Tim Urban has a similar post on this called “The Tail End”, noting that by the time we get to adulthood we often have used up the vast majority of time spent with loved ones - particularly with parents and siblings.
My brother and I read this and were touched by it; we lived on opposite coasts and since we were kids always loved hanging out with one another. The idea that in our current arrangement we had already depleted MOST of our time together was a bitter pill to swallow.
For years we batted around the idea of living closer to each other. One day we just pulled the trigger and did it. It was enormously inconvenient, took a ton of logistical planning for our respective families, jobs and so on; but we ended up with houses within walking distance of one another and went from seeing each other and our immediate families maybe 10 days a year to 300+. We have accepted going forward it may limit our career options relative to when we lived in top tier American cities but the happiness we gained in the process is more than worth it.
I’m still not 100% sure the experiment will work out, but making the adjustment to live closer to family has substantially increased my mental health and emotional well-being. If you have close friendships and have ever talked about this seriously, I’d encourage you to consider what you might be gaining or losing in your current setup. It’s not for everyone but worth exploring!
Due to unrelated and unexpected events, my mother, my sister, my sister's husband, and my wife's sister have all moved to within a few miles of my family within the past year. Previously they were all living in a different state from us. My father is dead, but having the rest of my close family nearby has made me so much happier. I wasn't unhappy before, but this much better yet.
I realize it's not a happiness booster in every circumstance. My wife moved a thousand miles specifically so she never had to suffer her mother again.
I loved your post because I have been living away from my younger brother (and parents) for over 10 years. We meet about once every 2 years.
Every time we meet each other, I feel - great. Just amazing. We just sit and shoot the shit like nothing changed. We care for each other's lives. Just sitting with beers or staying over at each other's place makes me feel belonged. Our spouses love hanging out with us. We all go on trips together. We explore restaurants, we bash our bosses, we make food/snacks for each other. When we are bored, we just go over to the other's home and watch TV with them. And all this is so much more fulfilling than grinding my life away at work.
I keep wondering if this rat race life in a big city is worth more than the pleasure I get by just living close to my brother. Who knows if we will be able to do all this tomorrow.
Of course it's a real phenomenon, but it needs to be brought up without jumping to negative conclusions about the person one is talking to.
Fortunately nine_zeros gave a nice answer and clarification, but often what happens is that the original commenter feels smacked by the mean interpretation, hits back twice as hard, and we end up with an unfortunate flamewar.
This dynamic is in fact one of the main ways we get flamewars, and HN has that guideline to remind us all to consciously avoid it.
Interesting you bring this up because spouses families don't live nearby either. I would certainly consider my spouse's requirements before we move. That said, spouse and I talk a lot about this and we both seem to miss our times with my brother+spouse because they are of our generation. It just makes us all friendly to each other.
I am far from most of my friends and live in a city for work reasons. There are more activities and everything is a lot more accessible. Definitely more promise in the air. That said, I am living alone and feel it. It's not healthy.
I do want to be nearer friends and (some) family but ironically I think there are fewer relationship opportunities back in the sticks, plus there are attitudes and people in my home town I really don't miss.
I agree with your conclusion - but when younger and single it is difficult to know exactly what to do. Being single being a big problem, and the day to day work from home isolation the other.
My experience is that in a big city you can meet people that better fit into your "tribe", the downside is that they leave town for the higher pay job after about 4 years.
The only solution is to always be adding new friends, at least that the theory. The implementation is tougher.
My wife and I moved to a town of 3,000 in a county of 17,000 during the pandemic. We almost left to go back to a bigger city because we struggled to find “our tribe” — nerds. But just in the last month, we found so many people that we’ve now got three weekly D&D groups running!
Would just like to say kudos for pulling the very complicated trigger on this
This is exactly the kind of thing where 99% of people would like to do but revert to not doing cause the benefits are hard to justify in “traditional” ways (ie financial, career, etc)
Again, kudos!
EDIT: hoping remote work sticks around and makes this much easier going forward
It depends. If (big if) previously both were far from their family, now one of them is not. Net positive.
We live very close to my in-laws, and there are lots of benefits from that, even if my parent and brothers live far away. But some months ago my brother moved close to my home and now we see each other every weekend, we both have small children that now have the time to play together and form new bonds. It's really great.
My friends are now in different cities or distant neighborhoods, we make plans every now and then, but it is really complex to maintain closeness when physical distance gets in the way.
