That is my prediction as well. It's unfortunate as we'll enter the unindexed web where all that helpful content you can find by appending "reddit" onto any search will no longer be getting produced. All of it hidden in discords, out of sight.
Who knows, maybe there will be an easy way to get stuff published out to the proper web. Things like community FAQs or guides that would be broadly of use. I think the loss of the conversations about minutiae will just be a fact though if that migration happens.
I mean, taxes are a real thing and you have to pay them based on where you (the employee) live and do work. In the US for state income tax, it's a confusing mix of both lived location and worked location in various amounts by governments with a "claim" and with plenty of exceptions to go around. Consulting companies have had to deal with it forever (and states have "handled" forever), because you live in Miami, doing work for a company based in LA, and you travel to your client in NYC for 3 days a week for the whole year (60% of your income "generated" there). This is now a complicated Florida, New York, California scenario.
So the choice isn't Big Brother companies who want to know where you are at all times and respectful companies who allow you to get your work done how you want. It's between companies who are following the applicable tax laws or those who are not. A company that is structurally opting to not follow laws seems untenable. A company is a legal construct in many ways. Whether or not the employee can commit something like tax fraud is perhaps a less interesting question, because, yeah, you can probably cheat on your taxes.
Elixir was one of the few languages I saw in companies (albeit, infrequently) that wasn't like Java, C#, Python, or JS (Scala here and there). Was always curious about it as perhaps something that could be reasonably pitched as having some nominal uptake.
Pure anecdata there also. Literally just ones I have personally seen on clients or heard about from coworkers.
> Maybe it bothers me that using ask as a noun is passive voice, like the request is disembodied. I'm not asking, the ask just appeared there!
I think the latter is the key to corpspeak as a whole and it has ramifications beyond just stripped emotion. It always erases causality from the communication. Everything is just "appearing" with no thought to how or why things are the way they are. Businesses are really, really bad about asking "Why?" at times and this kind of language reinforces that. There is no "Why?", things just materialize into existence and are and you (have to) deal with them.
The emotion part makes sense, because often the answer to a "Why?" is because someone has made a mistake or done something dumb and it provides cover. However, it also leads to rote, wasteful, inefficient behaviors. It doesn't necessitate that there is no reason "why" things are being done, but it does mean that a reason isn't required either.
"Why are we having this sync meeting?" "Well, to sync of course!"
> After the 10th "SMS Service" is created, no one knows what any of them do
Yeah, that's always been my concern. "Descriptive" is a very precarious strategy because it takes very little to go from maybe descriptive to generic and confusing. Multiple variations of the same "descriptive" name are another common issue. I see often a lot of very similar named services that are the bane of naming in my opinion. Someone made a User Management Layer and then someone else made a Person Data Service and next thing you know you see a User Data Service and now it's just confusing. Factor in that each one of those things gets called the UML, PDS, and UDS and it just gets worse (did I mention they each connect to the Person/User Data Store/base).
It's hard to think about because I feel like when they work I don't think about them at all. And when they don't work I think about and stew about them excessively. So the good cases I forget about completely and the bad ones are stuck in my memory.
SDLC is a frequent pain point. Often non-existent or hacky, e.g. export this giant XML doc and you can re-import it if needed. If any step requires clicking on buttons it generally leads to that kinda pain. Almost fundamentally, if I need to go copy paste or click on something for the product to work, I won't be able to automate it. Hence, it needs to be completely automatable. Similarly, if the config / set up / customization one does is obfuscated after it is specified it can be a headache to try to work around. Also maybe not the end of the world but many also decide to "handle" version control on your behalf, which can maybe be fine, but will also then almost by definition be divorced for your usual approach and processes.
On the last question, I think this boils down to how well can one operate at the surface level. It is not uncommon in these low code apps to have to understand in detail what is happening below the hood. So yeah, the top layer abstraction might be very simple in practice, but if working with it frequently necessitates me knowing how that abstraction will be executing it leads to an extra layer of complexity that has not abstracted anything. In a way they often function like a second language going through a translator: if I have to be considering the Spanish version the no-code cares about and also how and what it will be translated to in English under the hood, it's just extra confusing for perhaps little gain. What makes it extra pernicious is you can be operating entirely off intuition for what that under the hood English really is, rather than some open spec you can at least drill into.
