jzimdars

But they do mean well :)

IMO this is a reflection of a culture that's a little more traditional and a lot more conservative than the rest of the country (and I don't mean crazy-right-wing-extreme-conservatism, though we have that here, too). People live, work and start businesses in OKC because they want to be here — not because they want access to VC/talent/incentives/loopholes.

I've lived in OKC for 20 years and we've stayed because it's a great place to live. My kids aren't passing through metal detectors at school, I can drive anywhere in the city in 20 minutes, the other guy always lets you go first at a 4-way stop, and when I say "hi" to a total stranger on the street they smile and reply in kind.

He did! It was kind of cool to spend a day with a coworker in my town.

Zeldman wrote this in 1999 and it's still true today:

"The web used to look like a phone book. Now much of it looks like a design portfolio. In fact, it looks like the design portfolio of 20 well-known designers, whose style gets copied again and again by young designers who consider themselves disciples. Distinctions between graphic design and communication design are lost on these designers. As is the distinction between true style, which evolves from the nature of the project, and derivative pastiche, which is grafted onto many projects like a third arm."

http://www.adobe.com/motiondesign/content/en/Dialog_Box/Styl...

If you start a project and wonder, "Hmm... should I use Flat Design for this?", you're doing it wrong.

:(

That's usually a case for refactoring. Either by pulling styles common to both elements out and up the tree so they apply more widely or creating a class that can modify both. In the latter case we'll usually use a technique like the last example in the article (more of an OOCSS approach) that works independent of the dom structure.

We've found it to be just the opposite. Because nested selectors don't repeat the names of parent elements it's a piece of cake to grab a block and move it up or down in the tree or just plain move it somewhere else. We find that we refactor more because it's so much easier to hold the style model in your head and so clear where to move a block of styles in order to increase or decrease their scope. That just makes for better CSS.

The examples in your gist would not benefit from additional use of child selectors, but I'll bet they'd appreciate it if the parent elements did :)

I'd say it's just the opposite. The lack of organizational hierarchy and title means that people can work outside their normal expertise more easily. Nobody is stuck in a box.

Designers pick up programming skills as their interests allow. Programmers with UI ideas can try them out. Both contribute with writing, with workflow ideas, and on customer support. We've even had people completely shift roles from programming to design.

I think if you treat people like they're "those kind of people" they may just start acting and producing like "those kind of people".

Excessive accountability and other policies designed to maximize productivity often have the undesired effect of making people feel mistrusted. It is employees that feel like a part of something, whose efforts matter that do the best work.

I love this quote from Cristóbal Conde, president and C.E.O. of SunGard:

"If you start micromanaging people, then the very best ones leave.

If the very best people leave, then the people you’ve got left actually require more micromanagement. Eventually, they get chased away, and then you’ve got to invest in a whole apparatus of micromanagement. Pretty soon, you’re running a police state. So micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/business/17corner.html?pag...