My name is Zef Hemel. I use writing as a tool to structure my thinking, and to reflect, and adapt as a result. I’m transparent by nature, and have found that sharing the things I’m reading and thinking about — generally around the topics of technology, management and people — is not only helpful for myself, it can be helpful for others as well. And often, in response, people point me to things I wasn’t yet aware of, or challenge my ideas or conclusions. Now, that sounds like a win all around. Welcome to Zef’s Musings.
Recent Musings
An Ode to the HRBP
For most of my career I was unaware of the full extent of the value of HR. This all changed about two years ago. As is the case with many things, this was the result of a screw-up on my part. Some would call it a failure, but you know — I don’t buy into failure.
Before we get to that story, though, let me sketch my understanding of what HR entailed up to that point.
read moreAppreciated!
One of the common reasons for people to disengage at work is not feeling appreciated. People phrase this problem in various ways: not feeling seen, not feeling valued, not feeling rewarded.
These subtle differences in phrasing can lead to jumping to different types of solutions. Language is a magical thing. If people say they don’t feel valued, we may think: ok, the problem is value. What is guaranteed to show value?
read moreNifty!
A while ago I found my old wallet.dat file. I had it backed up, unencrypted on my old dropbox account. wallet.dat is a file used for Bitcoin that holds your cryptographic keys. After installing a Bitcoin client, plugging in the wallet file, followed by a few days worth of downloading the entirety of the Bitcoin blockchain, I could see that at some point in time (many years ago) I had 9 bitcoin in my wallet.
read moreInternet Central
Let me try to set this up with a few headlines from the last year or so:
Buckle Up for Another Facebook Election Twitter’s Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump Facebook and Shopify boot Trump following Capitol siege YouTube defends choice to leave up videos with false election claims Youtube’s COVID-19 medical misinformation policy Facebook says it will ban QAnon across its platforms Judge Refuses To Reinstate Parler After Amazon Shut It Down The payments mess that almost scared OnlyFans away from sex work I bet you have an opinion on each of these: good or bad?
read moreAn Ode to the Mattermost Mug
Writing about the detrimental effects of rewards in No More Rewards, one thing kept nagging at me. A few weeks earlier we had held a virtual conference for our company and community called MatterCon. One of the highlights for me was a video prepared by our community team. In the video they interviewed some of the top Mattermost contributors. People not employed by the company, but contributing at a purely volunteer basis.
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