What if we could visualise the cost of attrition?

Here’s a team. Someone leaves. We hire a replacement.
We get lucky and manage to find someone more skilled. Looks like we’re better off?

Really when someone leaves we lose all the relationships they had with the rest of the team as well. The team is a diminished more like 40% than the apparent 20% by their loss. It takes longer to rebuild the team than is apparent. Relationships take time.

It’s worse than that. The team probably wasn’t maximally-connected to start with. And it’s not just the interpersonal relationships that matter but the knowledge of tech and domain. A departure can break teams apart and organisational knowledge needs to be rebuilt.

Your organisation probably has multiple teams. Someone leaving your team reduces its connectedness to the rest of the organisation. Increasing the time to recover even with a swift new hire.

Internal mobility is less of a hit to the team’s connectedness due to pre-existing relationships. It also increases the whole organisations resilience by establishing more inter-team relationships.

Teams following the Isolated-individual model of work… (as opposed to collaborative work like pairing and collective ownership) …are particularly brittle & significantly impacted by staff churn.

How would we think about retention if we could visualise the full impact of someone leaving our team?

Beware looking at teams on a spreadsheet. If you have a hiring rate matching attrition rate it might look like the team health is maintained. It’s probably not.

Tracking tenure by team and average tenure in team can be interesting proxy indicators. Teams can be growing but have dropping tenure.

Bear in mind “All models are wrong, some are useful”. Sometimes teams benefit more from fresh ideas than the value of relationships lost in a change. Sometimes gaining someone who helps everyone else in the team form connections at a faster rate can accelerate the team.

This post is also available as a Twitter Thread

Here’s a team. Someone leaves.

We hire a replacement.

We get lucky and manage to find someone more skilled.

Looks like we’re better off? [1/10] pic.twitter.com/nSE8wJxElo

— Benji Weber (@benjiweber) January 9, 2022

The post Cost of Attrition appeared first on Benji's Blog.

The syslog-ng application is part of all major Linux distributions, and you can usually install syslog-ng from the official repositories. If you use just the core functionality of syslog-ng, use the package in your distribution repository (apt-get install syslog-ng), and you can stop reading here. However, if you want to use the features of newer syslog-ng versions (for example, send log messages to MQTT or Apache Kafka), you have to either compile the syslog-ng from source, or install it from unofficial repositories. This post explains you how to do that.

Read the rest of my blog at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/installing-the-latest-syslog-ng-on-ubuntu-and-other-deb-distributions

Virtual machine for my courses vojta Tue, 01/11/2022 - 16:37

Recently, I have posted blogs and articles about three operating systems (or rather OS families) I use, and now people ask which one is my “true” love. It’s not easy, but I guess, the best way to describe it is that both FreeBSD and openSUSE are true ones, and Fedora & Co. is a workplace affair :-) This is why I’m writing that it is a polyamorous relationship. Let me explain!

My first ever opensource operating system was FreeBSD. I got an account on the faculty server in 1994, a FreeBSD 1.X system. A few months later, I got the task to install Linux and a year later I ended up using S.u.S.E. Linux on the second faculty server. Soon, I was running a couple of Linux and FreeBSD servers at the university and elsewhere as a part-time student job. SuSE Linux also became my desktop operating system. I have always liked state-of-the art hardware, and while I felt FreeBSD to be a lot more mature on the server-side, it did not play well on a desktop. 25+ years later, it is still the case…

SUSE Linux, which later turned into openSUSE is still my desktop OS after 25 years. Of course, just like anybody else, I tried many other distributions. I was flirting with Gentoo Linux (due to its similarity to FreeBSD) and Fedora Linux (did I mention that I love having the latest hardware?), but I’ve always returned to openSUSE within months, as soon as it ran on my new hardware.

FreeBSD became my primary server OS around the year 2000. Web servers, especially those running PHP applications, were common targets for attacks. The FreeBSD jail system, or as Linux users know it: containers, was a perfect solution for this problem, over a decade earlier than Docker and over 1.5 decades earlier than Kubernetes became available. Jails are still my preferred container technology. Unlike the early days, there are now easy-to-use tools to manage them: I use BastilleBSD.

As I mentioned, Fedora & Co. is a workplace affair. I love the Fedora community; I have more friends there than in the openSUSE and FreeBSD communities combined. But the single reason I run Fedora, RHEL, CentOS and all the other RHEL clones is syslog-ng, my current job. The vast majority of syslog-ng users run syslog-ng on RHEL and compatible systems. So, I use these operating systems only for work. Except a couple of times for a few months, when openSUSE does not run on new hardware.

So, which is the true one? There is no definite answer. When it comes to operating systems, I live in a polyamorous relationship. You can read more on the various operating systems I use in my earlier blogs:

• openSUSE
• Fedora
• FreeBSD

It’s been exactly one year since I’ve done the foolish thing and changed my blog backend to write more. And to my own surprise it worked. Let me look back at 2021 from a rather narrow perspective of what I usually write about. Perhaps to your disappointment most of it is personal, not professional.

I’ve produced a fraction of my drone videos from the past years in 2021 and haven’t practiced or raced nearly at all this year. This void has been fully filled by music and synthesizers. After two decades of hiatus I enjoy making music again. Fully aware how crude and awful I am at it, there isn’t any other medium where I enjoy my own creations as much as music.

