I can't believe I've been around these parts for 17 years... Thank you for the inspiration to take a look at my join date. I feel the same as you about the discussions here, there is always a level of depth (and silliness) that I appreciate about the banter and interactions here.
I can’t express how much I agree with your perspective. It’s a completely different/total shift in how we might deliver functionality and… composability to users.
A significant portion of the reasons the author outlines are exactly the environment going on at $PreviousJob, except it started a year or two before the pandemic. It’s amazing to read their flags and notice how much of it aligned with the final few years of the nine I spent there.
It’s especially hard when a large company (80-90k employees) can’t see themselves as a conglomerate of smaller businesses that have individual/different cultures, customers and customer needs. The authors list destroyed $PreviousJob (not yet, it’s still there but all the “fruiting trees” that created the magic customers loved are gone. From top to bottom, it’s a shadow of itself in vision, ability and drive. It’s a shame, mostly for the customers.).
The biggest flag I can agree with is when sales timelines force corner cutting or outright premature/possible-unworking/unsustainable software get delivered to customers at outrageous prices all while losing focus on the needs of the core customer base. How can a business ignore the source of 60% of their core customers/fans for three-five years and believe they can recover from that? They can’t.
I know old peers and colleagues will read this and know what I mean. I hope they do, and I hope that my passion for what we were working on and our entire customer base was very obvious for all my time there.
It’s wild that “leaders” are deaf to internal experts who built and grew these smaller orgs into the businesses they are today. I don’t assume me or anyone else has all the answers, or are ever right, it’s the complete objection to suggestions of righting the course towards customers who actually need and want the product that’s wild.
I like to think of it like the Unix philosophy of “small sharp tools”, as our founders believed. Chasing extreme growth is a poison and when it infects giant organ from top to bottom… the issues the author highlights and the ones I experienced lead to these outcomes.
It's always heartbreaking to know parents had to deliver the news of a Childs passing. I hope they find peace and healing someday. Much love Jonathan (Zandar) Mott, you made the internet and the world better than you found it.
Not a x/twitter user much these days (mostly quit a long time ago) but I’m happy when companies put a minor barrier up to stop botting. So meh, good idea I guess?
I think you are severely underestimating the complexity of preserving digital data for 200+ years. It’s not trivial, but a family could totally put a box of notebooks and loose papers in a box in a dry/somewhat safe location and pretty much guarantee they will still be usable/viewable in 200+ years without any electricity/file format/solar flare/emp/etc/etc issues to have to consider.
I’m not disagreeing that it’s wonderful to be able to make multiple backups, offsite storage, etc of digital data, I’m just making sure you understand how difficult it is to keep digital data stored long term without significant attention to that desire.
Dropping some markdown in git is not a long-term (using 200 yrs as my example) plan.
I spent years and years working in a newspaper publisher trying to preserve the output digitally and it required serious investment (network storage, auto backup to LTO tapes, and verifying recovery is possible years later). It was and almost always is easier to ship two or three copies of the physical paper to separate storage facilities. I had to remind folks countless times that things like a dvd-r or cd-r have a maximal lifetime where we can trust that the data is retrievable.
Maybe long term storage of personal data will have some future breakthroughs that make it dead simple to trust they can be viewable in 200+ years but today that’s not the case.
I will say that most personal data (sans photos imo) isn’t useful after a few years (maybe 10+) and digital options are great for that. But for stuff we want to keep for centuries, it’s extremely hard and expensive today.