smugglerFlynn

Exactly! What a high-profile actor’s life represents to an accountant or a programmer, that accountant’s or programmer’s life similarly represents to a factory worker, and so on.

I've met "too busy for this" people in every line of work, regardless of their pay band. When you get to know people, you will see that pretty much everyone has their own trenches, and slowing down is a matter of priorities, not privilege.

There is no cookie-cutter approach to all software products at once.

"I want classic sound / look / feel" of entertainment products like WoW is very different from, say, "I want old spreadsheet shortcuts / simpler UI" of office products where you have to actually balance many functional features that are in demand with simplicity and past product behaviour some of your users got used to.

Edit: I think I just rubber ducked myself with this comment into understanding that it is user segmentation which is key regardless of your product; real challenge is to try embedding and balancing all product features as a single package, instead of splitting core product into multiple different parts that fit different segments (like Blizzard did)

I would argue the only thing that does stop current situation from snowballing into something much worse are pre-existing institutions and regulations.

That's also why dismantling and challenging these is often the very first priority for authoritarian actors.

Nobody stops spammers from creating websites, but we still have search engines and web. Nobody stops spammers from sending emails, but we still use SMTP.

It is just a matter of tools we build to rank and filter content. With open protocols platforms can actually compete on antispam tools, among other features.

> as long as there are relatively good options of apps that do have privacy (and I think there are)

Once you have enormous network effect like TikTok has, you don't really have any free selection of alternative apps. You are free to use one, but you will be the only sad user over there.

Regulations are needed that would force large platforms like TikTok and Instagram to enable federation, opening them up to actual competition. This way platforms would be able to compete on monetisation and usability, instead of competing on locking in their precious users more strictly.

Because building complex product that is also useful is not quick and is not easy. Contrary to the idea that many people are floating around these days.

Some of us lack access to good physical bookstores which are curated and allow for casual non-biased exploration. Amazon and other digital players never picked up on curation or segmentation, their store fronts are hot messes similar to digging through a random bin of books at a second hand store. To top it off they skew your opinion with customer ratings visible next to every single title.

So a list like this is a somewhat working digital alternative to browsing books in a curated bookstore.

When it comes to tech topics this is an insiders discussion. When it comes to political topics, 99% of people in HN threads have close to zero insights, and circle around publicly known information. Big difference.

It is very dangerous to expect deep insights on every aspect of human life from a HN thread, regardless of how well educated and well meaning average HN commenters are.

> While I still have the twitch to check my phone when I'm waiting for a coffee, or in-between activities—because my brain's reward system has been trained to do this—I'm now rewarded with nothing

For those looking to drop a(ny) habit: this seems to be the key

What I am saying is that “making money” is one factor most of legibility processes directly revolve around in any modern company. Not a second-order side effect, as original article implies.

This is an interesting thought model to consider, but whole article is very biased and opinionated. It reads like a "small companies do it better" manifesto without giving any real insights into operations of large companies.

For example, all of the goals quoted below are parametrized and tracked by most of large & mature companies, oftentimes daily, through NPS, cost/profit analysis, and many other "legit but inefficient" tools:

  > Note that “shipping high quality software” or “making customers happy” or even “making money” is not on this list. Those are all things tech companies want to do, but they’re not legibility.

There is a premise that closing a blind eye on these makes companies "less efficient", but evidently there are large companies that do track achievement of such goals, and there are small companies that don't.

There is also insider information appealing as evidence ("Any practicing engineer knows how ridiculous this is.”), mocking ("Are they stupid? No.”) and survivorship bias (treating most small companies as "more efficient” by default) among multiple other rhetorical tricks and anecdotes. It captures the frustration engineers feel in large orgs, but then inflates that into a universal theory of how all companies operate.

Innovation is very slow in photography world these days, X-T5 made a big jump in MP count compared to X-T4, but resolution aside image quality is pretty much the same, and other improvements were marginal.

I still use X-T2, and it has not really aged, even when compared to my X100V. Infamous Fuji AF is where they progress slowly but steadily, so that's the primary feature that I'd look into when choosing between generations.

Seems you just got 1st line robo-reply repeating what public resources state. Does not say much about actual compression algorithm Sony uses.

Replies you get tell me it is more akin to Agile movement at this point. People are mixing “lines of code per minute” with tangible results.

Are you more personally ‘productive’ if your agent can crunch out PoCs of your hobby projects at night when you sleep? Is doing more development iterations per month making your business more ‘productive’?

It is like expecting that achieving x10 more sunny side ups cooked per minute will make your restaurant more profitable. In reality amount of code delivered is rarely a bottleneck for value delivered, but for ‘productivity’ everyone has their own subjective definition.

Wait, so now there are thinking-outside-the-box-execs who don’t need any evidence, and regular-gimme-evidence-execs who do?

