It’s not just that. You want businesses to be able to fail if they are being run poorly. That’s something that’s a lot harder with government agencies, state owned enterprises, and large companies.
government agencies: People rely on them by design. You can’t simply shut down the health care or welfare system because it’s being run poorly or corruptly.
state owned enterprises: There is pressure from the ruling class to keep even inefficiently run or corrupt SOE going because they provide jobs and patronage.
large companies: They become systemically important. The loss of a single large business can cascade through the economy. See: Lehman Brothers or the big auto companies during the 2008 crash.
Well, I didn’t get much done. I relied some on internal organization with Emacs org-mode to keep track of things. I didn’t know this at the time, but that particular position had a high turnover rate. Apparently a year was pretty typical, which was how long I lasted. I have never outright quarreled with any other manager except this one.
It’s hard to tell. There definitely was poor communication on the project level due to lack of a ticketing system. That led to him distrusting me and being rather open about it. There were also issues with the position itself. I was supposed to split time between development and monitoring a queue of deployment requests. If the coworker who normally handled those requests was getting behind, I was supposed to jump in. That involved breaking concentration every 15 minutes or so.
I regret not pushing back on the demands made of me. They were entirely unreasonable and could be mitigated. Unfortunately I didn’t know what to ask for and I didn’t have the maturity to identify what I even needed to push for.
I found this article on the audit. It’s also about boring but necessary things like stockpile management, automation, climate risk, and bookkeeping. It’s broken into 30 sub-audits. It sounds like all of these must be fully passed as “clean” for an audit to not be considered failing.
I’m not going to blame this on insecurity, but I think ego is a bit more accurate. I was working under a senior software engineer in maybe his 50’s in my first real job out of college. A big part of our time went to maintaining a build system that was fairly large, maybe on the order of tens of thousands of lines of Ant code.
The bone that I have to pick looking back is that I got the blame when I had trouble organizing myself. Our team didn’t use any sort of issue tracker. There was absolutely zero collaboration tools beyond verbally issued instructions in meetings and email. Looking back, I realize it was madness. As an experienced developer, my manager should have had known that an issue tracker would be a high priority. Yet instead I was blamed.
Longevity is nice, but not as helpful if it can’t keep up physically with new releases.
You also have to imagine what that longevity is going to really mean. Even a sturdy phone with a good case is in an unfriendly environment. They live in pockets, purses, and get dropped. Getting updates for 10 years is great, but it’s not too useful if the phone is dead. It’s always good to pursue increased longevity, but there is diminishing return for many reasons.
Yup, polls can’t account for something like an “October surprise”. In Hillary’s case in 2016, that was the James Comey letter that was leaked by Republicans Congress. It had the desired effect, with her poll numbers dropping virtually overnight. He rescinded the letter, but not fast enough to make a difference. This was all prompted by FBI agents in the NYC office who were leaking like a sieve to the press. So if you ever hear someone grouse about prosecutors supposedly interfering with elections because they are prosecuting Trump for his crimes, remind them that Trump got a whole presidential term out of FBI agents interfering for him.
Especially a candidate with left wing politics. There’s a reason Democrats run center-left candidates for president once it gets to the general. Those are the ones that win.