All hands should be followed by Q&A, rare opportunity to have execs together so the right one can answer. And it makes sense to listen live to know what (not) to ask.
That's why they said "will become". It just takes longer for some than others, but at some size / leadership personalities it'll the company flip the approach. For some it may start already like this, for some takes thousands of employees to change the vibe, and most will just go bankrupt as usual.
Unless there's a need to interact (and there rarely is at an all-hands), it would save everyone time to just prerecord it. Any followup questions can be sent via email with reply-to-all (or an internal mailing list).
I couldn't care less about seeing and feeling my ceo, I just want to do my work and get paid with as little pointless interruptions as possible. Though this could be different if I worked for something I really cared about.
How large is the company you work for? In mine, I can't imagine wanting to "feel the leaders I work for and with" - the very idea of working with them feels like jumping 5 steps up and 2 steps sideways in the corporate org chart.
It was different before acquisition, back when the 90% of the company fit on one floor of an office building, and the CEO was someone you passed by regularly, and who contributed actual engineering. But company this kind and size, they don't do "all-hands" and "town squares" videocalls...
Yes, a lot gets lost in an email vs. video. I'm not saying it has to be a live meeting, but videos of execs talking about strategy often make their ideas much clearer than a written text.
And live has the big advantage that it cannot be re-recorded, so it's more natural and not as rehearsed as a recorded video.
If a strategy is clearer orally than on paper, something is very wrong. Either you're getting bamboozled by charisma and a bad plan is getting a fake dress up OR they don't know how to write.
…or some people just prefer visual interactions to text only formats.
This is very true in my case because I’m dyslexic so I ingest context more easily when heard vs when read.
For other people, it might just be a personal preference. Just like you have the personal preference to read rather than watch.
Arguing that the GP has some major character flaw because of their own personal preference really says more about your own character than it does theirs.
Also it's not personal preference. If you're an executive you need to know how to write properly. Execs rely on oral communication to use their charisma points on you, when you read the plans many times they have nothing to do with what was said or it's much simpler. Same with politicians.
A good all hands meeting is about much more than just outlining company strategy.
It’s about uniting everyone emotionally as well as academically.
The emotional component is an absolutely a critical part.
And this is one of the tells for a company that cares about staff moral verses those that don’t. One that care make their all hands about the employees too.
It's not about interactions. Sure, some people prefer or respond better to talk than to reading, or video, etc. But if the execs can't articulate their plan in writing, and can only explain it over words, it's a good indication they don't understand it themselves and it's probably nonsense - for the same reason your exciting, beautiful solution to a programming problem falls apart when you're three lines into writing it down.
Turns out, people have only so much working memory, but are good at covering for it with emotions.
Sure. But when all hands meetings are done well then they aren’t just about communicating company strategy. They’re about the employees too.
You’ll see demos from colleagues in different departments who you might not normally work with. And individuals praised for specific wins.
A good all hands should be for the staff, not for the execs. And that’s the harder skill execs need to learn: when to stfu and let their staff have screen time.
If all hands is done well, it brings the business closer and motivates employees in ways that an email couldn’t. However this is lost on most execs and so all hands often ends up being an ego trip for themselves, and when that happens the thats when things need to be communicated via email.
I'm not opposed to video, but if stuff gets lost in the written version that's more a statement on poor exec written communication skills than video being better than text.
People ingest info differently, and being able to communicate the same info in multiple ways should be table stakes at that level.
The video just gives execs more leverage to use the skills they use every day (people skills) to overwhelm the skills you use every day (charitably either the same skills or some sort of knowledge or physical skill). The more they're comfortable, the worse off you are. Their entire position within the company hinges on being able to exploit you for as much as you're willing to let them get away with, which hinges upon how well they're able to convince you you're worth less than they are (after all, you earn less).
Giving them anything is the wrong move. If you think you are getting as much out of the video as they are getting out of you watching them speak, you are wrong. The degree of wrong depends on your affinity with their chosen craft (which is, to be clear, grifting you).
>Have you ever attended an all hands that couldn’t have been an email?
Yes, they are the ones that happen once or twice a year, not the ones that happen weekly or monthly though, and they covered topics that have a broader scope than what I'm personally working on at any given time.
Tell me you don't manage a lot of people without telling me you don't manage a lot of people.
In some roles you have to over-communicate. All people -- me included-- over estimate how carefully they pay attention to communication. So people will say you could have just sent me an email in good faith and sincerity and the reality is that would not have gotten the point across, the discussion started, or coordination happening.
They have value in the code because they save time when someone has to deal with that code a couple of years later. Certainly the explanation could be in the code reviews or the commit message, but it's easiest if it is right there.
It's an obvious cliche, but that "someone" is very frequently you. It's really easy to forget why you made some non-obvious decision and waste time poking at the exact same stuff you already did a year or two ago. It's happened to me several times.
When you figure out something tricky, leave a comment.
completely agree every person who leaves detailed “unneccessary” comments like this has been bitten by coming back to a codebase a year+ later and going “who was the idiot that wrote this and why didnt they leave any clue behind” and realizing that yes, you were the idiot. or has had to come behind someone that left zero documentation or readable code and been tasked with cleaning it up. breadcrumbs are useful and comments cost nothing. yes, there are commit messages, but commits often aren’t super clean, explicit, coherent, or even looked at.
Yup. Our operating principle was that if a question was asked in a code review, someone will likely have the same question when reading the code weeks/months/years from now and there should be a comment.
Cities Skylines in the vanilla mode (and most, if not all, city builder games before it) famously ignores problems of car storage. It may actually seem like cars are somewhat sustainable.
I don't know if it strictly mandates having physical space persistently for every car that exists in the city, or whether cars still somehow spawn and despawn dynamically under some circumstances.
Edit: Looks like the car despawns if an attempt to find a parking space close enough to destination fails ten times.
The real answer is a bit later in the article I think. It produces summary only about what was in the training data. Works for someone's vacation blog, but anything novel can get lost easily.
This "sorry, I was wrong, here's another wrong answer" is basically my only experience with llm. But it also onpy works if I know the answer or the answer I get is really stupid. Luckily the latter is common.
It's answered in the post (in the thread) as well. But for comparison, when I worked for an AV vendor we pushed maybe 4 updates a day to a much bigger customer base (if the numbers reported by MS are true).
It was a long time ago and I wasn't as involved with this, so I don't know with certainty what was used and how. We had multiple channels for major product versions + beta customers on the most recent one. On top of these we could stage different CDN regions.
There were different types of data you could update and those might have been treated differently (e.g. simple file signatures vs definitions for heuristics).
I don't know about this particular update, but when I used to work for an AV vendor we did like 4 "data" updates a day. It is/was about being quick a lot of the time, you can't stage those over 3 days. Program updates are different, drivers of this level were very different (Microsoft had to sign those, among many things).
Not thay it exuces anything, just that this probably wasn't treated as an update at all.
In most appreciations of risk around upgrades in environments with which i am familiar, changing config/static data etc counts as a systemic update and is controlled in the same way
What you are describing could be just an email.