Tech Reflect

You may be familiar with the phrase “death by a thousand cuts” or variations on that. You may not know that it has a gruesome origin.

Lingchi (Chinese: 凌遲), translated variously as the slow process, the lingering death, or slow slicing, and also known as death by a thousand cuts, was a form of torture and execution used in China from roughly 900 CE until it was banned in 1905

Lingchi—Wikipedia

The modern version is sometimes called “death by a thousand papercuts” and does not result in actual death but perhaps the death of a product or company.

I couldn’t find agreement on what the phrase means in modern times, so here’s my version.

Let’s say you have a product and you are putting out new versions every year. Issues get reported and are prioritized. For obvious reasons, the most serious issues are more likely to … READ THE REST

I spent a lot of my career fighting for a good work/life balance for myself and encouraging it in others. I’m not sure if it had much of an impact but it was a fight worth fighting. And there’s research to back up the fact that working too many hours is detrimental to productivity and health.

The reason we have eight-hour work days at all was because companies found that cutting employees’ hours had the reverse effect they expected: it upped their productivity.

The Compelling Case for Working a Lot Less—BBC

One meta-analysis found that long working hours increased the risk of coronary heart disease by 40% – almost as much as smoking (50%). Another found that people who worked long hours had a significantly higher risk of stroke, while people who worked more than 11 hours a day were almost 2.5 times more likely to have a major depressive

… READ THE REST

Networking is not only a way to increase productivity of a company as a whole, but also a way to advance your career. One way to do this is to engage in the work version of social networking.

When a company is small, it’s easy to know everyone and recognize them by face. When a company gets large enough, you can get to the point where most people you interact with you rarely or never see in person.

It’s important to know what everyone works on, but it’s also important to get to know people. If people know who you are, they will remember you when starting a new project. Higher ups in charge of the purse strings may remember you better around review time.

So, how might this work? In the absence of any framework for this, it could be simple as creating a page for yourself or perhaps … READ THE REST

I don’t have data to support this, but at very large companies it’s likely that a majority of the people we know we’ve never met in person. This is especially true with large cross-functional projects where people may reside in multiple buildings. We know so many people only through email, messaging, or a bug tracking system.

You might ask why this a problem. Text is often fraught with peril when it comes to communication. It’s easy to miscommunicate both ideas and emotions. It’s easy to misjudge someone or think ill of them. This could impact how a project progresses.

Here are some radical ideas you can try to implement.

Phone

If you find yourself communicating with someone very often via text and visiting them personally is difficult or not an option (e.g. they are in another country), pick up the phone and call them. In cases where you’re about to … READ THE REST

Engineering is a world where something is always broken somewhere and there are plenty of things to complain about. It can get pretty tiring and dispiriting when all you hear is complaints about what you work on.

When you’re working with someone that impresses you, on your team or elsewhere, send an email to their boss and tell them about it. You need to keep good engineers and a constant stream of negativity is not a great recipe for preventing burnout. So, a couple times a year at least, try to send an email like this. Short and sweet is fine:

I’ve been working with so and so on project X and I just wanted to say that s/he was a pleasure to work with. S/he came up with some great ideas and was great at creating a solid architecture.

This can benefit everyone. The boss benefits by knowing the … READ THE REST

I’m a big fan of Confluence and a wiki-esque tool. Keyboard shortcuts make Confluence much quicker to create content. The feature is not hidden, but I find that few people are aware of it. To see what’s available, just go to the Help menu in the upper right corner of the screen and choose Keyboard Shortcuts.

This reveals three screens of shortcuts of various kinds. Even though you can see for yourself, I’ll add screenshots here because it might cause you to be interested in learning more about them.

Some very useful ones here are popping into edit mode and saving a page without having to scroll around in a page to find the button. Especially useful on very large pages.

These shortcuts allow you to avoid using the toolbar almost entirely! This is great as there are a lot of formatting options and it’s much quicker to apply them … READ THE REST

When you work at a very large company, especially one that has experienced a lot of growth, it’s easy to lose touch with people and feel less socially connected. A couple of years ago, I decided to start sending out lunch invites to people, just one person at a time. I tried to vary the kinds of people I invited:

• People I’ve known forever but lost track of
• People in different organizations (i.e. not just engineering)
• People new to the area where I work or perhaps new to Apple People that are great to brainstorm with
• People I work with cross-functionally
• People who spend too much time in their offices and otherwise have work/life balance issues

Many people need to be dragged away from their desko! Taking a break for an hour can have a lot of benefits:

• Networking can be tremendously important
• It’s a great mental break
• You can

… READ THE REST

Your job could be killing you

I’ve always fought, with pretty good success, to have a good work/life balance and to fight for it for others. Here’s some advice I’ve gathered over the years to help improve your good work/life balance.

1. Have children or pets. Your priorities will be forced to change. You can make the world a better place at work and also make it a better place for your “kids” by being home.
2. Develop a passion that has nothing to do with your job that you look forward to finding the time to work on
3. Use your vacation days and never cash them out. Many companies have a cash out program that sounds great, but it’s really a benefit to them. You’re gone less and they have less liabilities on the books.
4. See a doctor regularly to make sure work isn’t causing your health to suffer. I know

… READ THE REST

No, not those kind of relationships. Companies have always relied on the networks of relationships people form. There are a lot of benefits to trying to cultivate this:

• You can learn how other teams operate and when you find flaws with their projects, you realize there are real people behind it that struggle with the same issues that your own team might struggle with
• You may learn about tools and techniques and technologies you may not have been aware of
• Youʼll feel a stronger sense of connection while being in a company that is very large
• When you file bug reports or suggest features, you will have more credibility if there is a face behind the person filing the bug
• When you are ready to move to another chapter in your career, youʼll have a network to tap for possible ideas
• Review season will likely go better the more people

… READ THE REST

Some companies will solicit peer feedback when reviewing your performance. But there may be people that you interacted with during the year that you feel strongly about and you werenʼt asked for feedback. Donʼt let that stop you.

If someone really impressed you, look them up in the company directory and send feedback to their manager. Whether it ends up in a review or not, a good manager will appreciate the feedback.

It should go without saying that the same can be done if you found someone lacking. Often this can be used to improve the situation, either by assisting in terminating someone that has a host of negative feedback or in helping improve someone’s job performance.

And don’t wait for review season. Send it as soon as someone impresses you positively or negatively.