If everyone they are close to also moved to where this guy and his brother live--and so on--they could have quite the 1 easy trick to found a new megacity.
Here's the plan: you and 5 people closest to you move to the same area. Then each of those 5 people moves 5 of their closest people to the same area. Repeat ~13x and we can all finally be together.
So if a mega-city had a billion people. Maybe that's too much, let's say a 100 million people. Let us say this may be possible this century with some innovations in our habitat. So with a 100 million people in this mega-city, how many people can actually live close to each other? Even if you go 3-dimensions (connected skyscrapers), not sure this model will bring people close. Will it?
I’m curious about this too. My partner and I are both from different cities and live in a third city. We have friends and family in the original two cities and friends in the third city. There’s no way to make it work for both of us, and in fact the neutral third city is probably the most fair option despite being far from the best for either of us.
I get your point but the compromise isn’t “suffering”. We’re perfectly happy in the third city. It’s the moving to the original cities that could cause one persons suffering for another maximisation of their happiness.
> The implicit definition of "fair" as "equal suffering" is always a bit concerning to me.
For family peace, it may be the best thing. My personal anecdote:
I'm from city A. My spouse is from city B. We lived in city C. Our parents were fine with that.
My mother-in-law developed a rare disease. She had no children nearby. Now we live in city B, close to her.
In city A, despite having two of my siblings nearby, my parents absolutely resented our move. They were quite hostile at some point.
That sent my spouse to therapy and there's been no contact between them since. I'm fully on my spouse's side, especially given what my parents said and did.
Life gets complicated. We’re in a similar situation - family and friends are mostly in cities A and B (in different countries nonetheless). We lived in a compromise/neutral city C until we needed help with the kids and it’s impossible to choose where to go for the long term.
We pulled a similar move last year - moved back to Europe from North America after living there for 10+ years. It was a very expensive and risky move, and just like you, I’m also unsure if it will work out great in the long term, but I can tell you I feel great, I am finally in the same time zone as my brother and parents, they can visit pretty much any time, and heck even when my in-laws are in town, and I see them having breakfast with the kids on a Sunday morning, I feel like my life is finally complete.
Curious about the kids. I know kids will generally make friends wherever they go, especially when young, but my closest friends have been with me since I started school. 30 years later we’re still very close despite being a bit further apart. I think any significant move after approx age 13 and I wouldn’t have been able to develop those relationships starting somewhere new.
Kids were 7 and 2 when we moved. Probably the biggest factor in timing the move was their age - I assumed that if we didn’t move then, then we won’t ever do it, as the children would grow older and it would make reintegration really difficult.
One year on they are doing well, even learned a new language! And of course they do enjoy and always look forward to the frequent visits of friends and relatives.
I remember reading this when it came out, but couldn't remember the name and was too scared to type "articles about imminent death and our limited time with loved ones" into a search bar.
I've since lost my parents in my 20s, significantly earlier than expected, but found this weirdly comforting on a second read realizing that most of our quality time had indeed been in the first two decades of my life, regardless of what happened. It definitely makes me think about working to stay close / become closer with loved ones I have left.
Thanks for sharing this. Life's short and I admire your effort to live closer with your brother. Congrats on your "experiment" :)
I wish I could somehow evaluate what you're suggesting and understand if the outcome would be worth the effort. It would be SO, SO, SO much effort. I feel good being nearer my family but would that sour if I spent more time than the occasional holiday? Would the support my family might provide be worth the effort of selling our home, changing jobs, changing so how much of our lives work?
Sometimes I long for it but the effort makes it... unjustifiable.
Very nice! I've thought about something similar. Of course that a challenge is when you marry someone from yet-another nationality. Our plan right now is to try to get key members of the family that want to be together to where we're at even if we help them financially to migrate/move, since we have very good financial situation and the people we're targetting are mostly empty nesters or work in similar field.
Weird. I see my brother rarely, like once or twice a year, though we live less than two hours apart. It always seems like it is a big disruption or effort to have to get together. When we do, we don't have much to talk about. After it's over, I feel completely exhausted.
Probably expense and lack of options - housing a single family is already expensive (and often difficult to find), two right next to each other?
Nearly impossible, and definitely prohibitively expensive in any top tier city. Zuck got a lot of pushback and significant difficulty when buying a couple of adjacent lots in Palo Alto.
