Posted on
by

I no longer trust my work calendar.

First, colleagues reschedule meetings when we need to meet on a topic again. For example, a meeting held this morning at 10:00 ET had an outcome of meeting again tomorrow. Instead of scheduling a new meeting, the organizer rescheduled it to tomorrow.

Second, corporate migrated/is migrating to a new email system. Everything in the old system is still there in the old system. None of it transferred.

Third, the desktop, web browser, and mobile calendars loose synchronization. For example, last week I saw the same meeting scheduled for 2 different times depending on the platform. Luckily I noticed the difference and was able to confirm with colleagues about the actual start time.

Lastly, the work calendar relies on multiple internal corporate systems. Which internal corporate systems seems to depend on how the work calendar is accessed. Some of this might help explain , but right now a outage on another system impacts my ability to get at my schedule.

What does all this mean?

Keeping with the idea that “Plain Text Rulz!”, I am using my iOS Shortcut and the Beorg app to dump the next & current day’s schedule into org files so I will have a more reliable record of my comings, goings, and doings.

I will back it up with my analog daily journal. I used to keep my work schedule this way back when I worked in Japan but dropped the habit.

※ I do not share my iOS shortcut as is but might share a sanitized version if requested.

Posted on
by

Ugh. It happened again. Parts of the world changed their clocks because it was 02:00 local time.

When I lived in Japan I got to experience the joy of one time zone in the whole country that does not change twice a year. It was glorious.

However, I did have to invest in blackout curtains because sunrise was around 04:30 in the summer. With the longer morning-side day still came a longer evening-side day, and the earlier peak day heat meant that maybe it would dissipate enough in time for a nice evening.

Daylight savings time needs to go away – kind of.

With countries as big East to West as the continental US, Mexico,and Canada, how to get rid of DST becomes problematic.

My favorite idea is, in autumn, to merge Eastern, and Central time into one time zone, combine Mountain and Pacific into another, and Alaska and Hawaii into a third.

Central and Mountain time zones would do nothing. Eastern would “fall” back to aline with Central Daylight time. Pacific time will “spring” ahead (for the second time in the year) to align with Mountain.

Most of Alaska stays on Alaska Standard Time. The rest of Alaska and Hawaii permanently “springs” ahead to Hawaii-Aleutian Daylight Time.

If my math is right (and there is zero guarantee that it is) the newly created Eastern time zone and the new Western time zone would be 1 hour different from each other – 10 AM in Toronto would be 09 AM in Los Angeles, 10 AM in Chicago would be 09 AM in Denver, and 10 AM in New York would be 9 AM in Mexico City. All of Alaska and Hawaii would be 2 hours behind Los Angeles and 3 hours behind New York: a 5 PM meeting in Detroit would be 4 PM in Phoenix, and 2 PM in Anchorage and Honolulu.

Coming out of this the US would have 3 time zones (mostly), Mexico would have 2, and Canada would have 3. South America would ideally similarly simplify.

Quartz has a good article about this from 10 years ago: https://qz.com/142199/the-us-needs-to-retire-daylight-savings-and-just-have-two-time-zones-one-hour-apart/. Disappointingly, it only focused on the continental US with some through to Alaska and Hawaii.

UPDATE: I thought Atlantic was 0:30 off of Eastern time when I wrote this. I was wrong and adjusted things accordingly.

Posted on
by

Musk and Bezo Show the Perils of Plutocratic Pettiness:

Let me get nerdy for a minute. At least since the work of Max Weber a century ago, social scientists have realized that social inequality has multiple dimensions. At minimum we need to distinguish between the hierarchy of money, in which some people have a disproportionate share of society’s wealth, and the hierarchy of prestige, in which some people are specially respected and looked up to.

People may occupy very different positions in these hierarchies. Sports legends, pop stars, social media “influencers” and, yes, Nobel laureates generally do fine financially, but their wealth is surely mere pocket change compared with today’s great fortunes. Billionaires, by contrast, command deference, even servility, from those who depend on their largess, but few of them are widely known public figures and even fewer have dedicated fan bases.

The tech elite, however, had it all. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg was, for a while, a feminist icon. Musk has millions of Twitter followers, many of them actual human beings rather than bots, and these followers have often been ardent Tesla defenders.

Now the glitter is gone. Social media, once hailed as a force for freedom, are now denounced as vectors of misinformation. Tesla boosterism has been dented by tales of spontaneous combustion and autopilot accidents. Technology moguls still possess vast wealth, but the public — and the administration — isn’t offering the old level of adulation.

