Wednesday 2020-10-28
Say we were assigned the following corporate exercise:
You have been replaced.
As part of your severance package, the company will pay you a quarterly stipend to evaluate your replacement. What do they have to publish for you to prudently review their performance?

After handling the explicit question, we should also answer the implicit question: Why not publish that data today?

Input / Output

Imagine a company where worker on-boarding consisted of choosing which data to publish, and which to consume from the vast corporate panoply. While given helpful defaults, people define what makes sense for them, with people innovating feeds or imploring others to publish more.

While this seems correct, it is not cost-free. Witness patio11's write-up of working at Stripe ( "Stripe is a celebration of the written word which happens to be incorporated in the state of Delaware." ).

His accounting of four years at Stripe seems less a celebration of and more a crucifixion by the written word, though it does hint at the salvation intrinsic to such a martyrdom... that what matters is not the impossibility of following the torrent produced, rather that pushing people to write continuously improves both the person and the company.

Library / Market

A fairly reasonable knee-jerk reaction to all this is to demand a staff of Librarians and Technical Writers to manage the deluge. Alternatively, one can employ Twitter-like heuristics, ie. a) follow what everyone else follows, b) add your interests, and c) pay attention to what is trending.

The latter approach seems more Stripe-like, though with their emphasis on books perhaps it is not always one way or the other, ie. there are probably times a when a degree in library science comes in handy.