I’ve also come back to pixel art, even though the joy is a lot tainted by the tools I use. Very convenient, very direct, so much fun, very proprietary.

In 2022 I’d like to

• Replace my reliance on iPad and Apple Pencil. Would be nice to use a small screen tablet on my Fedora instead. Just plug it when I need it, run GIMP or Aseprite in the same time it takes me with Procreate and Pixaki.
• Embrace Fedora for music making. While I’m not a heavy Ableton Live user, I should totally embrace Bitwig instead as it’s conveniently available as a Flatpak. The Pipewire revolution also made Renoise usable for me again, so maybe I’ll give it another stab.
• Continue using the gear I have and not buy any more. I have way more gear than I need. I’m going to sell some I don’t actually enjoy using anymore, but even splitting time between the Digitone, Digitakt, Polyend Tracker and Dirtywave M8 is making me feel unfocused. If I only had a synth room where I could just walk in and jam :)
• Continue posting on this ancient platform called WWW. Before I figure out a replacement for comments, feel free to tweet at me or toot.

A little late with wishing you a better 2022 than 2020 was! I didn’t even catch 2021 fly by.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

First off, welcome to twenty-twenty-two, the year of the Linux desktop (wasn’t it?). The year is kicking off strong with openSUSE Tumbleweed – but not with daily snapshots: openQA did not agree with some of the changes (i.e one snapshot caused all non-x86_64 architectures to fail to boot, one snapshot had a broken virtualization stack, and of course, none of that made it to you, our users). Despite all that, we published 4 snapshots during this week: 20220101, 0102, 0103, and 0106.

The major changes include:

• Mozilla Firefox 95.0.2
• Linux kernel 5.15.12
• GTK 4.6.0
• Python 3.10 has been added to the list of python versions to build python<X>-modules.
• fmt 8.1.0

Things being worked on, that should reach Tumbleweed rather sooner than later:

• Python 3.6 modules will no longer be built (snapshot 0107+). We now build modules for python 3.8, 3.9 and 3.10. For now, python 3.8 is still the distro default python interpreter
• openssl 1.1.1m
• meson 0.60.3: since meson 0.59, the build system became much stricter. Meson now fails if invalid paramters are passed to it (most of the issues found were typos that were silently ignored, or config parameters that no longer eixtsed and thus had no effect anyway)
• KDE Plasma 5.23.5
• KDE Gear 21.12.1
• Switch to Ruby 3.1: all tests passed, only apparmor fails to build
• Python 3.10 to be promoted to the distro default interpreter (tests to start soon)
• PHP 8 as the default php flavor
• zstd 1.5.1: this was responsible in an earlier snapshot for the non-x86_64 boot failures; issue should be fixed, rebuild in progress

For the past few days, the IT news has been abuzz with announcements from CES. As usual, I’m following them on Engadget. I must admit, that there were just a very few announcements which really caught my attention. And my favorite announcement is the most boring of them all :-)

• Foldable tablet by ASUS: I still use my Google Pixel C tablet almost every day. It’s almost six years old and waiting for replacement. The ASUS tablet is larger and has more accurate colors, two features for the photography maniac in me. Being folded gives it a more book-like feeling when using it for reading. It also has an optional keyboard accesory, just like the Pixel C, so it’s not just a content consumption device.

• Color changing car is a promising concept by BMW. You can express your mood by the color, but it has more practical useses as well: turning it light in bright sunshine and dark in cold can also help in regulating temperature.

• Autonomous tractor by John Deere is more about my university research: precision agriculture. I worked on some of the foundations, like soil sampling and correlating the results with aerial photographs. Those and much more are already in practice today. This tractor brings precision farming concepts even further.

To me the best of show is something completely boring: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D. It is a CPU. Why is it interesting? It has 100MB of cache. I do regular peak performance testing of syslog-ng. It seems to me, that performance is correlated both to single core performance and cache size. I did not have a chance to test syslog-ng on the latest EPIC or Power10 CPUs, but my AMD Ryzen 7 5800X desktop CPU I use for photo editing beats any ARM, Intel or Power CPUs I tested previously with syslog-ng. And the 5800X3D has almost 3x as large cache, as my current CPU. I must say that I am amazed about the advancement of semiconductor technology and how it helps to deliver more capabilities with less power.

I have been enjoying running openSUSE Tumbleweed on the Raspberry Pi 400 (and 4, I kind of mean the same thing, I just happen to appreciate the fun of the keyboard with containing the computer of the 400). The point of this blathering is to use the Raspberry Pi 400 in the same way as […]

So the OBS supports packaging Debian packages for a while now. Is it perfect? No. But it works well enough. Though one problem I recently ran into …

How to get past lintian?

The obvious answer is of course: Fix the errors it spits out. And I agree. I have done that. For all but one …

bad-distribution-in-changes-file

For many of the debian packages, I helped to start, we used:

pkgname (1.2.3-1.1) unstable; urgency=medium

We had two candidates for two available seats. As per the board election rules, in such a case, each candidate should receive at least 50% of the total number of votes to be considered as elected.

Both Attila Pinter and Maurizio Galli received good support from the community members. We had 542 eligible voters, out of which 147 voted in the election.

Attila Pinter received 122 votes in his favour which represents 83%, 22 votes against and 3 abstentions.

Maurizio Galli received 120 votes in his favour representing 82%, 21 votes against and 6 abstentions.

Congratulations to both of them! 👏 🎉