asoneth

> they're not worth worrying about at the individual level

Just as an anecdote: My company tried to recruit an executive from Britain many years ago. He had young children and was concerned about the high rates of child mortality due to firearms and motor-vehicles deaths (the top two causes of death for children in the US) compared to the negligible risk in the UK.

While his underlying concern wasn't specific to "school shootings", he did point out that our blasé acceptance of them was another example of our comparatively higher risk tolerance.

> Humans are not good at measuring risk.

True in general, but in the specific case of gun homicides, the data do seem to support their concern. As per [1] and [2] the US gun homicide rate is more than 4 per 100k whereas countries like Switzerland, Sweden, France, Japan, UK, Denmark, and many others seem to have between one and two orders of magnitude fewer gun deaths.

If someone from one of those countries above expressed concern about gun homicides when visiting the United States it would seem no more irrational than a fellow American expressing concern about visiting Jamaica or Honduras because they have an order-of-magnitude higher gun homicide rate compared to the United States.

(I doubt the overall gun homicide numbers tell the whole story with regard to tourist safety, just that there exists a rational basis for this concern.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r... [2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-death...

> to become mainstream requires a bucketload of UX design and user support work that no one in their right mind wants to take on for free as a hobbyist.

There are several open source communities with UX designers and user researchers in them such as KDE, Gnome, Krita, GIMP, Inkscape, Penpot, Godot, Open Street Map, etc. For smaller projects that just need one-off design help there's a job board at https://opensourcedesign.net though I've seen challenges when developer-only projects start to collaborate with non-developers.

I think you're more right about user support. Many people dehumanize tech support and for some reason users who don't pay for software seem to be significantly worse than average so I can understand why very few people are interested in supporting strangers for free. That's why FOSS support ends up being via forums or personal connections. In a forum no one is obligated to respond to rude or demanding requests and when there is a personal connection (family, friends, in-person user groups) people tend to be more polite and grateful.

When I taught UX graduate students we certainly tried to instill in junior designers that their chief responsibility is to their end-users. And where it doesn't negatively influence their users their secondary responsibility to the business. Coming it at a distant third is their own sensibilities and satisfaction. Putting business needs above your users makes you a black-hat designer peddling dark patterns. Putting personal sensibilities over either makes you a digital artist -- not inherently a bad thing but also not what most companies are looking for.

Frankly many junior developers seem to have missed this lesson as well. I've seen countless rewrites for personal satisfaction or learning rather than concrete end-user or business goals.

> You should know exactly why you are building every little part of your system.

As a UX designer/researcher who focuses on exploring novel interfaces, if every company rethought their UI from scratch that would be great for my job security. But realistically there are good reasons why most companies default to following established UI conventions:

First, your users generally have significantly more experience using products from big companies than yours, and differences are often perceved as problems. See Jakob's law.

Second, sometimes a company that releases a novel solution does fantastically well. But more often than not it ends up being a lesson in why the convention existed in the first place. See Chesterton's fence.

Third, unless you want to make the UI a differentiating factor for your product then any time you spend iterating on novel interfaces is time you could have been spending on your company's core competencies. See... I dunno, Seth Godin, basically any startup blogger?

> no ... rewrites in Svelte or whatever

The vast majority of the terminal interface has been rewritten more than once, but the UX framework team does a great job mimicking the prior look and feel each time. Though if you know what to look for you can spot functions that haven't been updated in a while, and even a handful that have remained unchanged since the beginning.

> no refreshed new looks or skins

Basically right, though Launchpad was completely new and PDFU COLORS <GO> provides color themes intended for folks with color-vision deficiency.

> the Bloomberg Terminal constantly undergoes UI changes, though not in a dramatic way

This is correct. (Source: I worked on Bloomberg's UI change management policies.)

Despite dismissive comments from design industry folks and more modern-looking competitors, the folks who ran Bloomberg's UX team maintained a focus on customer needs and user research. There are even a few cases where function teams went back and re-implemented old "bugs" after a rewrite (e.g. in the MSG editor) because users had adapted to the old behavior. (Thankfully nothing as bad as spacebar heating https://xkcd.com/1172 though)

> Looks like something I would pay $150 for

That's useful market information, but note that in the "How much did it cost?" section he points out that the BOM is ~$400 not including labor, tools, or shipping. Going from extremely low-volume to moderately low-volume might reduce material cost slightly, but I'd still expect him to have to charge at least $400 just to break even.

More generally, I've never seen a low-volume split wireless keyboard for less than $200 and the closest in design I can think of would be https://lowprokb.ca/products/corne-ish-zen which had a base price of $320 before pricing in keyswitches or keycaps.

