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
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.
You seem to have misunderstood the point being made in the section you quoted. The items are not on the list because it is a list of benefits that accrue to the company from work being legible. "Making money" is not a direct outcome of legibility, although it is a second or third-order effect.
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.
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.
Their first reply was "we have passed your question to a higher technical team", then they came back four days later with the above reply. I was enquiring about the A7R mark V, which introduced the much needed "lossless" option. I think I asked because I wondered why they kept the uncompressed option and because experts warned that Sony did that before with "lossless" formats.
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.
GP isn't saying that there is evidence that open offices work. GP is saying that execs want such evidence. Way back when Google was young its execs thought outside the box, so it's no surprise that they didn't copy what MSFT was doing.
> 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).
> 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.
I was about to suggest the problem with that is that applicants may think they meet your standards, and then be fired, but then realised that of course that very few coding interviews measure their skills to a sufficient standard to prevent that anyway.
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.