+1000. But in my experience the trend started not with developers, but with the other people around them: Product Managers, Designers, Engineering Managers, Steve Jobs wannabes. There was an obvious disdain for users, and they were seen as complete dunces that should be shepherded to whatever new functionality happened to pop up their heads. There was also a complete disdain for the medium: designers used to print design choosing too rigid designs that didn't really work that well on a screen, and only adapting when the market started punishing them.
At first programmers were able to resist all that and have a voice, but lately it seems that the only prestige we retained was the salary, so we must play the same tune as the rest of the band. Agile was an attempt at being "self managed" and have a bit more independence, but that was also corrupted and lots of devs hate it with a passion too, so we're mostly back to practicing non-iterative, Steve-Jobsian-gut-feeling-centric development. Programmers have bought into that toxic mentality too.
And even in better situations, such as my current job, the tasks that cause the most issues, take more developer time and annoy the user the most are always the same: non-idiomatic features (for the web or for desktop apps), often concocted by designers totally disconnected with the audience, who at most did two or three "interviews" where the user said "yeah I could see myself using that".
non-iterative, Steve-Jobsian-gut-feeling-centric development
This is a misunderstanding of Jobs. It’s true that he had a disdain for what users would _say_ they wanted, but he was very focused on providing the, with something intuitive and easy to use. He wanted to make their lives better, and to ‘surprise and delight’.
He was also very iterative. He regularly saw demos of in-production software (and hardware), and would ask for anything from small tweaks to complete rewrites. He was completely unafraid of throwing away work, and would change his opinions on a dime if they didn’t work out.
Sorry, let me rephrase: I don't think Steve Jobs was like that at all.
But the copycats that don't believe in iterative development or in user research love to pretend they got all figured out before it's out for development.
But it became industrialized by business-types. The BOFH thing was personal. They considered (still do, sometimes), users of their systems to be "the great unwashed."
Basically, pests.
Business types look at users as a resource to be exploited to make money.
Basically, livestock.
Different outlook. We try to discourage pests, but we breed and incubate livestock. In neither case, are we particularly interested in the long-term benefit to our users. If anything, the BOFH types are actually working towards the benefit of their "lusers," because that's their job.
I write software that is targeted at a demographic that I actually respect, and sincerely want to benefit with my work (so, naturally, I don't get paid for it).
I'm constantly fighting with "modern software types" that want to treat users of the software that I write as livestock. They -quite literally- can't understand my PoV.
It's fairly discouraging, really. I'm treated like an idiot, because I actually want to help the users of my software.
The only way I see that happening is if it becomes easier to crowdsource donations. When your users are the ones putting bread on your table, they're the boss. Whatever they want they get. But sadly it's hard to crowdsource from programmers because there's so few of us. I love building and sharing software that delights my peers. Not because it's a smart thing to do. If money was the thing I cared about, then it'd be more rational to play video games on Twitch and blog about culture conflict on Substack. Rather coding is something I feel compelled to do and I won't stop even if it destroys me.
It predates the BOFH a bit as well. I am restoring a PDP-10 to operation and the operating system refers to users as "lusers", non-sanctioned users of the system are "turists" who were just there to gawk at things. It's not so much out of disdain for the people themselves as what they were doing with the computer - when computer resources were limited, it was grating to have to wait while unskilled and uncaring people occupied those resources for frivolous or unnecessary reasons.
Edit: Consider being told something along the lines of "Your DNA sequence has to wait, the CEO has important Facebook posts to read..."
> The disdain for "lusers" came from BOFH sysadmin types, well before it was adopted by the non-"tech", business-focused folks.
Based on the definitions in the thread, I'd say the BOFH attitude is more the inverse: it is contemptuous towards users, whereas the modern practice is more condescending towards users.
The latter still has a notional ethos of catering to the user, but the Monkey's Paw corruption caters towards the user's most superficial desires, particularly at a first impression, while de-optimizing for the acclimated or "power" user.
Exactly, the modern practice is condescending. The prevalent thinking is that "users don't really know what they want", so there is zero research, zero iteration, zero respect and a lot of corralling in the application to force users into a (lucrative) workflow.
But the treatment itself is first class, unlike with sysadmins of yore.
I think those are totally different kinds of disdain.
The former is generalized misanthropy plus specific hostility to the individuals who bother them.
The latter is more akin to the feudal lord or the cattle farmer: a lack of empathy plus an eagerness to stuff one's own pockets such that they build exploitative systems.
Sysadmins ultimately just wanted to be left alone to pursue their techie interests. But the MBA types are the opposite. You can't have an upper class without a set of lower classes to provide you with income and feelings of power.
Doesn't really get stuck (only time was when it "found" a fallen t-shirt behind a cabinet).
They do clean well for me, as long as I do it regularly. If I don't do it for a week it needs a second pass. But how much you need depends on external factors. Literally external, like how much dust gets in from outside.
Mine handled carpets well. IME of course. I didn't had pets when I had carpets, but at least with wooden floors cat hair gets cleaned fine.
Only caveat is if you have levels in your house you have to bring it up and down stairs but that's not asking much.
I mean there are countless documented situations where U.S. law enforcement has dramatically overreached or misstepped, and personally, I’d prefer people who have cameras and microphones in my home to require the U.S. judiciary to review some facts and agree to issue a warrant for any access. Amazon doesn’t meet this test and so this acquisition likely means we’ll be parting ways with iRobot equipment in our home.
I guess you could say my threat model is not “the United States is my adversary”, and more that I appreciate some checks and balances being present on ‘local yokel’ police departments which are empirically not always doing the right thing (especially where oversight is low).
One request from me would be for them to bring back the + operator and favour it instead of quotes, since Google Plus integration doesn't seem to be a thing anymore.