It's totally reasonable that this is your price point and everyone is different -- some people would never pay more than a hundred bucks for a keyboard, whereas I have a couple keyboards that are more expensive than the computers they're connected to.

DARPA Program Managers have a lot of leeway to write these sorts of requests.

PMs are typically experts in their field and often come from an academic, industry, military, or government research lab. DARPA gives them a budget for grants, autonomy, and 3-5 years to fund interesting work. Many fail, many have mixed success, and a small number revolutionize their field.

(Source: worked on a few DARPA-funded projects decades ago.)

> We are both active and require a lot of protein.

I'm curious what your targets are. I've found getting 0.8g of protein per kg of bodyweight (USDA recommendation) is easy on any diet whereas 1.5g/kg or higher on a vegan diet can be hard depending on your target macro ratio. If you're bulking or doing long-distance running/biking (i.e. carbs aren't a limiting factor) then it's totally doable. Besides tofu, seitan, and beans there's lentils, chickpeas, edamame, spinach, nuts, seeds, nooch, etc.

> beans: ... My wife gets bloated painfully

If she's committed to making beans work you could experiment with varieties and preparation methods that are more digestible, or she could try Beano. But honestly that seems like a lot of work.

> beyond meat: it's expensive, gas and bloat is still an issue, a big one

Same, I just can't digest it. I'm glad the faux meats exist for folks who want them, but I'm sad at how it's displaced other veggie burgers at restaurants.

> Tofu, seitan and TVP are all good, but they're extremely boring (user error attributes to this I'm sure).

I've come to appreciate the blank canvas they provide but that did take a lot of trial and error to get to the point where I knew what to do with them. Similar to beans it depends on how committed you are. (In my case it took a long time for the incongruence between my food choices and my ethics to grow big enough to overcome my innate laziness and affinity for barbecue.)

> Every vegetarian/vegan I've talked to is just not into weightlifting, so they sort of dismiss the diet needs we need.

I know a few vegans into powerlifting/streetlifting, and as mentioned above bulking isn't too hard -- the real issue is cutting. Every one of them supplements with protein powders, especially while cutting. Then again, so do all the omnivore lifters I know.

> There is a difference between a straw man and satire presented in a clear tone that cannot be mistaken as a reconstruction of the other person’s statements.

You are correct, my apologies. However, it's unclear to me how satire is any more useful a contribution to this discussion.

> “Oh that 7 minutes of checking my email while I refill my tank was horrible. Leaving the house so much earlier if I hadn’t done it the day before was truly oppressive. And these days I luxuriate in those rare gifted 20 minutes of leisure when I choose to recharge my battery while on the go!”

Please avoid strawman arguments.

If you're truly curious why some people prefer longer electric charging stops on road trips to shorter bi-weekly gas station stops:

Even when not strictly necessary for refueling, my family takes a ~10 minute break after every ~4 hours of driving to let everyone stretch and use a restroom. No one has objected to extending these stops to ~15 minutes when we take the EV. The primary inconvenience has been that it has constrained where we stop, as many of our old stops do not have charging infrastructure.

Whereas a refueling stop during a shorter trip (including running errands or during a daily commute) introduces an entirely new stop that serves no additional purpose.

A 31.5" color e-ink poster is ~$1700[1]. I do not know what these large panels cost but (possibly due to low yields) eink panel prices seem to scale superlinearly with area. I would expect a 75" panel that is five times larger to cost more than a used car.

Anything can become a "best seller" if you are able to arbitrarily lower the price by multiple orders of magnitude -- $500 luxury cars would fly off the lot but would not be profitable.

[1] https://inkposter.com/products/spectra-133

> But I think the reason virtual collaboration only doesn’t work is because you need to meet people, socialize outside of work with the business lunches and dinners etc.

And I'm saying there's more to it than that. A couple decades ago I worked on a collaborative mapping/whiteboarding/sketching for Cisco Telepresence rooms for military users. We managed to get pretty close to the bandwidth of in-person meetings: eye contact was slightly off and turn-taking still required more verbal structuring, but overall we were hitting our targets. After that I worked on digital collaboration tools for finance professionals and we found use cases where virtual collaboration was superior, cases where it was clearly deficient, and most fell into a fuzzy middle ground of "it depends". I haven't worked in CSCW for several years now, but still follow the research, and my understanding is that there are still tasks where remote work suffers, and not just for socialization.

Every company is different, many only need high-bandwidth collaboration in large groups once a quarter, while someone in a research/design/startup might spend a couple hours a day in small collaborative meetings. Every company is different.

