Ah, I read the italics as sarcasm and was trying to make sense of it in that way. I know what a Scrum Master is; my company doesn’t have them, so their responsibilities are spread across multiple roles. But yeah, my role is higher. I’m not helping the team with processes, I’m working with Directors and VPs on the business side to determine where the product is going. So planning side, not delivery side.
lol, seems like it. Pretty sure you’re just saying it as a clever pun, but in reality I would hate being an actual Scum Master! I’m a Lead Product Manager over four dev teams with a team of 3 PMs. I am trying to focus on longer-term strategy and removing barriers for my team, while the PMs who report to me should be the ones making decisions and doing the individual contributor work.
It’s not uncommon for me to only have one or two 30-minute breaks between 8:30am and 5pm. I’ve gotten to the point that if I have over 2 hours without meetings I often feel like I get nothing done, because I’ve gotten pretty good at getting a few things (emails or messages, not deep work) knocked out in the 5-10 min in between calls. I can only really focus on deeper work at night after everyone else has signed off.
Not really a sustainable way of doing work, I’m also not doing as much hands-on work these days. A lot of my meeting time is 1-on-1s with my team and making sure they have what they need to move forward, make decisions, and get work done or with other people to try to remove barriers to help the team be able to move forward. So in that sense, the meetings ARE the work.
So yeah, exactly like how they use the Bible!
The filters are made of plastic cellulose. Once upon a time I believe they were just cotton which would have been fine, but it’s been a long time since that was true.
My partner and I have a theory that MacFarlane pitched The Orville as “Family Guy in space,” and he got to make it because of his success with Family Guy. But the actual goal he had all along was to make Star Trek.
In order to keep the game up and get a second season, he had to sell the pitch at least a bit. So the early episodes are like Star Trek with cringey Family Guy-esque jokes. But as the series goes on, the cringe stops, the jokes slow down, and the plots get deeper.
I can’t stand cringe humor and did not consider myself a fan of MacFarlane, but The Orville changed that.
I have a new 6-month-old kitten. She’s shown interest in the toilet. Last night I discovered what she’s been so interested in. Warning: the following story is equally disgusting and hilarious.
We use flushable litter, so after using the toilet, I scoop litter then flush it all together. After scooping, I caught her with both paws in the toilet and chased her out. She managed to get a little bit of her target, the toilet paper!!!, away with her. So she could EAT IT.
I was laughing and shouting in shock and horror so loudly my partner came to check on us.
After cleaning her up, as I continue getting ready for bed, she went back to the toilet to bat at the water. I pulled her off then took one square of TP to wipe the seat off where she left a couple drops and threw it in the toilet. She immediately grabbed the square of TP (from a thankfully otherwise empty toilet bowl) and ran away with her prize, carrying it like a proud huntress. I had to chase her around the bedroom to get it back and clean her paws again.
So yeah, she’s going to train me to always leave the lid closed because of my disgusting but adorable pet.
Yeah, and that’s also the time that people who are grieving are likely to feel like they should be moving on, but that’s rarely the case. Having someone else acknowledge that it’s still ok if it’s still a difficult time can be really validating.
I recently reached out to a coworker whose dog died and said, “I’ve been thinking about you and [Dog’s name]. I hope you’re finding moments of comfort and are doing as well as you can. I just wanted you to know you’re in my thoughts.”
I recently lost my cat and know when a couple people reached out with similar comments it meant a lot.
Yeah I’m sure I could have gotten more a bit faster and I’m pretty sure I’d make more with my title at many other companies, but environment and quality of life are worth more to me.
The company’s culture is fantastic for many reasons. It’s a well-known brand with ~2k corporate employees and while others are mandating RTO, my CEO has gone on public record multiple times to reinforce that we are a work-from-anywhere company. Also while there have been constant layoffs in the news over the past year, our last layoff was in 2021 (and relatively small). Layoffs under our CEO aren’t a fact of life while our prior CEO relished the twice annual layoff and is still doing that at the company he runs now.
Plus I genuinely like the work I do and love the people I work with. Now that I make money well beyond my means, I care way more about culture than chasing another buck.
Comments like yours remind me why I’m so damn lucky and grateful for my job…
In February I’ll have been there 10 years, and my salary is almost 150% more than when I started (which was above $50k for context).
I’ve gotten annual ~3% “raises” each year, as well as one role change (+11%), two promotions (+25% and +13%), and a raise I pushed for (+12%). The first promotion, my boss literally called me on a Tuesday and said I had a new title and my raise was effective as of the Saturday before.
I share this to remind people these kinds of companies do exist, even if they’re the exception.
My guess is they work across multiple locations (Market) and manage personnel (People Lead). Everything up to that title seems likely to be related to just the one location.
Field offices for my company have team leads oversee 3 locations. Not sure how it would work in fast food, but that’s what I’m drawing my guesses from.
If I may rephrase what I’m reading: You don’t want to tell him to leave you alone because you would be upset if someone told you that.
Here’s the thing: you don’t know that will upset him. TL;DR of the rest of my post: he probably won’t take it the way you would, and I highly recommend being straightforward with him.
I suggest reading about the difference in Ask Culture vs Guess Culture. Those of us who grew up in a guess culture manage our own actions based on what we think will be acceptable to those around us and won’t even initiate something if it would be deemed inappropriate, so it’s rare we have to be told “no”. Those in ask culture will just ask and be totally fine if told no, because they haven’t already done the pre-work to figure out if their request will be approved.
