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That last line depends. There's a lot more to the environment, team, management structure, business goals, financing, and much more that would place them effectively at square one.

I agree with your other points. But as an example, I worked previously with some 20+ year executives with huge products... 15 years before the market I was working with them in. So, it's great they knew a lot about launching product in 2005. But I need expertise for 2020. If their ideas cost more than a more modern, more efficient method, I don't need to have to teach them the method uphill against their stubbornness to stick to what they know. This issue played a role in me releasing an entire sales team two months into my role. I don't care that they had the most experienced people. The debate about what they knew and where the company was going was driving up costs and lowering productivity for other teams.

This thread makes me wish I hadn't gone to grad school for an MSDA. I'd be a lot less angry at the ineptitude on bold display in this thread.

NowThis and that entire network of brands collaborating on radical politics. There has to be way to make this more obvious to people.

I've watched VICE and NowThis alone radicalize perfectly decent people. I knew someone for over 10 years who was always highly observant, emotional but self-aware, would drop what he was doing to sit in my car with me in a dark parking lot and let me go through the wild ride of emotions I have about my ex. He knew we wouldn't ever be a thing. I sat with him one evening in a dark parking lot and let him go through his emotions on us just not falling into place, the existential crisis of seeing something desired within reach and being able to touch but not keep it. He's the person who taught me every second is independent from the next, that a bad feeling toward someone can be isolated, compartmentalized, only exist in a moment in the front of our minds. That if we're aware of that independence, we can turn off an emotion so quickly we hardly notice the effort. And today, I could be thoroughly enraged by someone's comment online, turn off my screen and be in a great mood before I even realize the transition occurred.

A few years back, he started watching the VICE documentaries at work during his free time. And then he started watching the clips and cuts made by Buzzfeed and channels like NowThis. Then he started sharing them on social media. And the clips got more and more incendiary. It's like VICE news could do a 30-minute special on LGBT in Brazil, but he'd watch and re-watch the few seconds of Bolsonaro saying gays are bad and that's just his view. And then he'd repost the clips. And then he started posting them on people's timelines to make sure their friends saw the clips and his comments too. And it eventually spiraled out into him posting clips of Nazi propaganda and these detailed comparisons to the Trump administration. And then he got verbally abusive toward his family.

My last conversation with him was me asking why he posted what read like a manifesto that white people, Nazis/KKK, cisgender people should be put into training programs and if they refused or didn't show rapid progress then they deserved to be dropped off somewhere remote and left there. I thought he was joking, but he said he was serious. He ranted for almost an hour at me, even after I closed Facebook. I got 13 or so message notifications on my phone.

Just to clarify, his posts on Facebook and Twitter included his belief that 'cisnormativity' is a product of 'white mafias', that we're all accomplices and own a blood libel for the deaths of the poor around the world, that ISIS wasn't homophobic and only executed cishomos, that he'd force cishomos to have sexual intercourse with trans people even if it didn't fix them. Just insane, insane shit.

These sites are the gateway drugs to violence. For all the talk about violent video games and movies, these indie (corporate) 'news' channels are the real danger.

The entire dev process with Apple is hardly ethical. No flexibility with payment options, the constant review and redevelop process even on apps that have already established a strong history. And the upfront and continuing costs... You'd have to buy every available iPhone version on market, a Mac, the programming license, the app store license, and hope Apple doesn't just rip off your idea for a future iOS feature then kick your app out of the store entirely. I may be off on some of this, but any of it is too much.

Don't ever, ever, ever, ever... NEVER go to Reddit.

I'm losing more neurons than I am patience these days.

Just FYI: We don't even know why we have them anymore. For the last 30 years or so, pennies have been worth less than their raw materials. They're so worthless, most people have more of them in their furniture or under their car seats than they do in their wallets.

It's not a faulty teaching process. I'm white, and I can dance. Dance, at its super basic foundation, is about physical awareness. The same way you teach someone how to use a piece of gym equipment, hold a yoga pose, or even ride a bike.

