Recent content on Dave Pifke
(This is almost-verbatim a memo I recently sent to company leadership.) If we think the on-call rotation is working well and is an efficient use of personnel, I’d like to propose we fire all the middle-managers and replace the current management structure with an analogous “middle-manager rotation.” My team’s developers spend—on average—about one day each month on-call for…
Starting around 20 years ago, a popular way for shady startups to skirt employment laws was to hire an outsourced “co-employer” or “employer of record.” Employees would receive their offer letter from—and perform services for—one company, but their paychecks would come from another, which was often in a different state. That way, if the employment relationship went sideways, a shell game could be…
Nobody talks about murder hornets any more. Is that because they’ve gotten therapy and learned to suppress their murderous rage? (Sculpture by Alethea.)
Much of the experience of browsing the web is actively hostile towards users. Web pages are stuffed to the gills with obnoxious advertising. Spammers and scammers are constantly trying to trick us into revealing our passwords, or into infecting our computers with malicious software. Cookie banners interrupt us every time we visit a new site. The news article we want to read is obstructed by…
I recently had the experience of watching a leader—whom I really respect and look up to—get lambasted by his employees for a couple of big strategic decisions at his company. In one case, I think it was the right decision, but it seemed to abruptly come out of nowhere. In the other case, not only was it possibly the wrong decision, but it took weeks of agonizing, circular debate to get to the…
Thanks to a flood of robocall spam, I rarely answer the phone these days; if you want to get in touch, I recommend using email or SMS instead. But They Might Be Giants once recorded a voicemail greeting for me, so I’ll just leave that here:
There’s been renewed talk on the internet recently about killing off Pretty Good Privacy, aka PGP, once and for all. (If you’re having Déjà-vu, I don’t blame you.) I think this is well-intentioned, but because there’s a huge, legacy ecosystem around “PGP,” both its defenders and the folks proposing replacements seem to be talking past each other. Without trying…
Hi, I’m Dave. I update this blog very sporadically. I’ve founded a couple of startups: Codehof, a somewhat-dormant attempt to create a specialized internet search engine for open source software. Thingomatic, an e-commerce startup which helped “Mom and Pop” online stores compete with the Amazons of the world. Colorado Mountain Net, a dialup internet service provider I…