And it’s driving them crazy.

Tl;dr: Don’t pin hopes on these petty tech moguls.

I have a post from last year that says basically the same thing but I cannot find it.

Posted on
by

Hong Kong deserves more than two days per visit. I am glad I am here for these two days to know I should stay longer. I’m writing these word as I sip a Leffe Blonde at Frites Beer. “Super” rugby and football (soccer) are on the tele. Kids run wild as parents drink and chat. American pop music plays on the PA.
I needed this rest. I’ve walked what feels like one end of the island to the other. In reality I’ve just ambled about the north end and the large shopping center by the East Hotel hunting for Dim Sum for lunch.
The dim sum place I found, called Maxim’s, had a massive wait and a huge crowd out front. The biggest advantage of traveling solo is the ease at which one can get a table at almost any restaurant. Thus after the hostess and I spoke foreign languages at each other for a while she scribbled some numbers on my table wait ticket and pointed me into the joint. I was the only westerner in the cavernous establishment. The carts of soup and sides and baskets of bundled deliciousness pushed by my table every few minutes.
I found a store, Uniqlo, that had some nice clothes, but I rank a XXL by the local standards – a size too far. While my ego isn’t keen on that as I’ve dropped a lot of weight, my shoulders and arms do not lie. I did manage to find some tee shirts the kids will love. Hong Kong has no sales tax and the cost of goods is cheap to the US dollar in my estimation, so a double bonus shopping round for me.
My hotel is new. My room, a modest number according to the website, made awesome by the corner placement. It doesn’t take much effort to see out to the harbor even though I have no direct view. Looking out over the sea of high-rise towers with their dangling drip dry clothes and precariously placed air conditioner units is amazingly hypnotizing and strangely beautiful. Care is required to avoid fixating on the A/C units’ tilt angle as my fear of heights will cause the tickle in my tummy.
Speaking of Victoria Harbor, which I wasn’t, I woke early and after a light breakfast at the hotel headed out to walk the park alongside the harbor. It was foggy, gray, overcast, drizzling, and in all other ways not the picture of a walking tour. However, the roads and paths are well-marked and clean. The weather certainly didn’t keep the locals at bay. Many teams or crew or whatever you call a gathering of T’ai Chi practitioners were practicing their T’ai Chi in various little covered enclaves and nooks throughout the entire windy green-scape.
I took many pictures and will upload them as soon as I get to a place with strong wifi. My photography was a little shaky because of the fog but also the many cups of strong black coffee I had today.
My flight over was the picture of accidental awesomeness. The plane, a Boeing 777, was only 2/3 full. Quite a few people were upgraded to first and business class. I was not one of the upgraded. My ticket fare class was too economy for such things. Since my ticket booked economy plus, basically proving a few more precious inches of leg room, it was not too much a disappointment.
Once the boarding doors closed it was no disappointment at all.
The two people booked next to me upgraded, so I had free unfettered reign over a full three seat row for the 15+ hour flight. I found a way to stay buckled and lay down for some drowsy naps on the flight. There was an inebriated southern gentleman in the row ahead, and at one point he stood up to chat with me. He, undeterred by my diligent typing on my laptop, saw no resistance to chit-chat by my ears holding my earbuds, earbuds piping podcasts into my head. Because that’s what people do, I stopped what I was doing and removed my headphones to talk. I’m not sure what we talked about. I think it was about buying fabric and North Carolina (though with his accent I would have put him in Georgia) and going to parties and jet lag.
The departure was 15:25 Thursday Eastern Time, and arrival scheduled for 20:45 Friday China Time. I strategically slept little (a lucky bout of insomnia) the night before, about 5 hours, and then did my dozes on the plane. I only had two beers (one before the flight) and two glasses of wine during the first meal, then only water. When we arrived in Hong Kong at 7:00, I was still sleepy. A longer than expected taxi ride after a longer than it should have been immigration clearing brought me to my hotel right around 21:00. Within the hour I was in bed and asleep. I woke to my alarm at 06:00 local time. I love how a small amount of planning and a bit of good luck eliminated my jet lag for this trip’s front end. We’ll see how it goes for the return.
