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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

#41

Post by codelikeawolf »

shermantanktop wrote: post #10

This is the brown m&m theory. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-did-van-hale... A trivial, superficial fact is assumed to be indicative of a much more substantial concern. For Van Halen, the candy dish indicated adherence to contract terms; here, pluralization indicates the integrity and values of an entire company. It’s a cute idea that suggests an easy way to understand something complex. But there’s…

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., Ozzy's wife) didn't want to see walls. My sister needed to have production hang up curtains everywhere in the dressing room. Some of these people have become completely detached from reality.

As a result of this, over the course of her career, my sister has accumulated the weirdest contact list I could imagine. If I needed a bouncy house, chainsaw juggler, Russian interpreter, and a blimp, she could probably set that up in 30 minutes without ever needing to search online.

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

#42

Post by jordanb »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #26
shermantanktop wrote: post #10

This is the brown m&m theory. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-did-van-hale... A trivial, superficial fact is assumed to be indicative of a much more substantial concern. For Van Halen, the candy dish indicated adherence to contract terms; here, pluralization indicates the integrity and values of an entire company. It’s a cute idea that suggests an easy way to understand something complex. But there’s…

Van Halen was playing giant stadium shows that were massive logistical and coordination challenges and used this contract language as a canary for more important aspects like the scafolding setup. If they didn't read the catering closely, did they also skim the electrical schematics? Their concerts were perfect scenarios for heavy-weight process, defined procedures and scientific management. A lot of software is punk…

This is the excuse Van Halen used much later after to explain his extreme princess behavior.

I have never bought it.

If you want to make sure the venue is set up right you probably need to send an electrician to check on it before your tour arrives. The M&M thing may show if the venue operator read your contract not if they bothered fulfilling the parts that would be expensive (upgrading a building's electrical is expensive, making an intern pick the brown M&Ms out is not).

It probably didn't even prove that the venue operator read your contract. More likely the first time Eddie stormed out after seeing a brown M&M word would get around to everyone that "Eddie will flip his shit if there's a brown M&M so get rid of them. Yes, Seriously."

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

#43

Post by angiolillo »

It's a tradeoff.

I love projects where I can "sweat the details" and refine not just wording but typography, padding, visual alignment, layout, edge cases, colors, workflow, etc. And where the back-end, QA, doc teams are similarly able to hone their work to perfection.

But I know that this isn't always Pareto optimal. Sometimes your user, customer, and business are better off if you swallow your pride and deliver an imperfect solution now instead of a better solution in the future, and knowing when and where to strike that balance is a sign of maturity, not disrespect.

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

#44

Post by wavemode »

jordanb wrote: post #25
jon-wood wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If pluralisation of a status message in the UI is breaking core application logic then you've got bigger problems than the pluralisation code.

Every code path is an opportunity for a bug that escapes validation. Plus this particular example doesn't work with i18n. It would be more complicated in that case.

The (s) alternative that the article is arguing against is even worse for i18n, so what's your point?

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

#45

Post by jasode »

>You can’t have your UI disrespecting [...] and I care too much!

I think it just highlights that people care about different things. I've seen the "(s)" placeholder for decades in computer UIs and it's never bothered me. On the other hand, blog article characteristics that bug me are titles consisting of a non-descriptive teaser with ellipsis (...) that doesn't describe the main point and not having a publication date at the top.

But I'm not going to complain about blog articles that "disrespect" readers that way because apparently, it's ok with some writers and some readers.

Likewise, someone using the Comic Sans font enrages some folks but it never bothers me. On the other hand, displaying big numbers without any thousands separators is very annoying.

I code a lot of utilities for myself and I always avoid the "(s)" problem by re-ordering the text. Instead of:

  Uploading 3 image(s)
The UI is:

  Number of images uploaded:  3
That looks ok for all quantities and doesn't require tedious ternary logic everywhere :

  Number of images uploaded:  0
  Number of images uploaded:  1
  Number of images uploaded:  2

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

#46

Post by cj »

canes123456 wrote: post #34
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 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, I could see the author's logic being used as a justifcation to build more "evil" features:

> Talk to me like I’m used to. Be familiar, be approachable. I want to feel like you care about helping me. Not “me” as in “all the prospective 99,99,999 users”, but “me” specifically. Users shouldn’t feel like they’ve been dropped into a cookie cutter template - a cold, hard reminder that this is clunky, soulless machinery removed from their world.

In other words, the author wants a personalized experience. A personalized news feed. An experience that is tailored to them. (Isn't that what everyone is complaining ruined Facebook, insta, youtube, etc?)

I don't think that's what the author actually wants. I think it's just poor framing / unclear writing.

If the idea is "I want to work at a company that cares about its craft" -- the example they picked to illustrate that point is just odd. Whether or not a company uses a combined singular/plural form like "Uploading File(s)" is not a very good indicator of whether that company values its craft, IMO.

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

#47

Post by jordanb »

wavemode wrote: post #44
jordanb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every code path is an opportunity for a bug that escapes validation. Plus this particular example doesn't work with i18n. It would be more complicated in that case.

The (s) alternative that the article is arguing against is even worse for i18n, so what's your point?

You'll have to look up the way i18n frameworks work, but no the "(s)" is not worse. It is far better because it's a simple string that the framework can substitute without embedded business logic trying to manipulate the individual characters in a way that only works in one language.

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

jordanb wrote: post #42
skeeter2020 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Van Halen was playing giant stadium shows that were massive logistical and coordination challenges and used this contract language as a canary for more important aspects like the scafolding setup. If they didn't read the catering closely, did they also skim the electrical schematics? Their concerts were perfect scenarios for heavy-weight process, defined procedures and scientific management. A lot of software is punk…

This is the excuse Van Halen used much later after to explain his extreme princess behavior. I have never bought it. If you want to make sure the venue is set up right you probably need to send an electrician to check on it before your tour arrives. The M&M thing may show if the venue operator read your contract not if they bothered fulfilling the parts that would be expensive (upgrading a building's electrical is ex…

[deleted]
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