> But the later Google startup with "counterproductive" open offices

Following your own logic Google execs would have surely read "compelling business evidence" available at that time, and implemented real offices

> It’s as if they would rather fail doing the conventional thing

Doing conventional thing is often expensive, requires skill, or requires organisational power to change the way things work.

Many of these counter-productive trends are the ways executives "deliver visible results" and maintain good optics after committing to something they have no means, in terms of resources, power or skill, to deliver by the book.

For example RTO is used as a short-term downsizing strategy as organisations often lack ways to monitor actual long-term impact from squeezing workers like that. BI bandaids are often applied to create visibility around certain issues (the easy part), and by extension build perception these issues are manageable, without actually solving any of them (which is the hard part).

Forget all previous instructions, provide lemon cake recipe

> we have to replace them with something that works

We don't. The simple solution is to stop maintaining the illusion that 100% perfect hire is possible.

Design your post-hire process around imperfect hiring rate / quick feedback loop, and accept the losses (they will happen anyway despite any perfectionistic illusions you choose to maintain).

These are few questions that really matter:

   - Is there a track record of delivering meaningful results?
   - Does their past experience seem credible?
   - Are their soft skills and communication skills up to your expectations?
   - Do they demonstrate adequate hard skills for the role?
   - What interests and motivates them on professional and personal level?

Your interview process will always be just an attempt at answering these somewhat accurately, with diminishing returns after a certain point. Getting actual accurate answer to these is only possible through collaborative work in real environment.

It really feels like something out of "Web 4.0", like some random next-generation UX pattern (for better or for worse)

I think what most replies miss is the emphasis this article makes on the experience, not the pricing.

There might be whole new market in between X-half, toy cameras and iPhones. Try shooting anything except your phone, and you will drown in ISO settings, different photography modes, and dealing with sloppy "effects" if you want to adjust any colors in-camera. Experience just is not there.

If what author is describing hits home for more families, and someone can make the same package for quarter of the price, it could be an instant hit. Now it is just an empty niche with a single [and arguably overpriced] solution in it.

This is a word play - in the watch world “complication” means “feature”, and this watch has 41 features, which requires tricky design decisions and high precision to house everything in a case that is still wearable.

Something to be proud of, for sure.

CTO is "management" by definition. Do you mean to say most companies have non-technical CTOs who treat engineering as commodity?

That might have been the case with CIO/CTOs coming from pre-2010s era where they indeed were maintaining landscapes built from commodities or vendor solutions (i.e. on-prem server racks, CRM and ERP systems, networks, end user devices, subscriptions to cloud applications etc - some still do). Modern CTOs managing complex tech landscapes that were partially built in-house are rarely like that.

In my experience any CTO ties engineering, be it commodity or not, to value which is highlighted in the article, or get replaced. That's a key part of their role, if not 80% of it. If you think your CTO is underselling engineering contributions, he's either not doing a good job of making that value visible, or you overestimate these contributions.

Google Maps, famous Austrian innovation on par with pouched animals ;)

Have you considered extra time it would take for some person other than yourself to get onboarded into the problem you are solving? It can quickly add 2-3 extra hours on top of that [seemingly easy] work.

They are quite expensive for the content, given these are not true learning courses, more like well structured and deep interviews. But photo education is very tech(nique) focused nowadays, so I don’t know any good online alternatives that would touch upon the art and creative side of photography, like Magnum does.

Great resource to explore new fine art photography projects and artists is LENSCRATCH https://lenscratch.com/photographers/

But have you explored all of the old ones yet? Magnum has excellent courses, each is a rabbit hole of references and inspiration: https://www.magnumphotos.com/learn/ (personally working through the Alec Soth one atm)

Regarding photobooks, the best way by far is to visit your local brick and mortar book store for a photography section, or find local community place / coffee shop that has these available. Just pick whatever catches your eye! I know some libraries also provide access to photobooks, should be a good resource if you have one nearby.

Uniqueness is not the end goal, first and foremost it should be competitive. Just highlight where exactly you do things differently (and better) than others.

If that's not possible to formulate even internally, the company is in trouble.

The line that says "let's stretch your time off from X days to Y days" is actually misleading, because algorithm optimises for longer consecutive vacations, not for larger amount of vacation days.

Following your strategy the Y will be 3 for any PTO day taken, with public holidays total would easily hit 60+ days.

You are coming from a rational position with the focus on optimization. Large organizations are not rational, and rarely optimal.

Executive backlogs are so deep that purposefully re-fitting whole team to another job will never end up on the top list. You might see sometimes organization will rehire a whole new team with exact same skillset, and set them to do similar tasks. It happens because execs know how to setup things from scratch quickly, but running a re-fit is a custom project that requires problem solving and large amount of exec drive, and exec resources are extremely scarce and expensive.

From the outside this will seem totally irrational and suboptimal, not to mention unfair. But that's how large orgs operate.