For most regular foks "tier" is a budget consideration. And of course usually roots (e.g. being from an area) also plays a big role in their personal "tier" ranking of a city.
There's nature all over. You can leave somewhere that's not Seattle but still in the PNW for substantially less money.
My point here is that what matters to a given person is pretty subjective, and, personally, I'd never live in Seattle again if I could help it -- and this is from someone who grew up just 90 miles north in Bellingham. (I'd live in Bellingham again.)
The point of TFA is that you just need to be together with friends, i.e. having dinner or hanging out at each other's houses most likely. You don't need a bunch of amenities.
We seem to be doing life backward: We live alone and expend effort to gather together, as if that’s the healthy baseline
It's easier to make new friends in a top-tier city, especially if you're the kind of person who likes those amenities.
The alternative is staying in some backwater place just because one of your friends is there, and you have absolutely nothing to do there except hang out with that friend, while being constantly frustrated with all the other aspects of life in that place.
My opinion of lower tier cities is that they don’t have a lot of infrastructure (See: public transit, decent internet, etc…), lack certain kinds of development (bars, coffee shops, restaurants that accommodate diets), and they tend to lack diversity.
Iconography is hard! Interesting to see the criteria the biohazard symbol was developed against and how that informed the result. It reminds me of the complexities explored in a localization firm’s proposal for McDonalds as they explored creating a universal visual language for nutritional information. The archived pdf is here:
The reactions from testing varied quite widely based on geography, as they were trying to create a system that worked in 109 countries. For example, the original orange icon for sugar was said to resemble Scottish subway signs, Canadian road signs, and Danish danger signs. An early symbol for calcium showed a milk carton, but was scrapped because some regions mistook it for a building, portable toilet, phallic symbol, or tombstone. They had to take into consideration cultural and religious connotations for certain shapes as well.
For folks wondering "when would I use this?" I have used tools like these early in the design process for broad, net-new features or redesigns in apps where driving alignment early on is crucial to success. In a more buttoned-up Agency process you might see something like:
General Idea > White Board Session > High Level Screen Flows (this) > Individual Wireframes > High-Fidelity UI > Coding.
These are useful tools to step back from individual screens and think of the broader ecosystem of the feature the team is trying to build. If actions on one page affect another page further down a flow, it's easy to reference that in a meeting by having it all laid out in a lower-fidelity, non-distracting way. For example: "if I add a user to this group, where will that user and her derivative information pop up across the experience?" becomes an easier discussion with an artifact like this.
I find when working early on with multi-stakeholder or multi-department initiatives, some high-level UX documentation can be helpful in ensuring when everyone goes back to their desks, each group has the same, general picture in their head.
Nice explanation, thank you for sharing.
Do you have any experience working with mobile apps? I'm wondering if any aspects of the design process you outlined differ when working with mobile apps?
From the article: “McKinsey started as a business that sold candid, dispassionate advice to corporate managers, but selling advice and building a brand around it also sets up a mechanism for diffusing responsibility. The managers can say they’re just following the best available advice, and the consultants can say they’re just trying to help their clients boost profits and efficiency.“
I spent some time with an Engagement Manager at McKinsey a few years ago, and he noted one function that they provide to executives is a seemingly neutral arbiter for tough decisions that may be politically untenable inside an organization. A CEO may know exactly what drastic steps they need to take, but will face internal executive strife, board pressure, or lack of buy-in from the business to execute. McKinsey provides credibility in cases of extreme actions (layoffs, re-orgs, shutting down business functions, etc), which is why the final deliverable of an engagement will often times simply state what was already known across the organization, but in a more packaged, compelling format. The same Engagement Manager then noted that if management doesn’t know exactly the “answer” is to the question they are asking, often times the McKinsey Partner supervising the case has seen the problem enough times to generally know the solution they will recommend out of the gate, as they specialize in industries. Their team arrives and then spends the cycles putting together justification for their upcoming recommendation.
It seemed to me similar to the old adage “nobody gets fired for buying IBM,” executives can lean on the good will of the McKinsey brand to justify and expedite certain tricky decisions. In many cases this is about providing confidence to move in a certain direction. This has two benefits: the broader organization can be told an outside firm was able to arrive at said battle plan - ideally increasing buy-in since the “experts” recommended it, and if things go awry the executive can point to the deliverable handed off by the consultants as the sanctioned playbook. So this “diffusing responsibility” is a feature, not a bug.