Worst part here is I feel like this is really often something that will come with using the product. Often the use cases documented and sold really seem like all you'll need.
It likely depends on the broad culture behind it. If someone sends a "Hey" and then is a fast enough typer and immediately can get the context going as I look, that's not a huge deal. Sometimes it's an opening to a more synchronous conversation and then it's less of a big deal because we're gonna be going back and forth with quick messages. Part of the irritation is you can still just always open a message with "Hey, something something something" and keep it all in one.
The problem is people who send a lone "Hey" and then... nothing.
Some will wait for you to say respond with your own greeting (which is all you can respond with because you don't know what you're even talking about yet). Other's don't wait but do delay and the initial greeting was just a warning or something that a "real" message is incoming. I've had folks ping me the "Hey" and then I respond immediately with a "Hey" (to stave off the above "permission to speak" people) and they get distracted and say nothing else for 10 minutes.
Some will message you while you're busy, so you don't respond to their "Hi". You then respond to it a half hour later with the only thing you can say to that contextless message: "Hey, what's up?". Only now maybe they are busy, and they respond again to you a half hour after that. You've had a conversation "opening" for an hour for what purpose?
Some will immediately begin typing out a gigantic block of text and you are sitting there waiting while the "XX is typing" message unwaveringly sits at the bottom. Bonus points here if they were editing and revising as they went and you get an eight word sentence after what appeared to be 3 minutes of continuous typing.
Some will do all of those things so you end up having your attention taken multiple times for minutes at a time for a message that realistically might take you a couple seconds to read, parse, and respond to if it had been sent all at once.
Even more relevant to the question: it introduces complexity that harms citizen's basic needs by putting in place knowledge inequities. You can make the tax code as complicated as you want, and the hyper wealthy will still be able to pay for people to understand it and squeeze out every drop of value because the absolute amount of money in play makes it feasible. Spending $200k to "save" $1million is a good deal. That's maybe a couple full time employees. If you wanted to save $100 instead, throwing $20 at is isn't gonna get you anything.
So all those people who can't "subcontract" their way through the complexity with specialists are left to their own devices. And they don't have the time or expertise to navigate it themselves. So the tests and checks and processes and discoverability weeds out deserving people constantly just in the hopes of preventing some "undeservings" from having access.
It'd be like writing an algorithm and every branch of logic you put in you have to do a random roll and throw an exception some percentage of the time. Each new branch compounding to filter more and more while also costing more and more to facilitate. But that execution reality is ignored so that the pure logic can be focused on in a vacuum.
It's all like the opposite of Blackstone's ratio regarding crime that "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer". Social programs are designed such that they would often rather let ten innocent people suffer than one guilty person benefit.
Choice is the real thing though more than actual value add. I feel like I see it less now, but recall seeing how vendors would only accept certain cards and not others (frequently, not American Express) which was as far as I know stemming mostly from higher fees they didn't want to pay. Similarly, places would not accept credit cards at all if they had razor margins and didn't want to eat the fee. I still know of a few places like that, often with an ATM near by so the customer can pay a fee if they are caught unaware.
That was the thing though, a business could decline to accept particular cards or cards at all and still perform transactions. That "opportunity" has generally not extended to the app store world in a practical way. If you want to play, they had their cut and customers and vendors didn't have a whole lot of say in what was reasonable. There is no simple default transaction (like cash) that they were trying to out compete.
Survivor in 2000, American Idol in 2002, The Bachelor in 2002, The Amazing Race in 2001. That always felt to me like when they found their "reality game show" formula that was then replicated off of those base archetypes into the entire rest of the genre. So mid-aughts does feel about right for when the explosion happened.
The more pure reality shows like original Real World or COPS seem more like ancestors than anything and didn't spawn as much of an immediate copy cat proliferation. Real World if anything morphed to be more like those later incarnations.
> First, a lot of this is in the abstract and the difficult part is how it gets applied in any given situation.
