2022 in 22 aphorisms
Another strange year bites the dust. Here are some observations collected during these last 12 hectic months:
The true mystery is not about how successful companies get rid of nonsense but how they manage to succeed despite its inevitable occurrence
If you want to learn how to achieve something, ask those who failed trying
When a problem in a group or collective is directly proportional to the number of its members, you can never hope to solve it by increasing the number of members. Example: You can never expect to manage your staggering amount of JIRA boards by creating a new JIRA board
At any given time, a worker somewhere is complaining about ‘communication’; from ‘I never know what’s going on’ to ‘I don’t even know why I am in the loop’
No data migration in the history of data migrations has *not* resulted in a terrible experience for at least one person involved, and still be described as ‘smooth’ by those who didn’t have to do the heavy lifting
At any given time, someone is screwing up a hierarchical decomposition. Corollary: at any given time, someone is confusing a part for a whole or a whole for a part
Only source code tells the full story
When an engineer tells you that something is “plug&play”, it’s not
For every third-party bad tool in use, there’s a perfect in-house replacement which will be 100x worse, take 10x longer and cost 200x than planned. But will support “drag & drop”
You cannot sell “solutions” if you barely understand the problem
Any figure stemming from a brochure of a NewSpace organization must be read as an expression of desire
A tiny amount of NewSpace products do exist. Corollary: NewSpace organization’s breakthrough is always a constantly-moving 5 years down the road from today
The most scarce resource in tech startups is not capital, it is critical thinking
The most important questions of a topic will always be asked once the relevant meeting is over
Early stage projects are shared collective delusions
The best mental framework to handle mental frameworks is to trash all frameworks
Potential employers will not proceed with your application, but will surely subscribe you to their shitty newsletters
Because the relevant variables for policy-making, problem-solving and decision-making in organizations are latent or simply hidden, management is no different than witchcraft
Your future, either a raise, promotion, demotion or termination is being decided in a Excel 2013 spreadsheet with pastel colors and hard coded numbers
‘Realtime’ 99% of the times means not actually real time
At any given time, a useless meeting is relentlessly approaching
Market forecasts are as accurate as a dart-throwing chimp