How I learned to become a failure
digitalmash.com
How I learned to become a failure
1–6 of 6 posts
Re: How I learned to become a failure
#2jason fried is not going to be happy with this guy haha
Re: How I learned to become a failure
#3excellent article.. upvoted~
Re: How I learned to become a failure
#4Like. I have no interest whatsoever in the article, but this headline was paradoxically motivating for some reason. I really like it.
Don't get me wrong, the article is good and all that but the title informed the article pretty obviously, and I knew what was to come. But since I did know, that meant the title itself transfixed a little motivation to become a bigger failure in my own life.
Re: How I learned to become a failure
#5%s/small failure/reality checking/g
Re: How I learned to become a failure
#6I had a job where my boss expected our small group of consultants to maintain this "talk to clients a bit and then pull a rabbit out of your hat without further feedback" approach. It's good to hear it broken down in the article.
For my ex-boss, this "magician" image was what justified a consultant's high fees. Our actual assignment was a complete failure on multiple levels. Among those levels, what I think is the most awful part of the create-a-gold-plated-thingy-that-'just-works' paradigm is that it discards the human interaction part of development.
"Make it 'just work'" is a problematic meme now that it has come to permeate society (Apple Computer's huge prestige clearly being a driver of this). The problem I see is that algorithms/designs/platforms/technologies that "just work" make the trade-offs involved invisible to the end user but the end user is still effected by them and sooner or later they need to actually think about the trade-offs. Certainly, making your program "just work" - ie, not require excess thought, training or manual configuration on the part of the client, can be a good thing. The problem is when this approach dominates the entirety of design and development.