Hi team--and hello Fred! You and I had some great conversations about Slack's direction--as well as its missed opportunities--back when we worked there together. I was leading developer education at the time, and frustrated with the decisions that were coming down that caused us to pivot away from what we agreed on was the "true core experience" of a collaborative messaging system: connecting users with the knowledge they need without having to parse through other knowledge that may be important in different contexts.

I'm genuinely excited that you're in this space now, too, as I myself have had my nose to the grindstone building out what the collaboration app for distributed teams that I've always wanted. We need options/competition in this space; just this year alone, I've had a little over a a dozen conversations with interested folks in teams across the United States working in industries from agricultural sensors manufacturing to game studios for hire, and the same pain points that you and I were reasoning about back at Slack are the same pain points that users still unwillingly tolerate.

See you around--and good luck out there!

PS. As an English major I'd be remiss to not share that I love the name emdash. :D

:wave: Great to hear from you, Jesse — and so interesting that we’re both still thinking about these same challenges all these years later. Collaboration is tough to get right, and we’ve definitely heard plenty of painful stories along the way too.

Wishing you the best with your work — I’ll be keeping an eye out for your launch. Good luck!

I’m not sure I understand the analogy. To me there’s a difference between a former intelligence general being courted by a private company that sells services for rapidly and semi-autonomously generating content that bad actors have used and will likely continue to use for influencing geopolitical public sentiment, and a pharmaceutical company that does not sell similar technology.

The point is that anybody can make baseless insinuations about what a board appointment means that have nothing to do with the actual qualifications of the person.

Perhaps others may make inferences about what a board appointment to a company with growing influence in government security matters means based on the appointee’s history in government security leadership.

Right!

Like how some of OpenAI's current challenges include a) not leaking everything they create to the PRC and b) not having their tools abused for disinformation campaigns, so they appointed someone with leadership experience in keeping secrets from the PRC and combating disinformation campaigns.

Or did you mean "NSA man bad"?

This is a salient counterpoint and seems like a reasonable alternative explanation for the appointment. Thank you for that!

Similar experience here, too. Virtually every time I have worked with, trained, or reported to someone with a CS degree from Stanford or Harvard, they have approached their work with a narrow mind and little empathy for others. This has been true in the military, public sector, and the private sector. I don’t know what it is about these places.

I read something a while back that did color my understanding of folks somewhat, and that was that there are a lot of people who come into the technology field for the money, not necessarily because of their lifelong interest in tinkering with computers. That to me is nuts, but I guess it’s to be expected. Maybe the sample size of my experience with these folks is overrepresented with people who are in it for the money and not curiosity and creativity. I don’t know.

Some people have been told "you are better than anyone else" for their whole life. So that's their base line. Guess what

Apple has consistently made laptops and development environments that creative types enjoy and admire. It’s too mad our economic system is setup to only care about infinite growth and monopolization at Apple’s size. It’s too bad just “being a great maker of great tools for great people” isn’t possible when you’re publicly traded.

All good and great but I think it’s a bit misleading. The participants were asked to do LeetCode—which limits this study to the suggested effects of cannabis on arbitrary and abstract programming tasks.

I’d probably spark one up if I got asked to do leetcode in an interview

In terms of programming, LeetCode is quite likely to be harder than your day job.

Most developers mid level and upwards from majority of the companies I have held a role in are not spending the majority of their day coding, they're writing specs, doing meetings, providing guidance to their junior counterparts, assisting in support tickets on call, and if you had time, documentation. You were quite lucky to meet 30% time in any day/week/month/year spent writing code. The vast majority of developers were also not developing new, foundational code either.

So I disagree, its not misleading, its actually relevant, and arguably even more mentally stimulating than all the cruft that you actually do every day. At the least you're reusing and thinking about all the DSA knowledge everyone has lost touch with from decades ago.

> In terms of programming, LeetCode is quite likely to be harder than your day job.

It's orthogonal to your day job. The "cruft" you talk about is how we remove ambiguity and fill in details so that work isn't a series of free-floating gedanken experiments. If you're able to apply codified knowledge like LeetCode to a programming task it means someone else has already done the heavy lifting.

We "lost touch" with DSA knowledge because it turns out that it's easier to work things up from base principles using the scientific method than memorizing crap that worked for the vacuum tube generation. We don't *need* a reductive LUT approach to the process anymore.

That's great and all, but this is quite irrelevant conjecture, you can argue your point all you want, it does not matter to me. I don't care about what you do, and I probably never will.

The research performed in this study is relevant, and no one so far has demonstrated that it is "misleading", "bad or poor quality research", or really anything to demonstrate to me that it's results are questionable, going back to the parent thats what I address.

I was expanding on your point, not disagreeing with it.

From personal experience, logic skills are significantly impaired, but when I’m stuck on a problem and high I can think of „out of the box“ solutions more easily that I later implement.

I got to the end of your post and realized I’d love to hear more about your thoughts around this. Also you must be proud of building something with so little bugs! Thats quite a feat.

It does make me proud, absolutely.

Do you have a product yourself?

Reach out to me at [email protected].

Additionally, some problems have gone on for so long without any attention to solving them that they’ve created whole new problems—and then new problems, and then new problems… at jobs where you discover over time that management has kicked a lot of problems down the road, it can take a lot of words to walk people through the connection between a pattern of behavior (or a pattern of avoidance) and a myriad of seemingly unrelated issues faced by many.

Like remote work vs physically proximate work in software engineering, I’m hopeful that people will remember the value of human cognition so much so that it’s considered, like it is today for some people in some cases, a competitive advantage.

Sam, this is such a wonderful resource that you've put out into the world. Thank you for the time and care you've put into each paragraph and interactive component. You've not only given me a lot to think about in terms of my basic assumptions about memory, but also about how to write and teach better online. I'm really excited to start following you!

Honestly the best comment I've read on here in a long time. Cheers.