Yeah like current sibling reply here, it's OK to be idealistic: "here's what I think perfect looks like", and accept that sure not everybody meets that definition. Doesn't mean it's a bad aspiration though.
I mostly agree with the article, FWIW. Including having worked with various "talented but difficult" people before.
One of the more under-appreciated aspects of management is having direct reports you can delegate stuff to and (a) they just deal with it, and (b) you need little or no supervision and there's no drama.
Managers are humans: making their lives a little better by being Mr/Mrs/Ms Reliably Gets Things Done will in any sane org yield dividends. Of course not all orgs are sane, and not all managers are Good Managers, but that's a different conversation.
Yep. When 1 or 10 or 100 people do a thing, it's a "them" issue. When 100,000,000+ do a thing - it's a wider issue, and asking those 100,000,000 to do it differently just isn't a useful strategy.
In another vein, if my bank account is $100 short, that's my problem. If my account is $1m short, that's the bank's problem.
Considering it's a societal wide problem, society at large ought to care about resolving it. It's incredibly expensive otherwise to treat chronic, lifelong obesity.
>> I scanned, weighed, and measured every single thing I put into my body
Not being snarky, but is this truly "better" than a single weekly injection - 10 seconds and done for the week? I do think our wider society sees medications for overeating as "cheating". Perhaps we might benefit from rethinking that.
There is a reason for that perception. We are regularly finding out how there are damaging ripple effects from drugs that were claimed to be completely safe.
I would compare something like scale measurements to sex education. If kids were all exposed to some period of measurement of foods to learn what they were eating, it would stick. Studies show that ANY form of tracking causes people to make more mindful choices. Everyone I know personally that is taking these drugs uses it as a crutch entirely. They take it and make even worse food choices than before. It's very sad and I worry about the next issue they will cause with this behavior to then stack another medication on top.
>is this truly "better" than a single weekly injection - 10 seconds and done for the week?
Yes, obviously. I'm stunned that it needs to be said, but since it apparently does:
1. You propose taking a medication regularly which is probably completely unnecessary, and paying for it regularly. (This was worse with "metabolism boosters" etc. since the patient would be paying for the medication to have the privilege of eating more, and thus paying more for the extra food.)
2. Knowing what you eat, and being able to denominate it in calories, is knowledge. I thought we were hackers here? My experience has been that ordinary people have some truly absurd ideas about how fattening certain things are or aren't, or about how much they're actually eating, or about what healthy daily intake ranges, portion sizes etc. look like. (They also have absurd ideas about how much it costs to "eat healthy", as well as about the connection between "healthy" food and caloric intake.)
But since when did techniques which obsessive systemizers like us use play out well with the general population..? We're not discussing what works well for a niche community of hackers, but what will work for the hundred million+ on a sustainable long term basis.
I think "perfect is the enemy of good" applies here. People en masse are not controlling their intake. They just aren't. They can't do it. We can rage about it and criticise - and many do for all the good that's doing - or we can explore options. Medications with few side effects have some appeal here. Evolutions will likely reduce those. Eventually that will not be a strong argument against the medication option is my prediction.
For preventable diseases in general, prevention and self control should be attempted before medication. There are health benefits besides being skinny, and all medications have side effects. There's nothing inherently wrong with medication, but addressing the root cause should be tried first, and then medication can be introduced if it doesn't work out. It's not an either-or, binary situation.
Self control has gotten harder as the foods on offer have gotten more sugary and dense compared to traditional foods. Produce is also less available and less nutritious than it once was.
I don't disagree. As I've gotten older though I am just increasingly convinced that for the regular person going about their life, the fight against cheap and terrible and calorie-laden - but tasty! - processed foods is not an even one. Perhaps some form of counter-balance is just not such a bad thing?
It's an unusual idiom to be sure. We talk about lots of fruits and foods every day without such qualifiers. Are we to assume OP meant possibly-stale bread because it wasn't explicit?
Plenty of people will only eat in-season tomatoes. I'm not one of them but I certainly understand it. The real thing is so different than the tomato-shaped-objects you get in the supermarket in January that it makes sense to treat them as a different food item. Honestly, I've been using canned tomatoes outside the season more and more, because they retain more flavor than the "fresh" ones that come from a hothouse or 3k miles away.
This is a great question. I don't think mentoring features nearly enough in our line of work.
Guiding early-career engineers is something I am sure many of us seniors have done (I'm 25+ years in to my own career), but for people like yourself with 10, 15 years+ I do feel it's hard to find such guidance on "what next?" and "is this the right path?", and someone that can help one navigate choices which might become available.
Perhaps a professional life coach? Although I have never done so and cannot recommend or discourage, it might prove completely fruitless...
Plus workers in tech are absolutely not immune to this stuff and nobody should be complacent.
"They can't monitor me because I spent my morning mentor Alan the Junior at his desk" - that may be so but it won't stop them from trying, and the lag from deploying bad business intiatives to realising they're bad can be months or years in the making.