Honestly I think using quotes for that is probably better, even though + was a bit less typing. You wouldn't believe how many people search for [tar -xvf] and are confused as to why none of their search results contain the string xvf. It's hard to come up with operators that are easy to type and will never collide with their normal meaning in language, and I think quotation marks work much better for that than + did.
I explained elsewhere that it's very unlikely to come back because we actually do try to match + in queries now for thing like international phone numbers, and also as someone else noted, there's any number of names that make use of it (Disney+ for example).
I've definitely had cases where the manager (and on lots of cases, the CEO) tried to "turn those conversation around" and bullshit me.
The thing they wanted me to do was maximum priority, but there was also some other totally unpredictable thing (often support related) that I also had to take care of. The higher-up was 100% sure it wasn't a real problem and assumed I was exaggerating the situation.
The solution to the problem of lack of trust is of course to convince them, or to leave. If you can't make changes that increase your productivity, you'll become stressed and burned out, and will still not be able to do enough. It is a decision they made.
If you're doing something you think is important ("other totally unpredictable thing (often support related)") at work and your boss says they think it isn't important ("The higher-up was 100% sure it wasn't a real problem and assumed I was exaggerating the situation.") then I would assume your boss is right and you are wrong and act accordingly (start ignoring or delaying dealing with these support-related things when you are busy with the "higher priority" work). Either it will turn out your boss was right and it won't be a big deal, or it will turn out your boss was wrong, and it will be clear to everyone, and before you know it a big pronouncement will come down from up high saying that that "unimportant" thing actually is very important.
The previous CEO of the story wasn't wrong about what's important at all. Only about how much time it takes. He considered everything important and maximum priority, but didn't believe the "previous thing" was taking 80% of the time of the team. I couldn't tell the team to "drop the previous task" like the other post suggested: it was also maximum priority.
"Important" and "Takes too much time" are very different.
He didn't think it was important to put in the extra time then. He felt adequate results could be achieved with less time, and that the extra time to make sure quality and completeness was up to some standard was unnecessary.
So, try it. See how well you can do in 0.8 times the time. Probably not as well, but maybe still adequate for the boss's standards, or maybe not. Either way the impasse is solved, as both you and your boss will see exactly what can in fact be done in 0.8 the time.
> Do you blame Russians/Soviets and Chinese when their media are state organs that set agendas and promulgate state positions?
In general I don't blame Russians for what Putin is doing, but I will definitely blame a Russian that unapologetically supports the invasion of Ukraine, despite having the means to know otherwise.
If I tried to give them another perspective and they tell me to go fuck myself, or if they were actively trying to push an agenda (like it's common in USA political discussions), I would definitely blame them.
I don't know. It's like releasing some endangered species into the wild and then their natural predators come in and have them for dinner. The wolverines or lions or wolves, etc., will do that they do. We cannot blame them for eating the protected species.
When media are indoctrinating people and not providing perspectives how do you blame people, even if they have agency and can be considered responsible --just like the wolverine is ultimately responsible but free of blame.
But the media in general is showing other perspectives. Be it on other channels, be it by showing people what "that despicable other side is saying". And there's always neutral media too where others can check.
Sure, media is a huge problem. But people behaving like animals, having no empathy, taking no taking time to reflect upon what they say and taking no time to check other perspectives is what's doing the real damage here.
I don't think you're wrong per se, but I don't think GP is arguing that american "culture wars" are a media fabrication, just that it's meaningless, except for some wackos.
The problem is how the media (including social media) amplifies it.
I don't think it's true that they're meaningless, though; non-wacko people do have deeply-held values and get upset when public policy runs counter to them. The nihilistic viewpoint is more a symptom of getting used to politicians who pay lip-service to those values but break their promises.
You might not watch something because you hate the thing they put in (and that could be a minority), but you might not watch something also because "you don't give a shit" about the thing they put in - and want more of what you do like.
I think the Ghostbusters remake is an example where people not hating woke ideologically, still dislike the movie, because they don't give a shit about the things the writers found so important...
I've heard someone said "i usually care when the communication departement goes way too political: it usually mean that that the story is bad . In this case it was about video games, but i feel like it can be extended to TV shows and movies.
There is a lot of good rather feminist TV shows who don't get touted as feminist (mostly YA and fantasy tbh). The one who tries to sold themselves on that though, are all bad.
But i think this is transitory. In the 60s, when "La nouvelle vague" started to include different, new stereotypes (of women mostly, but of men too), there wasn't a lot of really good success in the beginning (to my eyes at least, the stereotypes were too much). They also had less money and couldn't afford to go wrong that many time, and eventually Truffaut got it right imho. Hollywood il bust, probably a lot, lot more than La nouvelle vague, but will start to get it right. Hopefully.
OK, take Captain Marvel, which is part run-of-the-mill Marvel movie, part lecture. A lot of people tune out because of that.
Whereas they don't have any issue with a strong, feminist female lead like Ripley (were men are usually the laughing stock, and all die in the hands of the xenomorph due to incompetence).
Your point is that "stuff <10% of people will like" doesn't make up for a mediocre film, and studios are trying to capitalise on that rather than working on better stories.
No, your point is that unless I completely agree with you about some specific voting demographics that happens to be a pet theory of yours, then I'm wrong about something completely unrelated. Seems like you're knee deep in this shit and projecting your views in an entire country.
I went to one too, and saw a talk about synchronising data between microservices and was astounded at how much work it was and the fact they had a whole team just to build tooling to debug issues on this specific company.
Basically they store 100x more data than they need because of data duplication between microservices. The company didn't even have that much customers (<1000), data or even enough users (a handful per company), but duplication was still generating several terabytes.
It's amazing how much complexity people are able to cram into simple system.
