Be careful with that thing, it's a confidential coffee maker
devblogs.microsoft.com
devblogs.microsoft.com
We had some serious storms come through while I was there. A lot of the permanent residents went home. As I was a visitor and there just for as long as it took me to fix some problems, I was encouraged to stay and work late. I was assured that we would not lose power because the building had been recently equipped with a generator.
A storm came through and the building lost power. It was almost entirely pitch black in the building full of computers, which all went dark, fans and disks suddenly silent. A small fraction of the emergency lights came on. Most were in disrepair and never lit up. It turns out that in a secure environment, one has to make special arrangements to have someone inspect the emergency lighting. We heard the generator spin up. Still no computers, no lights.
In the darkness, one little nook came to life. This nook contained the coffee pot, microwave, and refrigerator. Apparently this organization considered only one piece of equipment important enough to be connected to the generator. We thereafter referred to it as the mission critical coffee pot.
Each individual measure may make sense in isolation, but just like with any long-lived project, the sum total of all of them can absolutely still add up to absurdity.
The next day the CTO called me into his office and said he should have me fired right then and there for violating security protocols. I explained what had happened but he didn't care because it looked bad for him. Apparently I should have had someone call security to escort me back to my desk.
Two months later they started construction on the room I was in to provide a path to an exit that didn't go through the main office. To use the bathroom I had to go through that exit and leave the building, walk outside to the main entrance and use the "non-secure" bathroom and then be escorted back to my desk through the office.
the windowless rooms and sterile environment are actually not much different from commercial telecom stuff, like if you meet a person who works for an ILEC and has a desk in a CO.
stick your cellphone in the little shelf box outside the entrance to the secured area, pick it up when you leave, etc.
Maybe this is unfair and what seem to be failures are actually by design. Maybe the soul crushing environment is a necessary condition to be in the right frame of mind to inhibit ethical analysis and implement DoD policy.
GTFO.
And then he never shaved again, or wore anything more formal than a Hawaiian shirt. Much to the anger of his entire management chain.
I read this. I loved it. I remember it. But I cannot for the life of me find any references to it online and worry that I dreamed it all.
I would love if someone here has a reference to this and can share it with me. Or tell me I am truly crazy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Shugart
He lead the teams that created the world's first disk drive and the floppy drive. He later founded Seagate.
I did not find a reference to this incident, but he did have a love for Hawaiian shirts, and he did things like try to get his dog elected to Congress, so it would not seem too far fetched for him to do something like what you are describing.
> In 1996, he launched an unsuccessful campaign to elect Ernest, his Bernese Mountain Dog, to Congress.
I like this guy.
Political parties can ask for a free copy so they can mail info to the pool of possible voters. Is one of their rights as candidates. This information is valuable [1], can be sold or used in other projects to find possible clients, so is not a totally crazy move
Can be also interesting just as exercise to teach yourself in the inner parts of the voting system.
[1](specially in the pre-Facebook age. Not so much today).
In fact let’s make it required that only animals can be elected. Sure they have handlers who tell them how to vote, but at least the pictures would be nicer.
My next headline element is "Al," as in Al Shugart, who passed on the other day. His passing was definitely an event that gave me the urge to post. While the world remembers Al as a tech industry pioneer, his significance for me was that he transformed my name from the obscure to the instantly recognizable, a fact which has required me with predictable regularity to respond to many of those to whom I am introduced, "no, no relation." Sometimes, especially at industry functions, I felt like wearing a sign.
I posted a humorous incident about this state of affairs back in my early blogging days. It was right after Paynter was just getting started with his well-known series of blogger interviews. I had the honor of being his first male subject. The immediate aftermath was a rash of "are you related?" emails. So I put up a post to set the record straight.
Anyway, Al Shugart was my kind of guy--brilliant, creative, irreverent, fun-loving, and dismissive of the establishment. This guy was wearing Hawaiian shirts to work decades before it became a hip way to show that you or your organization were leading-edge.
Al, who started out as an IBMer, was able to get away with thumbing his nose at the rigid IBM dress code of the fifties and sixties. That may not mean much to Gen-X or Yers, but if you were around in those days, as I was, and remember how quasi-militaristic things tended to be in the big business sector, including high-tech, you have to be impressed with Shugart's chutzpah. I'm proud to bear his name. Rest well, Al.
