Hi team--and hello Fred! You and I had some great conversations about Slack's direction--as well as its missed opportunities--back when we worked there together. I was leading developer education at the time, and frustrated with the decisions that were coming down that caused us to pivot away from what we agreed on was the "true core experience" of a collaborative messaging system: connecting users with the knowledge they need without having to parse through other knowledge that may be important in different contexts.
I'm genuinely excited that you're in this space now, too, as I myself have had my nose to the grindstone building out what the collaboration app for distributed teams that I've always wanted. We need options/competition in this space; just this year alone, I've had a little over a a dozen conversations with interested folks in teams across the United States working in industries from agricultural sensors manufacturing to game studios for hire, and the same pain points that you and I were reasoning about back at Slack are the same pain points that users still unwillingly tolerate.
See you around--and good luck out there!
PS. As an English major I'd be remiss to not share that I love the name emdash. :D
Perhaps others may make inferences about what a board appointment to a company with growing influence in government security matters means based on the appointee’s history in government security leadership.
I’m not sure I understand the analogy. To me there’s a difference between a former intelligence general being courted by a private company that sells services for rapidly and semi-autonomously generating content that bad actors have used and will likely continue to use for influencing geopolitical public sentiment, and a pharmaceutical company that does not sell similar technology.
Similar experience here, too. Virtually every time I have worked with, trained, or reported to someone with a CS degree from Stanford or Harvard, they have approached their work with a narrow mind and little empathy for others. This has been true in the military, public sector, and the private sector. I don’t know what it is about these places.
I read something a while back that did color my understanding of folks somewhat, and that was that there are a lot of people who come into the technology field for the money, not necessarily because of their lifelong interest in tinkering with computers. That to me is nuts, but I guess it’s to be expected. Maybe the sample size of my experience with these folks is overrepresented with people who are in it for the money and not curiosity and creativity. I don’t know.
Apple has consistently made laptops and development environments that creative types enjoy and admire. It’s too mad our economic system is setup to only care about infinite growth and monopolization at Apple’s size. It’s too bad just “being a great maker of great tools for great people” isn’t possible when you’re publicly traded.
All good and great but I think it’s a bit misleading. The participants were asked to do LeetCode—which limits this study to the suggested effects of cannabis on arbitrary and abstract programming tasks.
I got to the end of your post and realized I’d love to hear more about your thoughts around this. Also you must be proud of building something with so little bugs! Thats quite a feat.
Additionally, some problems have gone on for so long without any attention to solving them that they’ve created whole new problems—and then new problems, and then new problems… at jobs where you discover over time that management has kicked a lot of problems down the road, it can take a lot of words to walk people through the connection between a pattern of behavior (or a pattern of avoidance) and a myriad of seemingly unrelated issues faced by many.
Like remote work vs physically proximate work in software engineering, I’m hopeful that people will remember the value of human cognition so much so that it’s considered, like it is today for some people in some cases, a competitive advantage.
I'm genuinely excited that you're in this space now, too, as I myself have had my nose to the grindstone building out what the collaboration app for distributed teams that I've always wanted. We need options/competition in this space; just this year alone, I've had a little over a a dozen conversations with interested folks in teams across the United States working in industries from agricultural sensors manufacturing to game studios for hire, and the same pain points that you and I were reasoning about back at Slack are the same pain points that users still unwillingly tolerate.
See you around--and good luck out there!
PS. As an English major I'd be remiss to not share that I love the name emdash. :D