Long Weekend Thoughts

The day before the weekend.

Sad.
"Why?"
Bored.
"Go hang out with your girlfriend."
Woman is busy. And anyway that would only slow down work, which would prolong the boredom.

Day 1

"User Logistics" - a vertical business function: acqui/ conv/ reten, buffering, conc. at critical battles, virality. #growth #startups Cooler classier scarier: User Logistics should just be called Agent Logistics or Traffic, as each U is an A of the marketer's system.

4pm. To-do list has been whittled down to 21 items, from about 40. I'm taking the rest of the day off to fart around with technical hobbies.

Rather messed up evening, given three unfortunate events stemming from the initial unfortunate event of entertaining an invitation to my mother's birthday dinner. I do not like hanging out with these people.

Next, Superails studies have been derailed by bootloader and filesystem studies. At least that is now headed down a clearer direction!

A rather disgusting day. Let's hope for a better tomorrow: to get wage work done, to obtain superior goods from the market, to get study work done, and to have zero communications with family members whose conversation adds no value whatsoever to my ongoing projects...

... I can justify listening to dumbfuck opinions all day for a salary, but for some abstract construct such as filial piety... no way jose.

Day 2

Training of part-time staff continues.

I think the perfect metaphor for this job, is running point in a L4D2 raid. I get to shoot everything first, once, and then have to hire someone to shoot it again, in time to make sure that it's dead before it kills someone else.

Day 3

Training of full-time staff begins - but we're working out of a cafe today.

Added a personal development to-do, of applying for jobs in the US for the rest of 2015. Not optimistic, but JFDI.

Last Dregs of Sunday

Job interviews on Sunday morning! ‪#‎moarwork‬

Well now, we've put quite a splashing on the fires of the week that's past. Praps now we can revisit the fires left from weeks before, before their embers turn to brightest flame.

A short hour of work, for science. Then back to the dowdy ruts of commerce.

1. Technology. Last iteration.
2. Product-market fit. This iteration.
3. Revenue. Next iteration.

Software Engineering Apprenticeships

Has anyone run their team on an apprenticeship model, with success?

The engineering department in my office is about 6 months old, and so far we seem to admit a lot of unskilled talent (because the market is just like that). All the (fulltime) unskilled talent starts in the "engineering support" role, where they do project management, requirements analysis, documentation, and a bit of system administration and bug-fixing. As and when senior talent makes itself available to provide coaching, we graduate them into junior developers.

It wasn't really planned, but this seems to be a natural progression.

Some folks responded by saying that developers should push code on day-1.

Pushing code (for review, not to production) is definitely encouraged for fresh developers, and so are operational tasks on live systems (if it crashes, reboot it like-so).

For folks hired AS NON-DEVELOPERS, I find the motivations to rush them to push to branch-dev a bit more dubious. Folks hired in "engineering support," here do have to log into live systems on day-1, so perhaps that's our implementation of deep-ending the noobs.

I think the hole I have is that there aren't enough senior devs to review code, and we're clearing up a mountain of legacy code, so letting "non-developers" push more question marks is a particularly sensitive concern at this point. I could be completely misjudging it. Hehe.