Why OKRs Kind Of Suck

The last two companies I’ve worked for have used OKRs, a system for company, team, and employee goal setting popularized (and possibly invented, for all I know) by Google. Personally, I’ve been very frustrated by OKRs, and if anything, they’ve made me less productive. I don’t think I was alone, and that’s one of several reasons […]

Thanks, John

John Anderson, my friend and co-worker at Bamboo, passed away from ALS this week. I’ve thought about it a lot — hell, I’ve thought about it a lot since I found out he even had ALS — and while I struggled even talking to him about it, or talking about it with anyone at all, […]

Persecution

I was reading a bunch of posts about how Christian conservatives can/should/will gracefully adapt to a world where their strict definition of behavioral “rightness” isn’t shared by a majority of their fellow citizens. More interesting, accomplished people have fully-baked thoughts about such a complex topic, but instead of talking about those, let’s talk about a […]

Mailing It In

I’m not very good at pretending to like things. I don’t like manually doing repetitive work that feels like it could be automated, or eliminated by a better process. I don’t like adhering to bad procedures simply because “that’s how things are done”. I don’t like avoiding a problem because acknowledging the existence of a […]

Things We Don't Understand

You can divide all the people who might care, or might find it interesting that a company like Facebook spent nineteen billion dollars on a company like Whatsapp, into what are essentially three groups.  1) People who get the purchase, and the reasons behind it 2) People who don’t get the purchase, but never claimed […]

Animation, Energy, and "The Third Heat"

For someone who is an admittedly terrible artist, I’ve always liked working with animation, even as a little kid. When I was 11 or 12, I started taking animation courses at the summer camp I went to every year, even though I never really fit in with obviously talented “art kids” who usually participated in […]