Patrick McKenzie

If you sell software for $X00 no sophisticated buyer of software will assume custom engineering work is on the table. If you have an option to pay you $Y00k, every sophisticated buyer of software will assume custom engineering work is something you have contemplated.

This also functions to say "Yes, I very well might be able to do that thing that you might assume I cannot do if you just saw off-the-rack pricing; please get in touch to discuss your needs."https://twitter.com/sehurlburt/status/1264058218541576192 …

I think about this a lot when I hear that, in tech epicenters in the US, workers are treated as economic migrants rather than residents. They're sneered at in the local polity. It is assumed, with rather little evidence, that they're disengaged from civic life, neighborhoods, etc

Some years ago, Ogaki issued me a piece of paper certifying that I was a resident of the city, and not someone who merely lived in it. Cities in Japan did this after years of pressure by advocates of foreign residents to normalize their status.

(One function of consultants is to launder practices of various firms into Industry Best Practices (TM) so that there is technical diffusion faster than the ordinary cycle of people moving around the industry.)

There's an interesting professional challenge about respecting secrets about things you built, because on the one hand NDA etc etc etc, and on the other hand ex-employers don't own most contents of your brain even though a lot of it is relevant to similarly shaped new employers.

An open secret in the tech industry is that these documents exist, they're just not public. Step one: Hire someone who was recently at X, in the ordinary course. Have them braindump into a document. Step two: Ask for comments from your other previously-X developers.

I would read/watch/etc the heck out of this for literally every large software company. What's the part of your stack/operations/etc you're proudest of? What is the corner that touches everything where staff engineers fear to tread? Where 3 multi-year efforts to fix failed?https://twitter.com/tylertringas/status/1263634121009528832 …

I assume it is in an A/B test or otherwise gated, but the way to access it is clicking the number next to the retweet button on a tweet, the same way that you'd previously access the list of retweeters. (Not that I do that semi-compulsively or anything.)

You could literally do nothing more advanced than cold emailing people who you'd assume would ordinarily not reply and offering a 15~30 minute something-completely-different conversation. That would probably work even more than it did in January.

This isn't just an opportunity for B2C startups; it's also yours for the taking for improving a professional network, getting a job, kickstarting or invigorating a community, etc etc. Your "target market" has more screen time than ever and is hating their median use of it.

There's a golden opportunity for the next few months, available to anyone, for providing some sort of Internet-delivered social outlet which doesn't feel like a work meeting over Zoom call. (I think that's one reason Clubhouse seems to be taking off so much.)

Goodness is *that* an arbitrage opportunity that remains underexplored. Teenager as a life stage is a social construct; almost no human societies have had a role for "A liminal state where you have the capacity of a child but risk factors of an adult and need to be cloistered."

Not to be the hipster Unix guy who thinks all true software is accessible from a text-based terminal, but it's basically crazymaking to me that it takes longer for me to load Gmail, compose, and send an email than it took me to do the same thing with Pine 20+ years ago.

I think if you took software developers from 1998 and brought them to 2020 they'd think that software is blazingly fast when written ("Only *weeks* between releases? You're kidding!") and blazingly slow from a user interaction perspective ("Did a war stop Moore's Law?!")

If there were actually a large reptile spotted off the coast of Japan there would be a subreddit within a day, and the moderators would probably have far more Wikipedia edits than most people but otherwise be pretty normal.

Interestingly, fiction tends to say that anomalies are generally found by deeply disturbed people or long-time experts who are also generally some flavor of broken, which... doesn't really match who ends up doing the yeomen's work on these things?