Morning

\o

morning

How are you folk doing?

tired 😭

how about urself?

Also tired 😆

Had to stay up very late to fetch my brother from the train station. Think I finally got into bed around 1am

youch

I've been tracking my sleep deficit via Sleep as Android recently. Quite scary how quickly you end up in one.

Haha I'm in so much deficit that there's no coming back

I find it quite amazing how little sleep people can get by on without realising it. That said, I'd love to get a regular full 2 sleep cycles every night. I'm sure I'd feel like a whole new person

I quickly become unfocused with <8 hours sleep. I imagine lack of coffee doesn't help me there.

Bore da

morning

Morning.

Morning

morning!!

@dominicm how do you determine your baseline sleep requirement for tracking deficits against ?

@mccraigmccraig 8 is a good starting point. The app tracks my deep sleep % against how long I slept for & when I went to sleep, and uses that to recommend how much sleep I need on average.

7-9 hours is apparently the range most people fall within for their ideal sleep.

I wonder how one's sleep data is monetised

@conor.p.farrell you pay for the app 🙂 If you don't pay, then they only track + perform smart alarm every other day.

ah, right @dominicm, so it uses a smartwatch with a heart-rate monitor ?

i noticed after changing my diet last year that my sleep requirement seemed to drop from 8hrs to 6hrs... it would be nice to get some further insight into that... so i guess that means i want a smart watch now

morning

@mccraigmccraig I have a very cheap https://www.amazon.co.uk/Xiaomi-Mi-Band-Smartwatch-Bluetooth-Black/dp/B01N011RPS/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1534151070&amp;sr=8-3&amp;keywords=xiaomi+mi+band+2 (£20), the Band 3 just came out with more features @ £50, but that has brought down the price of the 2.

But it can use ultra sound and direction sensor in the phone to do measuring.

@jasonbell 👋

hey @acron all good with you?

Yes mate, yourself?

All good here thanks

o/

I use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.northcube.sleepcycle&amp;hl=en to track my sleep -- it's quite good and extracting the tracking db is relatively easy

I didn't do much searching tbh, i used the one I used 6 years ago when I first started with android

I have never tracked my sleep - it doesn't seem to matter how much I get, I never feel any benefit from it. 😴

@rhinocratic I know the feeling

I always wake up tired

I've been using http://thriva.co to test out various hypotheses of why I'm always tired

I'll take a look at that! Tried numerous hypotheses, but drawn a blank so far.

I signed up for it as well. I've only done one test with thriva so far. I'm interested to see how it changes next month when I do my next one

Better hope you guys never murder someone, then 😉

@rhinocratic when in your sleep cycle you wake up is very relevant.

@dominicm It's hard to say - I wake up at intervals throughout the night! Also used to dream a lot, but hardly ever for the last 15 years - so I can't judge whether I've been in REM sleep or not.

Left to my own devices I seem to settle in to getting tired and going to bed around 01:00-02:00 and waking up around 08:30-09:30

Sadly that doesn't fit in with the working day so much, and if I just time-shift it back a few hours I take ages to get to sleep and even on the rare occasions I conk out quickly I still wake up tired

Does anyone have any examples of job descriptions / hiring notices for tech jobs (Clojure or otherwise) that are more colloquial than corporate in their tone..?

You could check the brave clojure job board

let me google

https://jobs.braveclojure.com/

(I am trying to persuade someone that going with more colloquial / human approach will attract a better class of developer, particularly considering we are a mission-driven company)

maybe start here and pick and choose the language you like

Thanks @guy I will check that out as a starting point. I have the JD I want to put out, but I can’t until I get sign-off and one of my peers is looking to edit me / it severely into a corp-speak nightmare that makes my skin crawl…

Try some A B testing maybe?

Just create two and see what sorta people it attracts

Depends on where you advertise it too

Best way i’ve always seen is word of mouth vs a JD

but thats also difficult :man-shrugging:

Hiring is hard ;(

This doesn't get rid of the corp-speak but it might be worth checking it against the language you've used - http://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/

Hiring is VERY hard, but I get 10-20 approaches a week via LinkedIn and direct emails… They are all about as inspiring as a kick in the testicles - they are all groomed, corporate JDs filled with buzzwords and lip-service to diversity.

ooh nice link!

Yeah, thanks @firthh

(I have had a couple of people that I know who work in diversity look at my version and they gave it a thumbs up)

Amazing :thumbsup:

this is the result that site gives me: This advert is feminine-coded

Very useful breakdown of details too - I am so keeping that link to hand @firthh, thanks so much 🙂

Fantastic. I've not had to write a job ad so I've never used it personally

Also https://github.com/rowanmanning/joblint this is the other one that article on CircleCI hiring linked to

That said, I have to say I’m not particularly convinced by the “feminine-coded” ad they’ve given as an example

I would be interested to see a job ad looking for 'hunk papas'

It’s more that I would not apply to companies that have adverts that say only “exceptional” or “world-class” developers need to apply.

Since I tend to treat requirements seriously/literally, and hype (or assuming “people will apply anyway”) filter me out immediately.

Also I have not found the inspired pitches very enticing either (because there is an implication that because the company is so awesome, they don’t have to provide good working conditions or salary.)

@lady3janepl do you think there is a broader issue around that in regards to imposter syndrome?

Oh for sure, but also cultural differences around whether it’s acceptable to say you’re good at something.

I got laughed out of the room when I said I was good at learning languages, at school.

