YES! I worked on the FedEx Enhanced SuperTracker software from 1999-2006, which I believe is the "Version II" you're referencing. The core software was still written in Forth, but we rebuilt the package routing logic in in C, which might be what you're referring to. Very curious to know how you are familiar with all the history, did you work there or at Forth, Inc?
Technical aspects aside (and congrats on the achievement!), I love the implications of the author's "Aside":
1. An otherwise inconvenient situation (snowpocalypse) was turned into a learning opportunity. I would've probably turned it into a Netflix binge.
2. People took the time to detail the CPU design in a document. I'm always looking for examples showing the benefits of documenting design (I'm an EM) and it's rare to find one that changes someone's life trajectory. :)
> The invertebrates that live there, likewise, are adapted to these temperatures and fare poorly outside them; bugs cannot regulate their internal heat.
This makes me think that the insects which do survive will be better adapted to the higher temperatures. Hopefully the change is slow enough they have time to adapt. And this is nothing to say about the impact of that adaptation time on other species...
The "short-term car rental hubs... where people who do not own cars can pick up a vehicle and drive for Lyft to earn money" is a nice idea in the short-term. I still think Uber has the right idea long-term with a completely autonomous fleet, but once those hit the market, there will still be a pretty large demand for NON-autonomous vehicles -- take my parents, for instance, who refuse to get into a car not driven by a human.
This feels a little like a troll, but I'll bite. :)
I'm new to management so I'll be the first to admit that I'm not great at it. I do wish I'd had someone to tell me some of these things when I first started, so you could think of this as advice to my younger self. YMMV.
As for whether asking tough questions makes people feel safe, I'd say, "... maybe?" I can think of hard questions that would certainly make me feel less safe. Two things: 1. Asking the question I lead with got me some great info, so I'm going to continue trying this; 2. I'd want to encourage people on my team to feel able to do the same, so I look at this as leading by example.
Author here. The answers were beside the point. The thought I was attempting (perhaps poorly) to convey was that I asked something that felt risky and was rewarded. This was encouraging. What if the rest of my team felt as open to ask questions in which the answer might raise some eyebrows or incur flat out ridicule or judgement from teammates?
> Why celebrate hard work just for the sake of work?
Why do hard work at all? My answer would be to risk building something great. I doubt anyone wants to do hard work for the sake of it. Building a culture that rewards honest effort would encourage the same hard work in the future despite risks of failure -- though admittedly it's easy to go overboard in either direction! Use your best judgement here.
Author here. In an attempt at being pithy, this might have been worded poorly. My experience is that rewarding success is the standard approach in most industries, but teams that become accustomed to only being rewarded when they succeed can develop an aversion to failure (and therefore taking risks).
I realize it might also be easy to extrapolate this out to always rewarding a team, no matter what, and I don't want to suggest that in all circumstances... you know if your team put forth an honest effort and should be rewarded despite building something that fails. Definitely don't mean for this to be a hard and fast rule, but more of a tip for encouraging a smart, hard-working team to feel safer taking risks.
I manage the engineering team at HelloSign (YC11) and wrote a little response to Google's team success study that came out a few weeks ago. It tries to answer the question: How the heck do you foster psychological safety in the first place?