What I think is difficult to describe in dance is how to communicate emotion through your body, not just your face. For me, the hardest thing to overcome there is this fear that someone will make fun of me for taking it too seriously. I don't know why I have this fear about becoming so immersed in something that other people think I'm cringeworthy. If it wasn't an issue, I'd pull every muscle in my body just to nail a routine to Celine's "My Heart Will Go On".

Maybe the fear of humiliation is the culprit winning out more often than most people will admit?

I now need to think about this. Like, that's a damn good song to me. And given that it's my life, my time given to a performance of it, why in the world am I concerned about a few assholes who think they're cooler than me in that moment?

This is difficult to express, but that difficulty inherent to my process of describing my perspective to you is a motivator for me doing so. And that's where difficulty/challenge as a component of knowledge acquisition is important.

We memorize and recall within the limbic system. That's the same system that also facilitates our emotional and physical responses to stimuli. And as I see it (keep in mind I'm not a neuroscientist), increasing emotional activity alongside the task increases the overall allocation of physical energy to the limbic system. I believe this is the physical component that defines "flow", or the ability to be so immersed in an activity or series of activities that, as I am at this point in my writing, we forget time. (I need to go stir tea on the stove. One moment...)

Alright. Um, our ability to sustain enough engagement in something to optimize our retention of that activity is, I believe, critically dependent on emotion. Think of reading a law book. Now, think of reading a law book on accounting. Now, think of reading a law book on accounting while referencing the IRS.gov web site for available white papers. The further we venture into emotional detachment from the activity, the more willpower we need to engage, the more energy we deplete through continuous activation and reactivation as we doze off and have to return and restart a portion of the activity.

I agree though that the challenge has to be enjoyable. I'm not interested in learning a new programming language while doing a handstand. I am, however, interested in learning a new programming language if a boy I like also likes it and likes to talk about it, and I want a reason to talk to him more often. (I had a stint learning C++ for that reason. And it's still one of the best things I've done because it expanded my understanding of paradigms and language capabilities.)

At the very least, limit the scope of the language until a standardized toolset is cross-functional. I'm not not throwing shade at UWP right now.

I did an MSDA, and I wanted to let you know that you're cutting off the majority of your opportunities for Data roles if you aren't specializing in a business component as well. For me, it was Sales. Started out as a Jr. Analyst and within a year owned all Sales Ops and Sales Enablement. Was a small 60-person, $23MM training company, but my skill with data paired with projects like forecasting models, process optimization, etc. made me a critical asset during a re-org. I'd say about 80% of my daily work was on data projects. The other 20 was in the sales channel itself. Kept things exciting. I worked 14-16 hour days. Never got tired of the grind.

So, consider pairing your data expertise with a business function. Really, anything from Marketing to Finance will open you up to a swarm of opportunities.

I believe that understanding relationships between units (objects, people, etc.) explains high intelligence, especially in autism, more than most average thinkers assume. People tend to fixate on the unit, and presume a relationship apropos between units. So, if we give core focus to memorizing the relationship then the unit, we may actually reinforce the neural pathways for both units and the abstraction between them without additional repetition.

My long-term memory is more efficient when I learn something from multiple angles. So, I don't look at basic algebra and just think, "X and Y are placeholders for numbers." I also think, "X can contain the value Y expressed as X=!Y." and "X can be a function of X expressed as X=X(X++)." and so on. This kind of ad-hoc modeling is about testing and defining the context of a relationship between units. And in that respect, I can say, anecdotally, that I consume information quickly and rarely have recall errors.

Here's an idea, for whatever it's worth: Address the incentive to riot instead of attempting to assign full control and liability to one element over another.

For all the obvious, on-the-nose proof that reactive states differ from proactive states, I find it very odd that people are still folding their arms and brandishing smug expressions for their equivalently useless ideas as soon as someone else's idea yields a critical failure.

