Ridiculous Threads: duolingo edition

I do a lot of Duolingo. I really love Duolingo, because it’s easy, and it’s effective, and it supplies most of its own motivation. I want to learn multiple languages, so I’m supplying that amount of motivation, but it does all the rest, really. I do a very minimal amount of supplementary language learning, mostly I am learning languages because I have had things I have wanted to be able to read and couldn’t and this is an effort to fix that. I naturally stumble across a fair amount of stuff that constitutes “outside practice” or whatever, and I travel a little, which is a bit more.

Anyway. That’s background. I’ve been using the product/service for years, and I have “attended” a couple online Duocons, and I reflexively absorb information about the intersection of finance and tech so I’m marginally aware of some of the key people.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7196909776696475648

That _should_ be a link to a post by Severin Hacker, describing how he put together a document describing himself so that new people he is working with will get through the Getting To Know process more nimbly. I may have screwed the link up, tho.

I became aware of this, because over on Threads, Some Guy On the Internet took issue with this, and it turned into a pro vs anti thread in which a bunch of Very Online People called him a narcissist, a horrible boss, took issue with his work hours, and so forth. The initial take included this:

“Also can we talk about this line: “I am good at the first 20% of a project and I'm terrible at the last 20%”?

AKA “I’m going to take your ideas because I can’t think of any, get it approved from the higher ups, then have you figure out the logistics to complete it. Thanks!””

On the initial post, under Severin Hacker, it says “Duolingo CTO and Cofounder”. So, first off, this is probably a person who had at least some initial ideas. And also, there aren’t any “higher ups”. He _is_ the “higher up” when it comes to technical ideas, and he is not super likely — judging by the limited number of CTOs of the cofounder flavor I’ve had interactions with — to be all that interested in any ideas that are not technical. Also, it is literally the job of a CTO to have people below him work out the logistics to complete it. Literally, the Hot Take _against_ this post was a wild failure to understand the nature of the poster’s job.

For background — and I confirmed this with R., so we’ve got at least a couple of industry folks weighing in here, with minimal overlap (that’s how we met) decades ago — the job of a CTO at a successful startup that the CTO was involved in founding is generally architecture plus. All the regular meetings and management are handled by a VP or VPs of engineering or some similar title (and that does appear to be the case at Duolingo, and yes, that person is a woman, which again, not a surprise). The CTO is responsible for making sure that the technical direction (the architecture plus) is correct, which as a practical matter means you will meet the CTO when you have to spend a half hour giving a whiteboard presentation to the CTO about what you intend to do, and then answer 15 or so minutes of questions, hopefully most of which you have anticipated and have prepared answers for, but anything in that series of questions that surprises you is likely to be what you will be working on for the next six months, and it will keep you awake at night and interfere with your ability to find joy or even simple pleasures in life.

Or, you know, the questions will indicate to you that the CTO is fundamentally incompetent and you will hopefully have the sense to start a job search. That can happen too. There isn’t necessarily a lot of evidence for that situation in this case, altho incompetence eventually comes for all of us.

The Thread went on to attack Hacker for things like saying he did his best work between 3-9 pm (which, given the global nature of Duolingo, and his position in that company, might actually work out really well for a lot of people he works with directly who are physically located in other timezones). Obviously, the autistic folx in the Thread chimed in occasionally pointing out that it was pretty helpful to have this type of document, and noting that they, too, worked unusual schedules and generally saying the kinds of things I might have said.

I became aware of this Thread because a friend sent it to me. I think we’re all clear on which perspective I took on the whole thing. My friend also works with people in many time zones, and described their schedule as follows:

“I usually start by day by 6:30 am to sync with coworkers in NYC and usually work until 5 or 6 pm to deal with folks in LA. I'm usually online 10 pm-1 am so I'm available to folks in India.”

I absolutely want to cut all the slack in the world to anyone working those kinds of hours. I worry about this person, but I don’t try persuasion on people who work hours like that. I just express concern and leave it at that. I’m not going to convince people who work hours like that to work fewer hours. They have their own issues. They are adults.

But I will say some things about this hostility to a 3-9 pm shift, and the focus on “normal business hours” being “7-4” or whatever. Morning software devs are not super common — they do exist! But also! 7-4 pm is super hostile to being an involved parent. To be at work at 7, you are going to miss the entire get the kids up and ready for whatever in the morning AND you are going to be there too late to pick them up after school, altho you might be able to pick them up from their aftercare program. You’ll be around for dinner, and then young kids will be going to bed. With older kids, you might be able to pick them up after their sports or whatever activities, or drive them to various things, etc., and possibly supervise homework. But who is doing the morning shift? It’s generally helpful to society if there are some people working earlier and other people working later, and in any kind of global company, where there is a ton of remote work and remote interactions across timezones, time flexibility and diversity is hugely helpful.

I would normally ask, well, would you be equally hostile to a 3-9 am shift? Or a 5 am-2 pm shift? And honestly, the people being hostile here are gonna be hostile. I have another friend who works nutty hours, but had to cut back because of some health issues. When they cut back to their early morning hours, from before they were working 12+ hours a day, lots of pushback on their workday starting early and ending early. When you are in the middle of compliance culture pushing down on the lever, there is no compassion. There is no sanity. It’s just harsh.

