Job hopping is the only reliable pay rise and companies have nobody to blame but themselves. Three percent internally, twenty percent to leave, every year, forever.

Cities that solved housing did it by building an unremarkable amount of unremarkable housing for a very long time, which is why nobody can point to a dramatic example. The absence of a dramatic case is the finding, and it is also the politics: a policy whose costs are immediate and local and whose payoff is twenty years out is the hardest thing an elected person can attempt.

Peer review does more harm than good at this point. Two anonymous strangers, no accountability, eighteen months, and a result nobody will ever try to reproduce.

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.

I cannot do a phone call any more and I genuinely do not know when that happened.

Nobody has ever said "we should document this properly" and then documented it properly.

Splitting the bill evenly is a tax on whoever ordered the salad, and everyone knows it, and everyone does it anyway because saying so costs more than the difference.

Are smart wearables a fad?

Everybody under thirty-five I know treats owning a home as roughly as likely as winning something, and talks about it in the same tone.

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

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

Football has too much football now.

We built an entire economy on the idea that people will keep buying things they already have, and then act surprised when the things are designed to stop working.

Nobody says out loud that getting fitter in your forties is mostly about being willing to be bad at something in public.

Cricket is the only sport where you can go for lunch, come back, and nothing has happened, and that is a feature.

Test cricket is the only sport where the boring bit is the point and I will not be taking questions.

The algorithm has quietly killed the thing where you find something you were not looking for. Every recommendation is a slightly worse version of what I already like.

Owning things is overrated, says the man with a garage he cannot park in.

I would rather pay for a thing once than be in a relationship with it forever, and almost nothing is sold that way any more.

Health advice aimed at women is still mostly either about being thinner or about having children, and it is genuinely strange how little else there is.

Tipping has quietly become a thing you do for a screen rather than a person, and I notice I resent it far more.

That dentistry sits outside the NHS is the strangest line anyone has ever drawn through a human body. Teeth are in there. They hurt. Nobody can explain it.

The best manager I ever had appeared to do almost nothing. It took me three years to work out that was the job.

Won on the science, lost on the sequencing: almost nobody disputes the physics any more, and almost everybody disputes who pays first. Which means another decade spent explaining the greenhouse effect is a decade spent answering a question that stopped being asked.

Football was better without VAR and I will not be moved on this. You cannot celebrate on a three minute delay.