4 ms·

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 ev

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. This blog post is about the color of the bikeshed next to the torment nexus.

canes123456 1y ago
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.
- cj 1y ago
  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.
  - John23832 1y ago
    Personalization != using appropriate common language to express what is happening to the user.
- commandlinefan 1y ago
  I was honestly expecting the link to be somebody's quixotic rant about software that does "good" in the world rather than serves ads and I was pleasantly surprised to see something I can actually relate to.
  - ctxc 1y ago
    Haha trust me, I have thoughts on that too!
- hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
  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”.
  - bobxmax 1y ago
    [dead]
  - CalRobert 1y ago
    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.
    - jordanb 1y ago
      "Information wants to be free" was always a pretty marginal part of the California Ideology[0]. The main difference between now and thirty years ago, is that now they're only "anti-statist" when the state tries to control them personally. They're pro-state when it's being inflicted on their perceived enemies or underlings. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology
    - jimbokun 1y ago
      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.
  - canes123456 1y ago
    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?
- abathologist 1y ago
  Right? Why would anyone muddy work with morality in this day and age? Morality is so 2010s.
- freejazz 1y ago
  It's true for some that morality is not an issue at all.
- elliotto 1y ago
  The title of the post is 'the kind of company I want to be a part of'. This presents a more abstract philosophical question of what one should do and how one should be. I clicked the article expecting a piece about social utility, intellectual stimulation, or the role of firms in an increasingly complex moral environment. Instead the author posited a point about pluralizing nouns. This is the Californian ideology - do not engage with fucking anything at all, because we're all getting rich off pluralizing nouns.
  - paulddraper 1y ago
    You are able to read a lot more into this than I am.
ivape 1y ago
It seems like a douchey post but it’s not. Just browsing the internet makes me regularly question how difficult it is keeping the tech industry full of people that give a shit. Software ate the world and along with it came a contingent that don’t care enough about it. The choppy first page load, the non-smooth scrolling, the ads janking in, shifting layout and content in unpredictable ways, and finally the bombarding of intrusive ads and popups where the dev didn’t even take a few minutes to construct a sensible UI compromise (yes, we need to show ads, but can we show the ads without anal fucking the user’s eyes? Yes possibly). So yes, we have a real IDGAF issue in tech, and I can’t imagine this getting better because Gen Z all have a casual drug dealer “this just my side hustle” attitude, and Millennials will not a give a fuck because they are still pissed about the GFC and the cost of housing. The Leetcode people don’t give a fuck because they are burnt out on Leetcode and their entire identity is based on salary and very little to do with quality of their actual work. There’s literally … and I mean this, there’s literally no one left to care.
- jordanb 1y ago
  They don't have intrusive ads because programmers "DGAF". They have intrusive ads because they need to juice their clickthrough metrics with dark patterns. Same with all the bad performance. Sometimes this may be a mistake but almost always it's because the site is firing up 50 prerender tracking scripts. The author is trying to imply that if everyone focused a little more on making the computer feel like your robot friend, the industry would quit producing shit software. But the reality is the industry creates shit software because it is running an ad-supported malware business model.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
John23832 1y ago
There's no good or evil here. Have attention to quality. Do whatever it is that you're doing well.
cmdtab 1y ago
We want to hire engineers who really pay attention to details and great product experience but it’s quite rare in practice. Hiring is super hard.
- fhub 1y ago
  Outside of engineers there is a whole raft of people on a team that should pick up and push back on this sort of copy problem at all phases of building a product.
  - philk10 1y ago
    holds hand up as one of those people
    - ctxc 1y ago
      high fives ;)
- ctxc 1y ago
  Just checked your profile out. Turns out I've interacted with Umesh on LinkedIn before on Runnable. Small world. Nice work, all the best!
- whstl 1y ago
  Apart from people who just weren’t good, what I found in a few decades is that most people will pay attention to details if given the incentive and time. What companies seem to want is developers who do everything perfectly despite having someone yelling at them to move fast. Also: the person yelling also doesn’t care about the details until someone else points it out to them.
- zem 1y ago
  are the engineers you do hire rewarded for paying attention to detail though? it's often the case that the company decision makers "want" attention to detail, in that they agree it's a nice thing, but their revealed preferences are more along the lines of "why are you wasting time on component x which is already in a shippable state when component y is behind schedule?!"
rdiddly 1y ago
1) You projected that anticipated focus into the title. Not wrongly. But I for example did not. My slant was more about innovation. The title doesn't inherently imply or contain either one. 2) The small, practical thing the post is actually about does address at least part of what you wanted to hear, because declaring "Loading 1 item(s)" IS hostile to users.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
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" = "one year"; "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-YEARS" = "%d years"; "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-MONTH" = "one month"; "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-MONTHS" = "%d months"; "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-DAY" = "one day"; "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-DAYS" = "%d days"; Which is actually composed in this dependency[2]. It's not perfect, but is pretty flexible. Silly stuff, I know, and the app is not exactly a viral sensation, but the folks that use it, like it. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nacc/id452299196 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nacc/id452299196 [1] https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/NACC/blob/master/Sources/Shared/Resources/Base.lproj/Localizable.strings https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/NACC/blob/master/Sources... [2] https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/LGV_UICleantime/blob/master/Sources/LGV_UICleantime/Text%20Report/LGV_UICleantimeDisplayTextLabel.swift https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/LGV_UICleantime/blob/mas...
- 317070 1y ago
  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%20old%2C%202%20years%20old%2C%205%20years%20old%2C%2021%20years%20old%2C%2022%20years%20old%2C%2025%20years%20old&op=translate https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=uk&text=1%20year%20ol...
ctxc 1y ago
(author) I can assure you my intentions were much less sinister (and simpler ;))
_vertigo 1y ago
Some guy writes a whimsical blog post about wanting to work at a company that takes pride in their work and the top comment criticizes the blog post because they didn’t specify explicitly in their 300 word post that the company has to not be evil too. Jesus, we’re fucked aren’t we?
thermalmotion 1y ago
I read this comment in Zizek, complete with cocaine sniffles and wild hand gestures. 10/10 would recommend.
jmye 11mo ago
> The implication that title and intro mean to imply is working for companies that build products that are [...] hostile to their users. But the call to action is to.. embed logic in the programs to pluralize properly (in English). So it's your belief that paying attention to how your tool communicates with it's users (in the language they're speaking) has no implications on user hostility? That's certainly a fascinating point of view that I would guess is in the extreme minority, and probably isn't actually something you believe yourself, if you stop trying to rant about California long enough to consider the words you wrote. Also, would love if you'd call out where anything about "evil" is actually implied - I would assume that, when you read the actual written words, you'll realize you've added that yourself, and that perhaps you'll be a bit more careful in the future when trying to throw in a slightly wordier Twitter-slap. Or not, I suppose your post is "current social media discourse in an HN post" or whatever.

