream dying before my very eyes. Is this what all my hard work over the past few month come down to? I had decided that it was time I found a new position around January of 2019. As if the Software Engineering Gods on high had blessed this very thought, a Giant Search and Advertising Company recruiter reach out to me on LinkedIn about a phone interview. This was perfect!
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When "Grow Your Revenue!" Is Wrong
Silicon Valley is flooded with caffeinated investors who, after spending about 15 minutes thinking about the startup at hand, strongly believe they’ve diagnosed the ailment the company has: “Focus on revenue!”, they proclaim. As quickly as possible as aggressively as possible. But is this always right? Is there a stage where this could be – gasp – the wrong advice? Here’s something interesting:
Stripe took two years to get to a full launch.
Notion and Airtable took double that.
All of these companies are valued at over $1 billion dollars. What gives?
Growing revenue is the easiest advice to give, not the best advice to give. What you really want is to make the most desired product as quickly as possible. By chasing breadcrumbs of revenue in the short term, you can distract yourself from building something really great in the long term.
Don’t get me wrong, you need to make money. Lots of it. Revenue isn’t evil, but mindless slurping of advice is. Too many founders become brain-dead drillbits, spending a year optimizing to get another $1,000 in ARR because someone told them to. Disagree with the norms, and build the best product for your business, whatever that is. Play your own game.
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Why so many of the world’s oldest companies are in Japan
Back in 2008, a Bank of Korea report found that of 5,586 companies older than 200 years in 41 countries, 56% of them were in Japan. In 2019, there were over 33,000 businesses in Japan over a century old, according to research firm Teikoku Data Bank. The oldest hotel in the world has been open since 705 in Yamanashi and confectioner Ichimonjiya Wasuke has been selling sweet treats in Kyoto since 1000. Osaka-based construction giant Takenaka was founded in 1610, while even some global Japanese brands like Suntory and Nintendo have unexpectedly long histories stretching back to the 1800s.
But what is it about Japan that produces these long-lasting businesses? And in a global era defined by scrappy start-ups that push boundaries at lightning speed, do they have anything to teach us?
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From 2000-2006, the web was an open place. If you built a highly trafficked web property, you could finance yourself by selling advertising. It wasn’t just that the internet itself was a decentralized network, so were financing streams behind content. There were many publishers and paths for readers to get to those publishers through different search engines or aggregators, and ad networks matched advertisers to those properties. The result was a flourishing of voices and new media projects.
That is very much what podcasting looks like today.
Podcasting is a three tiered system, with production, distribution, and advertising in vertically separated lawyers. There are corporations who produce, distribute, and sell podcast ads, but the markets in all three lawyers are open. As a result, there’s relative ease of entry. It’s hard to build an audience, but if you do, you can get access to a financing channel. And the net result is a lot of diverse voices and entrepreneurship. This dynamic is changing somewhat, as branded podcast corporations increasingly build formulas to launch new shows, but relative to near all other media ecosystems, with the exception of the mid-2000s open internet, it’s open. And the debates within the industry about contested relationships between advertisers, podcast hosts, corporate management, and workers happen within a context of a relatively flexible system.
Spotify is rolling up the internet audio market, which their CEO, Daniel Ek, thinks will grow from $100 billion in revenue a year to somewhere near the video market, which is $1 trillion.
Spotify is directly mimicking Google and Facebook, and attempting to roll up power over digital audio markets the way Google and Facebook did over the internet. It has already done so in music. Here’s Rolling Stone, reporting on Spotify’s exploitation of its public utility platform of music distribution to organizes payola-style extortion against artists.
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More to Check Out:
- What 8 years of side projects has taught me
- 1 on 1 Meeting Questions
- Owning a Home is Not For Everyone
- Vanguard Broadens Reach With Entry Into Private Equity
- WTF Happened In 1971?
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My Update:
in SF, working!
reading a lot