I remember all the lectures from overconfident bullshitters with shiny shoes. A company run by salesmen. It is SO SO nice that IBM got eclipsed by the internet tech companies. Even if they are arrogant/difficult in their own way it was a victory for the technically and ethically competent.
It seemed then that IBM was where software went to die.
Eventually we had to resort to the time honored tradition of buying a cheap Keurig style machine, and having a "community pot" in our area to buy k-cups, those disposable creamer packets, etc. This was the point where I realized that IBM is probably in its terminal phase.
Shame. I rather liked IBM at one time. Heck, my dream when I was in college was exactly go to to work for IBM and go to Boca to work on OS/2!
I worked at one F500 company that eliminated the coffee for cost-saving reasons. The coffee was terrible, so I didn't exactly cry, but for this company it couldn't have cost more than, maybe, a million or so a year. I mean, I wouldn't want to write the check myself, but as a budgetary line-item, it would have been a rounding error.
I've worked at an office that dumped their Bunn drip machine that had worked since 1837 for a Keurig, because they didn't like the big twice-yearly bills for the coffee service. The Keurig has been replaced twice, and the cups fill the waste bin, and I guarantee they're paying more for coffee now.
It's really weird how people get hung up on the Coffee Question. I assume they're all tea drinkers and are being spiteful.
Now a decade later, the ridiculous cost cutting has turned all the restrooms into disgusting places that are poorly cleaned. Except for the 4th floor. Where the VIPs work. Those restrooms are clean enough to eat off the floor.
I was friendly with the cleaning staff (I worked late a lot, and helped the facilities guys with stuff as needed). Turns out that their budget had been cut 25%, so they had to not only cut staff, but they lost all the productive people. So the good leftovers took care of the 4th floor while everyone else got the left side of the Bell curve. They would have been fine (it's janitorial work, not brain surgery), but they weren't given the time to do a good job. Trash cans were infrequently dumped, nothing was dusted, cubicles vacuumed randomly, and windows never cleaned. Except the 4th floor. Visiting it was like going to a penthouse suite in Vegas. Eventually they outsourced it completely to a company that cut corners to squeeze out a profit.
The same thing happened with our Security guards. They initially were company employees, had dedication and did a competent job. Then they were all replaced by a contractor. So now we have random guards who barely do anything.
I'm sure someone hit a KPI for saving the company money, but these nickel and dime actions make everyone question the company's commitment to their employees. If you won't provide clean restroom facilities, where else are you skimping?
The restrooms for the employees at a company says a lot about the company.
I do sadly agree that the app's eww-score would rapidly converge to represent the worst-case-scenario baseline. This is the trickiest part; squinting and looking from the right angle I could see Apple pulling such an app from the app store, and possibly Google as well. (The apps would definitely just be WebView containers with little investment.) But I see that as a possibility, not a certainty; they would provide a useful service as well.
There are a lot of interesting ways to potentially solve the moderation problem. Fundamentally the most complex yet most viable approach would naturally be to train an ML model to distinguish along a spectrum from "WHAT" from "wait is that nearby? that looks better than my current favorite." This would need training data and lots of manual classification until it reached a point of viability, so you would very probably need a small army of assistants helping to both classify image inputs and override the model's output. The good news is that with the service just starting out "army" could probably mean "1 or 2 people"; the caveat-emptor news is that you'd need the ML model ready go from day 0 in order to not wind up behind the curve. You might also be able to achieve sustainability by requiring users to perform 5 or 10 moderation tasks, say per fortnight, to gain/retain access to the service. (You'd send the same tasks to multiple users and aggregate the results, not just to weed out junk inputs, but because people will score things differently.)
While controversial some algorithmic magic would probably be necessary to keep the service viable. For example if all you have are terrible photos of one particular location it may be prudent to hide all of them just in case people are only posting when it's bad, and show more prompts to take photos "especially if it looks good". Figuring out how to find the signal in the noise would rapidly become the long-term headache: for example, that a particular location is only cleaned by the thorough janitor every Tuesday, but because the building entrance that would lead people to that restroom closes early that day very few people use that location, and the only uploaded photo ever submitted on a Tuesday was from a passer-by who happened to be in the building staying late. 98% of that context would never be recoverable. The service would need to still provide actionable insights.
TL;DR I genuinely think that moderation is a solvable problem and that this is a cool idea - it's getting knowledge about it into people's heads that's the real challenge IMHO.
