I think that there is some value in that friction. It used to tell us, the readers, that the narrator believed enough in what he wanted to tell to invest some non-negligible amount of time and energy. The final effect was that it maintained a sane ratio of stories worth reading over stories worth nothing. It kept a decent signal-to-noise ratio. In the future stories worth reading will be lost in a sea of regurgitated garbage.
Corporate culture changed radically in the 70s adopting Milton Friedman views that ethics and responsibility towards society have no place in the private sector, and as a consequence started maximizing profits in spite of everything else.
Corporations never had "responsibility towards society". In fact I much prefer corporations that don't pretend to have such a burden. It's almost always a false front.
Corps have a responsibility to deliver a product or service at a competitive price in order to sustain growth.
Friedman was an economist, not a corporate whisperer. To the extent that corps changed, they were forced to by market forces, most notably globalization, a force much bigger than one man and a force that was inevitable and even necessary in the wake of world war one and world war two.
Maybe, but somehow their behaviour and their products and services changed. Companies are made of people, and individuals had more freedom to put value in what they did, they took pride in the quality of their work. After Friedman everything got "optimized" for revenue, even if this meant screwing the customers (or the society). There are some things that cannot possibly work with this "self-regulated" market, so if we want to accept this way of doing business, we should move back some responsibilities to the public sector (healthcare, infrastructures, rehabilitation, education, research), because the search for "immediate gratification" of shareholders can't move the society as a whole out of local maxima that are far away from society best possibilities.
Very true. Long term effects are often neglected when framing considerations from a purely economic perspective, especially when these are externalized costs, like public health.
I'm constantly frustrated by software that tries to limit cognitive overload. Stop treating your users as if they were cognitively impaired. In other words, write a software that also an idiot can use, and only idiots will want to use it.
I have had the (dis)pleasure of watching my 60yr old mother having to re-learn the entire administrative part of her healthcare job three times over and deeply struggle because the insurance suits decided a new software package was needed.
Nothing humbles you more as a dev than seeing a layman struggle through an interface, getting increasingly frustrated and desperate because she can’t find the button she needs due to complexity and sensory overload due to a million tabs, buttons and text fields.
The worst of it is, you can see that she knows what she wants to do, but can’t translate that into the steps needed to get the computer to “understand” that, effectively making it feel as if it is trying to sabotage her. Something that would have taken 20 minutes with pen & paper suddenly takes 40 minutes digitally. Weren’t computers supposed to make us more efficient?
Considerately, screw your attitude. Eat some humble pie.
This anti-learning attitude is common, but I don’t find it admirable.
To me this is like a dev saying “screw Git, I just want to do console.log(). All this complexity is sabotaging my productivity.”
Modern jobs, even health care, require learning about and managing complexity. It’s not just “taking care of people”. Throwing your hands up and saying “I’m old”, which is a lousy excuse because I know plenty able old people and completely digitally illiterate young people, is not a viable solution.
Now, whether we want that as a society is another topic. But for the foreseeable future adapting to complexity and actually taking the time to sit down and learn this shit is IMO the only way forwards.
This is not anti-learning. This would be akin to git changing command names and flags doing exactly the same stuff. After a couple of times happening, even if the changes are somewhat ok, you too would start to be frustrated.
I've seen healthcare management software evolution due to my partner working with it. As in the worst management story, it's pitched to a boss that doesn't need or want to use it, offered to generally the lowest bidder, and then immediately outsourced in parts that rarely work well together taking years to develop.
The UI and workflows are designed by people that will never use it and are just plainly bad. The software/UI takes years to stabilize and reach feature parity to the same level it was before. During that time, it's pretty common to see staff having to use both systems and perform double data entry.
You're not learning to improve anything here. You're substituting a [shitty] tool with another one which does _exactly_ the same.
Sadly in IT this is pretty common. There's nothing special about healthcare.
> I'm constantly frustrated by software that tries to limit cognitive overload. Stop treating your users as if they were cognitively impaired. In other words, write a software that also an idiot can use, and only idiots will want to use it.
I disagree. I’ve been using IntelliJ for a few years now, and the new, simplified interface has made my experience a lot better. IMHO you should limit the cognitive overload but enable power users to increase it. See also Wikipedia, where the main editor is basic but if needed you can switch to the code editor and/or add plugins to make the interface a lot more powerful.
> I disagree. I’ve been using IntelliJ for a few years now, and the new, simplified interface has made my experience a lot better.
I work on a bunch of enterprise projects and therefore am sticking with the old design, because having more features available at a glance while also fitting as much of the code on screen as possible is definitely nice to have, in addition to my already established habits and knowledge of the UI.
But the new UI? It's also really sleek and pleasant, and a joy to use in the cases where I've toggled over to it. Plus, the fact that they worked on adding a compact mode to the new UI is also great to see! Definitely a good experience in my eyes.
I think the trick is in giving the user the choice on what to use, if there's no horrible incompatibility between the various iterations of something. For example, the day when the old Reddit UI (old.reddit.com) stops working is also the day when a bunch of people will stop hanging around the place. The problem is that companies often find the additional support needed to be a hassle and just optimize for the majority of users, not all of them - much the same how many games out there don't even have a Linux or Mac release, even in cases where the popular game engines make having one pretty easy!
The parent comment above yours is perhaps a bit more mean than it should be, though.
I literally have the opposite experience as a dev. The new interface is horrible, and it's not just the layout. They subtly somehow changed the borders and their color. I now officially can't delineate and know which part of the UI is for what.
I had to fiddle with color schemes, add-ons for updated icon colors, etc. It's a mess.
And even if it's about reducing cognitive overload. The old interface had plenty of "features" and "configuration" to reduce the cognitive load as much as you wanted with both presentation mode and the ability to change the UI however you wanted.
My cynical take is that we just had two giant camps promoting this. One was the designers that wanted to have something to do. And the other camp was the VSCode pushers that just couldn't stand that a glorified (and order of magnitude inferior) text-editor is maintaining user-counts.
They’re the ones asking for it. Release an application with dense UI today and the clients will quickly dismiss it because the market wants to do things as easily as possible with a few clicks - instant gratification. They want a language - computer interface, like Google’s Assistant, but one that works. This is why everybody pushes AI features: the promise of Clippy doing the work for you.
If you develop or sell something that has even a remote potential to kill someone, it's your responsibility to apply a cautionary principle and gather enough evidence that the probability of that outcome is negligible. Otherwise that IS gross negligence.
While the underlying idea that selling services on open source products is not sustainable from a purely business perspective may be true, the linked article is not particularly convincing to me, it doesn't provide strong evidences and it's based on an embarrassingly small sample size. Besides, maybe we should start to consider also other metrics when we evaluate a Business success, not only the mere economic profit: there are externalized societal benefits (and damages) that are very important and nonetheless poorly accounted for.
your library seems really interesting (I'd be interested in collaborating if it had a license compatible with my projects) but I've not found it mentioned in the repo. Would you be interested in clarifying the licensing terms?
