asoneth

I think the massive blowback the College Board got from "Adversity Scores" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_SAT#2019_introd... would prevent them from doing that themselves.

However they do offer a "Landscape" which provides similar details and many admissions programs use that to do something like what you're describing.

Like a teetotaler who gets drunk on Saturdays?

Or maybe a straight man who only sleeps with other men on Saturdays?

Or a reformed crook who robs banks on Saturdays?

Or a devout Christian who stocks up on indulgences on Friday so they can sin every Saturday?

> If I am vegan for January and then in February eat meat, am I retroactively not a vegan for January?

Like many labels I think it comes down to intent more than timeframe.

If you go vegan and then a day/month/year/decade later you change your mind and decide it's not working then you were vegan during that time and are no longer vegan.

But if you take a hiatus from consuming animal products with intent to go back to eating meat in a few hours/weeks/months then I wouldn't say you were a vegan during that time. If I happen to go a few days between consuming animal products that doesn't make me a vegan during those days.

> The pro-RTO don't talk about why is outsourcing perfectly ok but not WFH?

It isn't that companies want RTO at all costs -- if they can lower labor costs by at least 30% then executives seem to get over their antipathy for remote work quickly.

Whereas in my experience, most of the employees who wanted to work remotely expected comparable salaries and employment benefits to what they earned when they were in the office. Ultimately most of them ended up complying with the RTO mandate without even demanding a raise.

Agreed that most people do not miss their commute, though because I am lazy I found it useful to force me to ride every day.

But I'm surprised to hear that you think "nobody misses face-to-face meetings". At least in my office that seems to be the only reason anyone shows up -- people pop by the office when they have discussions, presentations, collaborative design sessions, etc and WFH otherwise. In several cases someone has explicitly polled the group chat the day before to find out who is thinking about to coming in -- if enough attendees plan to join remotely then we typically switch the whole meeting to be a dial-in only so it doesn't end up being one person calling in from an empty conference room and everyone else at home.

I agree that public companies can be successful, have long-term plans, or satisfy stakeholders so evidence of success or longevity or happy customers is not a counterargument.

But think of recent decisions that Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, or Tesla have made recently. Are they generally made with the best interests of employees, customers, users, partners, developers, and regulators in mind? Or do they only satisfy those other constituencies insofar as doing so increases profits for shareholders?

Ultimately the trust and goodwill they build up is just another asset to leverage to make more money for shareholders. If tomorrow they run the numbers and conclude that the most profitable course of action is to spend down some of that goodwill and screw over employees, customers, users, partners, developers, and/or regulators in exchange for slightly higher profits then they will do that.

Yes. Many of those companies have made choices that trade reputation and/or relationships built up over years to increase a quarterly profit margin.

Whether that is sacrificing product quality, sunsetting well-loved products/services only to spin up similar efforts in the future, treating long-term employees poorly, burning through developer goodwill through high fees or API churn, etc.

When I think about the value of long timeframes I don't just mean having a good R&D dept or throwing money at moonshots, I mean building up and maintaining goodwill with employees, customers, users, partners, developers, and regulators.

Of course many private companies are run by profit-maximizing jerks and some public companies have patient shareholders who trust the company's management. But in general I have had better experiences working for an engaged owner who I can meet face-to-face over working for a crowd of shareholders and venture capitalists for whom the company is just another financial instrument in their portfolio.

You're right, management was simply the messenger relaying customer priorities.

I will point out that enough consumers are willing to pay for a quality products that many niche companies exist to serve them. Many citizens choose to move to countries/states with better services even if they have to pay higher taxes. There are employees who reject higher-paying jobs that require interacting with poor-quality software or processes. (I work for a niche company that makes and uses high-quality products in a high-tax / high service state so I know many people like this!)

> citizens as users need to demand better.

I get what you mean, but as you point out many people's revealed preferences show that they don't actually want quality in which case they already do "demand better" -- it's just that for them "better" means cheap, fast, and convenient.

My current employer and my last were both 25+ year-old quietly successful private tech companies. In both cases there was a strong commitment to product quality in order to maintain our reputation and long-term customer relationships whereas the public companies I worked at were focused on chasing the next quarter to satisfy "the shareholders".

Every once in a while I'm tempted to work for a public company again since I might be able to earn slightly more, but after working for adults for so long it'd be hard to go back to a place where my responsibilities to users and shareholders are misaligned.

I don't regret the decision but I do feel a little guilt for what I left behind.

I have friends who moved out of struggling towns and states who describe similar feelings about being part of the "brain drain" death spiral that is hollowing out the place they grew up.

> Hopefully, given a free market, the service will eventually be replaced by something better.

I too believed that something like that would happen eventually but their business is still booming. In the decades since I've learned that the "fitness function" of companies that serve governments or large enterprises do not reward product quality (at least not commensurate with the cost of quality) so companies or teams that insist on wasting effort making quality products do not survive. It's not malice or incompetence, it's just a survival response to misaligned incentives.