canes123456 1y ago

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.

cj 1y ago
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.
- John23832 1y ago
  Personalization != using appropriate common language to express what is happening to the user.
commandlinefan 1y ago
I was honestly expecting the link to be somebody's quixotic rant about software that does "good" in the world rather than serves ads and I was pleasantly surprised to see something I can actually relate to.
- ctxc 1y ago
  Haha trust me, I have thoughts on that too!
hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
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”.
- bobxmax 1y ago
  [dead]
- CalRobert 1y ago
  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.
  - jordanb 1y ago
    "Information wants to be free" was always a pretty marginal part of the California Ideology[0]. The main difference between now and thirty years ago, is that now they're only "anti-statist" when the state tries to control them personally. They're pro-state when it's being inflicted on their perceived enemies or underlings. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology
  - jimbokun 1y ago
    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.
- canes123456 1y ago
  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?
abathologist 1y ago
Right? Why would anyone muddy work with morality in this day and age? Morality is so 2010s.
freejazz 1y ago
It's true for some that morality is not an issue at all.
elliotto 1y ago
The title of the post is 'the kind of company I want to be a part of'. This presents a more abstract philosophical question of what one should do and how one should be. I clicked the article expecting a piece about social utility, intellectual stimulation, or the role of firms in an increasingly complex moral environment. Instead the author posited a point about pluralizing nouns. This is the Californian ideology - do not engage with fucking anything at all, because we're all getting rich off pluralizing nouns.
- paulddraper 1y ago
  You are able to read a lot more into this than I am.

ivape 1y ago

It seems like a douchey post but it’s not. Just browsing the internet makes me regularly question how difficult it is keeping the tech industry full of people that give a shit. Software ate the world and along with it came a contingent that don’t care enough about it. The choppy first page load, the non-smooth scrolling, the ads janking in, shifting layout and content in unpredictable ways, and finally the bombarding of intrusive ads and popups where the dev didn’t even take a few minutes to construct a sensible UI compromise (yes, we need to show ads, but can we show the ads without anal fucking the user’s eyes? Yes possibly). So yes, we have a real IDGAF issue in tech, and I can’t imagine this getting better because Gen Z all have a casual drug dealer “this just my side hustle” attitude, and Millennials will not a give a fuck because they are still pissed about the GFC and the cost of housing. The Leetcode people don’t give a fuck because they are burnt out on Leetcode and their entire identity is based on salary and very little to do with quality of their actual work. There’s literally … and I mean this, there’s literally no one left to care.

