One of the top things that I want in a job is coworkers who care obsessively.
That’s such a great observation
Care
11–20 of 92 posts
Re: Care
#12One of the top things that I want in a job is coworkers who care obsessively.
Well, y'know. You're likely to be better off if you put that desire to one side and focus within.
Consider a soup kitchen vs a supermarket checkout. The people working at the soup kitchen arguably care a lot more. The person at the supermarket checkout can be as glassy eyed as they feel and still be part of feeding more people in absolute terms.
Humans seem to have some sort of emotional heuristic to focus on care (really, focus on motivation of others I think). That works in small groups but it is highly misleading in large ones. In large groups, the only factors that matter are incentives and competence. If the incentives are good and the people are competent, good results will happen. If the reverse, corruption. The motivation heuristic actually does a lot of harm because it causes a huge amount of noise in the discourse where people whinge about this person or that having bad character to no avail. It is often true that people have impure motivations, but at scale that is true of effectively everyone. There are the devils you know and the devils waiting to become known. We can get great outcomes regardless; our politicians are cut from the same cloth as the Nazi and Communist parties but look at the difference in outcomes.
One of the most peaceful insights I ever stumbled across was that of the people in the workplace who cared less than me, there were a significant and productive subset who were just doing more good than me through competence and being thoughtful about what work to pick up.
Re: Care
#13I feel like a lot of the problems with web UX come from browsers never natively implementing even basic functionality needed for many web apps, like comboboxes, menus, tab panels, etc. Then there's the endless layers of fiddly work needed to make accessibility work cross-platform (check out all the work Adobe puts into the react-aria project for an example), and that there's still fundamentally no browser-native no-J…
“And use the response”
Right, because a description of the use of the response would constitute a DSL
Re: Care
#14I feel like a lot of the problems with web UX come from browsers never natively implementing even basic functionality needed for many web apps, like comboboxes, menus, tab panels, etc. Then there's the endless layers of fiddly work needed to make accessibility work cross-platform (check out all the work Adobe puts into the react-aria project for an example), and that there's still fundamentally no browser-native no-J…
Agreed. I remember in 2012 we joked that if you used enough Javascript you could get the Web in 2012 up to the level that VisualBasic 1.0 offered back in 1991. But we were certain that in 10 years, by 2022, we'd up to the level offered by VisualBasic 6.0, which would have been amazing, because VisualBasic 6.0 had been amazing.
I've been stunned by the lack of progress. The major browser companies/projects have largely stopped innovating. The period from 1993 to maybe 2010 or 2015 was very fluid, and HTML and CSS expanded quickly, but after a certain point the attitude seemed to be "We don't need to fix HTML because we can fix it with Javascript." Which is sort of true, but it is clunky. It would be much better to simply add more to HTML. At a minimum, every form element offered by VisualBasic should have eventually been added to HTML. What is the hold up? Why isn't this happening?
It's shocking, but there are still no calendars in HTML. Every calendar has to be custom built with CSS and Javascript. You'd think in the year 2024 we'd have every possible time element added to HTML, with easy customization options. I'm baffled this hasn't happened yet.
What will it take to get the major browser companies/projects to start adding more to HTML?
Re: Care
#15One of the top things that I want in a job is coworkers who care obsessively.
Especially if you're working as team.
Caring obsessively can be a negative in some competitive environments, e.g., a very insular/non-collaborative university department. But I suppose I might not call those other professors coworkers.
Re: Care
#16Web and modern tech can be fantastic if you take away the dark patterns. The UX for booking a flight isn't complex because reserving a seat or taking your card is difficult. It's complex because low margin businesses like airlines can make more money up-selling extra legroom or travel insurance. Take away the dark patterns and incentive to eek every last dollar from the user and the entire web can be neal.fun.
Take away enough dark patterns and you eventually kill Capitalism. :)
Re: Care
#17Sure -- but lets be clear about what this is a function of; this is misplaced incentives.
There's nothing (yet) incentivizing a clean, efficient, pleasant web, owing to the fact that scale of the stuff the web connects to/makes available doesn't have any meaningful "competition" whatsoever.
Re: Care
#18I feel like a lot of the problems with web UX come from browsers never natively implementing even basic functionality needed for many web apps, like comboboxes, menus, tab panels, etc. Then there's the endless layers of fiddly work needed to make accessibility work cross-platform (check out all the work Adobe puts into the react-aria project for an example), and that there's still fundamentally no browser-native no-J…
Agreed. I remember in 2012 we joked that if you used enough Javascript you could get the Web in 2012 up to the level that VisualBasic 1.0 offered back in 1991. But we were certain that in 10 years, by 2022, we'd up to the level offered by VisualBasic 6.0, which would have been amazing, because VisualBasic 6.0 had been amazing. I've been stunned by the lack of progress. The major browser companies/projects have largel…
Input type=“date” was added and is supported in HTML5, no js required. Same with time!
Re: Care
#19One of the top things that I want in a job is coworkers who care obsessively.
Well, y'know. You're likely to be better off if you put that desire to one side and focus within. Consider a soup kitchen vs a supermarket checkout. The people working at the soup kitchen arguably care a lot more. The person at the supermarket checkout can be as glassy eyed as they feel and still be part of feeding more people in absolute terms. Humans seem to have some sort of emotional heuristic to focus on care (r…
I've been on large and small teams of people that cared and didn't care. It feels noble and reasonable and right to tie it to a greater purpose; like your soup kitchen vs supermarket example. It's not that type of care the OP is getting at.
It's closer to a craftmanship kind of care. Being proud of what you're putting into the world. Caring that it works well, not because the purpose is important, but because it's something you're doing and you want to do it well.
Re: Care
#20One of the top things that I want in a job is coworkers who care obsessively.
> One of the top things that I want in a job is coworkers who care obsessively.
While I agree with the premise, the "downstream" really matters though.
There's a lot of different ways to care obsessively and many are quite toxic if you've ever worked with them. One example comes to mind is I've been there were PR comments are way overbearing. There's definitely good points/notes, but nitpicking, snide comments, holier-than-art attitude easily comes along with the boat.
"With love" is such a blase statement, but it really has to be the starting point. That caring combined with respect has to be present to be a healthy, long term working environment.
Like with many things, there's a balance.