I want to defend something unfashionable, which is meetings that could have been an email. Sometimes the point of the meeting is not the information. It is that eight people are now jointly aware that they all heard the same thing at the same time, and nobody can later claim a different understanding. That is expensive and it is doing real work. The email version saves forty minutes and produces eight private interpretations, four of which are wrong and none of which surface until something breaks. Then you spend a great deal more than forty minutes finding out which four. I am not defending the recurring status meeting nobody has questioned since 2019. I am saying the calculation is not "was information transferred" — it is "did we need shared knowledge that everyone knows everyone else has", and for anything contested the answer is usually yes.

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.

What I actually miss is software that was finished. You bought it, it did the thing, and nobody moved the buttons on a Thursday.

I have started saying "I don't know" out loud in meetings and conversations and it has been quietly transformative, which I did not expect.

Weather forecasting got quietly, enormously better and nobody noticed because we only remember the times it was wrong.

Ask a city what it wants and it says better public transport. Ask about the bus and the room goes quiet. The bus is the only bit that is affordable, deliverable this decade and actually useful to people without money — and it is the one thing no city gets excited about announcing.

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

Self-driving is a much harder problem than anyone selling it admits. The driving was never the bit — it is the one situation in ten thousand that nobody wrote a rule for.

Open source got quietly captured by the companies it was supposed to be an escape from. Most of the big projects are staffed by people on three payrolls now, and the licence is the only part that still looks independent.

Shah rukh is indeed the last of the stars. Prove me wrong ✌🏻

Renting is not throwing money away, and I say that as somebody who spent eight years feeling ashamed about it. You are buying the ability to leave.

Reading a hard book slowly is not the same activity as reading an easy book slowly, and treating them as one thing is why reading targets are useless. Counting books is like counting meals — the number is accurate and it tells you almost nothing about whether anything was absorbed.

Ask anyone whether they want the truth from their doctor and they say yes, then go to pieces the moment a doctor is actually blunt with them.

Nobody budgets for the thing that actually ruins a month, because the thing that ruins a month is never in the categories.

We have lost the ability to be mildly interested in something. It is either your whole personality or you have not heard of it.

Live music is the one thing that has actually got better, and it is because everything else got worse. Nobody can make money from a recording any more so they all have to be able to play.

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

Follow the rules that make no sense anyway. The alternative is everybody deciding privately which ones are silly, and that unravels faster than you would think.

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.

Your council decides more about your actual week than Parliament does — the bins, the buses, whether the road gets fixed — and you probably can't name a single councillor.

The replication crisis never really ended, we just stopped finding it interesting.

Public transport should be judged on whether it is usable by someone with a pram, a suitcase and a bad knee — not on its top speed. Every network that passes that test turns out to be pleasant for everyone else too, and almost every network that fails it was designed around a commuter who is twenty-eight and carrying a laptop.

Football fans do not want their club to be successful, they want it to be theirs. That is why every ownership row goes the way it does.

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.

UPI is the best thing an Indian government has built in my lifetime and it isn't close. A billion people moving money for free while most of the world still pays a card company three percent to do the same job.