Indeed. I wish more developers were willing to take such a principled stance. (Though given the vitriol they endure I understand why most don't.)

> if you can't convince your "boss" to give you enough time to deliver something that meets your bar, quit.

I did this and while it solved my moral dilemma it made things worse for our users.

Many years ago I started my career working for a startup that got bought by a big government contractor. The most incredible people I've ever worked with tried harder than you can imagine to deliver reliable, usable software for the American taxpayer that met the very high bar we set for ourselves.

Because the incentives weren't aligned, most of the good people eventually quit to work at places where they could deliver something that met their bar and were replaced with junior devs and senior clock-watchers.

Every good person who left made that problem slightly harder for those of us who stayed because there was one less person fighting for quality and usability, but the contracts were as big as ever and the new people were less likely to rock the boat so management didn't care that product quality was dropping off a cliff.

In the end it was primarily our users who suffered.

Ok, I'll bite. Why would most people not consider using Google Maps and Spotify on your phone to be using your phone?

The city I live near has walk signs come on automatically, followed about five seconds later by the parallel automobile light. This seems to be standard timing for a Leading Pedestrian Interval[1]. Because this happens in both directions it adds ~10 seconds to a roughly two-minute traffic cycle but it allows people to use the road without a beg button.

Certainly this would be a poor tradeoff in rural/suburban areas where most traffic cycles have no pedestrians or cyclists. Those use cases should use beg buttons.

But in a city where most traffic cycles include at least one pedestrian or cyclist then it seems like a useful tradeoff to increase convenience and accessibility for pedestrians and cyclists. What's more it may increase automobile efficiency as well: adding a couple Leading Pedestrian Intervals to every traffic cycle takes similar overall time than adding a full Barnes Dance[2] to half the traffic cycles. So if more than half of the traffic cycles include pedestrians crossing then everyone is probably better off with automatic walk signs on a leading pedestrian interval.

Of course if the city wants to really encourage walking they can do both and have the beg buttons trigger a Barnes dance for those who are young, old, nervous, or just need extra time to cross.

[1] https://highways.dot.gov/safety/proven-safety-countermeasure...

[2] what you describe above where all walk signs are on and all automobiles are stopped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_scramble

I think YouTube is bigger (by profit, revenue, customers, or total hours used) than Netflix, Spotify, and Tik Tok.

See: https://mannhowie.com/youtube-valuation

Also see: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/28/youtube-is-a-proven-juggerna..., https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube-a...

I knew I recalled it from somewhere, thank you!

Observationally, self-serving denial seems to go through steps:

1. It's not happening.

2. Ok, it is happening, but it's not our fault.

3. Ok, it is our fault, but it's too hard to be worth addressing right now.

4. Ok, it would have been worth addressing at the time, but it's too late so we should learn to live with it.

These apply generally across the political spectrum, but specifically with respect to climate change, if people are shifting from step 1 to step 2 and even step 3 as per the article I suppose that is a form of progress in the sense that they are moving closer to reality. Having said that, no step requires that anyone take action or make sacrifices so practically it doesn't matter which step they're on.

> give consumers worse experience in terms of range, recharge time, and reliability

My expectation was also that switching to electric cars would involve some sacrifice but for my use cases it has been net more convenient.

For daily commuting I plug in at the office garage where they have dozens of L1 and about twenty L2 chargers. This has been more convenient than remembering to stop at a gas pump a couple times a month.

I initially kept a gasolene car for long trips because I assumed it would be inconvenient to schedule a ~30m stop every ~4 hours or so. In practice it turns out I need to stop about that frequently for family members to stretch, use the restroom, and grab a bite, etc. The major difference has been that it constrains where we stop rather than when we stop.

However, if you are regularly doing 5+ hour trips in rural or remote areas, then a gasolene or diesel vehicle is a more convenient choice. As they build out a more comprehensive charging infrastructure the difference may lessen.

I cannot speak to reliability as we've only had them for a year now.

Every interface convention was novel at some point. Breaking them doesn't necessarily make a UI bad, just as following them doesn't make it good. It depends on your skill as well as your audience, their expectations, and how experienced they are with the current interface patterns.

But certainly the vast majority of products should not create new or novel interface patterns just as they shouldn't "roll their own" cryptography -- it is almost always unnecessary and unless it is your primary focus it is very likely that what you come up with will be significantly worse than the status quo.

I may be, though given the popularity of dedicated toasting appliances, have you considered the possibility that it's not really an edge case?

Are there examples of phones that have done this, or is it a hypothetical fear?

Either way, I remain glad that the government has not made it illegal for a company to remove functionality from a product.

