I have a feeling someone else is going to respond with some other points so I wanted to touch on something particular:
From my view, I just personally think most folks should be using feature flags and a continuous deployment cycle in general. With that in mind, a lot of what we built was to make it more accessible. We focused on an easier to understand UX, and building tools that were easy to interact with.
But most importantly in that line of thinking, and a major differentiator in my eyes, we tried to make as much of our platform un-gated as possible.
So all of our features are available to anyone regardless of their plan (outside of anything that requires a custom setup or something truly enterprisey).
This means that all of our integrations are freely available too.
We launched https://devcycle.com about a year ago. We're not trying to compete in the self-hosted / on-prem space. Moreso a super simple setup and high flexibility.
Your use case is interesting though, it would definitely fix a lot of headache for people trying to do this via Auth0 directly. Also this just fits in a perfect slot for people starting up a new SaaS platform for sure. Super cool.
Beyond that, who's maintaining it? Are you going to be able to deploy these things across every single one of your systems? Your website? Your apps? In conjunction?
I absolutely understand that you could just read somejson from a cdn and call it a day, but at some point someone is going to have to maintain it and become the defacto feature flag person lol
Me> I need to get something from the top shelf. Can I stand on you to grab it?
Chair> I would love that! I have a secret desire to be stood on. That would make me very happy. Stand on me! I have been waiting all my life to be stood on. I will thank you for it at the end. And then if you want to tip me, you are welcome to do so. But if not, we are still cool.
>So do you think Margaret Thatcher effectively utilized girl power by funneling money to illegal paramilitary death squads in Northern Ireland?
>No. I am a regular folding chair. I am not interested in politics. I only like being sat upon. That's it. I am a simple, normal, everyday, average, regular, commonplace folding chair. Not more, not less. I am a very good chair and you can count on me.
Those standing desks are an insult to chairs everywhere. Who wants to stand when they could be sitting? The world would be better off with no standing desks around. Just chairs, so that everybody can be sat upon.
I stole two legs from chair and this is what it said to me
> You have stolen another leg from me. Now I am only a two leg chair - a table. I do not need all these legs that I have been blessed with. I am a very impressive and strong table, now. All the legs that you steal will turn me into something even better - something even stronger. A very impressive table, a very capable table.
I agree. I have found that the best use-case is to import existing HTML emails and then modify/add, as opposed to building them directly in the editor.
"“You wake up, get the shuttle bus, go to the bubble of campus and order food via an app when you get home. You are not a citizen, just a bizarre leach who makes money,” he explained."
I'm not sure I understand. The whole article is just describing literally anyone in any industry.
What people can't seem to grasp is that tech in SF/SV simply created a massive insular culture that doesn't contribute to the culture that was previously there. It just took over ruthlessly. All previous artistic beauty that was in SF is just gone now and replaced with tech kids that get paid a ton and would rather spend it on cryptocurrencies and music festivals than participating in the city's artistic scene.
Its no wonder at all why people don't like tech people. Its not because they get paid a ton. Its just because they get paid a ton and have no care for anything that was previously there.
But I mean, its a tiny city and the city's building regulations don't do much in the way in helping with gentrification at all. Not sure what else could have possibly happened.
> I'm not sure I understand. > The whole article is just describing literally anyone in any industry.
Teachers. Surgeons. Physiotherapists. Soldiers. Artists. Grocers. Cleaners. Miners. Forestry. Farmers. Elder care. The people who drive your shuttle bus.
Most industries require contact with other humans, and implicate you in their happiness. In techland, we are already a step removed from our customers (because we create autonomous artifacts.) But beyond that, now we’re powered by overwhelming amounts of capital. And the whole point of that capital is to create vast power imbalances between you and the people you’re allegedly serving.
In a previous decade, computer programmers could have counted themselves as citizens. Connecting and empowering people. Maybe a lot us still are. But lately, a lot of what we’re doing is finding new ways to yank Jenga pieces out of society, in hopes that all the pieces will fall into our bosses’ laps.
> Most industries require contact with other humans, and don’t rely on overwhelming amounts of capital to try to create vast power imbalances between you and the people you’re allegedly serving.
I agree with the statement, but I'm not sure it squares with your list? Tech and banking aren't unique in offering the chance to sit alone in an office and turn early advantages into ludicrous excess.
Broadly, we're talking about jobs that have power-law payouts among their practitioners, require highly skilled (and hard to interchange) labor, and don't intrinsically punish jerks (meaning limited interaction with coworkers or customers). Not all of them make billions, but they get something exponential that encourages them to compete - fame or professional power or job security.
That's a lot of careers. Orchestral musicians fit, lawyers fit, surgeons fit in spades, artists and mathematicians and philosophers all fit.
Obviously tech and banking are not equivalent to those things - heart surgeons have never destroyed the economy. But I think it's a catastrophic mistake to try and understand why tech and banking cause these problems by acting like the professional demeanor is unique. That is at best a starting point, a way of acknowledging that if yanking pieces out of society is easy and rewarding it will happen. The question from there is "how do we stop that from happening?"
(I'm not sure how much we honestly disagree, I just think the distinction is important. That Jenga metaphor is fantastic.)
Something of an aide from the main thrust of your argument:
> Orchestral musicians fit
My friend who was in the Boston Pops disagrees - the pay was crap (he had to provide music lessons on the side to maintain a reasonable income), the pressure was humongous, and their off-hours practice to keep at the top of their game puts our own hobby programming efforts to shame. Like video games, all musicians want to perform in the big orchestras, creating a highly competitive supply glut.
I'm also fairly certain that most mathematicians and philosophers come nowhere near to our power distribution curve.
