I do not enjoy phones except for pocketable phone, camera and map. I still have an old stubbornly adequate Moto-G. Chromebooks are cheap lightweight browsing and light typing devices. They work better than fine with no surprises.
Early business Web was Decision Support and not ad distraction based. There were cool "calculators" that would match relocation zip codes in Tulsa most like my favorite DC zip code or pick optimum breed/age/weight dog food.
Product Selection Engines (PSE's) were a different value proposition than product or brand promotion. They are fun to write for engineers because they correct purchase errors with IT good deeds like Consumer Reports but with user variables on priorities or constraints.
The Consumer Web threw out a great deal of baby with the .com era bathwater.
I disagree entirely. Every minute wasted in transit is wasted. I was lucky to make the most of a private school scholarship (Baltimore) and received overlapping theater, voice, writing, instrumental and athletic training alongside academic training and "gifted" early science training provided by state government. From city centers like Boston and DC I was exposed to the world many Americans only know through pictures or books.
Nothing is more damaging to adults or children than lives in remote isolation with delusions of Swiss Family Robinson self-sufficiency on government road, school and mortgage subsidies. We must stop claiming any normalcy to that post-Eisenhower makeshift accounting fiction. Lives in remote isolation are one of the reasons business formation is so low in the United States. Shyness is never any value. Shy people are takers.
Wow, quite the extreme take there, and a strawman argument at that. I don't know why you think that the alternative to not living in a city is a life "in remote isolation with delusions of Swiss Family Robinson self-sufficiency". The original comment even specifically referred to suburbs.
Transit may be wasted time, but for the vast majority of people, that transit consists almost entirely of going to and from work. Living in smaller cities or suburbs means that your transit time for everything outside of work will be roughly the same as someone living in a big city. So, if remote work were to be the norm, the wasted transit time is eliminated. I for one agree. The idea that you and others seem to believe in where anything outside a major city is an apocalyptic hellscape that is "more damaging to adults or children" than anything else is not just melodramatic, its pure fiction, and like the OP, is a viewpoint I imagine is only held by a (very) vocal minority.
That was poetically agressive. I recommend checking out Strong Towns. Across our shifting political and geographic spectrum folks are looking at 2 phenomena that landed Americans in peculiar distributions. First, Eisenhower era highway building. Even early suburbanization was under panic defense logistics influence. Second was supersizing suburbia with white flight overlapping deindustrialization. We need not moralize to calculate the engineering of that with calculable overlapping downstream costs and grim actuarial funding pictures. Those narratives overlap generations kicked off farms into those cities not long ago.
North Americans who buy homes move every 7 years on average. We have troubles building value in places where people stay over generations to enjoy it. Even educators are learning that "tickets out" is too abstract a target to motivate remote kids to study in schools. We inherited our little patches of planet and histories, but we should not normalize our current widespread displacements. Folks are migrating to specific places for different reasons we can examine on maps. Other folks in tons of places have troubles making a go of where they are for reasons we understand and cannot fix. [Edit: grammar]
Donald Norman in "Things That Make Us Smart" points out distinguishing between education and entertainment is not impossible but difficult. Artworks are performance outputs like proofs or designs. Then there are material sciences of their realizations and reproductions. We heroize the lone artist but artworks are social "supply chain" creations. For whatever reasons, outside the weekly pop charts for advertising attentions, we rearrange shelves of old and new artworks we consider exemplary in some regard. Kids study the outcomes and techniques both and keep remaking the present. The fictional novel, moving picture fiction "talkie" and lyric 3 minute tune are very specific genres. I imagine there are folks here who might credibly argue specific computers games are exemplary artworks worthy of study and emulation. "Humanities" along with many other of our departmental labels is not such a great term of art.
Conversations around whiteboards between stakeholders creates value. Pair programming makes for lower defects and more reliable scheduling. Software is a design delivery operation. There was recent article on MS office space redesign to create more value. We are never typing approximations to futures like the proverbial monkeys. Productivity is not per-keystroke. I have been paid extra to kill projects that never should have started. Personal productivity is almost a misnomer.
While I have nothing against MBAs, this is a typical example of what people call MBAish / corporate BS and why managerial profiles have gained a bad reputation here. It looks smart on the surface but scrutiny exposes non-sense.
>Conversations around whiteboards between stakeholders creates value.
Why ? Are whiteboards magic ?
>Pair programming makes for lower defects and more reliable scheduling
Putting aside the fact that the benefits of pair programming as less consensual than what you seem to suggest, it can be done much more conveniently in a remote setup with a screenshare and a headset than by sharing a desk.
>Software is a design delivery operation.
So ?
>There was recent article on MS office space redesign to create more value.
Here we have the business case reference, always good to include one. The substantial remark is that once again this doesn't prove anything, the first reason being that "value" is extremely vague.
>Productivity is not per-keystroke
The art of looking like you are siding with the people you want to control while it is actually the opposite. If we go the bottom of the reasoning : value is not per keystroke, we therefore need to put employees in a room because their true value must be monitored to be appreciated. "Please understand, I really want to be able to appreciate your true value". Sounds a bit hypocrite to me.
>Personal productivity is almost a misnomer
One more slogan.
>I have been paid extra to kill projects that never should have started.