I respect that you would be willing to sacrifice three minutes of sleep for toast without a toaster. However, I am working to increase my sleep back to a healthy amount including physical therapy, setting better boundaries at work, and outsourcing a lot of low-value "just a few minutes" kinds of tasks that are individually small but cumulatively add up.

If I can spend $50 and half a square foot of counter space to get an extra 3 minutes of sleep every day I would do that in a heartbeat. If I could pay $1,000 and ten square feet of counter space to get an extra hour a day I'd do that in a heartbeat too.

Our differing life circumstances make our tradeoffs different, though I will admit that I aspire to become time-rich enough someday to afford luxuries like spending three minutes a day making toast without a toaster.

In my case the primary benefit of a toaster is that it requires minimal intervention, not energy efficiency.

When I'm trying to get multiple small humans dressed and fed in the morning I prefer to put all the slices in a toaster oven and set the automatic timer. If I used the oven broiler I would have to manually set timers to remind me to run back to the kitchen and flip the bread. And of course if I forget or can't make it back to the kitchen in time then it doesn't take many burnt-on-one-side pieces of toast to equal the cost of a toaster.

I agree that there are niche kitchen gadgets that are not worth the space but it depends on the person. For example, I do not have a dedicated coffee machine, but many people consider theirs indispensable.

> Imagine removing the number keys from your phone and calling it progress.

But that's what the iPhone did, didn't it? Before that most phones (even touch-screen ones) had physical number keys, whereas the iPhone demoted the keypad/dialpad off to a secondary screen in the Phone application. For a while the only time I ever used the keypad when navigating an automated menu, but now that Android has "Direct My Call" I don't even use it for that.

I'm glad that there are still phones with number keys for people who like them, but I'm equally glad it's not illegal to make products simpler for those who prefer that.

Some customization controls, such as the darkness of the bread, are valuable to me because I like slightly darker toast than my partner. (As others have pointed out, note that this product does have a knob for that.)

But all options have a cost so those I do not use have negative value.

My current toaster oven has three dials and an LCD display with a hierarchical menu, the vast majority of which I have never intentionally used, though I don't mind all the bells and whistles because I have learned how to ignore them. But for toasting slices of bread my current toaster is less useful than one in the article despite the proliferation of options because it requires that I mentally estimate the amount of time to toast depending on the bread slice's thickness, composition, and current temperature (i.e. from counter, fridge, or freezer) so I can specify an appropriate amount of time to toast. Occasionally I slightly over- or under-toast something and then deal with correcting that.

I agree that it is much more infuriating when controls I depend on are removed or shunted off into a car touchscreen menu or appliance-specific mobile app. But for the vast majority of appliances and applications I just want the thing to do the job I hired it to do with minimal questions or interruptions.

> Nobody else wanted to take up the mantle of maintaining an X implementation.

This is the most surprising part to me.

Despite the volume of end-user complaints I haven't seen any developer stepping up to take over the soon-to-be deprecated X.Org Server or advertising their alternative X implementation.

Even if it remains niche like the various systemd alternatives it seems like a lot of people would be grateful.

The challenge highlighted in the article is that adds are increasing in areas that are harder to avoid such as billboards, hotel rooms, airline seats, ride-hailing apps.

Implementation differences are certainly a part, but people do interpret them differently.

For example, I'm working on an application that is transitioning some of our stateful navigation to be more stateless to hopefully address some end-user confusion. We have an overlapping hierarchy where many objects have multiple parents, and the same object would display different breadcrumbs depending on which path someone took to the object. This made people confused about whether they were looking at the same object.

I agree the use of "stateful UI" is ambiguous in general, but with respect to navigation I typically hear hierarchies referred to as stateless and activity stacks as stateful.

With a hierarchy like iOS every child is supposed to have exactly one parent so you only need to know the current page to know what the "back" button will do -- it will go up one level in the hierarchy to the page's parent regardless of how you arrived at the page.

With an activity stack like Android, it is not sufficient to know the current page, you must know how you got to that page because the "back" button refers to going back in the history.

Many websites support both -- the browser's back button is stateful and navigates your personal history, whereas on-page navigation like breadcrumbs are often stateless and do not depend on the particular path you took to get to the page. There are exceptions of course, many search interfaces are stateful in that drilling into an item and going back using the in-page navigation will return you to the prior query rather than the page's parent.

Now that you mention it, I do know a couple designers who do FOSS development but I doubt they would be interested in doing design or research for someone else's project.

As someone who also jumped from development to design I agree with your description of the friction between developers and designers.

I'll also add that compromise is especially difficult when everyone involved is a volunteer, many of whom seem to be attracted to FOSS partly to reclaim some of the autonomy missing from their day jobs. And when projects become popular many maintainers are petrified of making hard choices that might anger existing users.

Given that, it's not surprising how many FOSS projects fall back to tinkering with icons and colors but otherwise recreate workflows from proprietary competitors.