I’ve seen two solutions to some of the implicit problems described above, neither or which are cheap or easy: either A) the management team is solid enough and garnered enough goodwill that they can navigate such troubled waters (hard to do as the business scales) or B) An organization gets large enough they can fund their own internal management consulting team to tackle tough problems on a case by case basis - Samsung has used this across their business lines.
GDP growth comes from productivity growth. Productivity growth comes from research and development.
Michael Pearson [1], a 23 year McKinsey veteran pharma CEO, claimed that R&D was "inefficient". It is just mind blowing that people see this and don't panic.
We are allowing ourselves to be ruled by mediocre spreadsheet jockeys.
The idea that r&d is inefficient is not unreasonable. the reality behind valeant's demise is more complex. valeant initially began its strategy of buying cheap, cash flow generating assets. But as time went on, they ran out of low hanging fruit as asset prices rose and deals became harder to find. to generate revenue growth and support their growing debt balance, they resorted to unethical, and illegal, tactics such as raising prices and defrauding insurance companies into reimbursing their products.
People didn't "panic", but the markets and industry did certainly react to his ideas and behavior - the pharma company he ran (Valeant) tanked and he was ousted as CEO.
R&D is done via acquisitions, basically outsourced to startups. Probably "more efficient this way". (Which is kind of true, after all if the big incumbent buys the competition, there's no real incentive to really upgrade their offering, as they just bought that too, and they can do a small symbolic upgrade. Plus eventually do the regular run of the mill, business as usual, do what everyone else does around the world, 0 risk course of action thing.)
Freakanomics did an interesting episode on this indicating that as companies mature they have to focus more on “maintenance” of existing business rather than R&D. Acquiring smaller businesses becomes a natural way of investing in R&D
While I agree that R&D can be a major driver, it’s not the sole way to increase productivity. Making existing processes more efficiently is also a means to increase productivity, often with more immediate ROI and less risk than R&D. I have a feeling that may be the “inefficiencies” he was alluding to
Well, of course, from a specific view point on short-term to reap the most profits of a mature sector, R&D is not needed. (Let's say for Boeing, just sell the same plane tweaked a bit, don't spend and bet big on a new design.) But then on long-term the company just gets disrupted (oh damn, no pun intended). And for McKinsey it doesn't matter which company they give advice to.
Yeah, but you don't grow GDP 5% per year by shaving basis points off of vacuum tube manufacturing costs.
You grow 5% per year by putting physicists, chemists, and engineers under one roof and letting them invent transistors. Society at large will thank you, and the builders/makers/hackers doing dope shit will thank you.
R&D is definitely necessary for long term growth but I think you might be surprised how much process improvements can improve productivity.
In a previous role as an industrial/process engineer, it wasn’t unheard of to productivity increases approaching 20% for relatively little capital investment
Just because R&D is inefficient (it is almost by definition). It does not follow therefore that R&D is uneconomic. Though sometimes the government has to carry the cost.
It's not usually a problem. Big companies are inefficient and over-conservative (because they're risk averse and short-term oriented). Thus unsurprisingly they are bad at adapting, and sometimes there's a correction needed. Eventually the market will give them enough incentive to either get their shit together or a competitor will eat their lunch. (And McKinsey will just provide consulting to that one.)
I feel Earthbound, the classic SNES RPG where Ness debuted, is a masterclass on NPC dialogue. The dialogue is so well crafted it makes you eager to talk to each NPC you come by, knowing even if they don't give you relevant information they will give you a silly hot take on the world they occupy. It makes everything so much more rich. The Rabbit Girl referenced in the article is from Undertale by Toby Fox, who cut his teeth in gamemaking creating Earthbound mods. I suspect this is why his characters in Undertale follow a similar whimsical nature to this early influence of his. Undertale borrowed a lot from Earthbound's character construction.
I've been playing through Earthbound over the last few weeks and consistently find the writers and localization team put in just the right extra 10% to turn a "bleh" interaction into one you think about for days to come. For example, in a nod to the greedy, one character grumbles about the loan he gave to your family and now he "lives in poverty" - all while standing in the biggest house in the game.