While I am the first to advocate careful planning and writing code last, as an entrepreneur, I consider it a crime to sabotage projects, because anyone who has ever created something, or started a project or a venture understands that creativity is almost Holy. Beyond the technical deliverables, projects trigger group (and market) dynamics and institutional learning that may be hard to reproduce later in time. For this reason, doers do not sabotage or kill projects, they rectify them. Sure there can be pure follies that need to be stopped ASAP to stop diverting valuable resources of the company, but my overall impression is that you have a more liberal approach to assessing what must be killed.
I respect arguments from both sides, but this comment is really representative of the crap filling most companies.
Anecdotally, for the amount of problems I have seen them solve in short order. Yes. They force an idea in the mind to become concrete and logically digestible to other members of the party. If you can't draw it in a manner that other people understand, you don't understand the idea well enough yourself. It is also free flowing. Ideas can be added to and removed quickly with an interface that almost all humans have been taught to use since a young age. It only contains 3 parts. The pen, the board, and the eraser. No software with far too many options to understand. No weird bugs that crash in the middle of a presentation. Pictographs can transcend language barriers. Software sellers will never create such a simple product, there is little value added reason to.
So yea, if not magical, far better than its competition in portraying ideas.
> They force an idea in the mind to become concrete and logically digestible to other members of the party.
You make a very valid point, what I was highlighting is that good communication can be achieved without whiteboards too.
I understand your underlying argument that whiteboards may constitute the best technology, but I also think there is a tacit convention at play here. People tacitly agree to communicate in a way that make whiteboards work. For there are many effective and fluid ways to iterate on ideas that do not involve live drawings or complex tech.
I know it for a fact as drawing my thoughts on a whiteboard has always been counter-natural to me. I can do it but I wouldn't say that it is necessary for good communication. It is just a communication choice that people make.
Everything that can be drawn clearly can also be written clearly (analogies, bullet point lists for flows, etc...). Not to say that diagrams are never helpful, but it may be a stretch to assume that drawings and whiteboards have an almost essential role.
FWIW, spreadsheets are another remarkable group planning tool with an HDMI big screen. Many projects work forward against backwards constraint logic not always clear from day 1. Bugs made shallow with enough eyes applies early in projects. Even editing text documents of tables and lists around consensus concerning values of features and costs of risks is very useful. I have never had much need for any developer just typing against personal request. I always force stakeholders across roles and departments to sign their names to schedules and sign their names to ongoing weekly schedule adjustments. Every slip is caught ASAP including eyes on features bigger than schedule budget stomachs.
Why don't you ask a question? I am not an MBA. I wrote Harvard's Ultrix manual, C on SunOS, Windows and Linux. I sat at whiteboards with Steve Crocker, Sunil Paul, Mark Pincus and Brad Cox across telecomms, finance, early Net and XML protocols and even early bioinformatics. Do you imagine we channel future visions from God out fingertips?
Let's eliminate some cases. I know some people work on entertainment software or short term content. Others work in departments "against management" for take home pay. I never care about those projects or those people working on them. My words do not apply there.
Interesting hardware is not virtual but involves complex supply chains. The same goes for productivity software interacting with the world already in motion. New training often costs more than new tools. DC folks making NASD broker registration reality are essential personnel in tight supply chain relationships. Any error on a Congressional Report can tumble decision makers into felonies or disrupt global commodity markets. Same goes for folks writing device drivers or porting libraries to new hardware. None of this is any app buried in app stores or Office Space TPS reports.
In such greenfield or release cycle projects the right team size and composition will get there first, avoid mistakes, clean up markets later cheapest or occupy profitable niches longest.
Software projects concern progress and reach and thus "pass the bus test." Nature is not kind to the shy. Individual problem are just problems. Anybody can consult from anywhere if they can make a living that way. Otherwise, nobody cares about homebodies. Never project socials problems or commute logistics as values or virtues. Skunkworks remains the model for focus and shared responsibility. Software is not the deliverable. Tools and answers are the deliverables.
I used to go to the NASA Forth User Group meetings in the early 90's to hang with compiler and language nerds. Chuck Moore is a genius problem solver. His Starting Forth is one great example of an introductory language text.
FWIW, I wrote a graphing menuing system with primitive scalable fonts (for Arabic) in Turbo Pascal in '89 on US taxpayer dimes for live variable twiddling graphing of demographic simulations. It was all roll our own back then on 512K PC's. I implemented a Common Lisp compiler packaged in a DLL for Windows before the net took off. Some kind of "hardware and syscalls up" exercise should be part of more CS programs. It is a great experience to engineer truly reusable (and reused) code before the mosh pits of corporate labors. Good times make for useful memories.
You are sadly wrong and your examples show your parochialism.
I don't enjoy moving picture fictions, recorded edited entertainment or packaged food. I went to Harvard and live in DC getting everything live and in person 24/7. I do not drive any cars and live on parks and zoos taxpayer dollars keep safe and manicure.
I worked with Steve Crocker and Brad Cox, so I am no luddite. Last I knew Crocker was on the board of a local theater group and also prefers his life live in person.
Authentic pleasures are almost impossible to get in suburban "modern" life where priests called "Therapists" charge hourly for confession and charlatans called "Teachers" do the same for scriptural studies. Our doctors are the lowest performing in the developed world.
The peculiar imaginations of rusting commodities, factory fake foods and delusional fictions are meritorious goes with American accents and propaganda.
The average American who "owns a home" moves every 7 years last time I checked. We are a nation of itinerants. Equity investments give better returns apart from political windfalls.
