tatx

Indeed! Amazon does top-notch customer service at scale like nobody else. Everyone else just assumes that it is impossible to scale up something like this and they let the a previously great experience slip as they grow into a faceless organization. Good business is all about getting these hard things to scale.

They mention that the “the client base moved to enterprise” and I think that, if Gigster is ever reasonably successful, it will end up as a shop making niche products for enterprises who find it difficult to fit such development activities into their budgets and schedules. They will then be directly competing with consultants who today do not provide an 'end-to-end' solution, so to say, to the development problems plaguing these enterprise companies.

But it is mighty difficult to do this kind of niche work because developers will then have to spend an inordinate amount of time acquiring relevant domain knowledge to implement these niche solutions. Hard earned knowledge that will be useless after the project is complete. And the effort of acquiring this domain knowledge will often be under-appreciated and underpaid, cause it is very very difficult to estimate this effort no matter how good an AI have you.

Look at it from the other side. If a designer were to suggest some of the more fundamental changes to how your product should work, would you genuinely listen to their opinions and suggestions, or are these critical decisions being taken by someone higher up in management?

Designers are often pushed into the rear end of the process in every sort of consumer product development (including software development). It is no wonder therefore that we end up with not only ugly but often unusable products. Big opportunities all around for a company that brings good design and better designers to the forefront of product development.

But it is just too damn hard for most people to let go of their ego where design is concerned. The whole design thing looks so intuitive and apparent right from the start that we can't believe we can't do it all ourselves, and, not only that, do it better that everybody else.

That Apple was ever good at design was probably the relative side effect of other software and hardware developers being abysmally bad at it (probably due to monopolistic inefficiencies). And now that the competition is heating up and challenging Apple on the design front, the flaws that earlier would have been swept under the carpet by ardent fans, including me, are becoming difficult to disregard.

> The further down in the software hierarchy that you push the complexity, the less work has to be done by everybody above.

This. From the interview[1]. I think this is the most important takeaway for people building software. An inherent assumption here is that the deeper layers in the software undergo less changes and iterations compared to the outer layers. This may not always be the case, but it often is.

1. http://www.designingforinteraction.com/tesler.html

Browsing Facebook, or for that matter any other similar network (including HN :)), is like anti-meditation. They rattle your mind with so much information in such quick succession that it becomes almost impossible to think through or about any one particular thing. Like alcohol, it is simultaneously addictive – the mind craves information – and depressing – numbs the mind preventing it from engaging in deep rational thought.

I think we can have the best of both worlds – enjoy our whiskey and discuss philosophy too :) I think there is a future for a social network that can slow things down a little, maybe also summarize, organize and filter an apparently disparate group of things, allowing the user enough time to digest and process the information before moving ahead in leisure.

Great metaphor, but I think smartness is something even lesser than a torch. Creativity, it seems, is the torch that helps you find the right wedge. Smartness is probably what tells you to look for a wedge in the first place.

In today’s tech environment, you have to be a fickle programmer to get yourself hired. With age however most people learn just the opposite - to be less fickle and more focused.

I think that the current complaints about age-discrimination, apparent and false though they may be, indicate a misguided but passing phase that the industry is going through. People are hedging with trivial ideas and products, hoping they will stick. These guys built a CAD product on the cloud called Onshape, check out their engineering team - https://www.onshape.com/team

Cleartax has done an amazing job, really. I filed my last two returns using Cleartax and everything went without a hitch. Even when the system fails to parse the Form-16 correctly it is easy enough to just manually enter the data, save it, come back to it later and complete filing the returns. I have had a harder time filing tax returns with TurboTax, though that was a while back. Cleartax kept sending me repeated email reminders to complete the filing process even after it was already complete, so there's a bug somewhere :) but otherwise kudos to Archit and the rest of the team.

Hell, I am ready to join their efforts, if only they would have a grumpy old guy like me on the team :)

There is nothing inherently wrong with complexity. Complex things can be made to appear simple, usable and open too. It is just that, when it comes to software, we haven’t yet figured out a way of building complex systems that are beautiful (in a very broad sense of the term). Whenever we try to create anything complex in software it inevitably turns into a mess.

Also software engineering sounds unglamorous today and research in the field seems to have stalled. And therefore the craving for the simplicity of the Unix philosophy. Not that the Unix way of working actually solves the problems posed by software complexity, it just asks us to avoid complexity.

Growing up I read a lot of the Nancy Drew books that my sister would borrow from the library and her friends. I got hooked on reading because of these books. Short and fast paced, I generally liked them better than the Hardy Boys. Being a guy though, and out of the fear of being ostracized out of my already small all-male friend circle, I had to read them in secret and couldn't discuss anything related to the stories or the characters with my friends :)

While most of us are pointing fingers at the fast-changing nature of and innovation-craziness in the tech industry, I think the core reason may be quite the opposite.

It seems plausible that the tech industry, innovation-wise, is actually in a rut where companies are forced to cut costs and survive by hiring young people whom they have to pay less. The changes happening in the industry today are of a fickle and shallow kind, not fundamental and lasting. And in an evolution-like process the older amongst us, who are the only ones with enough experience to really innovate, are being driven out of the ecosystem and forced to disrupt an industry going stale.

Also, collaboration. I think we tend to over estimate how much people like to collaborate. And the organic UI looks very childish to me.

I have worked with several project managers who cite this article and claim to live by this ideal. However in practice they do everything but what is mentioned of a good product manager in the article. I don't know if I am biased or if the product managers, like most humans it would seem, fail to see themselves in a bad light (and thus correct themselves and set anew on a better path).

I also think that this is a subjective article, which, while it tries to list down the differences between good and bad traits of a product manager, fails to strongly separate the bad traits from the good ones by using vague management speak, and in general ends up making product managers feel goody goody about just being product managers.

I only started running regularly a year back, and I certainly feel something like a long-drawn low-ebbing pleasant kinda 'high' after a run. I also have double the energy now-a-days and am twice as productive since I started running. Concentration has improved along with temperament.

I am in my mid-thirties though and I can't recollect having run more than a mile before in my life. Maybe I will get used to this high and stop feeling the difference. Maybe I am feeling the kick because it is novel to me. But yes, it is nothing like the high you get from smoking marijuana :)

Just wondering - wouldn't it be easier, not only for music notation but also for math and other scientific notation, if there was an on-screen keyboard custom-built for this very purpose with the required symbols and movement keys? After all, why require a stylus and why sketch the characters when you can just as easily type (actually, typing may turn out to be a much faster input method). Is there a real benefit to sketching or is it something else.

Why wasn't handwriting recognition a big success?