Critical thinking is not an art, nor a science, nor difficult. It just requires someone to maintain a consistent curiosity and skepticism for the utility of information. If someone tells you cats climb trees, you should automatically think, Not all cats can climb trees and How useful is this to me?. And if you have a cat, you might sequentially think, Do I have any trees that my cat could climb? and How much of a tree should I trim to prevent my cat from climbing it? and maybe Do I have a way to retrieve my cat from one of my trees? and so on and so forth. So, someone please explain why, given the seriousness everyone attributes to the lockdowns, to police brutality, etc. Just... why are you doing the equivalent of hearing that cats can climb trees, and then you think, My cat would never climb my trees, because my trees aren't cat-climbable trees, so that makes my cat, my trees and myself better than other cats, trees, and cat owners?

Similar issues have confounded me for years. And I've come to believe that a consistent strawman and Catch-22 can be found in political correctness: If we agree to use the substitute words, we admit the original words were designed to segregate and that we used them to that end. If we don't agree to the substitute words, we prove the original words were designed to segregate and that we will use them to that end.

Most of these claims are bait. The goal isn't for the person asserting them to strike meaningful change in our understanding of the issue. They want to appear informed because they feel protected from criticism over their individual culpability. An anecdote: I had a friend who spent years patronizing white people she knew over their "ignorance" on the disproportionate impact of domestic abuse on black and Hispanic women. One evening, she flippantly described them as "too ghetto to know 'wuz good'..." So, all that talk and insistence, and she was the only person in the room with that opinion.

I don't know about minimum effort. Some of Google's product teams have focused their best work on limitations that don't make sense. An example: It takes a lot of work to build an entire app ecosystem for Android Auto, only to disable the whole f'n thing if the end user disables Google Voice.

We ended up here because Amazon can't scale. It's just uncool to admit you have to notice the pink elephant. Why? I don't know. Maybe it has to do with cred in engineering teams or for engineering teams in the broader org structure.

But the problem with AWS, with a lot of the "cloud", is the pitch that remote centralization of a service scales ad infinitum. It's still subject to the same constraints as self-managed, even if those constraints appear at a higher limit.

The greatest constraint is the per-unit pricing. You buy self-managed, you have huge upfront and period costs, but with remote, you see the $.03/MB price and assume that variable cost is more manageable over the long run. And it is... until price changes, overhead changes, bandwidth changes, or worse, accessibility changes. And suddenly, what you had cost-effective scaling on 18 months ago now has a massive deficit affixed to it. Because that's how most people used the platform... or because removing A or B features reduced maintenance costs or freed up bandwidth.

AWS is an experiment. Does it work in many or even most use cases? Yes. For now.

I love engineers. A lot. In fact, being in sales, I would give up a deal with an engineering team unless I knew for sure my ROI basis was solid. That said, I do know sales and marketing rhetoric. And having spent hundreds of hours in meetings with product, marketing and dev professionals, I wish I could record the stress-induced breakdowns I've seen in engineers and executives who had everything running buttery, "and then [provider] pushed [update]..." and they then have executives breathing on the back of their neck 16 hours a day, entire teams offline or unable to do basic tasks, etc. I just want to play that shit to people and say, "This is why you don't overpromise."

Terrible for accessibility though. I'm sure screen readers have come a long way, but the core issue we dealt with 15-20 years ago was that the convenience of an imap wasn't worth breaking accessibility standards.

With more of our traditional desktop services having moved to mobile and now moving back to the browser, I'm more concerned about this creating another wave of accessibility limitations caused by a petty convenience for dev.

I don't want to sound off like an activist, but I'd like to see that someone with limited mobility or sight can equitably access services they, as much as we, will sooner or later have to depend on as current apps and software lose support and phase out. The Net has always been a place where a person's only limitation should be their choice to not commit their time to learning how to use it. Let's stand by that now more than ever, or I fear we'll hand an uncontested victory to the idiots in Silicon Valley who want us to adapt to how they want us to use the Net.

I'm not sure where people get the idea that they can assert something as a counterpoint on no basis. "That's just your opinion," is not a rational basis to disagree, especially when your counterpoint requires the implied basis (semantic) to be equally relevant to the original argument's basis (law).

