Employee #1: Reddit (2016)
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
At NetApp, backward compatibility and ability to rollback across multiple releases was a hard requirement. This made the codebase real hard to understand and maintain.
There are ways to circumvent that of course, but I just can't be bothered.
Oh mobile, consider Apollo.
1) no "this subreddit is only available via the app" walls
2) subreddit search functionality that doesn't require jumping through hoops to execute
3) no comment reading limitations (again a push for the app)
I'm sure there's more, but these are the things that pop to mind instantly
TBH I struggle to see how the new interface could be considered better in any respect worth considering. The only good feature is, I believe, showing images by default, which you can achieve trivially with Reddit Enhancement Suite and would have not required a complete re-engineering on a SPA model.
There might well be server-side improvements that make it worth to Reddit, but from a user perspective the new UI was a straight UX downgrade; without old.reddit.com they would probably have become another Digg.
I think the new interface integrates more seamlessly with ads, so from reddit's perspective, I can see why they'd prefer it.
As much as many people hate UI/UX changes they happen for a reason. Due to the much more mainstream adoption of reddit I'd say that reason was wider adoption.
After reading "We are the Nerds"... well, I don't want to say I got the impression he was treated poorly. But it was very odd. He seems like a hidden founder which is weird considering how many treat Aaron Schwartz, given the stories told about them both in the book.
This isn't quite right either. They write them because he was awesome.
Aaron helped in the development of RSS and Creative Commons. He was everywhere you looked, and all around incredibly insightful (his book reviews and blog are still amazing). He was also well connected: Tim Berners-Lee, Lawrence Lessig, John Gruber, Paul Graham, ...
He was one of the brightest beacons for open source, open knowledge, the web, and open culture. He was incredibly well known and liked before the MIT / JSTOR witch hunt killed him.
We lost a luminary. Our world would have been brighter if he were still around.
Can someone elaborate the difference? To me IT is more on the operation side while engineering is on development side. Would love to hear other perspective
This probably shows a lack of understanding of cultural differences by the person surprised by the use of the term rather than the speaker.
Only the "executive engineer" held any kudos and there only a handful of those in the country.
In software companies I usually found an IT and an R&D department.
In non-software companies I found IT departments that did everything. From IT support to software development.
Engineering is external facing, their customer is the end user and they generate revenue.
The terms being so clearly deliniated is more obvious in the US, in my experience. But some old brick and mortar companies still treat their engineering departments as a cost centre and it shows.
IT support isn’t even employed here, it’s contracted out.
I have always seen Engineering to be a cost center and not revenue generating. This is the case, since Engineering doesn't directly add to profit but still costs money to operate.
This is a little weird to me, because for my age group (I'm 50), both sets were typically made up of the same tribe of computer-obsessed folks who begged a 6502 machine from their parents in the early 80s and took degrees in unrelated fields because of how far behind industry most university CS programs were in the early 90s. (And there really weren't any MIS programs.)
Somewhere along the way, though, a split happened. And in many (but not all) companies, IT became a lower-tier support organization. Salaries stagnated, and a quality gap happened. It might just be that, in lots of places, developers are a revenue source while IT is nearly always overhead. It's a rule of thumb that the more talented folks will probably venture towards being revenue and not overhead, because the compensation is typically better, and the organization will treat you with more respect.
So now, in many but not all places, there's a perception of a class difference between the two. The IT guy is derided as someone 5 hours short of an associate's degree with a cheap certification, no ability to troubleshoot beyond obvious steps, and zero interest in computing when off the clock while the developer is an ivory-tower whiz kid with hobby projects in Haskell and his/her fingers in half a dozen FOSS projects.
I am obviously exaggerating. But this view, which is not uncommon, and reflects a shift that IS real even if not to the degree I lampoon above, is probably why a developer would make the distinction.
My exposure to big-co IT is that BOFH attitudes are sadly common.
One thing that stuck with me from an early mentor -- who as NOT, I should be clear, talking about IT or software at the time -- is that too many people think there is power in saying "no"; real power comes from the ability say "yes".
In my company (a big Fortune 500) engineering and IT are totally different things if you look from the bottom of the hierarchy. BUT (this is a big but) when you talk to management the higher you get, the more SW engineering and IT are the same. I have been in several meetings where the CEO always referred to the CIO whenever a tech question came up. So the CIO answered all these questions although in reality she has no input into any software development decisions that are being made for our products and her knowledge basically consist of reading vendor whitepapers. It's quite annoying because this way IT often gets multi million dollar budgets for fancy AI/digitization/ML projects that are all wasted because they have no clue about SW engineering.
In summary, there is a very common perception that everybody that uses a computer is part of IT.
Digg fundamentally changed the way their site worked to highlight content from power users.
When you become huge, inertia is incredibly strong.
It's all about enthusiasts and early adopters (who are very fickle) and late adopters and laggards (who are very much the opposite of fickle). Crossing the chasm. Reddit has crossed the chasm.
Even though the rest of the world is literally flooded with US political news (less so now that Trump is gone), most of the rest of the world doesn't really care about those things Americans are super passionate about.
Reddit can remain huge even if half its US userbase leaves it.
This point is even more salient for Facebook outrage, BTW.
The only way a new platform can compete with them is by having the individual communities of reddit move to it with individual governance and then, allowing these communities to interact with each other in some way. The alternatives that look promising today are based on ActivityPub, but they fall into the same trap that reddit has: they want to appeal and attract as many users as possible without regard for suitability or community building. I'm hoping that the ting I'm working on will be better, but I'm not there just yet.
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(Yes, airline distribution is a messy domain)