Jay Hoffmann

Loving this handbook directory.

I also have a small obsession with looking behind the curtain of how companies work.

I’ve seen just about everyone link to this, but I have to add it as well. A really inspiring post that breaks down the allure and complexity of POSSE.

And more often than not, I find that what I need is some friction, some labor, the effort to work things out. Efficiency is an anti-goal; it is at odds with the work, which requires resistance and tension in order to come into being.

My own magic is a small one: to write in order to uncover what I think; to prefigure a future of work that serves the living; to listen intently as people speak aloud a story of themselves that is, in the speaking, being rewritten. But it is mine. For too long I have tried to make space for it along the banks, to keep one foot in the water, to speak my incantations into the wind while the river slips the sediment out from under me and pulls me ever deeper

via jwz. Yes, yes, and yes.

In 2022, the paper began to dip into the red. Ryan reassured people that the loss was expected because of the investments in the Post’s journalism and continued losses at Arc XP, the in-house content-management system that the Post expanded during Bezos’s and Ryan’s tenure (the software is now licensed to other companies). Arc needed to spend a lot of money to have a chance to make money in the future, the argument went, and according to two sources, it accounted for the majority of the Post’s losses in 2022 and 2023.

Love knowing that everyone hits writers block.

This snippet is from George Saunders.

So: writing is of you, but it’s not YOU. There’s this eternal struggle between two viewpoints: 1) good writing is divine and comes in one felt swoop, vs: 2) good writing evolves, through revision, and is not a process of sudden, inspired, irrevocable statement but of incremental/iterative exploration. I prefer and endorse the second viewpoint and actually find it really exciting, this notion that we find out what we think by trying (ineptly at first) to write it. And this happens via the repetitive application of our taste in thousands of accretive micro-decisions.

Story points are difficult to difficult, and this article does a really good of explaining why. I see the usefulness of Queues, even if I don't fully agree that it's a silver bullet for all the problems of Story Points. In the end, it's estimating and planning that's hard. That's always going to be true. But it's helpful frmaing.

Story points do not represent Time, yet the Velocity metric they are usually combined with defacto converts them to time, sabotaging everyone from the start by doing the thing that you can't do with a precise number and a range...adding them together.

First off, a queue is simply a list of work to be done. A backlog of stories. A list of tasks. When discussing queues in Reinertsen's terms, we're focused two things: Queue Size and Capacity Utilization. The closer you move to 100% capacity utilization, the larger your queues will grow which will dramatically increase variability of all of your work.