But it was a good idea! The interviewer just didn't expect a rock solid idea on the OP's part. It seems the interviewer was more interested in creating a hard interview rather than finding a good engineer. And while we're on that, I firmly believe that giving a business-agnostic pull request "spiked" with errors, brad practices and tricky to find bugs and asking the interviewing party to review it is going to tell you much more about them than leetcode-interviewing them.
The answer is network effect and friction . It is hard to communicate to everyone on your friends list that moving forward they can reach you via email or text only. It’s going to work with close friends and family but other people that want to reach out will not be able to find you. And there are always cases when you want to connect (or be easy to find) with someone who is not a close acquaintance.
I'm not trying to be combative, but that still seems like a very weak reason. And it's one that I used to use, not just with FB, but Twitter, IG and LinkedIn. They all held the same promise and failed to deliver it.
The idea that we need to be constantly networking is overblown, to say the least. When you step back and have an honest conversation with yourself about how much having access to these people you occasionally talk to benefits your life, it seems to be negligible at best. Certainly not something worth sticking around for, encouraging more and more privacy encroachment, targeted advertising, etc, adding undo stress and annoyance to your experience online and off.
Are we sure that we are not using the "stay connected" excuse to hide the fact that these things were designed to be addictive and we got sucked in by it? The only people benefiting from continued use are not users, but the advertisers and platform owners? Is there really anyone on that list where your life would be worse off for not ever interacting with them again? Are there other ways of making yourself just as accessible on the off chance a stranger wants to collaborate with you on something, such as a contact email in a GitHub profile or personal webpage that would satisfy whatever net positive you think you are getting from doing the same on FB? These are not easy questions to answer, but when we start drilling down, our excuses for sticking around start to fall apart and our control for being their gets exposed in ways that we maybe don't like.
I should had clarified my case a bit better. I am a writer. People that I don't know (or know very little about) contact me to invite me to book festivals, propose collaboration on some presentation, reach out to ask stuff about what I write, inform me about updates that I need to follow, coverage that I am included in or interviews that they would like me to give. There is no other way to facilitate this communication other than to have an easily discoverable profile on a social media platform. Could I do it any other way? Sure, I could print my email on my books or leave it to people to reach out to my publisher to get my contact info. But that adds friction. I could create a webpage for my work, but that means people have to visit it to stay up to date. I could create a newsletter, that I would have to keep up to date and that people would never check, alongside the other hundreds of newsletter mail they don't check.
On top of that I also follow other people's work, festivals, book fairs, interviews, publications etc. They also post everything on Facebook (some on Instagram as well). There is no other option to stay in touch with this circle of people if you are not on social media.
I dislike Meta and I agree that the social media have deteriorated considerably from what they supposedly promise to offer. But they are still better than the alternatives.
People got used to a passive “push” model for staying in touch that they forget the norm used to be “pull”.
Now you just passively absorb updates from people to stay factually informed but don’t directly engage with one another.
With email/sms, you can just ask somebody “hey what’s up?” And get their big updates. It’s more active and requires some more investment but that’s a good thing for making stronger relationships.
And for all those distant connections that you follow on FB but don’t want to talk to… you can ask your real friends “hey, have you anything about so-and-so?”
Those models don't work for distant friends. I should call my mom more often. However nobody would call someone they were distant friends with 20 years ago to talk about their kids sports game - but 10 seconds to see those pictures on Facebook is still appreciated. When that is what Facebook does it is valuable.
what's the point in seeing photos of a kids sports game if you are so uninterested in maintaining a relationship that you'd never consider chatting with the person? at that point, it may as well be a parasocial relationship with a celebrity where you look at photos of their life and say "wow, i'm so glad i've connected with them".
there's a difference between being informed about the goings-on in somebody's life (which social media browsing/posting can help with) and actually having relationships with people.
The point is to have something to talk about at the next reunion. It won't be for several more years, but I do plan on connecting again. Remember these pictures take only seconds to view, but they ensure when I next meet that person we have some place to start from when talking.
Your argument holds a weight only if you already think that “Facebook/IG is bad for keeping in touch”. For almost any average person, that just doesn’t matter. Privacy, targeted ads, “benefits of networking for your future” are things that only us, extremely fringe group of people, care about. My parents? Never. My non-techie friends? I don’t think they know what “targeted ads” even mean.
Your reasons are even weaker. We don't need to be constantly networking but for better or worse, Meta platforms have become the only remaining effective ways to get updates from a large group of extended family and friends spread out all over the world. Like if my second cousin in Indiana has a baby I'd like to know, and I didn't think they're going to announce it via email.
I don't understand why people are downvoting you when you're just explaining the reason why. Judging by the sentiment and aggressive downvoting in this thread one would think using anything else than email and text is completely abnormal. Fwiw I don't know a single person using email outside of work and the only texts people get are appointment reminders.
