Hacker News Reader

Comment by gyomu | Hacker News Reader

Alan Dye is the interface design lead at Apple, he's been there since 2006.

One of the lead designers on Liquid Glass is Chan Karunamuni, who's been at Apple since the early 2010s. If you search for more of the names of the design presenters at this WWDC, you'll find a lot of people with similarly long tenure.

So the theory that it's all Gen Z designers with no experience or talent seems pretty weak.

View on HN

Yeah, sure. But it's more fun to talk in hypotheticals and point fingers at straw people and those young kids that make a fetish of old Nokia phones and dumb tech.

So I'm sure there's 3 Gen Z folks in a trench coat approving the work of those other Gen Z designers.

All this is just delegating to flavor of the domain "higher powers" instead of trying to grapple with the complexity of reality.

We just have to wait for Gen Alpha to bring back flat design 10 or so years from today.

And to think this is the same field that has an issue with ageism as indicated by this post yesterday. I take serious issue with people over 40 being protected while discrimination against young people "just doesn't exist". It's a clear case of the law being constructed to advantage the already advantaged. It's politically expedient because old people have wealth and influence and young people don't. Could you hire someone who can't demonstrate competence in an interview to do the job? Why does it matter if they're 20 or 100? Yet the two cases are treated very differently. You can say you won't hire a 20 year old because they don't know what they're doing, but can you not hire the 100 year old because their mental faculties have deteriorated?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44269225

Edit: this appears to be a hot take, so I challenge others to take a step back and consider other protected classes and anti-discrimination laws. They don't call out one race or sex, they say they're all protected and the very act of discriminating is not allowed during hiring. They don't say "you can't discriminate against white people or men but others are fine". That's what the ADEA does.

Especially at Apple where it’s very well known that ultimate decision making is centralised around very few, very senior people.

A lot of "old and senior people" also fumble with big mistakes a lot of the time. They're not all-perfect gods. In reality, most successful people are one trick ponies. They caught lightning in a bottle once early on that boosted their careers but that doesn't mean they're still relevant and correct with their decision making today.

Look at John Romero, he knocked it out of the park with Doom 1, 2 and some of Quake, but all his projects after have been flops of catastrophic proportions. Look at Jonny Ive's last design mistakes at Apple compared to the early successes that were perfection from all aspects.

Most people can't pull success after success forever, they always bottom out at some point then decline, some sooner than others, especially in a fast changing field like tech. So it's a high chance those senior higher ups at Apple are now dated and out of touch, but still have the high egos and influence from the bygone era. Happens at virtually 100% of the companies.

> They're not all-perfect gods. In reality, most successful people are one trick ponies. They caught lightning in a bottle once early on that boosted their careers but that doesn't mean they're still relevant and correct with their decision making today.

I don't think that characterization is quite right either. I'm a big fan of Brian Eno's "scenius" phrasing:

> A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the old art-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out of nowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’.

Extremely successful people benefit from the scenius within which they get to operate. But as that context changes and evolves over time, they fail to recreate their earlier wild successes - not because they lost any of their skills (although that can also happen), but because the skills aren't sufficient, and the deep, layered conditions that enabled those wild successes just aren't there anymore.

I think there is something in that. Certainly the world of work does seem to pivot between rewarding people that “do the work” and those that “do the work around the work” but separate themselves from actual execution. 2021-2 was peak middle manager froth, and were on a swing toward more operator led now. Usually middle management “present the work upwards” types dominate though.

That a great idea, perhaps it is not just cultural.

Look at the Solvay Conference. That's a lot of lightning in a bottle all at once.

Though it's beyond me to articulate it, perhaps that was also cultural.

I could believe that this happens at Apple if it wasn't for the executive veto that pushed stuff like the Touch Bar and Butterfly Keyboard to consumers. It sounds less like "very large numbers of people" conspiring, and more like a select few conspirators hand-picking the contributions they think would sell well.

> Look at John Romero, he knocked it out of the park with Doom 1, 2 and some of Quake, but all his projects after have been flops of catastrophic proportions.

And the other guys from id haven't exactly recaptured the same magic either. It's a shame they broke up, it turns out that the team was way stronger together than any of them has been on their own.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com