And again, I acknowledge the many advantages of remote work for both employees and companies. Related to your point about remote workers being able to buy bigger houses in a lower cost of living area, my company has now been forced to pay at least 10-20% higher salaries for in-person hires compared to a similar caliber of remote hires, not to mention the costs of office space. Therefore, if you're not getting at least ~30% higher productivity out of being in person then it's probably a net loss, and there are many companies that are being irrational or deceitful about their RTO mandates. But I've also found remote work proponents overly dismissive of the downsides which makes it significantly harder for them to convince their companies and managers even in cases where remote work truly is a net benefit.

Your last paragraph seems to reinforce my point that "collaboration tools still aren't a satisfactory replacement for many kinds in-person work" given that you and your coworkers spent significant time and money to have occasional in-person meetings.

Perhaps I should be more nuanced since few tech roles these days are entirely remote or entirely in-person -- many remote workers occasionally meet up in person and many in-person office workers occasionally work from home.

The rest of your post makes the case that there are downsides to working in an office. I agree, there are! (Though as a parent with young children who recently worked from home for a week to keep an eye on sick kids I'm amused by the implication that an office is noisier or has more interruptions than being at home.)

To be clear: Remote collaboration is perfectly satisfactory (or better!) for many tasks. And even those tasks where it is suboptimal it may still be a net positive because of the higher costs associated with in-person work, including but not limited to the ones you list.

However, it is worth honestly acknowledging that there are also benefits to working in person. It's up to each company to balance those costs and benefits, but my guess is that eventually some companies will be better off working (mostly) remotely, and others will continue to work (mostly) in-person.

> The pro RTO people are nothing short of power hungry.

It depends. I have no issue with companies that RTO'd after lockdowns ended. Some teams and orgs work better in person, others can work fine remotely.

But promising new hires that they can work remotely only to renege on that promise a few years later when the job market tightens is a despicable bait-and-switch.

> Just because you haven’t learned how to adapt doesn’t mean the rest of the world hasn’t adapted.

The truth is a little more complicated.

We've definitely found some tasks where CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) performs better than colocated work, particularly for well-structured tasks that involve any sort of automation, documentation, or governance.

But collaboration tools still aren't a satisfactory replacement for many kinds in-person work. Studies routinely find colocated teams have higher creativity, efficiency, team cohesion, and job satisfaction. Whether that's worth the higher costs (office space and salaries) depends on the domain, but there are certainly companies that would be better off being in-person.

Why not a choice?

Individuals could choose a "secure" browser or browser mode that provides increased protection from such attacks or a "compatible" one that is less likely to break old websites.

> Prospective employees don't know who got laid off, and even if they did, they most likely don't personally know any of those people.

True, I've never interviewed somewhere where someone I know personally got laid off. But for large companies there are typically news articles about layoffs, their size, and occasionally even their generosity. For publicly-traded companies you can wait for the annual/quarterly reports, but these days there's usually a press release or blog post[1] if it's more than a handful of people. For private companies that are too small to be newsworthy you can still scour Glassdoor and other forums.

But regardless, it's definitely something a prospective employee should ask about during the interview e.g. "Tell me about the last time your organization had layoffs...". Obviously you get a positive spin from an HR or hiring manager, but when I'm interviewing I find those answers most informative.

[1] e.g. https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update...

> Almost one in 10 people use the same four-digit PIN

I can't think of the PIN 1234 without immediately thinking of Dark Helmet:

"So the combination is one, two, three, four, five? That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life! That's the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rSmMm-7SVA

> You get dirtier looks and more likely to be harassed smoking a cigarette than you would smoking weed

Interesting, this has not been my experience. Certainly smoking weed is much more accepted than it used to be and cigarettes are less accepted than they used to be, but it seems like they've both ended up in a similar category. A non-smoker walking down the sidewalk might stay further away from someone smoking weed but I'm not sure it's a value judgement so much as the fact that the skunky smell seems to travel further.

Though besides giving them a wide berth and maybe causing people to scrunch up their nose, I've never seen anyone get harassed for either unless they're in a nonsmoking area or a playground or something and in that case I haven't noticed any difference in people's response.

As heartbreaking as they are for those affected, layoffs provide incredibly useful information for prospective employees.

For example, was it a small number of people who were laid off with decent severance, or was it a huge mass of people let go unceremoniously with minimum severance? And were the layoffs due to a sustained period of unprofitability or did they occur during periods of profitability? In the former case why wasn't the business doing well and has that fundamentally changed? In the latter case, did they first attempt to reallocate people to more productive areas?

> Everything I’ve shared reflects the current state of the tech industry. It might differ at very small companies, but once you work at a company with more than 100 employees, you’ll likely encounter many of the same patterns I’ve described.

