not to be a stickler but I think that the word would be designed. Otherwise you can apply that statement to anything, it's like saying smartphones weren't designed so much as grown organically. Just because requirements, and technology progress doesn't make it any less design for that time.
A human thinks about the smartphone as a whole, drafts it up and builds it [slightly simplifiedly].
Old cities started as settlements, which more and more people moved to. Those people considered things like walking distance. Maybe they "designed" the places to put their homes, but the thing as a whole was in many cases not planned-through.
And even with the cities that were, pedestrian comfort was the main (or one of the main) concern(s).
If your team isn't delivering on weekly sprints something is wrong. Perhaps you are over committing. If you are resorting to two week springs to forgo the useless double hour loss of the sprint plan / follow up demo, then sure, I get it.
In any of the two above cases it sounds like you have a weak team on your hands. When you push to treat the subject like a marathon it makes the business people nervous.
When you are on an incremental weekly delivery cycle, and things are late, it is usually only late by one or two of those weekly cycles. BUT, If things are late on a "marathon cycle" they are usually late by a "marathon length".
You sort of have to keep in mind that there's a rather large reason that there was a push by the business people to force faster cycles. You and your team are expensive. Weekly or bi-weekly goals show your accounting department that they are receiving assets.
In my experience, I've never seen anything useful delivered in 1-week sprints. That pace generates a lot of activity and a lot of stuff that looks like work, but it's mostly just people planning stuff that can't be done in a week and having meetings about why it can't happen this week and most items being tossed out as blocked.
2-week sprints aren't a whole lot better. I could see maintenance and bug-fixing teams being workable at that pace, but new development projects I've seen have always been a total waste of time on that schedule. Yes, it does keep the business side of the company happy because they see a lot of activity and feel like real work must be happening. But the actual situation is that nothing is really happening--just very loudly and energetically.
My company uses a mix of 2 and 3 week sprints (not on the same teams). My team uses 3 week. I mostly agree with you. Many of our tasks are done well within the 3-week period, but some take more time, and 3 weeks seems to be a happy middle ground. We could probably do 2 week sprints, but our “miss rate” would go up a bit. And at the end of the day, our clients can’t absorb changes that fast anyways.
There are types of work where you may deliver nothing for months. I think the sprint idea mainly works for well understood tasks where there are no surprises. I often work on stuff where I can only report failure for weeks or months until it hopefully works.
Can you please elaborate somewhat on the nature of these projects? I’d like to understand what it is about the work that makes it difficult to get interim results.
For example I have worked on a way to launch a process in Windows with certain privileges from a service. It's a little unusual but important for the way our software works and right now the lack of this capability creates the need for a lot of clunky workarounds. Based on my reading of some Windows APIs I suspected we could make this work but it took 12 weeks to actually make it work. There was no guarantee of success either and there were no intermediate results.
Any kind of research into a novel solution will basically be failure until it is suddenly success. If you can see that success coming from very far away you're not doing novel work.
Elonrail responsibilities are to offer a good negotiation position for themselves. It's up to the city to counteroffer, say....:
1. Burying slightly deeper to accommodate larger building for the future.
2. Demolish the "test rail" after the "test" is proven to work.
3. Expand the rail after success is proven to accommodate a larger attendance
Elonrail/boring company is happy with the success of the test's outcome, the boring company will use this test as propaganda to further their goals and build larger projects, the boring company will not mind tearing down (or grandiosely upgrading) their tunnel with the new contracts it receives, and in the meantime: the region makes money from the project in the process.
The city has no responsibility to counteroffer, or even to waste any time or money considering the proposal. It's up to Elonrail to make a realistic proposal to the city if he hopes to get approval for his boondoggle.
in the meantime: the region makes money from the project in the process.
Based on the submitted financial plan for the Elonrail, it would earn maybe $250,000 a year. It would several tens of millions just to tunnel, not including the hundreds of millions to build the many stations along the way that Elon has proposed, or the millions it would take to build all the carts.
>The city has no responsibility to counteroffer
>gamblor956
Everyday lobbyists are making proposals to congressmen, founders are pitching to VCs, people applying for jobs and asking for salaries, and there is usually a middleground that these two parties can land at.
Perhaps the mechanism in like you suggest, simply to reject the offer OR perhaps more beneficially, the city should reject the offer and ask for what it wants at the same time, and play the negotiation game.
edit: I read your profile, and I get you're a lawyer, and that you're technically right that it has no `legal` responsibility to counter ... That mentality doesn't get either party anywhere.
You are starting from the position that the Elonrail is a good thing, or a practical thing, or even a feasible thing.
I start from the position that it is none of the above. It is a boondoggle, like the hyperloop. It solves nothing and the proposal as presented only raises numerous problems that Elonrail fails to address. Which is pretty typical of Musk these days: present a shiny new idea, not fully thought out, as if it were something innovative, take credit for it, and then let other people do the work of actually figuring out whether it's even possible to implement.
Yes, that would be the logical thing to find fair once you forgo your current ego. Disclosure, I eat meat, and if people should critique me in the future, so be it.
Half the people in this thread are ripping on Lenin because of the things he did, even though at the time they were mostly "lawful" since he wrote the law.
We absolutely should disgrace the horrible things people did in the past, so that to not do them over again.
I think setting up machinery and waiting for discoveries like this one can be compared to being patient at the slot machines; it is essentially economically equivalent to gambling. Eventually, as a person living in society you may run out of quarters before you hit the "jackpot." Yes, you can use your quarters today on other things in society that are more guaranteed to bring you more quarters, but, we don't know what kind of "jackpot" is waiting for humanity until we hit it. This makes a sad, difficult decision in the life of a scientist, which is why we should have more rich people funding (since a lot of them have gambling problems any way, ie: stock market, brothels, etc)
edit: to sum up, this would be an efficient economy at scale. Some one with money already puts someone with expertise to good use :)
"Walking into a store can get you observed by stores b-z and subcontractior 1-255"
Well what about the new amazon retail store, that records your every move?
Also what about stores or shopping malls that contract their security cameras out to other companies? Surely those security companies may be doing all kinds of stuff with people's facial recognition data.
Most of the new data landscape is only adopted reluctantly - no shopper was given a choice in this. The fact that consumers feel powerless, and every medium to large business feels they must grab all the data possible, doesn't make it right.
Amazon's high street store is an easy to avoid aside until a Tesco or Walmart tries it.
I hope that GDPR restricts the extent of "all kinds of stuff" that companies wish to do to cctv security footage. I suspect it won't be nearly enough. The trouble with cctv is the consumer/shopper has effectively no way of knowing thus should be quite strictly regulated.
