161–170 of 205 posts
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Reminds me of > Knowledge is Power - France is bacon.
These are examples of dangling modifiers [1]. They’re related to garden-path sentences [2] because they trick you into parsing one way and then get you to backtrack. One of my favourite grammatical constructions! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangling_modifier [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
One of these lovely discussions again. I’m firmly on the devil’s advocate side here: some install bloat isn’t a big deal. 1. Believe it or not the LinkedIn app is huge in terms of the amount of things it does. It’s basically a super-app for professionals. News, social interactions, an entire chat app, a job board, recruiting and sales tools, etc. Of course it relies on a lot of frameworks. 2. You don’t need a “high e…
The app may do a lot of things, but what fraction of users use all of the things? Even if I use 10% of what an app is capable of, I still have to store 100% of the app on my phone.
I don't have LinkedIn installed, but it's hardly the only app guilty of this. My phone has probably a dozen apps or so that take up much more space than I would expect (400 MB for the iRobot app that runs my Roomba? 250 MB for Firefox Focus which is now the same size as 'full' Firefox?) For many of these apps, I use them frequently enough that the space tradeoff is not a concern. For many others though, they're in th…
Why not pick a popular third-party app and buy it or employ its developer, which should be much cheaper than employing hundreds of subpar developers.
it's how microsoft does it's business. They have to lead by example. What message would it send if they can develop this with 5 devs, but the customers they sell their advice and licenses to needs a 1000? So they have to dogfood, leading to all of these bullshit bloated apps
So with a company full of people whose #1 concern is their paycheck and their resume, they'll make choices to optimize those, which means turning a trivial 20-minute shell script into a 3-month project requiring a whole team of devs.
Is app package size something users care about?
TL;DR: There're few global incentives for a LinkedIn app developer to make an overall good app, as opposed to making their PM happy. In detail: This is how death by a thousand papercuts looks like. I've had the (dubious) pleasure of observing a roughly similar BigTech app project. There are likely 100s-1000s of app developers involved in the LinkedIn app, and they are likely under immense pressure to Just Ship Alread…
> There are likely 100s-1000s of app developers involved in the LinkedIn app I don't understand why you'd need 1000 or even 100 developers to produce such app. It's a CRUD frontend for a backend that already exists. What am I missing? Are you counting the developers of all the third party libs they integrate?
The apps were roughly identical in the services that they provided (they both sold the same products but maybe some of the payment methods were different).
I'm still not sure why one company needed 10x the people to maintain the same thing.
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> go on a PM-centric feature frenzy Do developers have any agency whatsoever, or are they at the mercy of doing whatever their managers suggest (while always knowing the "right" answer, of course)? Does our industry attract people who avoid accountability? Fraud? It's the executive's fault. Business struggling? It's the MBA's fault. Bad product? It's the PM's fault. Must be nice!
On balance, devs have more agency than ever before, but they choose to use it to load in every daft technology imaginable that makes their resume look good. IMO developers are less and less inclined to act like professionals that bring data to the decision table, so as to create meaningful business solutions. Take scaling for instance: there is such a thing as unnecessary scaling. I've seen junior devs in AWS shops i…
I see senior devs doing that all the time as well; they have resumes to work on as well. Applications that probably will not get more than a few 10000 hits a day, if that, getting set up and stress tested so someone can say ‘set up app that could handle millions of hits a minute’. All on the company’s dime of course.
I don't have LinkedIn installed, but it's hardly the only app guilty of this. My phone has probably a dozen apps or so that take up much more space than I would expect (400 MB for the iRobot app that runs my Roomba? 250 MB for Firefox Focus which is now the same size as 'full' Firefox?) For many of these apps, I use them frequently enough that the space tradeoff is not a concern. For many others though, they're in th…
That is wild. Firefox on Android is an 85 MB download, and it's real Firefox with all the associated features. LinkedIn is 45 MB. I don't see how anybody can believe Apple is spending any effort on automated static analysis in app review if they're leaving such low hanging fruit.
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That is wild. Firefox on Android is an 85 MB download, and it's real Firefox with all the associated features. LinkedIn is 45 MB. I don't see how anybody can believe Apple is spending any effort on automated static analysis in app review if they're leaving such low hanging fruit.
I have Android and it's close to 300 MB. 180 of which is cache.
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In my experience PMs are not rewarded for good product, but rather a mix of shortsighted metrics and whatever their VP/senior person has on their personal agenda. At big companies, employees are often not even using their own products. The corporate ladder is all that matters. Obviously that’s not unique to the PM role, but seemingly more prevalent. I think it’s an effect of the rootless roaming you get when you spre…
Best product people I've worked with operated alongside QA and support instead of engineering.
There is a balance though - in some cases you have to roll the dice and strike out in bold new directions. But this needs to be done with eyes wide open and everyone in full acknowledgement that this is an experiment and conversations with users are the next step.