There are jobs in which one may find oneself where doing them poorly is better for the world than doing them well.
I think you and your colleagues should sit back and take it easy, maybe have a few beers every lunchtime, install some video games on the company PCs, anything you can get away with. Don't get fired (because then you'll be replaced by keen new hires), just do the minimum acceptable and feel good about that karma you're accumulating as a brake on evil.
Is this a known thing? I've called myself 'immune to charisma' which seems at least related, and I've thought perhaps it's an autistic/aspie trait but have never come across any studies or articles mentioning it.
I sympathise with the author but I fear what he's doing here is adding one more item to that list of thoughts: "I'm in a trap"
There's a lot of stuff I started writing from personal experience but I've just deleted it because I sense what's being talked about in the article is probably classifiable as an eating disorder and I am in no way qualified to say anything about eating disorders. People who identify with the sentiments expressed in the article may want to consult a doctor.
Every update is worse than the last. I did the same, and I'm particularly loving turning bluetooth on or off requiring a swipe and three button presses instead of one. And I thought the quick settings regressed in 14 when they went from icons to huge buttons, but now they've gone for less-huge buttons with always-truncated text in.
At least with Windows it alternately gets much worse then a bit better again with each version.
Regarding the monstrosity in the link, yes it does make me 'feel things' - things I will refrain from typing out lest they be construed as threatening behaviour.
"X and Y were in the garden, Y noticed the ripe tomatoes as they went into the greenhouse". Is X in the greenhouse?
I'm way woker than the average person but I have to admit encountering a singular 'they' breaks my concentration in a distracting way - there's definitely possible ambiguity.
People really ought to read redacted documents to get an idea for how people write with clarity when gender and even number of parties is unknown.
But I'm confused by your sentence regardless of the gender terms. Did they notice the tomatoes in the Garden or in the greenhouse? This is just ambiguous wording in general.
- These are two different sentences, but they're separated with a comma. It should be a period, as it makes no grammatical sense with a comma unless you're trying to make it intentionally confusing.
- You would write "They both went into the greenhouse" if they both entered, or you would write "Y entered the greenhouse and noticed the ripe tomatoes."
- "Before entering the greenhouse, "Y"/"they both" noticed the ripe tomatoes in the Garden."
More likely they didn't care and nobody wrote an automated test for it because that would be hard, no human testers are employed (because who even does that now?), and only two users got all the way through the labyrinthine process to report it as an issue so managers triaged the bug as wontfix.
I think this is industry standard practice in 2025, right?
It's very surprising to me that this needs to be said - but maybe that's because I've mostly worked in, let's say, 'resource constrained' environments. You focus on the stuff that keeps the money coming, or people start losing their jobs.
Is that on the things that make money now or the speculative things you might make money on later?
Almost everyone is resource constrained in that the ambition of non-dev management is always 10x what they have the money to pay for. I take that back a bit - I haven't worked for FAANG so perhaps they do have more people than real work.
The author works at Github, so yes not so much a "resource constrained" environment. It matches my experience at a high growth company, Canva, where in places it was easy to see the connection to profit and in other places quite hard. There were people that didn't care about their connection to profit, and there were expensive employees doing "good work" done merely because it was good to do. Canva could do that because its margins are 80+% and it made almost $1B in revenue at the time.
I think you and your colleagues should sit back and take it easy, maybe have a few beers every lunchtime, install some video games on the company PCs, anything you can get away with. Don't get fired (because then you'll be replaced by keen new hires), just do the minimum acceptable and feel good about that karma you're accumulating as a brake on evil.
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