Don't people use whatsapp in your corner of the world? Over here in Europe all of that happens over whatsapp, which is still a Meta property at the end of the day, but one that hasn't been enshittified with off-network crap or algorithmic feeds... so far!
What is the big difference between messaging apps and sms? They are both forms of semi-synchronous communication via texting. SMS in many cases incures charges, moreover messaging apps actually do not necessarily require using an actual phone, or even _having_ a phone, which is a big plus in my book.
The thing is that in this scenario there is no control over the conversation so some participants may feel uncomfortable. My 10% can vary greatly from someone else's. The writer admitted so themselves "I decided to go for more than 10%. I shared about how my marriage had almost collapsed a couple years prior and a taste of how painful it was"
Imagine your manager asking you to share something at 10%, you share something modest like "sometimes I really feel anxiety over my work / deadlines / performance" and then the next person shares a deeply personal, super serious story about their almost collapsed marriage. They either set the tone for the whole conversation, forcing everybody else to follow along, or they hijack the conversation since what they shared is more serious.
There is no way to know before hand what someone is going to share, so there is no way to know before hand that everyone is going to feel comfortable.
"Human connection" could be discussing your hobbies with your coworkers, doesn't have to be a round table where everyone is sharing difficult experiences.
I have been paying for Kagi for the past five or six months and apart from the truly niche cases where I need top of the shelf search results the majority of the time the top results are not that much different from, say, duck duck go. My other issue is that I am on the first subscription tier which currently supports 300 searches and I often find myself reaching that limit sooner that I would like. I will continue to pay for the service, but so far the, admittedly, better results haven't given me this light and day experience other users describe. Maybe I am just not using the engine to its full potential...
The one in my previous job, which was an admin board for a market intelligence application. Ultimately, the reason it was good was because the engineers had zero ego on top of having excellent skills. The team that set the codebase were basically 4 seniors and 3 principals (the client actually did pay for top talent in this case) so not only everything was based on industry standards, written elegantly and organized perfectly, but every time some new requirement came up, these senior / principal engineers would discuss it in the most civilized matter I have ever seen.
E.g, "we need to come up with a way to implement X". Person A gives their idea, person B gives another idea and so on until everybody shared their thoughts. Then someone would say "I think what person C said makes the most sense" and everybody would agree and that was it. 30 minutes to hear everybody out, 3 minutes to discuss who will do it and when and the meeting was over.
I think the biggest testament to this code base was that when junior members joined the team, they were able to follow the existing code for adding new features. It was that easy to navigate and understand the big picture of.
This is the approach I tried to take as an IC frontend on a building management system dashboard about a year ago. It was basically me and one other frontend, one full-stack, and a QA or 2, plus a manager. My manager I guess had written a lot of the code we'd be interacting with, and I guess was somewhat protective and reluctant to delegate authority over decisions around it. It was a big refactoring project, and I just encouraged my colleagues to take the things they wanted, like rebuilding the state management system. We'd discuss the requirements and why it was necessary, and I'd look for reasons to agree rather than disagree, then we'd be off. Something burnout has taught me is that the marginal differences between one implementation detail or another are not worth getting hung up on unless they pose a real problem, especially when someone else gets to decide that doing it fast is priority (sprints).
> Something burnout has taught me is that the marginal differences between one implementation detail or another are not worth getting hung up on unless they pose a real problem, especially when someone else gets to decide that doing it fast is priority (sprints).
I think this is true. And a self-imposed problem (should a problem arise) is much less frustrating to fix than one that came from a decision imposed by someone else, even if the latter avoided loads of other problems. Sometimes it's better to let people make mistakes (as you believe them to be) and correct them later.
Otherwise known as "you are not your code" and "you are not your ideas." Essentially, criticism against your code is not a personal attack (and other corollaries). Its definitely something I aspire to, but its surprisingly hard to get right.
What is development if not communication? Between the clients, the coworkers, the users, and the computer
I'd take a mediocre dev with no ego and ok social skills on my project any day over an egotistical genius who can't work with other people or effectively communicate their ideas
“We care a lot about SPAs, team misjudged how many people rely on this today”.
This comment worries me because I was under the impression that RSCs are an option for a specific use case and not the one approach to rule them all. SPAs should be supported and expanded because they do serve a valuable purpose not only based on their use cases but also for developers. React being SPA friendly means people can spin up hobby projects, small applications and big non SEO reliant apps with ease. Going all in with RSC and ditching SPAs means that many will be discouraged from entering the react scene due to the sheer amount for things that used to be optional and now suddenly just became mandatory.
I liked react and I still like it. But I believe it’s on a path to alienate its user base.
