You can search for articles and you will find more info dating from the year 2000.
IIRC, there was a lengthy court “battle” to allow them to adopt, as the parents are a gay couple and that was not as openly accepted at the time. That’s why this story was so big back then and is still relevant today, it was a unique case.
As time goes by, people will feel like these changes are more and more what makes Paris great. It will be similar to how progress happened for Amsterdam and other cities. A slow conscious fight against car centric infrastructure, it’s not magic, it’s slow steady progress.
Unfortunately it is considered "woke" and left-brained to use alternatives to cars, therefore billionaire-owned media (i.e. most of French TV and press) tries to hammer that this is somehow bad, making policy progress needlessly slow and difficult.
In the middle of the hype/doomsday articles about AI and our type of work, I decided to write a bit about my mental journey towards embracing LLM agents, and agentic engineering.
A moderate take on all the change going through our jobs. I hope you enjoy the read.
Experienced Data Engineer with 7 years of experience in startup environments, building data pipelines for SaaS products.
Worked with cloud environments built with AWS and GCP, and proficiency with Python, SQL, dbt, Airflow, PostgreSQL and BigQuery.
Track record of delivering end-to-end data solutions, from customer facing data integrations, to API driven data ingestion, and making data available for web applications and C-suite reporting.
Location: London, UK (GB and EU passport holder)
Remote: Fully remote preferred, 1x/week ok
Willing to relocate: Depends (to Canada)
Technologies: Python, Airflow, dbt and SQL, Docker. Comfortable in AWS, GCP, and happy to pick up new technologies (Golang was one I did in my past job)
I have had a few people around me say that it is really hard to connect in remote companies. It was not my experience at my last job, and I think a lot of it came from consistently engaging in virtual coffee breaks.
I know they are a divisive topic, so I wrote a bit about my experience with them, and I hope this shines some positive light over them - they should not be "mandated corporate fun".
Hope you enjoy the read, and hopefully engage more fully in them!
Thank you for sharing these sources with me! I will have a look.
I would not say I am trying to "manage up", but I am definitely trying to be a lot more active in my growth process. In the past I kept waiting for things to happen, and thought my manager would have all the answers. Now, I want to be an active part of that conversation and find the right path.
This is a very good thing to do. Managers have to split their attention multiple ways across multiple people and so they end up neglecting you by default. They're also time poor.
You will actually be helping them if you can package up "asks" in a way so that all they have to do is hit reply on an email, type "approved" and hit send. There's often an asymmetry between the value you get vs. the cost to your manager which you can exploit. For example, where I work they provide financial support for certain forms of further study (e.g. master's degree) in certain domains. If one of my direct reports sent me an email explaining they want to study X and the policy covers them studying X, here are the details etc. etc. I will say "approved" pretty much every time. The money doesn't come out of my budget anyway, so it's free additional remuneration frommy perspective. Heck, even when it is my budget I often don't care because it's not personally coming out of my own pocket, and we lose that money anyway once the next financial year ticks over, so better to spend it while we can. But if they just sit there quietly hoping that I'll one day come to them with an offer for them to do further studies in X, they're going to be waiting forever. I want to give my team members stuff but I've got 50 billion other things to content with so I don't have the time to plan their career for them. The worst are the people who think I'm their mother and they come to me with "I want this thing, now you go figure out how to do it for me." The thing is, I'm lazy: I like to do easy things, and I don't like to do hard things. And that request sounds like a lot of hard work to me. Easier to just say no.
So remember: (1) If you don't ask you don't get, (2) It's almost never my money anyway, and (3) If you make it easy for me to say "yes", I almost certainly will.
I think you're mistakenly equating mentoring with managing.
A manger inherently isn't your friend nor on your side, a mentor is.
It's straight up in the name: the goal of a manager is to remove your individuality from the perspective of the person above the manager.
The manager is essentially an abstraction layer if you're looking at it from a software development perspective, so the caller doesn't need to worry about the implementation details.
Your manager can also be your mentor, but the manager can't mentor everyone they're managing. That's just impossible from a time perspective
IIRC, there was a lengthy court “battle” to allow them to adopt, as the parents are a gay couple and that was not as openly accepted at the time. That’s why this story was so big back then and is still relevant today, it was a unique case.