"Open source" isn't based on the semantic that the source code is public, its definition comes exclusively from a set of guidelines that limit the rights of the original creator to enforce a specific range of IP protections guaranteed to them by domestic and international laws. There are various types of public licenses, also known as GNU, that are considered "true open source" in that the original creator can only enforce some provisions like a source attribution credit in a modified distribution. And there are permission licenses, like the MIT License, which don't necessarily meet every guideline for FOSS, but do meet most of them.

When it comes to IP, the only basis that matters is legal, as its the only basis that's universally enforceable. Laypersons can define "open source" however they please, but when engineers, devs, business, and legal discuss it, it has one definition, and that definition is well-established as exemptions from current IP law.

From an SE/SO professional, can I rant here for a moment?

Marketing and Product rag on Sales a lot for discounting. Nevermind the fact that we own the touchpoints with an account, so it only makes sense that we'd know what any individual account needs. I've had this issue with Marketing and Product professionals since I started in Sales, and even more-so when I took over Sales Enablement and Sales Ops.

For one, pricing is a big deal, but value is bigger. I could sell you on that $1500/user easily by giving you a work product that factors the product roadmap, your business roadmap, and makes a compelling ROI case for you. I'm willing to give you those 8-11 hours.

But we both know it'll be wasted. Because in 90 days, Marketing will push a discount campaign that conflicts with preexisting agreements, and thereby throws all of that work product up in the air. We'd have to go back to square one and recalculate everything to see if a deal even exists. Or Product decides to drop the roadmap, delay a feature, realign to attempt to capture more of a saturated market.

You know who sets pricing? Pricing experts. And maybe, just maybe, if they spent five minutes on a discovery call with you, they'd understand why you bring up discounts, why I would rather give you the discount, and why both of us walk away knowing we missed an opportunity for quality relationship-building.

I tried this once with an account. We locked their pricing down, pushed a work product out justifying our use case. The account came back and requested we drop the discount, that they saw the additional upfront cost (nearly $40k+) as an investment in our roadmap that could return utility for them sooner rather than later. We made it six months post-close before Marketing and Product decided to completely drop the current roadmap and work on something else. I had to issue more than $22k back to that account, and we got forced into RFP by the parent org, which we lost and subsequently lost all business from them, domestic and international.

So. Thank you for airing your perspective. And just know that people like me have stormed in and out of meetings, and still do, trying to stop this BS.

Maybe. One distinction I want to argue is placement: Amazon always places the Amazon Choice options at the top of the search and product listings. They also always include them in the "Popular, Editor's Picks, Highest Rated, etc." box that appears in the middle of most pages on the site. This would be like you walking into Safeway for a bag of sugar, and as soon as you turn down the aisle, there's an employee telling you everyone buys the Safeway brand Sugar or an advertisement with three boxes showing Safeway's as the Most Popular option, and two others next to it.

Where this gets real distinct is in delivery: Amazon is currently purging its warehouses of stock from thousands of vendors so it can keep stock of Amazon-brand and big box brand alternatives to those same products. (See: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-28/amazon-is...) So, the Safeway equivalent of this would be you going down the sugar aisle and finding exactly 1 or 2 bags of competing brands with a note that says, "Hurry! Almost out!", and each bag has 10lb. anchor attached to it. But there's 100 bags of Safeway sugar, and there's a line of employees offering to carry it through the store for you do you don't hurt your terribly sore shoulders...

How would you feel if a Safeway associate slapped a tracking device on you when you walked in the door, and then didn't tell you they were recording everything you thought while you were working your way through the store? That's how Amazon.com works. Oh, and if Safeway could just look at your other recent thoughts and know you fapped about 20 minutes before you walked in the door? That's also Amazon.

No one wants to learn how to develop a proper UI either. For all the heatmap and eye-tracking and logging tools available, no one seems to be doing anything useful with the data they get.

Do you know it takes 3 or more states for Google Maps to load and start navigation from within it's own app? Try it. Count how many times you have to interact with the screen just to use the actual main feature of the app.

