top | item 46498914

(no title)

bauerd | 1 month ago

It’s not how you get promoted though. Plus implementing complex UIs is challenging which engineers like. The incentives are off.

discuss

order

eddieroger|1 month ago

It's not only not how you get promoted, it's a pretty good way to get canned as well. If you don't like the work you're being asked to do, your options are pretty limited to doing it or going elsewhere. There are a million UXers and engineers who'd love to work at Apple and would be happy making whatever their boss suggests.

rdiddly|1 month ago

That's how you know the "culture" and the "vision" really do have to come from the top, and how you know Steve Jobs really was providing value.

EGreg|1 month ago

Seriously. People got canned for resisting the corporate overlords. That’s capitalism. Corporations run by their employees? Guilds? Cooperatives? Hah! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc

Just that usually the forcefed initiatives have to do with corporate profits for shareholders, or trends like shoving AI into everything. Imagine saying no to that!

Even at the supra-corporate and supra-national level, if the organizing principle is competition, no actor not even a CEO or a corporate board or a government can afford to stop racing towards disaster. There is a simple mantra: “If we don’t achieve AGI first, China will and then they’ll dominate.”

Once in a while, the world comes together to successfully ban eg chemical weapons or CFCs, and repair the hole in the ozone layer. Cooperation and restraint takes effort.

Judging by the way we’ve drained all the aquifers, overfished the last fish, destroyed the kelp forests, cut down the rainforsts, bleached the corals, and polluted the world with plastic, I don’t think there is much hope of stopping.

Insects and pollinators are way down, and many larger species are practically extinct, 95% of the world’s animal biomass is humans and their food, and people still pretend environmental catastrophe is all about a few degrees of temperature.

PS: Yes, that escalated quickly. In the real world, it has taken only 80 years… :-/

bradgessler|1 month ago

Yeah, software orgs ship their promotion structures.

euroderf|1 month ago

This explains why all commercial software enshittifies.

grufkork|1 month ago

Besides the visual design, I've been thinking about the tech part of it. There's so many bits shifting, morphing and having state, that it sounds antithetical to what a UI is supposed to be: a consistent and unnoticeable tool to interact with software. I do like some of the things they do to free up screen space, but having components being to programmatically complex is bound to cause issues. Besides having your presentation desync with your data, your UI now has opportunities to desync with itself...

hopelite|1 month ago

It’s an extremely uncomfortable conflict and contradiction between corporate organization, finance “capitalism”, engineering, and creatives; in addition to individual vs group dynamics.

Corporate structure is driven by exploiting and using value for and by a de facto nobility (the c-suite).

Finance “capitalism” seeks to extract value, be it short or long term.

Engineers are motivated by building and creating value.

Creatives are driven by changes for changing’s sake to remain or get a seat at the table.

The uncomfortable reality is that these are inherently conflicting interests that are pulling and pushing each other, but mostly top down.

It’s essentially the “colonialist” exploitative model of existence using creators to leverage rather than extract natural resources, a system that is increasingly not suitable for the modern, technological, commoditized world. AI is a good example of that; it arguably diminishes the value to n degrees of both engineers and creatives, while also leaving the “nobility” and their neo-aristocratic corporate system out in the open exposed as revealing it not only as having no clothes on, but utterly abusive, useless, and downright evil. And no, that’s across the whole political spectrum, not just the opposite of your silly system approved political sport team.