Later on, a key item with key information gets shipped to your character via the equivalent of Fedex "Neglected Class." A rumpled delivery man eventually shows up and tells you "Anyway, he said... well... uh... I forgot. Yep, I forgot... actually I forgot the stuff I was supposed to deliver, too. I think it was some weird machine to make trout-flavored yogurt. Yeah, I forgot it at the desert... I'm not going back that way, so don't ask me to get the package... I mean, it's your package, right? So YOU go get it! Go on, get out of here." You then have to schlep to another part of the game to recover the package the delivery man decided just wasn't worth his time [0]
If you've played the game and want to figure out why some of the quirkiness just WORKS, I would recommend the later parts of Tim Roger's piece from a decade or so ago [1].
[1] http://archive.is/fMD7F (edit - huh, yeah this article has NOT aged well at all I should have taken a closer look since it first was released long ago, but I'll leave it here for the sake of discussion & derivative comments).
Agreed on Earthbound. I will add one more data point. GTA V. We learn about each character through the banter and their actions and not some long winded exposition. If there was a time I could not help feeling for the characters lately, it was GTA. They felt so tragic.
> That piece you suggest by Tim Roger is disgusting to read in its casual misogynistic violence.
I mean, he is quoting/paraphrasing Shigesato Itoi, the producer of Mother 2. The part about prostitutes only constitutes the first 2 paragraphs, so it seems unfair to make assumptions about the entire article based on the opening paragraphs (which, again, paraphrase Shigesato Itoi)
Not sure why you're getting downvoted - flippantly talking about murdering prostitutes is... not good to say the least. The choice to refer the the hypothetical prostitute as "it" is enlightening too...
Obviously written words can't literally punch you in the face, but I think that joint understanding of that is implicit when we both know that the thing being referred to is written words. Nevertheless the article pretty flippantly talks about murdering prostitutes as an allegory to games.
(I know the first part of it is a quote from the games creator, but the rest of the article continues to riff off of it without a hint of "huh? that's a weird thing to say.")
It's like you people think the world began in 2010. We've been through a drastic shift in what popular culture considers polite in the last decade. Nothing was weird about that metaphor in the nineties, it would have been seen as middle of the road edgy and nothing more.
As for "obviously written words can't literally punch you in the face"—No. That's what the theory GP plucked the phrase from implies, that hurtful language is literally violence.
I'm also fairly sure casually talking about murdering prostitutes didn't just become uncomfortable in most circles in the last decade, although I'm not quite old enough to confirm that anecdotally myself.
You can find out for yourself, if you're curious. Grab some vernacular fiction from the time period. Watch some movies. Even better, drop by a library or used book store and pick up some popular humor magazines, you'll be pretty surprised.
It wouldn't shock if after some digging you find that people of thirty years ago were barbarians. This wouldn't be the first time someone felt that about those in the recent past, but at least you'll start to develop an understanding of how quickly culture can change. The more you read, the more you'll get a sense for what changes are superficial and which are more profound. You may even begin to recognize the currents that took us from there to here.
They say the past is a foreign country, and they say it for a reason.
It has never been a respected profession. Homicide has always been an occupational hazard.
GTA3 (1999/2000?) put it into the popular consciousness by allowing players to emulate it, but IME nobody really started getting shamed for joking about it until around 2010 (coincidental to trans issues becoming mainstream?).
As fucked as this is, my distaste for this particular metaphor is somehow the thing that just triggered me to think metaphors are kind of bullshit. You can literally make a metaphor out of anything, apparently.
I'm now trying to figure out if there's a more tasteful way to make really terrible metaphors just for the sake of showing that point... I'm honestly not sure if it would work any other way but to be painfully awful though.
EDIT: I've made progress I think: It is dark humor and requires repetition, but I think what might work is some awful singular simile/metaphor that gets bent into every single shape possible by everyone, like a prostitute. Once the metaphor gets used enough, it could become a one line argument about how "your metaphor sucks."
E.g. "life is like a box of chocolates blah blah blah," and in response "yeah, life is like a prostitute..." (with no follow up). The point being, you totally could follow it up with some bastardized metaphor, but unlike the original person making one, you have the good sense not to continue.
Related: "They called it the Aristocrats"
EDIT 2: It might not have to be darkly offensive, it could just be annoying. Maybe "x is like a sandwich" or something, where you can always just add layers as though they're ingredients.. I dunno. I don't think it has the stain power, but there is a joke here at the expense of all metaphors.
EDIT 3: I THINK I GOT IT!
"X is like (an) onion(s)." Reference to the popular "Ogres are like onions" quote from Shrek. It's not quite as moldable as "prostitutes," and maybe a bit childish. But it has stain power, and could seemingly get the point across.