jordanb 1y ago
They don't have intrusive ads because programmers "DGAF". They have intrusive ads because they need to juice their clickthrough metrics with dark patterns. Same with all the bad performance. Sometimes this may be a mistake but almost always it's because the site is firing up 50 prerender tracking scripts. The author is trying to imply that if everyone focused a little more on making the computer feel like your robot friend, the industry would quit producing shit software. But the reality is the industry creates shit software because it is running an ad-supported malware business model.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

John23832 1y ago

There's no good or evil here. Have attention to quality. Do whatever it is that you're doing well.

cmdtab 1y ago

We want to hire engineers who really pay attention to details and great product experience but it’s quite rare in practice. Hiring is super hard.

fhub 1y ago
Outside of engineers there is a whole raft of people on a team that should pick up and push back on this sort of copy problem at all phases of building a product.
- philk10 1y ago
  holds hand up as one of those people
  - ctxc 1y ago
    high fives ;)
ctxc 1y ago
Just checked your profile out. Turns out I've interacted with Umesh on LinkedIn before on Runnable. Small world. Nice work, all the best!
whstl 1y ago
Apart from people who just weren’t good, what I found in a few decades is that most people will pay attention to details if given the incentive and time. What companies seem to want is developers who do everything perfectly despite having someone yelling at them to move fast. Also: the person yelling also doesn’t care about the details until someone else points it out to them.
zem 1y ago
are the engineers you do hire rewarded for paying attention to detail though? it's often the case that the company decision makers "want" attention to detail, in that they agree it's a nice thing, but their revealed preferences are more along the lines of "why are you wasting time on component x which is already in a shippable state when component y is behind schedule?!"

rdiddly 1y ago

1) You projected that anticipated focus into the title. Not wrongly. But I for example did not. My slant was more about innovation. The title doesn't inherently imply or contain either one. 2) The small, practical thing the post is actually about does address at least part of what you wanted to hear, because declaring "Loading 1 item(s)" IS hostile to users.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

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" = "one year"; "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-YEARS" = "%d years"; "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-MONTH" = "one month"; "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-MONTHS" = "%d months"; "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-DAY" = "one day"; "SLUG-PREFIX-CLEANTIME-DAYS" = "%d days"; Which is actually composed in this dependency[2]. It's not perfect, but is pretty flexible. Silly stuff, I know, and the app is not exactly a viral sensation, but the folks that use it, like it. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nacc/id452299196 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nacc/id452299196 [1] https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/NACC/blob/master/Sources/Shared/Resources/Base.lproj/Localizable.strings https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/NACC/blob/master/Sources... [2] https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/LGV_UICleantime/blob/master/Sources/LGV_UICleantime/Text%20Report/LGV_UICleantimeDisplayTextLabel.swift https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/LGV_UICleantime/blob/mas...

317070 1y ago
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%20old%2C%202%20years%20old%2C%205%20years%20old%2C%2021%20years%20old%2C%2022%20years%20old%2C%2025%20years%20old&op=translate https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=uk&text=1%20year%20ol...

ctxc 1y ago

(author) I can assure you my intentions were much less sinister (and simpler ;))

_vertigo 1y ago

Some guy writes a whimsical blog post about wanting to work at a company that takes pride in their work and the top comment criticizes the blog post because they didn’t specify explicitly in their 300 word post that the company has to not be evil too. Jesus, we’re fucked aren’t we?

thermalmotion 1y ago

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

jmye 11mo ago

> The implication that title and intro mean to imply is working for companies that build products that are [...] hostile to their users. But the call to action is to.. embed logic in the programs to pluralize properly (in English). So it's your belief that paying attention to how your tool communicates with it's users (in the language they're speaking) has no implications on user hostility? That's certainly a fascinating point of view that I would guess is in the extreme minority, and probably isn't actually something you believe yourself, if you stop trying to rant about California long enough to consider the words you wrote. Also, would love if you'd call out where anything about "evil" is actually implied - I would assume that, when you read the actual written words, you'll realize you've added that yourself, and that perhaps you'll be a bit more careful in the future when trying to throw in a slightly wordier Twitter-slap. Or not, I suppose your post is "current social media discourse in an HN post" or whatever.