One of the best lessons I’ve had in the past few years is that other people don’t respond like me. I mean, that should be obvious. But it came up in the context of being a manager at work with an underperformer. I would be devastated if my boss told me I was not doing well at my job, and so I was terrified of telling my direct report that. I communicated the gaps in her specific actions for months, but we finally got to a point where I needed to have the conversation that I didn’t think the role was the right fit for her. It was one of the hardest days in my career. And she thanked me for it!
I was so scared because I was imagining how I’d feel hearing what I was going to say. But she’s not me! And instead of being upset, she felt relief to hear someone else say it.
You’re afraid of being rude, and that shows you have compassion and care for others. But I bet you that this coworker of yours just needs to be told, and not communicating with him is actually less kind.
A quote from a favorite book series of mine is a take on our “golden rule” through an alien culture: “The Iron Rule: Treat others less powerful than you however you like. The Silver Rule: Treat others as you’d like to be treated. The Golden Rule: Treat others as they’d like to be treated.”
I prefer spelling it with an ‘e’ so I always do that (probably because my name has two common spellings, one with an A and the other with an E, and mine is the latter).
But if forced to identify which is which color-wise, I’d say “grey” has cool undertones while “gray” has warm undertones. Really no reason to think that, but it’s right in my brain.
Requesting one small caveat to your thinking: your friends with chronic health issues (physical and/or mental) may bail more often than others but still love you.
My partner has lost friends over them thinking he uses his migraines as an excuse to not show up to things. They feel hurt because he bailed one too many times for them, and he feels hurt because they diminished his disability and didn’t believe him. It’s hard to see the additional toll it takes on him.
(I also have my own chronic issues but thankfully have been able to suck it up often enough to not have it come in the way of friendships. Sometimes he and I are intentional about making sure at least one of us attends something even if we both feel like shit in order to not alienate people we care about.)
I appreciate you breaking it down this way. It helps me understand the stance so many hold on landlords.
However, I think you’re missing a lot in your distillation that everything above mortgage + handyman salary is making money for nothing.
Owner also pays property taxes, insurance, all maintenance costs, all upgrades, and possibly utilities or yard care. The benefits for the renters include having a maintenance person on-call all the time, not needing to vet each tradesperson, not needing to get quotes, no expenses when an appliance breaks, no liability in case of a disaster, and more.
If I didn’t have a handy partner and the market was reasonable, I’d love to rent. I don’t want to deal with maintenance and I like having a consistent monthly fee rather than suddenly having to spend $2k on a new water heater like I did last month, or being afraid that our heat might die suddenly this winter because we weren’t ready to spend >$20k this summer to replace the air handler when it went out and needed a new part. Plus my partner took 3 half days off work to get 3 quotes for it. They each told us significantly different things that we needed to do, so we couldn’t decide if we were comfortable doing business with any of them. That shit is stressful! Having the assurance that I can call just one person and someone else will take care of it is worth a good price.
So the cost of owning some units is more than just the mortgage, and the benefits of renting are more than just a maintenance person’s salary. Distilling it to just those two things is an unjust comparison.
Should a person get stupidly rich off of being a landlord? No. That’s exploitative. The cost of renting should match the cost of the property and maintenance (as averaged out over time) plus the cost/savings of the additional benefits of renting. That’s all. But that’s a lot more than just mortgage + handyman salary divided out over however many units the landlord owns.
(Also this assumes the person is actually a good landlord, and we know there are many landlords out there who aren’t.)
At one point in my childhood, my dad made the comment, “Women don’t know compass directions.” I took offense to that and made a point to learn them to prove him wrong.
I felt vindicated in high school when he was coming to pick me up from a friend’s house and said, “I’m at the gas station. Do I go left or right?” I told him there were several gas stations on the way, and asked which direction he was facing to figure out which one he was by. He couldn’t tell me and finally hung up on me in a huff.
Ah, interesting callout; I can totally understand why that is a turn-off. My sister recommended the book to me so I didn’t give the title any thought.
The story is definitely about that trope, and mostly turning it on its head. It’s about the women, with the underlying theme that they are what they are because of men but they own who they are and their future.
I hope if you give it a shot that you enjoy it as much as I do!
Deliberate in what way?
Oh, I may have a book (series) for you! The Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss. It starts with Mary Jekyll—the daughter of Dr. Jekyll—and expands to find Sherlock and Watson, a daughter of Hyde, Justine—the woman made to be Adam Frankenstein’s bride, and other women left in the path of various men who tested the limits of humanity. It even talks about Shelley’s book and why she might have written it as she did. The second book expands into the wife and daughter of Van Helsing.
I’m about 75% of the way through the second book and have been loving them. They’re very post-modern though, with the characters somewhat frequently interrupting the narrator to discuss the way the story is written. I love that sort of thing but know it’s not for everyone!
Scrum.org doesn’t have anything about strategy in the Scrum Master role so no, not by-the-book. By-the-book Scrum, I am a Product Owner of the whole application. But because my app is huge, areas within it are owned by members of my team. I’m working on the long-term business plan and organizational-level barriers, not the day-to-day execution that a Scrum Master would own.