From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

I believe most users see a tech product as a tool, "The thing that gets you to the thing". Whereas a majority in tech view those tools more as experiences. An experience puts more focus on the process itself, at the expense of the end result.

Unfortunately this tech oligopoly landscape doesn't leave users many ways to express this preference, but I often wonder if the culture will change at some point in the future as the industry matures.

An aging western population might have an influence here as well, in the long term. Older folks have less tolerance for having to relearn how to do the same thing they already knew how to do for the umpteenth time.

Really, they were shocked to learn that customer support makes only $18 an hour?

How insulated from the rest of society in the US do you have to be to find that shocking?

The biggest cost of bloat comes from people being nice, it is emotionally hard to replace/rewrite code when the author is still there and not disliked by the team. Basically it sucks to make people redundant, so we try not to, and that makes it look like people aren't redundant even when they are.

For example, lets say you give a project to a competent engineer, he writes a clean and maintainable solution quickly alone. But if you schedule it to him together with another engineer of similar status but much less competent, then the other engineer will take a part of the project and basically block it since the competent engineer is unlikely to to take that fight, and instead just lets the project stall.

You don't get promoted for pointing out incompetence, there is a reason managers hires consultants to do that for them. This made me wonder, are there software consultants who act like management consultants and mostly go in and fire a lot of people? I don't think management consultants would do a good job of firing the right software people, they would need to be engineers.

TWC is literally what it says on a thin: all workers, no backers, just being honest about our experiences.

You can call us entitled, but insofar as we're propagandists, each individual is only pushing our own personal "narrative."

"Building power" is _definitely_ political activism but, again, the way we build power is, primarily, by exposing ourselves to eachother's personal experiences in the tech industry. That knowledge is power.

Think of it as a qualitative extension of passing around the salary spreadsheet. Sometimes, we formalize the exchanges through a speed-dating-like "worker's inquiry" where techies pair off and ask eachother basic questions like: 1. How is our work evaluated? 2. How are decisions made in our workplaces? 3. How do our respective bosses motivate us? 4. How does our work fit into the larger economic picture? 5. How is conflict handled at our workplaces?

These answers aren't collected, except when they're published in articles like this. It's just... good to know what's going on with eachother.

In previous generations, we'd have eachother over for dinner, for poker night, or whatever. We'd join bowling leagues, or the Sierra Club, and people working in the same industry would likely be living in the same towns, and joining the same bowling leagues. These formal, albeit recreational institutions offered workers the opportunity to casually learn about one-another's working and living conditions.

Those activities have largely evaporated since the 1950s (in America, at least), atomizing our society, and making us all supremely ignorant of one another (outside the carefully curated social media profiles, and the highly dramatized "reality TV".)

I don't really know why a literate person would object to casual, even semi-formal discussion of working conditions. (Of course the TWC self-selects people who are dissatisfied with our conditions, but it's a common truism that work sucks, no.)

This is the unintuitive thing about growth stage companies and just the scale that internet companies can achieve today. They might already have a million users who are happy with how it works and would rather that the UI didn't change. But they are on track to grow to 100 million users, and so if making things a little bit more flashy improves the new user activation rate by a small percentage for the next 99 million users, that can dwarf the preferences of the existing users. Especially if the existing users grumble for a few days but then mostly continue using the product.