For most software engineers a degree stopped being worth what it costs. It is now mainly a filter that employers use because filtering is expensive.

Everything now assumes you have a phone on you, and we made that assumption into infrastructure without ever voting on it.

Inheritance decides more about how someone's life goes than education does, and we spend all our time arguing about schools because that is the lever we are allowed to touch.

You can love the work of someone appalling. I have never once met a person who manages it consistently, but in principle you can.

Open-plan schools, hospital targets and the gig economy will look like the same idea wearing three hats — measure the throughput, ignore the thing being thrown through.

Most people would be happier with fewer options. Ask anyone who has spent forty minutes scrolling and then rewatched something they had already seen twice.

Every handover document is written by somebody who has already mentally left, which is why none of them are any good.

Denzel curry is better than lil dicky. They're not even in the same league

A thing I have noticed after fifteen years of interviewing people: almost every interview process is measuring how comfortable someone is being evaluated, and then reporting that as a measure of how good they are at the job. The tell is that the same candidate performs completely differently depending on the room. Give someone a whiteboard and three strangers and you learn how they handle being watched. Give them a real problem and an afternoon and you learn something about how they think. These correlate weakly, and we have built an entire industry on assuming they correlate strongly. What makes it hard to fix is that the noisy signal is cheap and the good signal is expensive. An hour of whiteboarding costs an hour. A realistic work sample costs a day of the candidate's time and half a day of yours, and multiplied across a funnel that is a real budget line that somebody has to defend. So we keep the cheap test and then add stages to compensate for its noise, which is how a process ends up with six rounds that are each individually indefensible. I do not have a clean answer. I have stopped pretending the current thing measures what we say it measures.

Index funds have made markets less efficient — half the money in the room is now buying without an opinion about anything.

Saying the uncomfortable thing is usually the kind option, and almost nobody does it, because the discomfort arrives immediately and the kindness turns up months later.

Tipping culture has completely lost the plot and I'm saying that as someone who used to wait tables.

Cities keep building cycle lanes that stop. Just end, mid-road, and you are in traffic. What is the point of ninety percent of a cycle lane?

Olympic sports get worse as they get more professional. What people actually miss is the amateurism, and it turns out that was most of the charm.

We will still be typing passwords in ten years. We have been promised their death for two decades and I am still resetting one most weeks.

Science journalism is mostly press releases with the caveats removed, and the caveats were the science.

A backdoor for one government is a backdoor for everyone, and this is arithmetic rather than politics. A key that exists can be stolen.

A thing about going to the doctor that took me far too long to work out. For years I went in and described my symptoms in the order they had bothered me, which is the order they occurred to me, which is almost exactly the wrong order. The thing I was most worried about came last, usually in the doorway, usually prefixed with "oh, and probably nothing, but". What changed it was a GP who interrupted me about forty seconds in and asked what I was actually frightened of. I said it out loud, she dealt with it in two minutes, and the remaining eight were useful for the first time in my adult life. I now write down one sentence before I go in, which is the thing I am afraid of, and I say it first. I am aware this sounds like a productivity tip for being ill. It has changed every appointment I have had since.

Genuine question: has anyone actually changed their mind because of something they read online? Not softened, not "considered" — changed.

Moving house is the only reliable way to find out what you actually own, and the answer is always "far less than this".

Everyone I know who is good with money either earns a lot or was quietly given something early. The budgeting apps are for the rest of us to feel busy with.

Genuine question: can anyone name a single thing their MP has done? Not voted for. Done.

Being good at your job and being good at describing your job are almost completely unrelated skills, and only one of them gets promoted.

Every company I have joined has a three week onboarding plan and the actual onboarding is one person who has been there six years and answers questions. Nobody has ever written that person into the plan.

The hardest thing to find now is something made by one person who was not thinking about an audience.