Here's another one: In Outlook, I want you to count the number of interactions required to attach a file to an email. You're free to use the drag-and-drop features, but you have to count every single individual action required to complete the task, including clicking Start, opening Explorer, navigating to a folder, etc.

These are critical tasks and features. And they require more work than using tertiary features. So, not only are these interfaces getting less and less responsive, accessing critical functions for routine/repetitive tasks are more convoluted than features no one uses, like the go offline feature in Outlook.

My mom is a CPA, SM in Tax, and won't take anyone onto her team if they can't look through a list of allocations and correctly answer whether they do or do not apply for Real Estate and Hospitality.

She has had one person last more than three years on her team. But with 1/6th of the workforce of any other manager, her people have ranked top three annual billing and efficiency for the last 6 years.

There are tests, but they're unconventional. And there are times I hear my mom pick up her office phone, call one of the firm's partners and say, "Stupid question. Would you allocate this to X or Y?" And then 40 minutes of heated debate over whether it will or won't cause a $300 penalty on a multi-million-dollar return.

Maybe engineers need more unconventional tests?

Worth mentioning that engineers often build proprietary solutions with proprietary tools and methods. So, while there are a lot of solutions that can be licensed and modified for a use case, the guy or gal building, say, Cisco's WebEx platform can't transfer their skills as readily as the guy or gal deploying, securing and maintaining it within a company.

So much of your work has insane barriers to entry, even for internships, that I'm surprised your roles don't come with one or two assistants to manage the mundane business of scheduling meetings, filtering emails, and planning deadlines around out of office time.

I got my BS in Cybersecurity, and after a few interviews, I nope-d out of IT as a whole. They'd post preferred certs on the job description (like CCNA) only to ask why I wasn't a CCNP during the first or second interview. Or they'd debate whether some other candidate with a CompTIA cert was better prepared for the $15/hr. internship. And I'm nowhere near the specialization of most engineers.

Awesome, awesome work, but it takes a ton of grit to get your foot in the door, and even more grit to switch jobs.

I'd agree on a lot of things in life, but UX is an exception because decisions made about how we interact with something have an area of effect.

I've railed against Google's UX approach for years. Their UX approach requires too many steps between states. Where does this get dangerous, even potentially lethal? Android Auto.

If one lock screen is too distracting while driving, Android Auto adds one more. None of your non-Google App notifications will appear on your dashboard, but Android Auto doesn't let you access your notifications unless you completely exit the app. You can't open Messages in Android Auto, even when the vehicle is not in motion. Android Auto disables all touch controls when the vehicle is in motion, and if you disabled Google Voice on your phone, you won't know until you're going 80MPH down a highway and need to adjust your GPS that you can't use touch, you can't use Voice, and you'd have to exit Android Auto just to re-enable it, and it can't just be enabled for Android Auto, it has to be enabled for your whole device... and Google owns any data you generate with the Voice Assistant, and you have no right to restrict how Google uses it, including the sale of that data to a third party.

So, I agree on most things to not be rude. But with UX, the goal is to prevent conflicts by modeling features around our most likely approach to using said features. When professionals at Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, force end users to use features in a specific (rather than intuitive) way, the consequences are wide and deep and the terms of service make it impossible to hold them accountable to change it.

Minimalism is about maintaining useful purpose behind the things you own and not retaining unnecessary objects. If you're a DIY person, and you have a good reason for a backyard of junk cars, that's explainable. If you buy a new iPhone every year but you don't actually use the majority of the new features (if ever at all), that's frivolity.

Minimalism isn't the ideology that (less is more)==(less things). That comes from people appropriating philosophies to compete for attention on social media, where everything is at best one-dimensional because the point is to entertain not educate. No, minimalism as a philosophy means (less is more)==(object-essentialism). You initialize solutions among what you have, and factor the time, resource, and opportunity cost into the cost-benefit of acquiring a new object. So, as I mentioned, if acquiring a backyard of junk cars is more cost-benefit savvy than having to acquire a new junk car every time you need a resource from one, it's minimalist. However, if you acquire a junk car that adds what you already have a sufficient amount of, it's frivolity.