documentalope.bsky.social
Director, Special Projects for the State of Eternity.
IA, Systems thinking, product management
She/her
sarahrbarrett.com
185 posts
245 followers
99 following
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Thank you!
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That hadn’t occurred to me, but it does look exactly like the kinds of things you build with magnatiles.
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The flat enclosed ones can be a little bit weird at first. They’re not made with rights and lefts, but they mold to your feet as you wear them. They’re also pretty unfinished on the inside, which is traditional, because they’re supposed to be cheap and casual.
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“Winterized” for us means “did you open all the plumbing valves so we won’t burst a pipe if it freezes.” It does not mean comfortable.
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That’s wild! One interesting thing about places like ours (off the grid, on non-ferry-served islands) is that they actually haven’t gotten more expensive like this place and everything in Seattle. It hasn’t even kept up with inflation. One win for Seattle?
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I didn’t! I’m stocked up but I highly highly recommend them, they’re all I wear during the dry months in seattle.
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Yes, in my experience, a design org is also a terrible place to try to get meaningful IA done. You need to be closer to where the decisions are made.
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I was really hoping I’d get a fun gray pattern like my mom, no such luck.
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Ah no clue if that would work in New Zealand, mine was domestic when I randomly found an enormous chandelier at a flea market and wanted to bring it home. The independent part was key, those guys can cut you a deal when a franchise employee can’t.
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I have had success with taking it to an independent shipping place and asking for a quote, then balking at the price, and they have agreed to do it for the same price as an extra checked bag.
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I also had a nice chuckle while writing the headline for this slide 😈
hachyderm.io/@cate/114590...
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And so much love to Cate for live posting my talk on mastodon especially my debut of Cat's Law, hehehehe, which I enjoyed very much
hachyderm.io/@cate/114590...
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100%, I always check myself when giving career advice because I literally got my first IA job at a pizza party. Had no idea what I was doing, and probably not strictly replicatable.
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This is my favorite description of architecture, I use it all the time.
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So maybe don’t hold yourself to such a higher standard, maybe con these people too a little. Because if their rules aren’t good enough to keep you out, maybe there’s no difference between that and being “really” qualified.
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But it does mean that I was raised above the store, so to speak, and I find one of my skills is looking at things and saying “oh this is a con.” And I’m not saying I’m right, I’m just saying that a lot about tech careers right now are tripping that trigger.
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Not to be glib, but if I have one piece of career advice, it’s that everything is a lowkey scam.
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I was pretty surprised at how eager we were to hire people who had worked in the *space* whether or not they had expertise in specific skills. (E.g. a PM who had worked on a Q&A site instead of someone who knew about SEO when we needed SEO for a Q&A site.)
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Some of them were absolutely wonderful, but they almost all struggled, because “core PM skills” seem a little nebulous to me. The instinct that hiring is too focused on people who have worked in that exact domain before is very accurate.
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Oh man, this is something I have some Thoughts about. (As a caveat, I really only have one organization to base my ideas on, so it may very well be not true generally.) We hired entry level PMs out of college or grad school, and it was never quite clear to me what criteria we were using.
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Pratchett loves a protagonist who complains about their knees. Sophie is cursed, but the physicality of age is very much part of Howl’s Moving Castle. Tehanu. Witches of Lychford?
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One of my rabbis likes to say something like “we’re going to have to move past ‘understandable’ to solve our problems”
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I still think we should tie upzones to additional resources — like parks staffing. Places that are absorbing density? Give us more library hours, rec centers, pools, and parks staffing. And more bus shelters, sidewalk improvements and traffic calming.
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Man, the rest of that substack is a nightmare though.