You appear to be strawmaning this piece to a large degree.
The necessity for humans to find meaning isn't ignored or argued as anything other than "how human brains work", in the piece.
The Database metaphor isn't a separation of raw data from narrative -- it's recognizing that in the modern zeitgeist, the abundance of data is so vast that a new experience has emerged that supersedes any Narrative, that's the Database: a super collection of all raw data as well as the known paths through it.
The existence of the Database then calls into question the validity of any one Narrative, and the rest of the piece follows.
I never understand this complaint when Javascript/Typescript is sitting there with a mess of .lock and .json files across multiple tools that sometimes interoperate and sometimes don't.
Package management isn't a solved problem; Python employs standard patterns for it; Significantly better than chained Makefiles from my C-development days.
This transition from junior to senior includes another important skillset: balancing social dynamics against engineering realities.
The key is illustrated in the book club parable: The elitism is directed outside of the group and becomes only a means of alleviating the fear of judgement for misjudging the paper. The grad student's approach clearly communicates the socially agreed upon reality: the whole paper is crap. This stance and boundary provides a clear decision space to the learning junior members: "if you think you see a mistake, those here will be happy to hear it; no sacred cows".
Bringing this practice into a situation where the target is a member of the group's work changes the dynamics such that you have to mind your Ps and Qs again -- and so, dampens learning.
I was once at a talk with several medical technology founders. One of them namechecked specific legislation that enabled their solution to come to market. And so I asked, "How do you survive if only 1 law is prying open the opportunity for your business?"
They replied that their business exists to solve a need -- a need that exists regardless of the specific regulations. Should the regulations shift, a company motivated beyond a specific solution will adapt to keep meeting its customers' needs.
The world's beliefs are many and varied. There are plenty of religious groups that provide a foundation for a healthy life instead of insisting they are the only means to achieving it.
You'll be hardpressed to apply this list of grievances to the average Buddhist community, for instance. Sikhs, Jains, Baha'i, Quakers -- many more come to mind.
>very likely your technical people are smarter than your product people
Intelligence is multifaceted. That business listens to product and not to engineers could be seen as a type of social intelligence of which engineers are notoriously unskilled.
Regardless, framing any portion of your organization as "smarter than" (implicitly "better than") isn't going to help in terms of fostering collaboration.
I'm curious why you think the author misrepresents/misunderstands stoicism on this point.
The entire piece is that Stoicism is an individual's philosophy -- one that solves an individual's struggles. The philosophy helps confront that which you can't control...but the author is arguing that it will tempt you to throw up your hands, that you can't control anything.
The short of it is that Stoicism encourages an individual to draw within themselves and create a worldview that is acceptable. All well and good for the individual, but the world's problems will be fixed by collective action -- not individuals withdrawing.
Too much Stoic navel gazing might decrease the likelihood you join the community action board.
tl;dr: Stoicism's first response to a problem is to change the individual (have the individual reinvent their worldview such that what can't be changed is instead accepted and perhaps even reveled in). In a world of decay, having this as your first response delays -- if not outright masks -- collective action towards rectifying the problem, towards building a better world.
Stoicism is great for dealing with things you can't change (illnesses, famine, etc). It's great for accepting that personal struggles, like the fact that your parents aren't going to say the Thing and give you a hug.
But what does Stoicism offer to the community? I as an individual can create my own happiness, but nothing in the philosophy would properly motivate me towards helping to fix the world with my brethren.
> it's difficult to determine where to set the regulatory "dial."
I think about this a lot and have come to this thought: you - specifically - won't get to set the dial at all.
Too many political philosophies completely ignore the other for the sake of a perfect solution. This framing of a knob to dial extended imagines a whole switchboard of regulations that can be tuned or turned off. The Democracy video games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_(video_game)) use this metaphor as their core game mechanic.
But the reality is that the Other(s) gets to act during and in response to your actions.
All this is to say that if politics is setting a knob on a control panel with a precise tuning in mind, reality is an annoying rodent running behind the panel and swapping wires with reckless abandon.
> The funny thing though is that, in most urban settings, this is completely untrue. Cyclists actually speed things up by creating less traffic.
Citation please.
> Every cyclist on the road means less cars on the road.
While that part is certainly more true than not, the implications of fewer cars but several bottlenecks added to the traffic system is far from certain and likely relies on so many other factors than just the number of bikes on the road.
> But I'm always the same person in all those situations with the same thoughts, the same desires
I think that's debatable, and further, a lot of that coherence is a personal/cultural choice and not something inherent to consciousness. At a minimum, you might admit the existence of biases like anchoring -- maybe you'll more heavily weight your child's desires while playing with them versus when your in the middle of work a day later (maybe vice versa!) -- but such things might be a hint of how these other perspectives work.
> you wear one mask with one group, another with a different group. Wouldnt say multiple identities though
You're just establishing that for a given persona there is a spectrum from 'Mask' to 'Identity' and insisting that there is an arbitrary threshold.
For a moment, embrace a worldview that there is no singular, core Identity -- in fact all personas are masks to some degree. An Identity may be a mask you're particularly dedicated to wearing, but it's still a mask. The rest of these "systems" people's perspective follows from this point and emphasizes certain experiences -- that you may suppress -- over others that you may hold on a pedestal.
> The more well compensated you are, the more disconnected you are from the perils of working class poverty.
For sure, but there's a type of blindness that comes from our culture and class expectations too.
I know many service workers who make more than white collar workers. But -- critically -- the white collar workers are unaware of it. You could say the white collar workers are banking on social clout for why they feel better than the service workers they utilize, but I don't think so. It looks like straight up ignorance and willful projection.
The service workers are happy to let the white-collar-fools carry on with the delusions --> it leads to big tips when the white collars need to show off and there's a payoff for workers who can put on a show of subservience while ultimately enjoying more freedom.
Engineers never want to admit that it amounts to politics. No amount of process will shield you from politics. It has to play out; priorities have to be decided. You can try to alienate yourself from it and watch it play out like the weather -- leaving yourself to prepare for the seasons.
Or, you can suck it up, learn that humans are a critical (THE critical) component of the system. You have to learn how they work too.
> what good is documentation without a final product?
Reference material for the features and techniques the product had/was going to have. I've earned years of my salary at a time by referencing documentation for vaporware -- things that never quite made it but that had worked out a ton of problems and documented them along the way.