I am a middle-aged woman, and that’s being generous. This year’s milestone for me is the Sammy Hagar I Can’t Drive birthday. I sure hope I’m past the halfway point. It would be so easy to respond to the complaints — especially the one about taking your ideas, clearing them with the higher ups and then making you figure out the logistics — by saying, meh, kids these days, don’t know what work is all about! I hope I’m not.

Mostly, I just really hate when people bash on autistic people for being autistic. We’re trying, and a lot of the people responding to the thread I am _not_ linking to were just straight up being ablist. Among other things.

There was this brief, blessed period where Twitter was no longer something that people shared widely, and nothing had fully stepped up to replace it. Alas, that is over, and now I’m getting bluesky stuff shared on FB, and Threads being texted to me. I may have to just straight up say, no, I’m not reading that bullshit. I have plenty of bullshit in my life. I have a pantry of the apocalypse stocked for years against a possible future in where there is no bullshit. I have enough bullshit to supply everyone with two bites of bullshit for the rest of my life.

I don’t need any more.

Samantha Bryant, _Going Through the Change_

This is the first book in the Menopausal Superheroes series, and it’s worth pointing out that the ending is at least cliffhanger-adjacent. It’s not _so_ cliffhanger that it’s intolerable to stop at the end (OMG she’s dangling from a tree that is coming out by the roots over a deep canyon!), but it doesn’t feel like closure. That could be a good thing — there are multiple books in the series already out so more to read! Or it could be a less-than-great thing.

There are multiple women characters occupying a spectrum from gleefully evil through complicatedly evil and into different flavors of well-meaning but often annoying and ineffective, well-meaning bull in a china shop, etc. There are not very many male characters — one woman has two young sons, and another character is married to a man who appears on page. Other men exist in this book, but tend to be off-page (another husband, an ex-husband, etc.).

Hey, Spoilers! Get lost if that’s a problem!

There’s a mad scientist (complicatedly evil character), who is Asian. She does biological science-y stuff (glowing animals, type of thing) and starts making soaps, lotions, teas, woo woo stuff to help people with stuff that Western Medicine is bad at. But the stuff she makes has weird effects on some of the people who use it, so Cindy Liu, Mad Scientist, is the origin story for our various women developing superpowers. There’s a ton of really great stuff going on here, over and above Menopausal Women! First, the whole soaps/lotions/teas/coop/anti-Western Medicine thing is presented from a ton of different perspectives, through the eyes of the characters. That whole element of our culture gets a lot of authorial menace or authorial support if present at all in fiction; here, it gets wild-validation from the author (It Definitely Does Stuff), but the emotional and judgement type responses by various characters are just all over the place. I really liked that.

Linda, the Hispanic woman married to an on-page man, David, uses a soap and it turns her into a man. Once it is clear the change is permanent, she uses the name Leonel, buys clothes, gets her hairstyle adjusted, etc. The responses of her adult children and grandchildren are complicated and presented as complicated, and the adjustment in the marriage likewise. All that was great. But what a weird take on transitioning. It isn’t just involuntary, either — Leonel is over a foot taller than Linda was, and extremely buff. This is a fantasy, and there’s latitude for doing this. It’s just so weird. Linda’s perspective on having a penis is very hilarious. And if you are having, But You’re Deadnaming Leonel! Welp, not really. If you are looking for trans representation in fiction, this probably is not it, but it is a really interesting take on transitioning, identity, involuntarily looking a certain way to the world when you really, really, really don’t feel that way, etc.

Will I read more in this series? I honestly don’t know. The author was on a panel at RavenCon — I don’t know if I ever would have heard of her otherwise, and I stopped and chatted with her in Author Alley. She’s nice, and smart and had a really interesting perspective on writing that I was glad to hear, both in the panel and in our conversation. I inflicted my question about reuse in writing, intentional or otherwise, on her and she was a good sport about it, saying that when she is writing she is also thinking about and chewing on things in her own head and so those will naturally tend to come out in the books she is writing while she is thinking about those things. Very insightful, and obvious only in retrospect.

If you are thinking of going to a con, and you see that she will be on panels there, go and listen to her! She’s great. And if you think these books sound fun, give them a try. The first one was enjoyable, and while I read it slowly (because I was really trying to attend to a lot of details in how the book was put together), I think it would be a fast read for most readers. The chapters are short so the book is easily interrupted and then picked up again (thank you, Ms. Bryant!!! That’s what our lives are like!). The characters are drawn crisply but with compassion and nuance, so you’re never going, but who is Patricia again? You know. The voice shifts from one character to another by chapter, and that works very smoothly for the most part.

The nature of the story is not exactly like, but is reminiscent of, James Alan Gardner, especially _They Promised Me the Gun Wasn’t Loaded_ / _All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault_ (Sparks and Darks), with a sprinkling of _Commitment Hour_.