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The kind of company I want to be a part of

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Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#141

Post by thermalmotion »

jordanb wrote: post #22

This is the Californian Ideology in a blog post. The implication that title and intro mean to imply is working for companies that build products that are not evil and hostile to their users. But the call to action is to.. embed logic in the programs to pluralize properly (in English). It's possible to write evil software that pluralizes words. It's possible to write beneficial software that does not pluralize words.…

I read this comment in Zizek, complete with cocaine sniffles and wild hand gestures. 10/10 would recommend.

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#142

Post by jimbokun »

CalRobert wrote: post #99
hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, your comment probably exemplifies the “Californian Ideology” the parent comment is criticizing. “Why would you consider good or evil when talking about how you want to spend the overwhelming majority of your productive life”.

I miss when Californian ideology was of the “information wants to be free” and “connecting the people of the world will end tyranny” variety :-( . Something really changed after the first dotcom bubble. Maybe it was my own youthful naïveté (as someone living in Sacramento desperately wishing I lived in that much cooler city to the west). Maybe it was the last drops of that wave Hunter S Thompson talked about breaking…

What happened: the ideology came into contact with the broader world of unscrupulous actors and human weakness.

We really do have access to all the world's information to a first degree. We also have access to all the world's propaganda, advertising, trolling, and algorithmic optimization of content.

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#143

Post by stevenjgarner »

ctxc wrote: post #129
stevenjgarner wrote: post #93

With such a clear vision of the "company I want to be a part of", maybe you should walk the walk and establish such a company? Perhaps then you will find out that what actually floats to the top is what we've got, rather than what we want. Or perhaps you will be the next GOAT.

Ouch. Unfortunately I don't think I will. I'll probably always be hired by someone else to build a shared vision and aspire to do it as well as I possibly can :)

I didn't mean that to be demeaning at all. I seriously urge you to implement that vision even as a bootstrapped side project to your main gig. If you want to "build something (you're) proud to sign (your) name on", chances are whatever you build will display that authenticity, which will either resonate with customers or not. People love authenticity, perhaps customers not so much. The market can be brutal and just because something is "better" or more genuine does not necessarily equate to revenue. You have already started a big part of your story, explaining why your vision is "better". Go ahead and implement something incorporating that vision, explaining its advantages to the market. At the end of the day, you will at the very least feel true to your self. A job may not give you that.

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#144

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

(s) is important, but cosmetic. I'd rather you care if the product works well first, and then care about the cosmetic. Is it solving the user's problem like they want? Is it not creating more problems for them? And is the work being done in a sustainable way (for the employees, environment, etc)? That's the company I want to work for.

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#145

Post by fragmede »

flatline wrote: post #66
codelikeawolf wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sister has worked as the operations manager for a large concert venue for several years and she has some great stories about contract riders. She regularly needs clarification on whether she needs to provide what preposterous thing they ask for. I think Lady Gaga asked for a goat, which ended up being in there to verify she read the whole thing, so no goat procurement was necessary. However, Sharon Osbourne (i.e.,…

Missed opportunity to procure a goat. When I’m doing project management like this, if I ever have a minute to come up for air between getting all the essentials in place, I will absolutely prioritize little things like that for my own amusement and, hopefully, that of the client. I would at least have gone as far as lining up a supplier, getting a quote, and letting the client know we’re locked and loaded with a goat…

Haha I bet there's a story out there about how this one venue was hosting the state faire the previous weekend and had goats left over or the venue owner's brother had a goat farm or something, so they didn't question Lady Gaga on the goat thing, so they just went and did it. Baby goats are the cutest!

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#146

Post by canes123456 »

hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #88
canes123456 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am baffled why you are inserting good and evil into this. He just seems to want to work at companies that value craft and attention to detail. It just like the jobs quote about the back of the furniture also being attractive.

Ironically, your comment probably exemplifies the “Californian Ideology” the parent comment is criticizing. “Why would you consider good or evil when talking about how you want to spend the overwhelming majority of your productive life”.

Who is saying not consider doing good? Can’t there be more than one thing you consider?

Do you going into this rant when a coworker asks about vacation days too?