As an aside I think it would also be both useful and interesting to publish data dumps of all of the uploaded images (possibly with added watermarks) and attached classification data to give the ML community an extra dataset to play with - this would be an unusual but effective way to raise awareness about the service. Maybe even release the model, and possibly even open-source the website and app. This would be a sure-fire (but high-stakes) way to attract suggestions for improvements to the ML model, receive drive-by fixes for obscure bugs people hit in the field, etc.
Good coffee is barely more expensive than terrible coffee. Good tea is significantly more expensive than terrible tea, but few tea drinkers quaff it in the quantities that dedicated coffee-fiends demand. The overall cost of providing coffee, tea and a few other beverages is quite small compared to any other benefit of working in an office.
The cost of not having good coffee available for cheap or free is that people take coffee breaks that last much much longer, and nobody counts that time. The secondary consequence is that they don't spend the coffee break time talking with coworkers in a convivial surrounding, so they don't cross-pollinate ideas and share information.
I've worked for the same company for 18 years now, and it's not because of the excellent coffee service. The excellent coffee service is a result of being a company I like to work at.
1. We're in really dire financial straits and you should all probably start looking for an exit while you can.
2. The company doesn't give a shit about the morale of the staff, and will therefore soon be in dire financial straits if it is not already, and you should all probably start looking for an exit while you can.
It's just a really, really bad look, IMO. As managers are so fond of saying... "it's bad optics."
https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
Wow, well that's good to hear. Maybe somebody saw the error of their ways. Or maybe it just varies by location. My experiences were all at the 500 building complex in RTP.
Before I worked for IBM I asked a friend what it had been like. "Unbelievably bad", they said. "Worse than everyone had said it would be."
So I thought, it can't be that bad. How could it be? And when I worked there it was worse! So when the next friend who got approached asked me I said, my god, remember how bad friend -1 said it was, well, it's worse! And that friend thought, no, it can't be that bad. And then they worked there and found it worse than even I had explained.
And so it goes.
Seriously though, I see people in the office talking and when someone says "Yeah, I worked at IBM for a while." There seems to be a quiet exchange of knowing looks.
this made me laugh, thanks
Ugh. I worked at a place that used Clearcase. It seemed to cause more problems than just dealing with the annoyances of other source control systems. I'm pretty sure companies that use it need to hire someone just to manage the thing. I've passed on job postings and offers at the mere mention of "Clearcase experience a plus" or similar.
1. Putting appliances in random places (like your cubicle) can sometimes lead people to running extension cords to power these additional devices. And excessively long, or poor quality, or "excessively long, poor quality" extension cords can absolutely be a fire hazard. This is especially true when people don't understand "current carrying capacity" vis-a-vis wire gauge and choose the wrong cord for a given load.
2. Space heaters. If you include space heaters in your definition of "small appliance", then there is a fairly real risk. First, it's very easy for flammable materials to simply get too close to the heating elements of the heater, and catch fire. Second, space heaters tend to draw a LOT of current - typically more than can be handled by your generic power strip. And people don't understand this, and will happily plug a space heater into a power strip, which will then melt, short out, and catch fire.
On balance, the odds of having a fire caused by most small appliances in offices is still probably fairly low, but the risk is non-zero. And having a blanket ban, instead of trying to distinguish "well, your blender is OK, but the space heater has to go" is just the slightly lazier way to dealing with it.
While 110V might be less of a shock risk compared to 230V, I have to wonder how much of a difference it actually makes in practice, like how much less likely are to die from the lower voltage?
Because on the other hand, the lower voltage increases the fire risk.
And by all means, if you have some high-risk area (storage rooms are quite common ones), do make special policy for it. But if you insist on the same policy for every area, you are actually endangering people.
The other limitations, particularly regarding space heaters and fans, usually come from fire insurance. Your premiums will be substantially lower if you prove your business gets regularly inspected for compliance and that electrical appliances get regularly checked if they are properly installed (i.e. no stacks of extension cords, no damage on the cable from chairs rolling over it or from floor tank lids).
In contrast, home fire insurance will often have priced in damages from such unsafe practices, and a no-pay clause for gross negligence - particularly the latter is what any reasonable business will be keen to avoid given the disastrous impact a fire can have.