I stood up a data science operation at my company over the last few years, and have noticed a key difference in data-science projects that have been successful and those that have failed. It hits on a number of points brought up in the article, namely where does data science "fit" in an organization delivering software and how is the value realized by the business.
The worst cases I have seen is when executives take a problem and ask data scientists to "do some of that data science" on the problem, looking for trends, patterns, automating workflows, making recommendations, etc. This is high-level pie in the sky stuff that works well in pitch meetings and client meetings, but when it comes down to brass tacks this leaves very little vision of what is trying to be achieved and even less on a viable execution path.
More successful deployments have had a few items in common
1. A reasonably solid understanding of what the data could and couldn't do. What can we actually expect our data to achieve? What does it do well? What does it do poorly? Will we need to add other data sets? Propagate new data? How will we get or generate that data?
2. The business case or user problem was understood up front. In our most successful project, we saw users continuously miscategorized items on input and built a model to make recommendations. It greatly improved the efficacy of our ingested user data.
3. Break it into small chunks and wins. Promising a mega-model that will do all the things is never a good way to deliver aspirational data goals. Little model wins were celebrated regularly and we found homes and utility for those wins in our codebase along the way.
4. Make is accessible to other members of the company. We always ensure our models have an API that can be accessed by any other services in our ecosystem, so other feature teams can tap into data science work. There's a big difference between "I can run this model on my computer, let me output the results" and "this model can be called anywhere at any time."
While not exhaustive, a few solid fundamentals like the above I think align data science capabilities to business objectives and let the organization get "smarter" as time goes on as to what is possible and not possible.
As a person doing data science / ML in the last 4 years, I mostly agree with your points. Especially about the hype driven demand for DS/ML. One thing that is often neglected though is the exploration part it. There really is a lot of data out/in there that your company knows anything about, but can probably benefit from knowing. E.g. even a simple crawl of a popular jobs/ads/... site done diligently for e.g. 6 months can reveal many interesting insights about market structure and trends. Google and its mission to organize all data in the world exist for a reason. This however is in stark contrast with the approach that most executives take. Instead of managing it as a well thought strategic/long term investment, they want to time-box it, to get immediate value and to show off to senior management or customers. I've seen this tendency in both big corporations (mid-level management) and startups, which makes me think that the confounding variable is the fund/incentive management process. In both big corps and startups, there is a limited time&budget to show meaningful results and people optimize for that, which often involves taking shortcuts, neglecting strategy and outright lying.
In contrast to that, I've seen projects driven by wealthy individuals, who don't look for immediate value, but are scratching an itch (e.g. curiosity). These usually fare better than the former as long as budgets don't get out of hand (to exhaust the cash cow). I would argue that these are most successful, because of better alignment of motivation (person paying the bill) and execution (person driving the process).
A math friend of mine often consulted for scientists. His least favorite were those who asked him to "make some clusters". (think k-means) "What are you looking for? What is your hypothesis?" "Just make some clusters and we'll see."
Not utterly without merit, but fairly blind fishing nonetheless.
>The worst cases I have seen is when executives take a problem and ask data scientists to "do some of that data science" on the problem...high-level pie in the sky stuff that works well in pitch meetings and client meetings...
I'm been in various external and internal facing Data Science roles for 8+ years and this is spot on. IME it's the #1 reason Data Science projects "fail." If you can replace "do some of that data science" with "do some of that black magic" that probably means nobody actually checked to make sure the data and problem made sense in the first place. But somebody somewhere already committed to it, so the Data Science team has to deliver it.
> The worst cases I have seen is when executives take a problem and ask data scientists to "do some of that data science" on the problem, looking for trends, patterns, automating workflows, making recommendations, etc.
While I agree on the point, there's a case that's arguably worse: When those executives hire Data Scientists and then ask them: "So what can we do with Data Science?"
My heart really goes out to employees who are about to be put through the wringer, I've heard horror stories of coffee shops and restaurants laying off 90% of staff on a day's notice - I'm sure it will quickly expand.
I work at a DC startup LiveSafe and we are still hiring. We offer a communications platform for students and employees focused around safety & security - we were founded out of the need for communities to have a quicker, more direct line to campus security following our founder being shot in the Virginia Tech shooting. I have been helping lead the expansion of our offerings into Fortune 500 corporate clients.
