The reader can feel a glimpse of the author's ego the moment he explains his skills as a Google Site Reliabiliy Engineer and his glorious work on improving gmail post-mortems right after the section where a hospital team saves various people in a mass casuality situation by empowering nurses to perform formally doctor-only tasks.
Only with a healthy dose of cynicism I can understand where he's going. While the topic of accountability sinks is quite interesting, I'm searching for the author's reflection of their own accountability.
They worked at google, made a boatload of money for the advertising company and himself, and now philosophically lectures others how to detect and/or design accountability sinks.
> The reader can feel a glimpse of the author's ego the moment he explains his skills as a Google Site Reliabiliy Engineer and his glorious work on improving gmail post-mortems
That's a horrible take. He did nothing of that sort. He didn't say anything about his skills, nor did he say anything about improving Gmail postmortems. You made everything up. He was just mentioning the fact that in this case, limited accountability when handling emergencies has strong benefits.
> he explains his skills as a Google Site Reliabiliy Engineer and his glorious work on improving gmail post-mortems right after the section where a hospital team saves various people in a mass casuality situation by empowering nurses to perform formally doctor-only tasks.
Isn’t this the practice we do to sell ourselves during interview about quantifying our work and value?
I firmly believe that the author is the perfect interview candidate who will pass an engineering interview with flying colors. For rest of us, “so erm… I fixed a bug which allowed my employer to scale quicker globally during natural disasters and erm… allow emergency response teams to coordinate. My manager tells me it saves billions of life but I do not have access to actual numbers but the number of promotion each of my managers get when I fix a bug tells me, my contribution has good values”.
P.S. Off-topic.
Maybe he thinks it's too early to get sued over a blog-- he's only just got to the HN frontpage for the first time this year?
Subtext of his previous blogpost:
Capitalism is powered by greed.
https://250bpm.substack.com/p/per-tribalismum-ad-astra
EDIT: another post of his that got traction ~5 yrs ago was about the Swiss political system (Swiss are a pragmatic culture though afaik he's Slovak so we might have to account for some Iron Curtain baggage)
So the author gives what, 10 examples, and one of them is about himself and his own experiences, and one of them is from a hospital.
And from that you convey that the author must have some kind of ego? I don't think that's justified critique.