That almost sounds insulting. Like management is the only party with vision, drive and a goal and everybody else is just there to help. When often management just manages and true innovation really comes from people of all positions.
On the contrary, it is a helpful term. Before the term, it was common to ask "are you a manager", and then you were defined oppositionally, as not-a-manager.
Whereas IC having its own identity means it has many positive connotations. "I'd much rather be an IC, so I can get things done" etc. You can still be very senior without having direct reports or having to do line management, often seen as a necessary evil.
In my reading it makes it easy to even spin managers as the bad ones: ICs contribute individually and directly something of worth. Managers contribute only indirectly via ICs.
The term isn’t used to define everyone who isn’t a manager. It’s used to define people like Lead and Principle Engineers who are a subject matter expert, have influence in defining a project, but have chosen to continue in engineering roles rather than switching to management. Often their position in the company is parallel to the managers rather than subordinates, hence the “individual” part of the term.
This requires the intentionality of the organization though. They seem to default to managers make the decisions. Ideally, managers manage people, IC execute and you get the "right" people in the room to make decisions, regardless of title or track.
> This requires the intentionality of the organization though. They seem to default to managers make the decisions.
if a company doesn’t intend to utilise IC then they don’t have ICs, just regular software engineers.
An IC is only an IC if the organisation is structured to utilise them as an IC. It isn’t a job title, it’s more to do with how an individual is utilised in a company. It’s their placement in the org structure.
> IC execute
IC plus engineers execute. IC are a subset of engineers.
As @hnlmorg mentioned, the term is only typically used for people who are at a level where they could be managers, primarily supporting others, but are instead still contributing directly themselves. It's almost the opposite sense from your "insulting", in my experience.
SME and IC are functionally different. SME informs, IC creates. Often, IC aren't SME in the space they're developing in, because they're SME of the technology instead of the business.
That's fine to do that, but kind of pointless. Everyone is then a "SME" in their own job space and thus the term is kind of useless. So, just replace every mention of SME outside of your company to "Business SME" instead of "Technology SME" and you'll understand what we're talking about.
Or, if you truly do not need anyone but a "technologist" to deliver product, you must work in a pretty simple business space! I work in healthcare and our PhD's and MD's have a very, very different knowledge space than I do, I and I deeply respect their contributions.
This whole thing reminds me why I never wanna work for someone again. From what I saw at Google it all just ends up being classist top-down BS of who isn't allowed at the big kids table, or bottom-up BS by insisting they aren't the SME just the IC and we can't do anything until the XYZ PM SME TL and/or manager approve.
It is unparsable Dilbert nonsense to anyone outside of specific scenarios. And it causes interminable discontent. Because what if the SME is the PM because they know business and tech but the SME is actually the IC because they know the tech and its tech but what if the manager is actually the SME because they're running the tech and may need to redelegate if the IC needs vacation, blah blah blah.
(job history: college dropout waiter => my own startup, sold => Google for 8 years => my own startup)
I'm sorry you've had bad experience working with other people, but in my experience as a developer, having multiple SME's available is indispensable to real alignment and fast development. I've primarily worked in startups, not big companies, and have often worked in healthcare. In healthcare, you get beyond your "I'm a big smart engineer" ego BS and you are willing to listen to the PhD's and MD's that help inform clinical workflows. From my perspective, I would never ask a clinical researcher or a doctor to understand our react app, and they aren't going to ask me to have deep understanding on medical details and clinical workflows. We work together to deliver high quality useful software quickly.
My PM SME validated my workflows and I found Jesus in them then my MBA TL PhD…bla bla bla.
A human being who avoided corporate brainrot just writes “I worked with John and he was indispensable because (insert reasons you wrote here)”
I’m 37 and never heard of this acronym. That’s the entry-level version of my point. Not that other people hurt me or people knowing things is actually bad.
True. It is part of the general industrial ritual of reducing workers to a number or a letter combination. That way, managers reduce the emotional attachment to the people, and they can fire them more easily.
If, instead, you would be Tom, Bill and Biff, there is a risk that the manager would build attachment, and make it harder to treat you bad. If you're IC1, IC2 and IC3, you can be exchanged like machine parts when you break, without anyone crying.
No that’s not really how it works in tech at all. There’s a deep recognition that individual engineers (and other functional practitioners) have important knowledge and expertise that is essential. Of course you do need some overlap and redundancy so that people can take sick days and avoid the wheels falling off through attrition, but competent shops aren’t ever treating people as numbers. To the contrary good ICs are widely recognized as being much less full-of-shit then management.
My openers have myQ and it worked so terribly I gave up on using it. The opening/closing worked intermittently, and the monitoring of open status only worked once, and never again. It was so bad that I spend 5 hours to get my in-car controls working with the opener instead.
I've installed two of these several years ago and integrated them with Home Assistant. Working pretty well, no major complaints. It uses a distance sensor to determine whether or not the door is open, so it's not as reliable as state that that the garage door opener has. There was one time the distance sensor acted up and I didn't know if the door was up or down, which was annoying because I was 100 miles away. Other than that, it does what I need it to do.
I used to use this quite heavily, but about a year ago the move away from YAML made it too hard to keep a declarative config that can be checked into source control...
Show death statistics vs. time. Initially, there were regions that were horribly hit (NY, Italy, ...) and then things shifted as first management and then vaccines appeared. Now, the issues seem to be the power of Delta and the sheer pig-headedness about vaccines.