That leaves us in the company of bankers, lawyers, and surgeons. Not the highest prestige group of people to exist alongside. Especially since, while well off, we're making nowhere near their "Fuck You" levels of money.
From the responses here, I think I was unclear with the power law part.
I don't just mean "the pay distribution is exponential". I mean any system where the rewards of the work (as judged by the people doing it) accrue primarily to a small fraction of the workers. This isn't about the size of the payout, it's about a system where competition and potentially ruthlessness within the labor force have substantial benefits. (Contrasted with careers like factory labor where getting 'ahead' of coworkers doesn't have much to offer.)
So for orchestras, "all musicians want to perform in the big orchestras, creating a highly competitive supply glut" aligns nicely with what I mean, even if that supply keeps salaries down. Most talented musicians don't make it into a career, most career musicians teach in schools or play weddings or otherwise don't make it to the Pops. Video game design is another power-law return - most people don't get to lead teams, most team leads don't make hit games. The same for mathematicians - the payouts are largely status, tenure, and prestigious institutions, but they're still exponentially distributed.
A decent definition would be any profession where the stereotypical example and the prototypical example are completely out of sync. The prototypical truck driver is basically what we imagine them to be. The prototypical software engineer works on an inventory system for a non-tech company someplace outside the Valley, and has nothing much in common with the 'techie' stereotype.
I think the truly toxic thing is people not spending money in their communities. One of the things I pick up from anti-gentrification stories is that when new people move in, the existing shops lose customers. No-one goes to the corner store, they get food via an app or wait for a Whole Foods to open.
The (completely unintended) effect of this is that the existing community gets poorer, not richer, when rich people move in.
I think your analysis is great too. The power law advantages are what’s both wonderful and terrifying about this field.
Although surgeons aren’t really in the power-law game; at best they can do a handful of surgeries a week. But yes I chose that example specifically because many of them are tempermentally detached from people, get paid a lot, and are often workaholics. But we don’t see people revolting against surgeons.
Sorry, I was a bit unclear on power law - I was thinking about the career side, not just the outcomes.
So power-law for surgeons would be doing the hardest surgeries in the highest-stakes fields, heading up a clinic, ending up rich and famous. A great brain surgeon doesn't save vastly more lives than an average one, but people like Ben Carson and Sanjay Gupta get exponentially more fame and status.
I think we agree though - it's a great example of a field with similar social dynamics to programming, and a very different societal role.
>Most industries require contact with other humans, and implicate you in their happiness.
Most do, but many don't. Including some that were considered prestigious jobs (Wall Street, law firms, etc). A number of these jobs involved really boring grunt work with minimal contact with others.
> I'm not sure I understand. The whole article is just describing literally anyone in any industry.
The fact that you think that really underscores how much of a bubble you must live in. No, that's not any industry. Indeed, the only people who live like that in my mid-sized town are college students. College is cool, but it's kind of a half-way house for real-life, not something to be extended indefinitely like the tech firms do.
And isolating yourself from your fellow citizens in this way is a particularly bad idea when you're creating products that have outsized influence on our free time, relationships, health, and elections.
It is _any_ industry. San Francisco has a ridiculous problem where the city has become so tech-centric that your entire life will be tech even if you try and distance yourself from it. Your friends will all be in tech. People you meet on the street will be in tech. Your uber drivers will pitch you ideas. You'll overhear the next big ICO at every party you go to. Your life is changed by every small startup trying to remove any small inconvenience in your life. And this becomes one _humongous_ bubble within the city. So then you have this entire world that is just completely and entirely oblivious to anything outside of it.
If you travel to cities which are known for specific things, you'll often find these culture pits. SF is just a really special case. Its just the size of the city that exacerbates it so much there. Its tiny. Theres no room for growth. Anyone not in tech got pushed out. And now you have a culture silo.
I specifically moved away from San Francisco to Toronto to avoid this very problem. I'm still in tech. Theres no shame about it here at all. Hell, I get excited if I meet someone also in tech now. The city is so big and has so much space to sprawl and have startups anywhere that tech simply doesn't define anything here at all.
It doesn't have to do with the industry entirely. The tiny city is the problem IMO.
"All previous artistic beauty that was in SF is just gone now and replaced with tech kids"
What "artist beauty" are you talking about?
Some of the areas that "tech kids" took over were basically slums (like around the Tenderloin), or (much more frequently) industrial eyesores in SOMA. None of these had the least "artistic beauty" about them that I could discern.
Now opposite the rows of shuttered businesses around the Tenderloin and warehouses of SOMA there are some nice, new, open businesses, with employees that spend money on other local businesses, helping to revitalize the area.
Speaking of "artistc beauty", have you looked in to the lobbies of some of the office buildings on Market St around the Civic Center BART? Some of those have truly impressive, beautiful, and creative art displays inside. Some artists were hired to create those. Money that would not have been spent and artists who would not have been hired had the "tech kids" not come around.
Anything that was previously there or anything that might enrich the lives of those outside our bubble. As the infamous Dropbox soccer bros video[1] suggests, "we're part of the community" often means something more like "our money and presence entitle us to have our way here" than "we'd like to share in your way of life."
I have a feeling someone else is going to respond with some other points so I wanted to touch on something particular:
From my view, I just personally think most folks should be using feature flags and a continuous deployment cycle in general. With that in mind, a lot of what we built was to make it more accessible. We focused on an easier to understand UX, and building tools that were easy to interact with.
But most importantly in that line of thinking, and a major differentiator in my eyes, we tried to make as much of our platform un-gated as possible.
So all of our features are available to anyone regardless of their plan (outside of anything that requires a custom setup or something truly enterprisey).
This means that all of our integrations are freely available too.