Assuming that 10 dollar phone charger that Joe from Accounting got on Amazon or the airport store on the last vacation was not a dangerous counterfeit, that is. A sensible IT department will buy original chargers directly from the manufacturer or at the very least name brands such as Anker.
We laugh at pictures of managers wearing near-identical suits and ties, and then we can look at a bunch of techies wearing near-identical tee shirts and hoodies and somehow not see a culture using clothes to signal belonging to the tribe.
There will always be tribal signals. It's clothes whether suits or plaid flannel, it's drinking bourbon or craft IPAs, it's playing golf or ultimate, it's being clean-shaven or bearded, it's driving a Tesla or a Caddy.
Some of us are not "joiners" and chafe at the idea of carefully selecting our clothes, grooming, music, possessions, and neighbourhood to signal that we want to fit in. But we should at least understand and empathize with why others may find these things comforting.
The issue is when people want to impose their dress code on others, especially for non-client/customer facing roles.
Putting a large emphasis on the dress code has downsides as well. The more focus people spend worrying about their attire and judging others, the less focus they have for more substantive matters. It's an easy crutch to dismiss someone for dressing "wrong", a crutch which plenty of lazy employees and managers are happy to latch onto.
I think de-emphasizing dress codes encourages a more productive workplace.
I didn't end up getting the job but I consider it a bullet dodged. It was like a white-collar McDonalds where you had to "earn" the white collar.
——
There is a historical reason for dark-coloured clothes being associated with people of lower social status/rank. In earlier times, poor fabrics didn’t dye bery well, so the only way to get an even tone was to use a dark colour.
To get a white fabric or pastel shade (like cream), you needed to start with better fabrics, higher-quality dyes, and have the dying done by experienced craftspeople.
The result was that light-coloured clothes became associated with wealth and prestige. This has carried through to this day, even if the rationale for it has been obsolete for a century or more.
In a related area, PayPal once no-hired an otherwise qualified engineer because when asked what they do for fun, the candidate replied “shoot hoops,” and PayPal’s cultural belief was that “No PayPal engineer shoots hoops.”
I would never work for a company with cultural filters like this, but I can understand their reasoning even if I deeply believe such workplaces are toxic monocultures with a side of racism.
Here I'm thinking specifically of school uniforms. It can be easier to be able to just wear the uniform rather than having to choose what to wear every day.
That said, I probably wouldn't like to work at a place with an overly stringent dress code.
If someone really has so much trouble deciding what to wear ... just get a bunch of gray t-shirts and sweatpants/blue jeans. You (or the parents for a young child) are free to make your own uniform. However, if someone feels the need to express themselves through clothing, they are free to do so.
That said, if you’re not a school girl and it’s not the first week of work, I hope you’re not so focused on your clothes that you can’t focus enough on work.
We sit in the meeting room, and 2 people enter. A distinctive gentlemen wearing a suit and tie, talking in a calm, authoritative voice. Next to him, a hyperactive tshirt wearing creature, think Adam from Mythbuster, talking excitedly about all sorts of tech, while making excessive arm gestures. My colleague whispers a joke comparing him to a monkey swinging from tree to tree. We both immediately knew who was the architect and who was the lowly tech.
Wrong, it turns out. Gentlemen spends his time in floor crawlspaces pulling cables between servers, and had dressed up for the meeting. Monkey Head Architect was just his manic normal self.
Both were incredibly competent, BTW.
Now we're midwest through and through. In the Before Times, the women tended to wear out of fashion clothing, while most of the men wore golf shirts and slacks. And if you wore something slightly out of the norm, people would sniff and tut-tut you.
Then COVID happened, and CurrentCompany went 100% remote. Then vaccines came out, cases dropped, and the whole RTO movement started up. And CurrentCompany realized that everyone was used to working in WhateverTheFuckWeWantToWear. And actually made a good decision. We could now wear jeans. Or shorts! OMG shorts! That was previously treated as if you were coming to work naked. And t-shirts were allowed. Sneakers/tennis shoes too! Anything to get people back in the office.
I'm 100% remote, but every now and then I need to pick up something, or PushLargeButtonInDataCenter, so I go visit those who are hybrid. And what do the majority wear? Jeans, golf shirts, out of fashion women's clothing, and very rarely, t-shirts.
It takes a long time to turn around a company that has been operating for a century.
No, casual dresscode allows for a much wider variety of clothing and goes in the opposite direction than "signal belonging to the tribe".
