Week 48, 2024 - Ghosts and Elves

Happy belated Thanksgiving to my American readers, I hope you found someone to be grateful for, and had a chance to tell them. And a joyful Black Friday to everyone participating in the global discount hunt craze! I like every aspect of what Mountex is trying to do with the decision to keep their stores closed today. If your differentiator is premium quality products that last for many years (they even do affordable repairs in their stores), then speaking up against overconsumption is probably a good match with your vision. Also, taking your employees on a hike during a workday is great for morale, employer branding, and reinforcing company values. Kudos!

📋 What I learned this week

As planned, I spent most of the week preparing for the talk I gave at the Craft Mini conference. Early on I decided to treat this as a chance to learn more about public speaking, an area I'd like to improve at. The point of framing something new and scary as a learning opportunity is not to lower the bar of success, and therefore decrease the stress of preparation — though that’s a nice side effect. The point is that success is different: it’s not the feedback you receive, not the length of clapping at the end of the talk, or the scores after. It’s about how many ideas you had a chance to try and validate.

So, in this sense, I tried:

• Presenting my talk to a friend before the event: this was a great idea. I already record myself to study and find potential improvements before presentations, but doing it in front of an audience (of one) is shockingly closer to the real experience. I had a page full of insights about the content and the format, having a concrete impact on the end result. (Thanks István!) Two tips if you’re doing something similar: find someone who’s comfortable giving you honest, detailed, even hard feedback; and share your work early, when you still have a chance to make significant changes and not too attached to the content.
  • Verdict: 🟢 Experiment was successful, even better than I imagined.
• Finalizing my slides and not do any last minute changes: I kind of failed this one. The idea was to decrease stressing about the content when I’m close to presenting, and allow my brain to digest what I have to ensure I can present it authentically, not pressuring myself to try to keep up with the stuff I added last minute. I failed because I couldn’t resist editing my slides on the morning of the conference — but I’m happy with what I did: I cut out 80% of my speaker notes, reacting to advice to only include trigger words and not full sentences, to avoid reading those out and breaking the connection with the audience. I had extensive speaker notes before, and by the time I started to present, they were radically cut - to the point where some slides had none.
  • Verdict: 🔴 Experiment was a failure, but I’m happy that I didn’t commit to it because the changes were worth the stress of last-minute tinkering.
• Enjoy the event and make new connections. This, and improving in public speaking were my two goals from the event. I had mixed results: I made great new connections with the other speakers, all truly inspiring people, and I had exciting (though unfortunately short) discussions with some of the audience members who approached me with questions after my talk. However, I fully drained my social batteries and wasn’t able to participate in the closing party as much as I planned originally — I left an hour or so before the end.
  • Verdict: 🟠 Experiment half-succeeded, learning: save some energy for after the event too.

This might sound like a cold, scientific experiment, but it was not: I had a lot of fun during the event and am grateful to the organizers for the invitation and the smooth running of the conference. Their main event in 2025 has a very limited Black Friday discount running now. This is a unique event, the venue and the multiple stages in different tents making the mood a mixture of a music festival and a tech conference, something worth checking out for yourself. (See my takeaways from the 2024 one here.)

Once I have the video of my talk I will share it here — along with further learnings after re-watching myself.

🎯 What I want to try next week month

I want to slow down a bit in December and spend some time away from the computer. I’m hoping to use this month to distill my professional strategy for 2025, be with family and friends, and spend more time in nature. I might slow down with the newsletter too around the holidays.

When working on a project, I found that moving away from it, taking a walk maybe, and just letting my mind wander without purpose, can spark amazing, unexpected ideas and solutions. I’ll see if this works in a bigger timespan too.

🤔 Articles that made me think

Reactions to the DOJ’s push to sell Chrome

Strong support for Google, but I don’t fully agree with Theo here, though he has some good points. Still, he seems to downplay a critical part of how Google benefits from having an in-house browser: It’s not just being the default search engine, it’s all the user tracking and profiling in the browser that helps their advertising business, the Big Money Maker.

I hear the worries about the web as we know it today, but I’m not that concerned. Let’s hypothesize for a moment that Google is forced to sell Chrome. One of two things can happen: Maybe someone buys it — and I do believe that even with the astronomical price mentioned, there might be interested buyers. Google doesn’t have a monopoly on the ad business, there’s Meta too with comparable advertising revenue, and I’m sure they would be excited to have the most popular browser help their ad targeting offerings. The buyer continues the development because they don’t want their investment to go down the drain. If they do a good job, then it's going to be more or less what we have now: a strong company supporting Chromium and all the web standards work. We’re OK.

If they don’t do a good job, or Chrome dies for any other reasons, maybe because of lack of a strong buyer who can reliably support its development, well, in this case, users will vote with their feet and use different browsers. I don’t think Firefox sucks as much as the video implies, and they definitely have a good chance to further strive in this scenario. This happened before, with Internet Explorer – and arguably, the web we have today was made possible by people moving away from that bug-ridden, ActiveX-pushing pile of garbage IE became by the end of its era. Because slowly people realized that there was room for competition even in a field so overwhelmingly dominated by a single player, if you offer something truly better than the incumbent product.

Are Overemployed ‘Ghost Engineers’ Making Six Figures to Do Nothing?

I’m pissed off this is coming back again, and to be honest, I can’t fully explain why I react so emotionally to something as stupidly simplistic as claiming to be able to judge a software developer’s productivity by the number of commits they do. I guess as long as there are CEOs frustrated about their organization’s performance with hypotheses about lazy developers slacking at home, there will be consultants ready to take their money and confirm their beliefs.

Gergely Orosz and Kent Back debunked this much better and deeper than I ever will be able to, so here’s just a thought: if you do find “ghost engineers” in your organization, start a Performance Improvement Plan — for their managers, not the developers. Because either their team is not functioning, so this disappearance remained undiscovered for them – or they suspected this, but failed to take any action. In both cases, I don’t this is the sole fault of the developer, and furthermore, addressing it at the managerial level is a longer-term solution than taking actions on a developer.

Let me take it one step further: if you forced your managers to code instead of supporting their teams and the people reporting to them (including performance management!), then maybe you deserve “ghost engineers”, people taking advantage of this setup in your organization.

🎅 Something cool: Advent of Code

If I have readers who don’t know about AoC, please check it out, it’s the most fun I have had while coding for a long time. Especially the first few days, when the challenges are easier, are great for scratching that itch that many Engineering Managers have who spend their time at work on more impactful areas than coding. Also, it can be a great exercise to help you learn a new language, and much more rewarding than grinding through leetcode exercises preparing for an interview.

If AoC is not new to you, I still have two cool stuff to share:

• How to Leaderboard: this article goes deep into explaining all the aspects that can contribute to a better placement on the global leaderboard. Even if you don’t want to speedrun the challenges, some of the tips can still be useful.
• Advent of Code Charts: While the global leaderboard is far from most of us, running a private one with friends or colleagues can be a great learning experience - and a healthy challenge. This browser extension is an addition to these private leaderboards, extending it with various stats and charts, making the competition more exciting.

That’s it for today, buy less stuff this weekend,

Péter