A lot of these "genre" of books tend to fall into this camp for me. They feel like trying to hold onto sand: sure in the initial moment you have it grasped, but it just as quickly falls away and there's nothing really there to hold onto.
A classic example is one from this list, "Delusional self-confidence causes you to resist change". If you drill into this, it seems like non-delusional self-confidence is what lets you enact control and not simply let life happen to you. In the other case, delusional self-confidence means you are refusing to accept reality and the changes you can't effect. It might be then reformed to "Rational self-confidence causes you to accept change".
What is the take away then? Seems like it's "Don't be delusional / be rational". Which, sure, but that is basically inapplicable and a near truism. If you knew you were in either camp you don't need any of this advice. "Know when you're being rational and when you're being delusional" feels like the general place a lot of stuff like this reduces down to in the end.
I do like the simple compliment / feedback accepting with a "Thank you" one as it's fairly easy to actually do. You will get thrown occasionally when someone wants to dig after the fact however.
I've used Slack competitor Flowdock in the past which did the more "elevated" approach to threads. Rather than "hide" them from the main branch of a channel, the main branch had every message in the top level and you could collapse to a thread view if you wanted to read it in isolation.
In my experience, the main problem here was that people regularly lost sight that a conversation even was in a thread. So they'd post their response unthreaded right in line. Now the people in the thread view can't see it, but if you were in the main channel it still looked just fine (after all they were one after the other). If it was a nascent threaded conversation (like 2 or so posts only), often the thread was just abandoned and everything was done top level. For bigger threads where you caught after the fact it was a threaded, people would either delete and repost or would just duplicate their post over into the thread again (which means it appears twice in the main channel). The worst offenders were people who refused to thread so even if it was humming along fine they'd just post their response inline always (and repeatedly).
Don't know if I have a particular point there other than both had tradeoffs. I do find that the Slack thread updates disappearing seems to be less frequent of an issue and the threading problems in the alternative were near constant. I think Slack's issue would be largely a nonissue if viewing a thread "subscribed" you to it so you could see updates without needing to post. Maybe reactions are a workaround too. It's fairly easy to unsubscribe if one's blowing you up. Subscribing to all threads regardless seems to reduce some of their usefulness and that's the current solution I believe.
White boarding. We had them everywhere and used them often. The big ones in conference rooms were good and pretty standard, but the tiny ones placed near the actual desks for just quick and slipshod thinking out loud type stuff is what I miss most. For the big group type things I find myself often just pre-diagramming things which is way less efficient, but works as I'd probably be the one drawing anyway.
And part of the problem is that I know there are tools and we've kinda sorta used them every now and then, but at my company at least we don't have a solid broadly used solution. It might be the part mentioned by others about the ever looming "return to office" plans that have lead to it being punted constantly rather than properly addressing the need some way. Part of me hopes that there can be some moment where remote is just accepted and we can take steps to making it work as well as possible (with things like tablets with a stylus distributed) rather than just carrying on in limbo.
So I guess broadly the hardest thing is about how we're still, nearly 2 years later, in a nonideal one foot in, one foot out approach to remote working.
I heard this in a podcast recently about people's perceptions of the pandemic driven work from home situation. Some folks we're saying they missed the "commute". The hosts argued that they probably didn't miss cramming into a subway, being stuck for an hour in stop-and-go traffic, or being stranded out in the rain. That feeling they were missing were just those clear points of delineation between on and off work. Also that it did involve a clear amount of time set aside that was not work or open, free time.
That point and one about how a pandemic caused, mandatory work from home scenario where many other amenities around home were not available is a really weird situation stuck with me most. In particular keeping in mind that we can ameliorate many of people's least favorite parts going forward.
The inflation argument is one I don't know enough to be able to square myself. Don't fully understand how whatever the UBI is eventually reduces to being below the bare minimum of basic.
But, putting that part aside, the idea is that it's just the barest of basics. So if you have a decent salary now, the UBI that is 1/5th or less than that is not gonna help you pay your rent/mortgage that has gone from 30% of your salary to 150% of your UBI. People could likely realign their life though over time which would be massively impactful. Perhaps some would prefer having their basic needs met + working a very part amount of time for some spending money + engaging in a different core life pursuit. But, with that part taking time the market could presumably correct.