Many of our clients have been using our software to push outbound information to their students / employees about policies around COVID-19, as well as triage and respond to employee needs, so we are fortunate in that our product fits into the response effort for most companies who purchased us. I think we will be fine for the foreseeable future - sound financials and a generous credit line secured during good times just in case.
We are hiring for a much needed Data Science position focusing on building and deploying NLP models & products to analyze the data that travels through our platforms - plus our production stack is a dream to build and deploy on. It's a small, fun, mission-driven team granted a lot of autonomy and responsibility - I'm on phone screens just about everyday and we have not slowed down filling this position. Would love to hear from any Data Science / Engineering talent may need a soft landing in all of this - very interesting text-heavy data set.
For what it's worth - I saw the value of Tailwind UI as its connection to the Refactoring UI product from Adam Wathan (tailwind) + Steve Schoger - https://refactoringui.com/ The tips, screencasts, and eventual book they offered gives a superb, distilled, crash course on making stuff "look good" when to the untrained eye it can all seem arbitrary. They take a lot of guess work out of adding polish to your product.
Taking a look at Tailwind UI, it's clear they have baked in all of the tips and tricks into the components offered, adhering to preached principles like good visual hierarchy, layout and spacing, color theory, and typography. Therefore, while TailwindUI may seem like just a bunch of utility classes, the components they have constructed tap into a lot of solid design principles that a large community has bought into and studied. I'll for sure be buying and trying it out in future projects of mine.
The only explanation as to WHY is the before "look[s] really busy." That's quite subjective and unhelpful. There's no testing here, there's no remark on usability/accessibility, no discussion of color-blindness vis-a-vis background color tones, nor real justification for the change anyway.
If you want to create pretty things without worrying about the consequences, they seem like a great resource. But hard to see it as more than a toy resource; professional UI resources do a much better job because they're made for real end users, rather than other developers e.g. UK Digital Project[0], US Digital Project[1].
PS - I'm not saying their designs don't look nice. I'm saying a nice looking UI design isn't a good yardstick for UI. I've created plenty of nice looking UI that users performed worse using.
+1 on all of this. refactoring ui is an awesome resource for developers who want actionable ways to improve their design skills, was a must-buy for me.
in the same way, tailwind UI has been really useful over the last week since i bought it. some of the integration stuff isn’t ideal - you have to copy-paste huge snippets of code w/ alpine.js code you need to manually remove - but overall i’ve already found it to be useful to help me get unstuck on designing my apps.
i made a little vid on my channel about getting started with tailwind ui if anyone wants to see what it looks like in practice: https://youtu.be/quhvuOTlrwA
(note that since then i’ve added a lot more of the components in this project: my feedback has stayed pretty consistent, and i think some of the copy-paste problems are easily solvable)
I'm into design myself, but not so much into designing for SaaS, form layouts and stuff like that. That's why something Refactoring UI or Tailwind UI is interesting, they're designed by people from that space, they're basically selling their design domain knowledge.
Agreed, Adam mentioned many times in his screencasts that his intention for Tailwind UI was to create a source of income to keep working on these projects. I'm happy he went this route rather than a Patreon or starting to charge for content like the screencasts.
Crows are astoundingly intelligent. If you're having a slow day, a quick youtube of "crows solving puzzles" yields some great videos of them solving complicated tasks like water displacement to reach food[0]. I believe raccoons share this achievement.
Additionally, there was a thread on here some time ago[1] by a Dutch Startup[2] about trying to teach crows to exchange cigarette butts for treats inside a tiny device place in parks, I always thought that was a funny idea if you could get the crows to teach one another.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html
My brother and I read this and were touched by it; we lived on opposite coasts and since we were kids always loved hanging out with one another. The idea that in our current arrangement we had already depleted MOST of our time together was a bitter pill to swallow.
For years we batted around the idea of living closer to each other. One day we just pulled the trigger and did it. It was enormously inconvenient, took a ton of logistical planning for our respective families, jobs and so on; but we ended up with houses within walking distance of one another and went from seeing each other and our immediate families maybe 10 days a year to 300+. We have accepted going forward it may limit our career options relative to when we lived in top tier American cities but the happiness we gained in the process is more than worth it.
I’m still not 100% sure the experiment will work out, but making the adjustment to live closer to family has substantially increased my mental health and emotional well-being. If you have close friendships and have ever talked about this seriously, I’d encourage you to consider what you might be gaining or losing in your current setup. It’s not for everyone but worth exploring!