The one thing that didn’t go well for this trip was that I didn’t realize my flight to Shanghai Sunday is earlier than the one I had asked for. Moving to a later flight would only cost over $1,000 US dollars, so I’ll head out tomorrow morning.
I took my light travel packing to a new high in low weight, practicality, and planning. It’s an 11 day trip, but 9 days when the flights factor in. I have two Land’s End blue no iron button downs, two pairs of LL Bean trousers – one khaki and the other olive, one J Crew black corduroy blazer, one black and one brown leather pair of Merrill barefoot shoes, my Col. Littleton hat, a Nike navy golf pull-over, and five sets of under garments. The joy of this is that, other than the hat and shoes and maybe the blazer, none of the rest of it needs to come back with me. The trousers still look okay in passing but are on their last legs (ha!). The shirts are okay but I don’t care for no iron shirts in general. The blazer I picked up at Salvation Army for $5, I think.
The Macbook Air, iPad2, Canon T3i, Kindle Touch, and iPhones will come back with me, but as a group are pretty light weight and easy to carry around. Add in the cables and such and the toiletry kit and I made it here in two underpacked bags. That let me bring over some Michigan treats for my coworkers in Shanghai. It also means I will have a lot of room to bring things back.
Back to Hong Kong, the sheer number of kid playgrounds and elderly exercise kiosks would put Starbucks or McDonald’s to shame. Not that there aren’t plenty of those here, too, but there is prime real estate taken up by parks and open spaces and cushioned playgrounds. They’re used, too.
There was one stop where the exercise equipment wasn’t just for the elderly. There were two Americans (by the sound of them) teaching a fitness class. Whatever they were teaching it is working. Everyone listening to them with rapt attention before eagerly implementing the softly barked instructions were fit to the point of being ripped.
As I’m typing this there is a little boy sitting at a toy piano singing “B.I.N.G.O.” as loud as he can while banging his hands on the impotent keyboard, just as happy as a clam.
Since I’m rambling on my recollections so far, I wish someone in that dim sum place had spoken some English. There was one dish I had that looked incredibly disgusting. It was, by far, the best thing I ate there.
Oh, and a note to people with braces traveling here – beware of the foul with the bones still in it. The last thing I ate at Maxim’s was chicken (I think) with the bones still in. One might be able to gnaw past the bones, but the bone shards are hard to extricate.
In my wanderings I went off of the beaten tourist path. There were a maze of twisty roads, all alike. The stalls sold everything. There were butchers, places that roasted chicken and ducks, fruit shops, spice vendors, convenience stores, hardware stores, street food vendors, appliance repair, and maybe a dozen other types of shops in 20 foot wide storefronts spilling out on the already narrow sidewalks.
One woman at a fish shop on a corner, with fish so fresh they were still flipping and flopping on their ice bed, hollered “Hello” to me and waved me over. She was trying to sell me something but kept pressing these little tasty morsels from the postage stamp of a kitchen into my hands. It was great, but once she realized I wasn’t planning on taking seafood with me back to my hotel (would people really do that other than Umberto Eco?) she focused her tractor beam elsewhere and I was free to depart.
I found the local fire engine company, ambulance dispatch, police barracks, and a number of primary schools. Most surprising about that was seeing all of these uniformed children heading off to school on a Saturday. Well, actually the most surprising part was that they were smiling.
I had planned for one aspect of Hong Kong – they drive like the Brits do, on the wrong side of the road from the wrong seat in the car. While I am not driving here I will cross the street. My attention on looking right once while crossing blinded me to the minivan coming from the left on what was in fact a two way street.
I presumed that people would walk having people pass on the right as well, but that seems to be a myth. Old women would glare at me while they continued their forward progress assuming I would move out of their way, which I did.
What else?
There is a preponderance of western coffee shops. If you’re here for a bit buying a wifi pass would be a good idea. There is wifi everywhere. Take the train instead of taxis to and from the airport. If you do take taxis go for the more expensive but faster tunnel and bridge options. You can buy umbrellas almost everywhere, so presume the weather here will be at least a bit wet and humid.

