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 […]

About Capital

You know what’s worse than the government wasting money? That money not getting spent at all. Private equity firms are sitting on some $1 trillion in “dry powder,” or uninvested capital from previous fundraising rounds. Like cash-heavy companies in the corporate world, the firms are hoarding more cash, partly because they’re having trouble finding worthy investments amid economic uncertainty […]

The Case of the Missing Cell Phone

A couple of months ago, a got a new phone for the first time in five years. Given that I work with nerds, and live in a pretty affluent part of the richest country in the world, most people reacted to seeing my new phone with the following statement. “Why didn’t you get an iPhone?” […]