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#147

Post by 317070 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #108
jordanb wrote: post #22

This is the Californian Ideology in a blog post. The implication that title and intro mean to imply is working for companies that build products that are not evil and hostile to their users. But the call to action is to.. embed logic in the programs to pluralize properly (in English). It's possible to write evil software that pluralizes words. It's possible to write beneficial software that does not pluralize words.…

What I do, is have two different formats in the translation tokens. As an example, this app[0], is currently only localized in English, but I still use tokens, whenever I do apps, so the base localization[1] has stuff like this: "SLUG-CLEANTIME-DIVIDER" = "\nThis is "; "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-YEAR-EXACT" = "exactly one year."; "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-YEARS-EXACT" = "exactly %d years."; "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-YEAR" = "o…

From the little Ukrainian I know, I do know that they have 3 forms for the word year ("рік" pronounced r-ee-k). There is one that matches the English singular "рік" (but you'd also use it for e.g. 21 years), and there is one "роки" which is used for quantities 2, 3 and 4 (but also 22, 23 and 24) and another plural form "років" for the other quantities. [0]

So, the few lines of the localisation you posted don't work for Ukrainian and most other Slavic languages.

And that is the issue! Languages differ a lot in ways that are hard to catch in code. And it is the issue leading to for instance "blob(s)" in localised applications, as a lot of languages don't even have a plural, such as Mandarin.

[0] https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=uk&text=1%20year%20ol...

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#148

Post by hylaride »

ferguess_k wrote: post #112
OhNoHereWeGo wrote: post #85

The essence of this post is about craftsmanship, value, and caring about what you're doing. It's really hard to put this into words. There's certainly a gradient and trade-offs to be made. In most businesses, the priority is to make money. This is not bad. Business owners deserve to make money for their efforts. It's always been the case that "bean counters" will optimize to increase profits. If you want a superior p…

I think most big tech companies started with a tech centered culture and gradually moved towards a finance/PM centered culture, which makes sense, especially after they went IPO. From what I recall, David Cutler was quoted in "Showstoppers" about DEC having an engineering culture when he joined but he got discontented after a few years (when his team shipped VMS) because it was too bloated. Microsoft could be a bit d…

I still am trying to decide what's a better balance.

If you're too tech/engineering oriented you have a higher chance of not becoming/continuing as a viable business (DEC was a perfect example of this).

Swing too far the other way and the tech suffers and in theory you open yourself up to better alternatives or it becomes too burdensome to innovate as tech debt builds and the PMs refuse to deal with it until it becomes so acute that it drives away your better talent. Worse is that by this time the original PMs have moved on under the impression they did amazing and somebody else is cleaning up the mess.

In theory with scrum/agile, it's the engineers who pick up the backlog and work on what they feel is important to move forward (be it features, security, tech debt, etc), but in practice the PMs usually have the control.

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#149

Post by cantor_S_drug »

tyleo wrote: post #2

I’d say overreaction. The real world is full of tradeoffs and I’ve seen people try to get minutia like this correct in convoluted contexts which actually broke the core application logic. Given the limited time we can spend on things, supporting proper plurality falls below some of my other UI priorities like proper accessibility settings. I don’t think plurality is bad, just low in the stack rank of things that matt…

I think there was an article on English stackexchange where linguists proved that the word "the" is a useless word. It's a filler word like umm, etc.

Re: The kind of company I want to be a part of

#150

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

317070 wrote: post #147
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I do, is have two different formats in the translation tokens. As an example, this app[0], is currently only localized in English, but I still use tokens, whenever I do apps, so the base localization[1] has stuff like this: "SLUG-CLEANTIME-DIVIDER" = "\nThis is "; "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-YEAR-EXACT" = "exactly one year."; "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-YEARS-EXACT" = "exactly %d years."; "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-YEAR" = "o…

From the little Ukrainian I know, I do know that they have 3 forms for the word year ("рік" pronounced r-ee-k). There is one that matches the English singular "рік" (but you'd also use it for e.g. 21 years), and there is one "роки" which is used for quantities 2, 3 and 4 (but also 22, 23 and 24) and another plural form "років" for the other quantities. [0] So, the few lines of the localisation you posted don't work f…

Like I said, not perfect, but you might want to look more closely.

Note that the only format placeholder is an integer. You can use whatever words you want, around that integer.

If you have a singular, then you use one of the singular tokens (no integer).

I found this to be the most flexible approach.

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