I don't want self-hosted, and I definitely don't want subscription based. I, 1Password user for many years, want the local vaults!
1Password 6 is great, and I'll keep using it until it quits working on my devices, but no more after that! I used to recommend 1Password so much to people it was borderline evangelizing, but I quit recommending it once the subscription was pushed over the other options, and now that local vaults are going away I'm actively recommending against it to anyone that asks.
Guess I'll be moving to Bitwarden or Keepass myself; time to research!
They disabled the buy button when GME was over 400. But now the buy button is back and you can get twice as many shares for the same money. Sounds like a bargain!
The price was going up by $10s of dollars per minute in January.
It was a short squeeze of unprecedented scale — the first widespread opportunity for wealth redistribution of its kind, thanks largely to social media.
Where “Occupy Wall Street” failed, “Liquidate Wall Street” was winning.
The hedge funds blatantly rigged the public trading system to avoid bankruptcy. I can’t believe so many people still defend them.
Okay, I'm probably your exact target demographic - I have about 1,300 hours in Rocksmith and I'm obsessed with it, but often find myself wanting more "pro" features like Guitar Pro has. So hopefully you'll find my feedback useful...
On the tab interface:
- Seeing a blob of 6 numbers come isn't intuitive enough. The strings REALLY need to be colored. You should be able to get away with using the same colors as Rocksmith, as there's generic sets of strings using those (https://www.guitarcenter.com/DR-Strings/Hi-Def-NEON-Multi-Co...) - or at least make them configurable. It's hard for me to tell which string is which in fatpick.
- Bar lines for the beat/measure changes would be helpful.
- Chords saying their name above them would be a huge help - "G" is much easier to parse quickly than "355433"!
Practice mode:
- Just adjusting playback speed isn't enough. To be actually useful, fatpick needs something like Rocksmith's Riff Repeater, where you can select a section, loop it at a selected speed, and have it increase 1% each time you get the notes right. In fact, here's where you can outshine Rocksmith, since Rocksmith only lets you select entire sections, whereas you could make it so you could really drill in on notes
Audio:
- Being able to play the audio file instead of just guitar pro-style midi would be a huge bonus. Don't make it required, so you can still just import a quick GP file to play, but for curated tracks or imported Rocksmith psarcs (see my comment elsewhere about psarcjs), the real audio would be great.
- Even better... multitrack audio! Just play the song .mp3 if that's all there is, but there's plenty of multitrack ogg's sourced from rock band / guitar hero floating out there. For these songs you could play with your chosen instrument removed - IE, pick a song with a multitrack ogg, pick the bass part, the audio engine wouldn't play the bass part but would play the rest.
- Some kind of effects on the guitar would be nice. Using an AxefxIII and Loopback I can mix in real guitar sounds with the game, but most of your demographic won't have that ability, so being able to pick an AC/DC song and have basic distortion effects will be a must.
Anyways, after playing with fatpick for 20 minutes I'm going to go back to Rocksmith. Will check on this in a month though and see how far along it is - there's a lot of potential here!
Personally I switched from Rocksmith to goPlayAlong, mostly because it syncs audio to tabs. It does not do note recognition, but I had more trouble in rocksmith than its worth. Notes that do not get recognized for some reason. My low e string has trouble getting recognized even though its in tune.
I've also realized that its not a good idea psychologically. You basically remove the "did I play it correctly and did it sound good?" part from your brain, and rely on a external system to provide that feedback for you. This would be no issue if these tools could gauge that better, going beyond "does the input have the correct frequencies at the correct times?". It does not recognize fret buzz, it does not recognize you slightly panicing but still hitting the correct notes.
So in goPlayAlong I just select the parts I wanna work on (you can not just select bars, but also single notes), make sure the pitch is correct (it has halftone + semitone corrections), slow it down to the tempo I want to work on. Then I play it a few times. If I am happy with how it sounds, I press the + key on my keyboard to increase the tempo by 5%.
It also has a trainer mode which increases the speed after a set amount of playthroughs (of the section), by a set amount of speed. So increase 1% every 5repeats for example. I use it when I am more focused on improving speed.
It also has a very tight feedback loop. After it played the last note of the section it straight goes into the first note of the section again. No "You did great", no playing 5 seconds after and before the section like rocksmith does.
Unfortunately it costs something like 40$. After trying the demo and the song syncing I instantly bought it. I was very impressed it was able to accurately sync a live version of a song to the tab, accurately.
The only thing I miss about it is beeing able to edit the tabs.
Give Soundslice a shot (https://www.soundslice.com/). It's tabs synced with audio/video, complete with a notation editor, various instrument visualizations and a community of people posting stuff.
Thank you for your detailed feedback. I really appreciate it.
I've been thinking along the same lines as many of your suggestions, just haven't gotten around to them yet.
The color-coding of strings comment is interesting. It's obviously not hard to do, but it never occurred to me that this would be particularly valuable. (To be fair most of your suggestions are interesting, but this is one that surprised me.)
I guess this is academic from your perspective, but as it happens FATpick does support sync'ing with original audio recordings in addition to the synthesized per-track audio that it generates. But that feature is not exposed right now due to some challenges with the auto-synchronization logic. Maybe I should add the recorded audio to some of the existing tracks just to demonstrate the feature. That's definitely a more compelling experience.
Question about the string coloring: Does Rocksmith support guitars with "extra" strings, like 7-string or 8-string guitars? FATpick does, and I'm wondering what they do with respect to string color in that case.
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