All of the men wore golf/polo shirts, khakis, and tasseled loafers, but some wore oxblood loafers while others wore black or even brown loafers. And some wore plain leather belts, others wore woven leather belts.
</sarcasm>
Some cultures value conformance, and even if the rule is “wear whatever you like, as long as it’s not jeans or tee shirts,” they’ll self-organize around an unwritten rule of what to wear.
Who is "we" here?
Specific examples of prohibited items in office spaces include:
- Hotplates
- Hair dryers
- Cooking devices using an open flame, including propane, butane or wood.
- Car batteries and chargers.
There’s then a list of about 30 items that require a permit.
We were joking about the oddly specific nature of the items. I’m assuming some lunatic at one time had a camp chef or Weber Q in his cube cooking up some lunch.
That lasted about a month, and then shorts were no longer allowed.
When there’s no clients it can be a bit silly. But if one department has to toe the line all of them will.
One of my coworkers wanted a coffee pot on his desk. He found an automatic drip coffee maker at a garage sale. It had a broken switch. Being a frugal engineer, he routed a wire past the switch and just turned it on and off by connecting and disconnecting it from the wall socket.
More than once, I was working late and noticed the smell of it burning through the last dregs of the pot because he had forgotten to disconnect it. The first few times, I disconnected it. Finally, I threw it in a garbage can and probably saved the building from an eventual fire.
I know it is annoying to have rules, but there are reasons for fire codes and facilities managers. I know too many people like my previous coworker.
In that same building there were some desks with fans because it was too hot and space heaters because it was too cold. (I saw this ridiculous waste of electricity in many facilities.) I don't trust most facilities to have good AC, ventilation, or wise inhabitants.
If you go into the break room in a place like that, you're going to see consumer grade coffee makers. Again and again. They're totally normal.
It’s one of the endearing aspects of HN and the large cohort of California based tech company people.
It was literally in a modular building that had been assembled onsite. The floors sagged and the fabric on the cubicle walls had mold growing in it. The nearest coffee pot was a 10 minute walk away, which is why residents were tempted to bring their own.
Given that the overwhelming evidence, for example the fact that no house has burned in a large radius around my home, I'd say your and IBM's assessment is wildly off-target.
Coffee makers are relatively simple designs. They're basically hotplates with a one way valve underneath for the water.
Without the shut off, the thing would just keep getting hotter. And while heated glass will not catch fire, it can shatter violently. And those heated shards can then catch things on fire. And that's outside the fact that just faulty wiring can cause sparks and fire itself.
https://www.electrical-forensics.com/Coffeemakers/CoffeeMake...
Worse, I personally watched one person see it as a problem, flip the switch assuming that would fix it, and walk away. I had to point out that the switch was not involved and was just a decoy. That made it even worse from a safety perspective.
This is the expected operation of a basic coffee pot without an auto-shutoff timer. It should remain hot indefinitely, and as a result, any remaining coffee inside will start to smell bad. However, there is (from the factory, at least) a thermostat that will regulate the temperature at the normal operational temperature, and thermal safety fuse(s) that will permanently shut off power above the normal temperature but before any components will catch on fire.
>I personally watched one person see it as a problem, flip the switch assuming that would fix it, and walk away.
True, that probably has enough inherent safety issues regardless of whether it catches fire.
And regardless of what I said above, I personally avoid coffee pots with manual switches. While they might not catch fire, there's still other general dangers regarding hot things that no longer need to be hot.
In this case, the best option would be to involve management or HR, or even facilities management in the positive step of buying a better coffee maker for the office. Failing to provide access to safely brewed good coffee was the bug here.
Did you take his red stapler, too, Lumbergh?
Really, consumer-grade coffee makers aren't intended to stay on for days at a time. You need commercial machines for that, all metal and glass, that won't be a fire hazard or have melting plastic. Some facilities have strict rules about that.
The problem is that those companies are notoriously cheap. They won't buy coffee makers or poorly maintain them and their managers are trained to act like callous idiots when questioned about it. Really, in general, most employee disatisfaction comes from managers and executives acting like callous idiots instead of actually trying to solve problems.
Managers and executives are usually trying to solve problems, but generally not the problems of people below them on the org chart.
Generally, org charts are designed so that the people whose problems you are expected to (and held accountable for) working to solve are above, not below.
