Any company/organization can theoretically change its culture, but it's quite difficult in practice.

> And yes, I don't like managers trying to shape communication patterns.

I'm a manager who shaped communication patterns (e.g. default conversations to a public channel) because we're solving different problems. By moving conversations to a public channel away from an individual, we're improving redundancy and reducing single points of failure. Our primary responsibility, which understandably garners discontent, is to prioritize the system over the needs of individuals, within reason.

There are many issues resulting from defaulting conversations in private channels or DMs that you've probably seen first-hand.

There's a lot of wasted discussion talking about an intentional design decision because they're arguing from consumers' perspectives, ignoring the huge benefit to political organizations (e.g. freezing Russian assets).

0: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks

The EU is not a hegemonic state, but rather an economic supranational organization. France/Germany tend to be primary proponents of increased EU strategic autonomy, while Poland/Czech/Baltic states are less supportive.

Similar to recent discussions of self-hosting, it's a tradeoff of autonomy/control vs efficiency.

Google was also the company that espoused, "Do no evil" and contributed a bunch to open source. A lot has changed since then.

It's a framework to prioritize important tasks instead of falling into the agency trap, akin to prioritizing meaningful strategic tasks such as product development and tech debt instead of fighting fires.

Without planning, a depth first traversal is a high risk endeavor in the likelihood that the that path is wrong but backtracking and creating the graph is comparatively expensive and susceptible to sunk cost fallacy. Depth-first traversal is writing the book a chapter at a time without a table of contents in mind.

If there's grunt work that no one wants to do, I distribute it fairly among the team. Fairly can be splitting it up evenly among the team (everyone refactors _n_ files) and sometimes it means we round-robin the responsibility (e.g. quarterly compliance reviews with auditors). Obviously this depends on the team size and role in the company, but I think it's only come up a few times over ~4 years.

User karma has no impact on the default sort ranking[0]. The source code is available here (as of ~2018): https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/l...

> And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.

User karma is impacted by mods' use of AutoMod on a per subreddit basis or fraudulent[1] accounts, but otherwise there is no site-wide application of user karma.

Source: I spent some time experimenting and implementing alternative rankings at Reddit.

0: Subreddit hot score, not applicable to logged in users' default feed.

1: Shadow banning (vs direct banning) fraudulent accounts makes it more difficult to reverse engineer signals used to identify malicious accounts.

I don't like Go personally, but I have advocated for Go to be used in many situations depending on context. It's unproductive to start a language war here since it's generally situation-dependent.

# wait on a path and do something on change, e.g. `wait_do test/ run_tests.sh`

    wait_do() {
        local watch_file=${1}
        shift

        if [[ ! -e ${watch_file} ]]; then
            echo "${watch_file} does not exist!"
            return 1
        fi

        if [[ `uname` == 'Linux' ]] && ! command -v inotifywait &>/dev/null; then
            echo "inotifywait not found!"
            return 1
        elif [[ `uname` == 'Darwin' ]] && ! command -v fswatch &>/dev/null; then
            echo "fswatch not found, install via 'brew install fswatch'"
            return 1
        fi

        local exclude_list="(\.cargo-lock|\.coverage$|\.git|\.hypothesis|\.mypy_cache|\.pgconf*|\.pyc$|__pycache__|\.pytest_cache|\.log$|^tags$|./target*|\.tox|\.yaml$)"
        if [[ `uname` == 'Linux' ]]; then
            while inotifywait -re close_write --excludei ${exclude_list} ${watch_file}; do
                local start=$(\date +%s)
                echo "start:    $(date)"
                echo "exec:     ${@}"
                ${@}
                local stop=$(\date +%s)
                echo "finished: $(date) ($((${stop} - ${start})) seconds elapsed)"
            done
        elif [[ `uname` == 'Darwin' ]]; then
            fswatch --one-per-batch --recursive --exclude ${exclude_list} --extended --insensitive ${watch_file} | (
                while read -r modified_path; do
                    local start=$(\date +%s)
                    echo "changed:  ${modified_path}"
                    echo "start:    $(date)"
                    echo "exec:     ${@}"
                    ${@}
                    local stop=$(\date +%s)
                    echo "finished: $(date) ($((${stop} - ${start})) seconds elapsed)"
                done
            )
        fi
    }

    nevergonnagiveyouup() {
        false
        while [ $? -ne 0 ]; do
            ${@}

            if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
                echo "[$(\date +%Y.%m.%d_%H%M)] FAIL: trying again in 60 seconds..."
                sleep 60
                false
            fi
        done
    }

1. Find early adopters of the thing you're building who are willing to use and give feedback (bugs, friction logs) in the early stages of the feature.

2. Build relationships with your users / VIP users and meet regularly to discuss friction points and upcoming features (feasibility, etc). To make it time efficient, make sure you're talking to staff engineers who can speak on behalf of a significant portion of your user base. Make sure your team is closing the feedback loop with these engineers (i.e. shipping things that address their concerns) in a timely fashion.

For example, sending money via a banking wire. If the bank goes down, you can't send a second wire through another bank without loss because the first wire is not retractable.

1. Core members are burnt out.

2. This is not their primary skill set (administration vs engineering/community building).

Other languages have been blessed with an administrative group (GvR/Python[0], Hickey/Clojure), corporate sponsor (Pike/Go), or committee (C++, Java). The counterpart for Rust is core member/Mozilla, but there is no appetite for this responsibility.

0: I like this talk about governance models at Pycon 2019, after GvR stepped down as BFDL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAC83JVDzL8

But yes, a revolving door of product leaders and decisions is going to bias towards short term optimization.

I apologize for the Freudian slip as my edit window has passed.