That's just for high earners though who can't currently just drop out / transition overnight due to present obligations. The folks who are closer to where a UBI would be putting them anyway it gets way more difficult. A negative income tax might work there, so that keeping the job is still more regardless of what that currently salary is. That flat UBI tends to have some problems in that regard. Then again, those same folks might be over night doubling their take home cash or being able to have no change in cash for a complete reduction in work and the temptation to just go to zero hours would be high (assuming they aren't in financial pain already where the current amount is still not enough). A flat UBI would probably need to be slowly rolled out. Basically get folks used to being more well off so that the flat UBI only can be appropriately viewed as less ideal than their (new) current situation.
Yeah, we need our TicketFixer to also include the No_Bob 0.2 plugin that figures out that a decent percentage of the time whatever "Bob" is asking for in that meeting is not what "Bob" thinks he is asking for or should be asking for and can squash those tickets. Without that we're gonna somehow end up with spreadsheets in everything.
Yeah, it's important but not some grand law one should obey. I think every technical person has a time in their early life where they come across something that was genuinely wrong or illogical or just bad (in some cut and dry way). That imprints on them and from then on it is burned into our minds when we see something that seems off to immediately think "that is stupid". That is always my first (perhaps subconscious at times) thought I know and suspect it's fairly endemic.
All I take this nice parable to mean is that maybe you make your second, less instinctive thought be "why is that here?". That's it. Consider it then carry on. No law mandating a thorough investigation. No restriction on change without complete understanding. No need for deterministic certainty. Just a simple consideration that you should entertain. Or perhaps more accurately, a consideration you shouldn't disregard.
If your "default" reading of any sociopolitical proposal is to assume it is an absolutist desire and not one more nuanced or practical under the hood, you have a wrong default.
"Defund the police" meaning "zero funds for the police" or "no police exist". "Anti-work" meaning "against all work" or "work" meaning "general expenditure of productive effort" or something.
You can look a little bit more into any slogan or label and see more of what it entails. Hell, some people might want to abolish police entirely or have everyone laze around in utopian bliss while not starving. Feel free to disagree with the former and see if the latter have any plan to not starve or if it's nonsense. I've generally taken each to mean "we should allocate public security and safety money differently" and "our current construct of the job as the sole driver of societal worth is bad".
So "default" to something more reasoned and nuanced and see if they are absolutist rather than the reverse. Pithy and descriptive tend to not go hand in hand so this applies often.
I use one and have had a couple over the years. Decently cheap and I functionally just want a laptop form factor and UX for a tablet use case: web browsing, some light app usage (often for casting / streaming), and also being able to type as needed, all from an actual couch / on the lap / wherever. Used to be no Android App support so that part was a no go and now you have the linux containers to fall back on if you need to run something else or want a proper terminal.
I have a bulky work laptop and a big desktop PC. The niche left over maps to a nice slim, fanless device for casual usage very well in the Chromebook space. Maybe preaching to the choir here, but my keyboard will need to be pried from my cold, dead hands and the tablet + detachable options all seemed way too delicate.
I don't have GamePass but do find it intriguing. The value prop is completely on the other end. It's not wondering if you can play (or replay) some older game that you want in particular. It's when a new game comes out or you are in the mood for something you haven't played before, you can go to the page and find something to at least try for zero marginal cost. If you play or are interested in a broad swath of games, eliminating that initial hump of whether you want to invest money into it is a different ball game.
It's really is literally just Netflix of games. Not great at all when you want to watch Movie X, better if you want to just watch some movie, and the only way when you want their in house productions which in theory are striving to be high quality. GamePass isn't to that final level of exclusivity yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if some game goes "Only on GamePass" in the nearish future.
It's also similar to Netflix in that if your usecase was the old "Just streaming The Office only" you could probably just purchase it. A mono game player would definitely be better served just buying the title they want for $60 rather than a monthly fee, but it starts to get more attractive at just a few games per year.
Who knows, maybe there will be an easy way to get stuff published out to the proper web. Things like community FAQs or guides that would be broadly of use. I think the loss of the conversations about minutiae will just be a fact though if that migration happens.