Month: October 2014

Soraya Nadia McDonald, writing for The Washington Post:

What was strange was the mushroom cloud of controversy Buress set off repeating something he had said before — not about new allegations, but about the same 13 women who signed on as witnesses in Constand’s 2004 lawsuit.

Without intending to, Buress became a perfect example of the conundrum of male allyship: It wasn’t enough 13 different women accused Cosby of drugging, raping and violently assaulting them. It was only after a famous man, Buress, called him out that the possibility of Cosby becoming a television pariah became real.

Last month, Cosby was a guest on the “The Colbert Report.” Colbert remained in character, but was unambiguously deferential. In August, Cosby appeared on “The Tonight Show” and got similar treatment from Jimmy Fallon.

I remember seeing these late night appearances when they happened, and Bill Cosby was very much still Cliff Huxtable to me. I had no idea he was a serial rapist, but I know now.

I find these details amazing:

“There was the UI that you got if you were knighted by Steve to see these glorious pixels cause they’ll blow your fucking eyes out. And then there was this other UI that we called Skankphone for testing. It was this awful UI that allowed you to make phone calls and text, but it was these hideous red buttons and boxes.

And later:

[The team had] to go to extremes to work around the system to the point where he had to sit his own engineers next to one another with a curtain in between–one with full iPhone access, the other with Skankphone access–to debug the code.

Some good advice. One item in particular that caught my attention is:

Don’t

1. Personally fix bugs and ship features. You have to write code to remain an effective tiebreaker, but that’s where your coding responsibilities end.

I do exactly this myself and find that it’s the most effective way to manage a team. Some new engineering managers try to code too much, or have a habit of parachuting in when things go sideways to do the job themselves. I won’t say I’ve never gone into hero mode to save something, but when it happens I always treat it as a sign that I failed as a manager, and I take action afterwards to correct that.