Unnecessary meetings are a $100 million mistake ($) at big companies, according to a new survey that shows workers probably don’t need to be in nearly a third of the appointments they attend.

Via Bloomberg

Posted on
by

Let’s be clear – layoffs is a euphemism for the mass firing of people. The difference is that when one is “laid off” it’s not necessarily because anyone “let go” did anything wrong or damaging in their job. That’s being fired for cause, and that’s not often an “innocent until proven guilty” situation, but that’s another post for another day.

Note that layoffs impact middle management down. Upper management and up do not suffer such indignities.

Layoffs don’t only impact the person formerly employed. It ripples out to their family, their community, their social circle, and so on. That some organizations treat it flippantly casual is beyond reprehensible.

I have some works on surviving layoffs: Preparing for the Pink (Slip) based on my experience and research, though it is a bit long in the tooth. And Cate over at Accidentally In Code has some great stuff, too, about taking hold of your career.

Axios Login: Tech layoffs’ toll:

1 big thing: What to expect when your tech firm is downsizing

As Silicon Valley and the broader tech industry face a season of layoffs, workers are unprepared for the ordeal and management has little experience with the wrenching process, Axios’ Scott Rosenberg reports.

Driving the news: Meta is expected to announce large-scale job cuts as soon as Wednesday, the first ever in its history. That comes on the heels of major layoffs at Twitter and many other flagship tech firms.

Why it matters: At most companies, layoffs are a business decision for top execs but a deeply personal experience for everyone else.

The big picture: The industry’s phenomenal 20-year run of largely unimpeded growth means that most of its workforce doesn’t have much idea of what to expect from widespread layoffs. Here’s a brief guide.

1. For those laid off, the pain is personal.

  • Even in the best cases, where a company has carefully selected who gets the axe and applied sensitivity to the process, people who are let go can feel a sense of failure — even though, typically, the actual failure belonged to the company and its management.

Having been laid off myself once, I know that in my case it was entirely due to mismanagement, a lack of leadership, and weak governance.

  • The worst cases — as with Twitter’s reportedly 50% cuts last week, made by a new ownership team with little preparation or apparent care — create a broader kind of sorrow among a workforce as well.

I’ll not waste more electrons on EMu’s clusterfuck, at least for the moment.

2. While no one should shed tears for the managers, they’re having a hard time too.

  • Middle managers often find themselves having to select winners and losers from groups of people they handpicked to join their teams not that long ago.
  • Then, they have to face the people who are left and help them through what can be extended bouts of anger, depression and survivor’s guilt.
  • Workers and managers both face bigger workloads under post-layoff do-more-with-less mandates.

When I was a manager I never had to do large scale layoffs. I’m thankful of that but also I did a lot to make sure I did not find myself in that position. It didn’t help me retain my job, disappointingly.

Also, if I had to fire a large part of my team I would have not done well. While I received “leadership” training, very little of that was about the nuts and bolts of how managing people works and none of it covered firing people.

3. For companies, layoffs leave slow-healing psychic wounds.

  • Tech companies often aim to inspire workers with mission statements and caring rhetoric. But once a firm has gone through a round of layoffs, it becomes effectively impossible to persuade employees that anything matters beyond the bottom line.

Never trust in a founder/CEO/evangelist, especially if they’re charismatic &| inconsistent.

  • After big rounds of layoffs, tech leaders can’t just move on as if nothing happened. They also have to try to rekindle workers’ belief that the organization can do big things.

See above.

Between the lines: Layoffs that are tied to the shutdown of a specific product line or division can be written off as strategic in nature. Broader layoffs are a sign that a company grew too fast, took too many risky bets, or just never hit overly ambitious goals.

  • Many tech companies overhired during the pandemic and now face tougher times.
  • The people responsible for such choices are rarely the people who lose their jobs — though sometimes, as in Twitter’s case, layoffs are made by a new management with a belt-tightening agenda.

All of the above cop-outs – rapid growth, risky bets, ambitious goals – are tell-take signs of a lack of basic business fundamentals, starting with a business plan and governance. Sadly, there’s no Sarbaines-Oxley legislation for a lack of planning and competence.

Not to say that these tech companies don’t have good people in key roles, but if Operations and Finance and Marketing aren’t all aligned and operating with enlightened self-interest (a rare commodity, to be sure) in the absence of business fundamentals, this is the shit that happens, IMHO.

To be sure, many tech workers have been generously paid and are relatively well-off compared with other industries. But losing your job is still losing your job.

Amen.

Scott’s thought bubble: I’m a veteran of a dotcom era startup that went public and then laid off half its staff more than two decades ago, and I still get flashbacks.

  • You never forget these experiences, and this year’s cuts could reshape how a generation in tech thinks about their careers.

I was laid off from my management role almost 10 years ago and I’m still reluctant to go back into a similar role. And I still plan my finances with the possibility I’ll be laid-off again.

Yes, but: When laid-off developers filled the coffeeshops of San Francisco and other tech hubs after the bust in 2000-2001, they used their newfound don’t-give-a-damn state to hatch passion-project ideas.

  • Some of them took off and sparked the next boom. That could happen again.

We’ve seen this before and we will see it again. If I were a tech-reliant business I’d be taking advantage of the talent suddenly on the market – but not to grow things too fast.