LucianaWritesTech

When Maya Chen joined Harbr as VP of Engineering, the on-call rotation was quietly destroying the team. Two senior engineers had already left. More were close. Here’s how she fixed a problem that turned out to be much less about alerts, and much more about what an engineering culture actually values. Source: istockphotos   The first thing Maya Chen did when she joined Harbr was ask to see the on-call logs. Not the incident reports, not the postmortems, the raw logs. Every page, every alert, every 3am notification that had fired in the previous six months. What she found was not a reliability problem. It was a tax, a slow, compounding levy being charged against the attention and sleep and goodwill of every engineer on the rotation. Harbr builds data infrastructure tooling for mid-market companies: the kind of product where uptime genuinely matters and where a real incident at the wrong moment can cause real downstream pain for customers. The on-call rotation existed for good reasons...

When Rocket Money’s user base exploded and support requests surged, the obvious answer was more headcount. Director of Operations Michelle McGowan chose a harder path, and what she built instead is a blueprint for how AI and humans can divide labour in ways that make both better. source: istockphotos   At peak, one person on Rocket Money’s support team was spending two to three hours every single day doing one thing: manually rerouting conversations to the right agent. Not solving problems. Not helping customers navigate a confusing charge or cancel a subscription they’d forgotten about. Just moving tickets from one queue to another because the system had no reliable way to do it automatically. It was, in the language of operations, a solved problem that hadn’t been solved. And Michelle McGowan, Rocket Money’s Director of Operations, knew exactly why. “We realized that no matter how well we tried to design those flows,” she says, “we were never going to be able to predict every sit...

C ounselling services close at 5pm. Gambling doesn’t. How researchers from Deakin University and the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation used Cogniss to build digital tools that meet people in their most vulnerable moments, and what the results reveal about the future of behavioural health support . source: istockphotos   The urge to gamble rarely arrives at a convenient time. It might come on a Tuesday afternoon, or late on a Friday night, or at two in the morning when every support service is closed and the nearest casino is twenty minutes away. For people trying to change their relationship with gambling, the gap between when they need help and when help is available has always been one of the hardest problems to solve. Traditional treatment works. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Motivational Interviewing are both clinically proven to help people quit or reduce gambling. But they share a structural limitation: they happen in a room, on a schedule, with a counsellor whose ...