The easiest example I've found is comparing a manager to a conductor in an orchestra.

Most people will only see a conductor on the night of the performance, and they don't look like they do much, but a lot of the work is actually done before the night.

The main issue is that because there are so many musicians in an orchestra, it's hard to have an overall view of what everyone's doing and if a piece sounds good.

The main job of the conductor is to be the person who has that big picture. They make sure everyone is playing in time and in key. And if they're tricky parts of the piece - they make sure it's played properly. If it isn't, they hold individual practice sessions to make those parts smoother. If some musicians aren't performing well, they have conversations with them and maybe let them go. If there aren't enough musicians they hire more. And if the pieces aren't working they change them from the millions of pieces available to play. And they have to do it in a way so as not to make the orchestra angry and all quit!

So to answer your question what does Tim Cook actually do? Does he tell his staff the priority is moving xyz units, does he come up with the core strategy, does he pick up good ideas from his staff. The answer is most likely yes to all the above - but that's such a small part of it.

The big thing he needs to do is have a vision for how he wants the business to be, and then do those parts you mentioned, plus the hundreds of other tasks and decisions to get it there.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34717723

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Many of the decisions seem to be on a whim (despite the public telling him they're bad ideas), and when the consequences of those decisions occur, he reverts those decisions - with an almost obliviousness to the warnings previously given to him ...

I'm curious to know if this is how he's run his previous businesses - and were they successful despite of this style of decision making (or maybe because of this style of decision making?)

Maybe double check the "try another way" login options and maybe one of them will help you get back in.

Good luck!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33418421

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

    === START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
    SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

    SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
    Critical Warning:                   0x00
    Temperature:                        28 Celsius
    Available Spare:                    100%
    Available Spare Threshold:          99%
    Percentage Used:                    6%
    Data Units Read:                    510,433,533 [261 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 395,139,884 [202 TB]
    Host Read Commands:                 4,755,060,485
    Host Write Commands:                1,317,327,139
    Controller Busy Time:               0
    Power Cycles:                       180
    Power On Hours:                     944
    Unsafe Shutdowns:                   9
    Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
    Error Information Log Entries:      0

Which seems a lot better than the 18 month average, which was 700GB /day.

Hopefully means it's since been fixed, and I haven't destroyed my SSD too much!

    === START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
    SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

    SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
    Critical Warning:                   0x00
    Temperature:                        27 Celsius
    Available Spare:                    100%
    Available Spare Threshold:          99%
    Percentage Used:                    6%
    Data Units Read:                    509,334,138 [260 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 394,959,651 [202 TB]
    Host Read Commands:                 4,719,463,111
    Host Write Commands:                1,312,261,606
    Controller Busy Time:               0
    Power Cycles:                       178
    Power On Hours:                     938
    Unsafe Shutdowns:                   9
    Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
    Error Information Log Entries:      0

I do think scenario #1 is interesting to talk about though.

I.e. If I was that manager receiving that news, I wouldn't outright tell the devs and say "it could be crunch time for the next 6 months", which might cause a panic and devs will start looking for other jobs.

Instead I'd call a meeting with leadership / sales, see what was sold and if there's any flexibility on deliverables with the client. If we need more resource, is it worth finding funding to hire more staff, or maybe postpone another project to get this higher priority one done.

Once that's resolved then I can think about delivering the news. Maybe it's a non issue (e.g. a new team is spun up to handle the project and someone gets a promotion to head the team), maybe it's crunch time (in that case it's time to have a difficult conversation with the team), or maybe the client is flexible on delivery (so it's business as usual).

Again, I could see how some managers would be uncomfortable not telling their team everything (and potentially cause unnecessary panic) - but I think that's part of management, knowing what level of detail your team are happy with, knowing what you can / cannot handle, and knowing how to delivery good / bad news and sometimes having to be the bad guy.

> Transparency is not your job.

> You're job is to keep telling your reports that everything is on track no matter what

> This will 100% require lying or being non-transparent at some point.

To add my 2 cents I kind of agree. When I first got into management, I didn't realise how many fires they were, or priorities I needed to balance. Initially I thought "there shouldn't be this many fires" but I soon realised that that was my job, to put them out, escalate when required, etc all while making sure the ship is steady and doing it with a smile on my face.

Some examples include:

- News that a sales person has sold a huge project which will save the company, but we can't deliver or build with our current backlog / resources

- One key team member has been taking a lot of doctor's appointments recently - and suspect they might be quitting / job hunting

- There's a very obscure security issue which could be fatal if discovered, but is a huge task which will disrupt a project which is already delayed and over budget

If I ran into any of these when I first started I would have freaked out - and that would have disrupt my team as they couldn't be productive with that anxiety over their heads.

Instead I just had to be confident that I could put out those fires, or put in place strategies to mitigate them, and let the team know it's all under control.

Of course if something was too big to handle I'd escalate, or if something blew up I'd take responsibility etc - but I think job #1 in management is to shield the team from distractions and let them do what they're best at doing.

It's on the roadmap though and good to see others have the same idea!

> What I am trying to say is: is there a way for me to see if there are changes I have not seen

Currently I have a red "dot" on the cloud icon in the navbar when it's lost server sync - but there are certain cases where it doesn't show. I do need to spend more time on the multi-user aspect, though it's quite a large piece of work and unfortunately not a lot of users seem to use it.

I also think a hierarchy / folder structure would be super useful. Using it regularly I have an unwieldy large number of sheets and it's difficult to find older ones / search!

As a mitigation I did add row highlighting (if you hover over a var it'll highlight the row it was defined at), but the underlying problem of dynamic sums is still there.

I was working on a TOTAL() function (which someone also mentioned in this thread), but conceptually I also think some of the calcs are better in a tabular format, so have been toying around with designs with tables etc.

It's on the list though but unfortunately due to how integral mathjs is to the app it might not be an easy change to make!

Thanks! This was an intentional design decision on the desktop too so I'm glad someone noticed!

> Are you using OT or CRDTs for real-time editing?

You know this is embarrassing - it's the first time I've heard of those terms and from a quick google I really needed this a few months ago! A lot of the problems described I actually had to battle with and if you try hard enough, you can get the calcs to break state between the users.

I'll definitely dive deeper into this, thanks!

> Are you using any specific cross-desktop platform? (Electron?)

Yeah sure - the app was initially written in React.js for web, and I just did a few modifications to get it deployed via Electron. Tbh the migration was quite straight forward (there were a few design tweaks and UI elements I had to make) but surprisingly the most difficult part was creating the binaries and submitting them to the app stores!

There was also some issue with CORS (due to Electron using local .html file) but managed to find some code to rewrite the headers which fixed it!

I haven't heard of immediate / retained mode before - interesting concept! Figr is more straight forward and evaluates a line as "0" if there's an error (the opposite of "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept"!) so they are problems where entire calculations are "wiped out" if there's an error on a line, but I think that's the trade of to having accurate results.

As for a custom text view completely agree! I did do that initially though switched over to draftjs later and (despite it's lack of good guides) has been a huge time saver!