Many tech companies have never needed to resort to layoffs -- not just small companies but medium-sized and/or privately held companies. Personally I consider layoffs of any sort to be a major red flag. It means company management makes poor business or organizational decisions and is willing to tank morale and lose their best people to please shareholders. It means that you're going to be a line in a spreadsheet that can be spun up and down as necessary.

Personally I'd steer clear, but if you choose to enter into a relationship with such a company you should appropriately discount any salary they offer to factor in that risk.

> "it's all a priority, get it done."

Reminds me of a product owner I had who abused priority categories by insisting that the majority of his tasks were "top priorities" because he had discovered that any time he didn't mark a task as a top priority it wouldn't get done.

Every team ended up sorting his tasks as a flat list so that when he asked people to "make this a top priority" it was up to him to decide where it went in the list and which of his other requests would get bumped.

There are many kinds of "negative" responses:

0. This idea is bad.

1. This idea is probably bad, but if someone wants to put together a more compelling argument we will discuss it at a future meeting.

2. This idea needs to be more fully developed before we can decide whether it is good or bad.

3. This idea is probably good, but it will remain in backlog limbo until someone makes a compelling argument that it is a priority.

4. This idea is good, and while it is not a high-enough priority to displace our current tasks, we will actively discuss including it when we plan our next sprint/release.

Depending on who you work with these may need to be gussied up with manager-speak to let people save face or to prevent people from hijacking the agenda to turn the meeting into a brainstorming session. But treating all of them as synonymous with "no" loses useful nuance.

All else being equal I agree with focusing on companies that have a long track record of success -- due to the Lindy Effect they're also more likely to be successful in the future.

> in an industry where there is not much competition

This hasn't matched my experience so far. The less external competition there is to align the company, the more employees seem to channel that drive into internal competition for resources and petty office politics.

> Where do you find these places though?

Thinking about the best jobs in my tech career, in one case I made a list of companies that were biking distance from my house, in another an ex-classmate recruited me, in another a recruiter cold-called after I moved to a new state.

Beyond "being lucky" I'm not really sure how to generalize those experiences, though I will say that if you can identify things that you value differently from most that may help you find opportunities that are undervalued.

On the flip side, as I've gotten older I think I've gotten better at recognizing when an organization is a poor fit and having the confidence (and the savings) to turn it down or walk away even if the position is high-status, highly-paid, and/or seems like a perfect fit on paper. That can be especially hard if everyone from your family to your coworkers is telling you you're crazy.

> All of my kid’s sixth grade friends have smartphones

My condolences. I agree that it's too late once you hit a tipping point and a critical mass of their friends have smartphones. At that point you have to fall back to weaker backup defenses like parental controls and limiting screen time. The point of Wait Until 8th is to provide a little more time to let them form their own self-image and build up their ability to manage their attention and information diet.

> Do you really think you can predict your kids future friends correctly and lobby the correct set of parents during kindergarten years?

Instead of trying to predict the "correct" set you can just lobby everyone. Our public school has about a hundred kids per grade from K through 8th. Parents bring it up not just at school pickup but on playdates, the local listserv, the PTO newsletter, when new families move to the neighborhood, etc.

Apparently several older grades have managed to hold the line such that most kids in that grade didn't have smartphones until high school, and many didn't even have smartwatches or dumbphones.

> everyone else has accounts they should not have or devices they should not have

You can start the conversation with other parents at kindergarten pickup.

Each grade at our school has a pledge that kids & parents can sign to wait until eighth grade to let them have a smartphone. This can be as simple as a shared spreadsheet or a dedicated site like https://www.waituntil8th.org

My kids are still young but from what I've heard from families with older kids is that holding the line gets increasingly hard as they approach 8th grade. You have to be prepared to socially exclude families that let their underage children use smartphones or social media, the same way you wouldn't invite a family that lets their middle-schooler drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes to your kid's birthday party.

While you can never get everyone to agree to anything, as long as your kids have a critical mass of friends who don't have smartphones then not having one won't make them an outcast.

I also consider myself extremely lucky in that regard.

> the key seems to be getting out of the corporate world, away from companies with a singular focus on profit-making and competition

In my experience there are still healthy corporations out there. The signals I now look for are: profitable, privately held, not pursuing IPOs or buyers, grow headcount slowly (if at all), have never needed layoffs, promote engineers into positions of authority, and have high average employee tenure.

It's refreshing to work in an organization where people feel secure enough to make long-term investments in infrastructure, people, and projects that may not pay dividends for many years. (And to be the beneficiary of decades of prior long-term investments.)

> the grass isn't greener anywhere else

That may be true, but even the act of looking can provide some measure of hope, which can make everything more bearable.