Author Archives: aknudson
Talent is a Power Curve, or Why Employee Top Grading is Driven by Bias
In which I discuss how talent distribution follows a power curve rather than a Gaussian “bell” curve, making it difficult to differentiate low performers. It critiques Amazon’s stack ranking policies, which ultimately lead to bias becoming the determining factor for who gets performance management. Continue reading
My Current Top 10 Space Photos
I lay out my top 10 favorite images, captured by my Unistellar eVscope 2 telescope, from the back porch of my home. Continue reading
Amazon’s RTO SNAFU
Where I discuss Amazon’s RTO (return-to-office) mandate, and their inability to communicate any data-driven or evidence-based decision making. Continue reading
Leaving Amazon
The first post I made on LinkedIn was my goodbye post, announcing that I was leaving Amazon, with a few comments as to why. I was surprised when it got nearly 250,000 impressions, over 1,500 reactions, and 150 comments. It’s … Continue reading
Increasing the Scope
As mentioned in the about page, I’m not only an amateur / hobbyist astronomer with a high-tech telescope, I’m also a software professional. I graduated with a computer science degree back in the mid-90’s, and pretty quickly got into management. … Continue reading
New Solar System Objects: Blue Angels!
Every summer, the Blue Angels perform in Seattle at SeaFair. For those that don’t know, the Blue Angels are the US Navy’s acrobatic flight team, and they perform all over the world. When in Seattle, they fly over Lake Washington, … Continue reading
Revisiting Some Favorites, And a New Nebula
I had a clear night a couple nights ago, without high clouds, and decided to give it a go. I was happy with what I captured! The first image is a new object (for me) – the Little Dumbbell Nebula. … Continue reading
I Tried To Catch a Saturnian Eclipse…
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out very well. On July 18th, Titan passed between Saturn and the Sun, casting a shadow over the Saturnian cloud tops. Unistellar pitched this on their website as a viewing opportunity, and I figured, what the … Continue reading
Maybe my new favorite picture
It’s been clear the last few nights, and I got some new photos. The first night I focused on galaxies that I’d not yet captured, and I got two new ones that are part of a cluster of galaxies referred … Continue reading
A couple revisits, a couple new ones
Despite the high clouds, I made another attempt a couple nights ago. Unfortunately, most of my long exposures got interrupted, and so I got two good images and one mediocre image. On the plus side, the mediocre one has 2 … Continue reading
