Recent content on Marco Tabini's Blog
Here’s a scenario that is likely to feel very familiar: You’re in a meeting, and you’re convinced that everybody is talking past each other because they are making a different set of unspoken assumptions about the topic at hand. You want to speak up, an idea or question simmering in your mind, but you end up dismissing it as too obvious or simple to voice. The fear of looking…
As you take on roles of increasing responsibility, your viewpoint on meetings tends to change: When you’re young and inexperienced, you desperately want into them, and when you’re old and experienced you desperately want to avoid them. The reason for this is fairly simple: Both the most junior and most senior member of the team have exactly the same number of hours in their day. When…
A distressingly large number of business books I have read suffer from a strange form of survivorship bias that I call “success rot.” It goes a little bit like this: Company X is very successful. Company X uses Process/Technique/Tool Y. Therefore, Process/Technique/Tool Y is what made Company X successful. I’m never quite sure how one is supposed to learn anything from these books. For one…
It seems obvious to me that decisions should always be pushed down as far as necessary to find the people who have the best knowledge to make them. Any responsible business will try to hire experts in whatever fields it needs, and they are most likely closer to the problems that needs solving than those above them in the orgchart. By definition, this means that managers should almost never be the…
All throughout my career, a common pattern has repeated itself time and time again: You want to do something that requires resources (money, people, time, and so forth); you ask for n resources; after much wrangling, the business gives you m resources, where m is significantly lower than n1. When I put together my first budget at Noom, therefore, I was prepared for the usual haggling; imagine my…
In preparation for a presentation, I recently found myself looking for a layperson’s explanation of how bandit testing works and why. I haven’t been able to find one that suits my needs; Wikipedia’s entry on the subject is at the same time short on details and rather arcane, while most of the articles I’ve been able to locate on the Internet seem more concerned with establishing bandit testing’s…
Years ago, when I first moved into management, I seemed to suddenly have a lot of time on my hands: It looked as though the business had decided to give me more responsibilities, and yet needed me less at the same time. Sure enough, I had my projects and my meetings, but sometimes entire days would go by when the company simply placed no demands on me. I could have, figuratively speaking, fallen…
For a few weeks now I’ve been fighting with a really odd bug. I have a server process that opens a persistent connection to a service provider, authenticates the end user, and then performs a series of streaming operations. Inexplicably, every now and then this process leaks a socket. It doesn’t happen very often, but often enough that, after a while, the machine on which the server is running…
When I first started digging into the bowels of the Internet, I was fascinated by how many of its protocols—like HTTP and SMTP, for example—were entirely text based. At first, this struck me as a very odd thing; text is inefficient, and machines, not humans, are meant to interpret protocols. A binary setup would save bytes—bytes!—and be all-around more manageable by software. It wasn’t long,…