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2018-08-13
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How are you folk doing?
Also tired š
Had to stay up very late to fetch my brother from the train station. Think I finally got into bed around 1am
Let's just say I'm feeling a little rough around the edges today š I might have to get up from this sofa and make some āØāāØ
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!!
@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.
@conor.p.farrell you pay for the app š 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
Can you tell us more about this magical sleep reducing diet?
@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&qid=1534151070&sr=8-3&keywords=xiaomi+mi+band+2 (Ā£20), the Band 3 just came out with more features @ Ā£50, but that has brought down the price of the 2.
I use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.northcube.sleepcycle&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. š“
@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 had a nightmare the first few times
it wasn't so much the stabbing
as getting enough blood out
I think it's important to drink enough water
and a good massage / squeeze technique is vital
I'll take a look at that! Tried numerous hypotheses, but drawn a blank so far.
I finally have a lead on thyroid function
I have high TSH which is apparently "subclinical hypothyroidism"
gonna try supplementing iodine for a month and then retest
it's so nice to have a feedback mechanism
I had low B12 and low vitamin D as well,
so nice to watch them come back into proper range
Interesting - thank you! It might be worth a shot. I've felt knackered since my teens - it's been quite debilitating. Lots of tests (including thyroid, I seem to recall), but nothing positive.
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
@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..?
(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)
Thanks @guy I will check that out as a starting point. I have the JD I want to put out, but I canāt 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 crawlā¦
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 emailsā¦ 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.
(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)
Very useful breakdown of details too - I am so keeping that link to hand @firthh, thanks so much š
Also https://github.com/rowanmanning/joblint this is the other one that article on CircleCI hiring linked to
That said, I have to say Iām not particularly convinced by the āfeminine-codedā ad theyāve given as an example
I'm not sure, but I think it would score 3 points for sexism and 1 for culture from joblint
New drinking game: drink a shot every time you find a way to create a more ridiculous sounding sentence that hits a high score.
Itās more that I would not apply to companies that have adverts that say only āexceptionalā or āworld-classā developers need to apply.
Since I tend to treat requirements seriously/literally, and hype (or assuming āpeople will apply anywayā) 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 donāt 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 itās acceptable to say youāre good at something.
X years later, Iāve 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, itās unwelcome to say that!
Iām Polish by origin btw š Sometimes it interacts with learned ways of Britishness in strange ways. I donāt have patience for pretending there is no elephant in the room for ex.
I am not proposing to recruit for āWorld Class Developersā - I hate that turn of phrase along with āninjaā, ārockstarā etcā¦
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!
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
Yeah but itās always nice when youāre working on food rather than getting people addicted to games, or tricked into buying stuff they donāt need because ADS.
@lady3janepl - I did, with more detailā¦ Colleague I mentioned is trying to turn my JD into a corporate nightmare of mediocrity
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? Iāve 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.
Iāve 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)
I wanted my next job to have a social-good aspect to it and this one kinda fell into my lap.
Mmm. I tried, but when/where I was at the time, there didnāt 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 rolesā¦
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 itās ok to use black hat tricks to get people to buyā¦ since itās for their own good.
He REALLY is about trying to do his part to save the world; genuinely very impressive on that score, but also heās a smart business man, and a pragmatist. Itās a good mix.
Our COO is cut from the same cloth too - heās a lawyer, but heās also the chairman of the UK Ankylosing Spondylitis (sp?) charity
Hypothesis: maybe the corpo-speak guy is attempting to write it up so as to appear like a serious company.
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
it means that we can shift the blame when things turn bad
its code for avoiding reponsibility
they donāt have to justify their practices because they follow an example someone else set
it can be both good and bad; bad because youāre not allowed to question what might not be working, good because time is not wasted on posturing about whose way is better
I assume 95% of the time it means they've cargo culted some articles they read on the internet about "agile" and whatever else
It means, āWe pay lip-service to these ideas and will expect you to work an 18 hour day for weeks on end when our Investors demand resultsā
I've started writing a blog post on best practises but I don't think it's ready for public consumption yet
I write blog posts about politics - I need to write some (more) about my professional life soon, itās been a whileā¦
The thing is they always start out with the best intentions (agile, best practices, etc), but they get twisted by people and muddled with other ideas until they mean nothing. They're just words that everyone repeats
maybe unpopular opinion but I like cargo-culting "best-practices" (if they make sense) in a team -- they shift blame to an impersonal other when limitations are hit, rather than making whomever internally to the company pushed a design decision feel personally responsible
But Iām not sure if just saying āwe follow best practicesā without specifying what or why is the best way to present your company. Just like āwe follow agile methodologyā is a bit too brief.
@U060FKQPN - I think that having them come from consensus around āother peopleā outside the company setting out some ideas that the internal group like is good, ācos as you say if they donāt pay off you can blame someone you donāt have to share the kitchen with.
@U060FKQPN I get your point but I think it depends if you're talking about technical patterns or people processes. Technical patterns can have value in cargo culting (but you should still have a deeper think about why that's the right thing to do), vs people processes I think should all be defined by the people in the team
yeah you have to get beyond that and talk to the folk who need to get the stuff done as quickly as possible
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
Iāve 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 themā¦
(I am looking for them actively myself too - you are not all my data vending machines or anything, I promise)
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 donāt use curse words) approach to some more āmiddle-groundā type terrain as a way of placating the colleague who wants to go very corporateā¦
I mainly know them as the very early proponents of being completely open about the company pay
oh, found an example: https://open.buffer.com/job-descriptions-diversity/