Essays
Occasional writing that belongs to no client and no company. Nothing here is about tax and nothing here is about marketing operations; those have their own homes and their own standards of proof. This is the other thing.
What survives compression
The number that leaves the room is the one I said. The confidence attached to it is not, and I never once sent that part.
Credentials as a shape of belonging
You are admitted to a professional body. Nobody says certified by one, and the verb has been telling the truth the whole time.
Saying not launched out loud
A financial statement tells you what it is before it tells you anything. A sentence about your own work carries no such label.
The week is arbitrary and it runs everything
I planned in months for about a decade and then in weeks. The work did not change. What I could see about it did.
Averages hide the thing you need
The figure gets chosen because it communicates, and then gets used to decide. Nobody notices the substitution happening.
Software replaces the memory of why
Losing a rule and its reason is recoverable. Keeping the rule and losing the reason is not, and it is the normal case.
Nobody wants a range
The high end never leaves the room. Only the low one travels, and it travels without you.
What a beginner can still see
I have been a genuine newcomer twice, eleven years apart, and the second time I could feel the signal switching off.
Defining quality before anyone asks
The checks were the easy part. The document's real content was one number, and I had no authority to choose it.
Two universities in one city
The rivalry is not about teaching. It is about two address books that overlap and never merge.
Jargon is a membership test
There is a test that separates a real term of art from a password, and it takes about four seconds to run.
The honest answer is long
The question wants a word. What I have is an order of events, and the two are not convertible.
Building something that has not launched
Every job I have had returned a signal every month. This one returns nothing, and I did not know how much I was leaning on that.
Why businesses have anniversaries
The date is not chosen because it is meaningful. It is useful precisely because it is not.
A number with no owner
I asked where a line came from and got a name. The name had left the company two years earlier.
Dashboards create demand for dashboards
Nobody planned an estate of a hundred workbooks. It accreted, one perfectly reasonable request at a time.
Round numbers get approved
The figure I had derived carefully got three questions. The one I had put in as a placeholder got a nod.
Learning by fixing other people's mistakes
A broken set of books is a teaching problem somebody has already solved for you, at their own expense.
What an estimate actually is
Two people can say three days and mean completely unrelated things, and the number hides which one you are talking to.
A river that is a border
The crossing takes a few minutes and changes the law that applies to you. Nothing about the crossing tells you so.
A language with no native speakers
Nobody grew up speaking this. Every fluent speaker in the room acquired it late, on purpose, and can remember doing it.
What a name does in an inbox
The first thing anyone reads is not my first sentence. It is the from field, and I did not write that.
Decisions that outlast the deciding
The choices that turned out to be permanent were not the ones that felt important while we were making them.
Business time is lumpy, not continuous
A month is not thirty days of work. It is a few days of work and a long approach to them.