I always remember that the best way to succeed is not to do a good job, but to do whatever will help my boss; either make him look good, or take some burden off of his shoulders. It's cynical as hell, but that's how life is in corporate life.
1. If they're not meant to stay on how come most of them have clocks?
2. Many machines no longer warm the coffee by using a heating element underneath a glass carafe, they've switched this out for insulated carafes (no glass) which tend to work better anyway.
https://www.nbcnews.com/select/shopping/best-coffee-makers-b...
Specifically so that the machine is not on until a set time.
If you wanted the heating pad to be perpetually on, there would be no need for a clock. The clock is so that you can have it start brewing later.
The hand wringing is not necessary.
Surely a coffee maker would get a break in the afternoon/evening? I agree that using it at a duty cycle higher than it was designed might be an issue, but unless you have the entire floor share one machine it should be fine.
I know a lot of people who drink coffee all afternoon. Plus, they won't hesitate to dump and rebrew a pot if its been warming too long.
My circa-2002 Mr. Coffee brand drip coffee marker has an automatic cut-off. I have never bothered measuring it precisely, but I think it cuts off at around an hour and a half or two hours after being turned on. Believe me, there have been many times I put on a pot of coffee, got "in the zone" working on some code, got up a while later, walked in the kitchen, and found the pot of coffee stone cold. Much to my dismay. Although as a former firefighter, I do understand the intent behind this, and I can't really be mad about it.
"One-Hour Auto Shut-Off – Keeps your coffee warm for 1 hour after you brew, then automatically turns off."
Edit: In the US, for sure. Like most of the ones on Amazon right now that are under $30.
I inherited an older Moccamaster, which does not have the timeout, and the newer one went straight to storage. Unfortunately the old button without a timer is not sold as a spare anymore, or I would have "downgraded" the newer machine.
I personally can't stand the taste of 'cooked' coffee. I'll grind and make another mug when needed in an espresso coffee maker. Doesn't take long at all. Mine is manual but you can have automatic machine to shave off even more time.
I wonder EU have that 40 min cut off is due to their high voltage/amperage?
The only I know that consumer coffee maker don't have the auto shut off is the one that have a rocking switch and they are normally the most basic kind ($10 - $30 USD).
The plants had large office staffs, so having different rules for offices was more complex, and the culture of uniformity was a thing for them.
This is also sort of why I like startups. You can have cultural cohesion. If you get a 10k person company, everyone has to conform to the one guy who believes that you can't have a vim pedal because the cable under your desk will cause you to fail to be protected in an earthquake.
No, thanks, I'll take the risk of tripping on the cable while the earthquake is on.
1. Had to keep foot in the same place
2. When had to raise foot it was annoying holding it up like that
Here's a link for clutch mode: https://github.com/alevchuk/vim-clutch
Back when I was addicted to WoW, I dreamed of using foot pedals as secondary inputs for macros/key combos, but never really pursued it past thinking it would help.
However... we were a bunch of game developers. So everyone had a high-powered Windows PC and one or two console dev kits in their cube. The PS3s were so notoriously power hungry that in summer months people would run box fans to try to blow off some of the waste heat.
Each circuit in that poor building was heavily loaded. The coffee maker had to go once someone finally realized that turning it on was the straw that broke the camel's back and caused the circuit for that row of cubes to trip and everyone's UPS to kick in.
It’s always surprising to me. The most intense over the top security process I ever ran into was an agency that disbursed grants to artists.
Doing onsite IT support for a big car company that meant khakis, a golf-type collared shirt, and boots. I was fine with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignment_(Dungeons_&_Dragons)...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418
I'd be tempted to ask for a Waffle Party, but that scene was a bit too creepy for my taste.
I built their client-specific ordering sites, all of which had to be customized for each client's particular policies and desired bureaucratic process.
The way I see it in my life amongst regular coffee drinkers:
* Coffee enthusiasts are all about the perfect pour so they select tools based on control and repeatability (and fads like all human things). You get the pourovers and areopresses and what-not from them.
* some folks don't want to waste precious counter space, or hate cleaning the coffee pot, and end up with a kettle and something like a pour over or french press.
* everyone else has a coffee pot.
One incarnation kept a tally of the number of cups consumed, which I always liked (and secretly wished for a serial port so I could get the number out of it programmatically).
Which is as effective as a strike.