X years later, I’ve self-taught Japanese to communicative level, including reading simple newspaper articles with kanji, learning at home at own pace using free materials off the internet.

Also I do poetry translations and proof-editing in a second language. Heck yes, I am good at learning languages. But socially, in my country of origin, it’s unwelcome to say that!

It is something deep in the British (and indeed Irish) psyche, IMO

It makes me really struggle at job interviews.

Claiming that you're awesome is for Americans

I’m Polish by origin btw 🙂 Sometimes it interacts with learned ways of Britishness in strange ways. I don’t have patience for pretending there is no elephant in the room for ex.

I am not proposing to recruit for “World Class Developers” - I hate that turn of phrase along with “ninja”, “rockstar” etc…

I want competent people who have a broader horizon and are genuinely energised by our mission as a company, which is to have a positive impact on food-stress and nutritional sustainability, through SCIENCE!

DUDE WRITE THAT

This is a really good article on job ads, it covers some of the issues we've been discussing - https://medium.com/@fox/your-tech-job-posting-is-broken-heres-how-to-fix-it-6db06b9769cb

I'm too much of a cynic to be energised by a company's mission to sell things

wizard, that's still okay though?

Yeah but it’s always nice when you’re working on food rather than getting people addicted to games, or tricked into buying stuff they don’t need because ADS.

@lady3janepl - I did, with more detail… Colleague I mentioned is trying to turn my JD into a corporate nightmare of mediocrity

@dominicm white wizard problems

Selling things is FINE, I am all for selling things, but I work for a company that needs to hire people who are a cultural fit for our wider mission and that requires that they are inspired by our mission, which is a real thing.

How does that work? I’ve always found meshing with your immediate team to be much more important.

@lady3janepl - We are small - there are 5 full-time and 2 part-time people in the whole company, and honestly I think we are all on the same page about the mission (if not how to communicate it to potential hires), so to some extent we would be looking for people that were a social / personal fit and the mission-driven part of why we are doing what we are doing would be an aspect of that.

Yeah, no, I was wondering about your personal experience with a mission statement

Bluntly we wouldn’t get on with someone who is just looking for ANY Clojure job

I’ve never worked for a good cause company (not sure how to phrase it, but you know what I mean - somewhere that you can be proud of working for, rather than just working for yourself / money)

Oh I see… The mission statement was what got me on board.

I wanted my next job to have a social-good aspect to it and this one kinda fell into my lap.

I mean it’s something that I do actually care about

Mmm. I tried, but when/where I was at the time, there didn’t seem to be any companies that required anybody on a higher level than setting up a CRM

Every company seems to have some mission, but very few of them actually feel honest, you know? So you get cynical.

Yeah, I KNOW I am blessed - there are not a lot of companies out there doing anything in this regard, at least not a lot with tech roles…

The guy who started Cervest set up a massive rice farm in Ghana as his last role, a company called GadCo.

I read a couple books about sales out of curiosity, and (in short / cynical tldr) they advise the salespeople to convince themselves that the product is so superior that it’s ok to use black hat tricks to get people to buy… since it’s for their own good.

Oh good, actual industry experience! 👍

He REALLY is about trying to do his part to save the world; genuinely very impressive on that score, but also he’s a smart business man, and a pragmatist. It’s a good mix.

Our COO is cut from the same cloth too - he’s a lawyer, but he’s also the chairman of the UK Ankylosing Spondylitis (sp?) charity

(and he worked with our CEO on GadCO)

Hypothesis: maybe the corpo-speak guy is attempting to write it up so as to appear like a serious company.

Your hypothesis may be accurate, and I have definitely offered to give ground…

how many corportate buzzword job-specs have accurately described the job that you actually ended up doing

about 20% accuracy is my rough impression

I sometimes suspect that there is buzzword inflation going on

HR pad a job spec out with irrelevant requirements because they don't want to appear technologically backward

> HR pad a job spec out with irrelevant requirements because they don't want to appear technologically backward They usually make it worse in my opinion

definitely

@ben.hammond - I agree with @firthh this approach just makes me switch off

"We follow best practises" has been my latest pet peeve

What does that actually mean?

yeah you have to get beyond that and talk to the folk who need to get the stuff done as quickly as possible

*nods*

you can get an eye-popping gap gap between how easy someone seems to work with in interview and how difficult they are In Real Life

Hell yes - that’s a particularly terrifying development when it happens…

I’ve only had one real surprise in 10-12 years of hiring people, but it was a real shocker.

Anyway, if you see any tech-job ads / JDs that are a bit more playful and / or colloquial as well as being diverse and less male-coded, I would love to see them…

(I am looking for them actively myself too - you are not all my data vending machines or anything, I promise)

I’ve always found Buffer to strike a good balance between friendly and professional

https://journey.buffer.com/front-end-engineer/en

(ymmv)

Thanks @lady3janepl - reading now(ish)

Yeah, that is more in the style I am looking for and would perhaps provide a good yardstick to move my VERY colloquial (I don’t use curse words) approach to some more “middle-ground” type terrain as a way of placating the colleague who wants to go very corporate…

(I am going to bookmark that)

They might have something on their blog about how to write job adverts

I mainly know them as the very early proponents of being completely open about the company pay

and a fully-remote company

https://open.buffer.com/

oh, found an example: https://open.buffer.com/job-descriptions-diversity/

</spam class="links"> 😉

🙂

Thx