I think the truth of this article depends on the size of your team.
If you're hiring only one to a few developers, it's likely that you need your employees to self manage. They need to strategize, have realistic expectations, and fulfill them to the best of their abilities. "Dianne," the good developer, demonstrates these skills. So, judgment is important from this kind of developer.
However, I think that "Dianne" would be best suited to a more managerial position, focusing on her strategy skills and ability to relay needs to other developers. Handing off the implementation details to a team of rockstars, with deep and varied proficiencies, would make for a spectacularly complementary team.
And in the latter case, your best developers are - and should be - rock stars. You need to consider not only how you want your code to scale, but how your company will.
I'm sure some fashion companies do make well-designed products. But a defining aspect of fashion is that it's fleeting--certain things go in and out of fashion. When a company has been making products that all basically resemble rounded rectangles for almost a decade, with each year's release almost indistinguishable from the last, it's pretty obviously a matter of design and not fashion.
I agree with what I think Boriss' point is – that our interfaces are not natural. They require us to build a new system of patterns to match with encountered interfaces of a similar kind, in order to know what we're doing. Same is easily said of learning any new language, visual, written, or spoken.
But to suggest that iconography and buttons in general are unique to digital interfaces is inaccurate, and recounting one man's first interaction with a computer as "user testing of browsers" comes across as a sensational misrepresentation of what user testing is, and what education-by-interface should be.
Let's not show an entrenched English speaker Japanese and claim that it is the language's responsibility to immediately map to his mental model of English. Learning falls on a motivated student (which Joe, with self-proclaimed "no excuse[s]" for never using a computer, was not) matched with an expert evangelist like Jennifer Boriss, in the event of a total failure of comprehension.
Regardless of the Thiel Fellowship, this is the guy that I would want on the inside taking academic ideas from research to revolution. Ito represents a kind of energy and enthusiasm that higher education direly needs.
More creative, free-thinking skeptics of academia should definitely be empowered to lead it. I see Ito as one of them, and I think this is an inspired choice.
"The first thing you notice about Kiip CEO Brian Wong is how decidedly un-CEO he actually looks...In nerdy black glasses and a halfway zipped navy hoodie (flecked with kaleidoscope colors on closer inspection), the young man who graduated from college as a fresh faced 19 year old could've very well been, you know, anyone."
Has the author never seen a tech CEO before? Or the Social Network? Are you totally kidding me? This is no longer "un-CEO," my friend, this is de rigueur.
The Michael Jordan approach, however, is one that is as aptly applied to entrepreneurship as it is to optimizing your abilities and success in any realm. He's created a product called Michael Jordan, and that product has proved unarguably to be a game-changer, if not an entirely new game itself.
Interesting that this is out of the MIT Media Lab, since the Minority Report interfaces were based on earlier work there by another guy, who has since spun it into the spatial operating environment g-speak (oblong.com).
That said, I'm super into the fact that the extension is open source and the technology is available for others to build spatially-aware interfaces. Really, really cool work that I know I'll want to check out further.
If you're hiring only one to a few developers, it's likely that you need your employees to self manage. They need to strategize, have realistic expectations, and fulfill them to the best of their abilities. "Dianne," the good developer, demonstrates these skills. So, judgment is important from this kind of developer.
However, I think that "Dianne" would be best suited to a more managerial position, focusing on her strategy skills and ability to relay needs to other developers. Handing off the implementation details to a team of rockstars, with deep and varied proficiencies, would make for a spectacularly complementary team.
And in the latter case, your best developers are - and should be - rock stars. You need to consider not only how you want your code to scale, but how your company will.