> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse.
There was no beancounter takeover and it never was so obsessed. I worked there from 2006-2014 in engineering roles and found this statement was particularly jarring: "User obsession means spending time in support tickets, talking to users, watching users struggle, asking “why” until you hit bedrock"
When I worked on user facing stuff (Maps, Gmail, Accounts) I regularly read the public user support forums and ticket queues looking for complaints, sometimes I even took part in user threads to get more information. What I learned was:
• Almost nobody else in engineering did this.
• I was considered weird for doing it.
• It was viewed negatively by managers and promo committees.
• An engineer talking directly to users was considered especially weird and problematic.
• The products did always have serious bugs that had escaped QA and monitoring.
In theory there were staff paid to monitor these forums, but in practice the eng managers paid little attention to them - think "user voice" reports once a quarter, that sort of thing. Partly that's because they weren't technical and often struggled to work out whether a user complaint was just noise or due to a genuine bug in the product, something often obvious to an engineer, so stuff didn't get escalated properly.
This general disconnection from the outside world was pervasive. When I joined the abuse team in 2010 I was surprised to discover that despite it having existed for many years, only one engineer was bothering to read spammer forums where they talked to each other, and he was also brand new to the team. He gave me his logins and we quickly discovered spammers had found bugs in the accounts web servers they were using to blow past the antispam controls, without this being visible from any monitoring on our side. We learned many other useful things by doing this kind of "abuser research". But it was, again, very unusual. The team until that point had been dominated by ML-heads who just wanted to use it as a testing ground for model training.
I also am a huge supporter of DIY projects. Also a huge fan of medium-format, film photography.
To that end, if I can help others try medium format film, I want to add that there are plenty of inexpensive used medium-format cameras on eBay. I have purchased perhaps a dozen over the years—none of which even approached US $1000. In case you are not DIY inclined…
(Sadly, Japan has been the best place to order used camera gear but that has become cost prohibitive now for this American.)
Searching just now on eBay for "Yaschica TLR Mint" shows a number of cameras around $300 that are probably excellent (surprise, most are from Japan).
Can't afford a Hasselblad? Try "Bronica Mint" on eBay. Looks like $500 will get you in the game.
Mamiya cameras are built like tanks (and weigh as much). You could do a lot worse: "Mamiya Mint" is going to get you a few great models around $400 or so.
All of these were (are) considered damn fine film cameras.
(Mamiya tend to have interchangeable lenses, as does the Bronica. There are some Wide/Tele adapters for the Yashica, but generally you use them as-is. Most of these cameras are completely manual in operation—the more sought after Yashica though have some light-metering capabilities.)
(The Yashica and some of the Mamiya are TLR, twin-lens reflex—more or less equivalent to a rangefinder? The Bronica and some Mamiya you view through the lens 'TTL'.)
Uh, OK. So a few decades ago a scientist I respect built his own scientific tool from parts (https://www.nature.com/articles/35073680) and I was really blown away by that idea, especially because most scientific tools are very expensive and have lots of proprietary components. I asked around at the time (~2001) and there wasn't a lot of knowledge on how to control stepper motors, assemble rigid frames, etc.
Although my day job is running compute infra, I have a background in biophysics and I figured I could probably do something similar to Joe Derisi, but lacked the knowledge, time, and money to do this either in the lab, or at home. So the project was mostly on the backburner. I got lucky and joined a team at Google a decade ago that did Maker stuff. At some point we set up a CNC machine to automate some wood cutting projects and I realized that the machine could be adapted to be a microscope that can scan large areas (much larger than the field of view of the objective). I took a Shapeoko and replaced the cutting tool with a microscope head (using cheap objectives, cheap lens tube, and cheap camera) and demonstrated it and got some good images and lots of technical feedback.
As I now had more time, money, and knowledge (thanks, Google!) I thought about what I could do to make scientific grade microscopes using 3d printer parts, 3d printing and inexpensive components. There are a lot of challenges, and so I've spent the past decade slowly designing and building my scope, and using it to do "interesting" things.
At the current point, what I have is: an aluminum frame structure using inexpensive extrusion, some 3d printed junction pieces, some JLCPCB-machined aluminum parts for the 2D XY stage, inexpensive off-the-shelf lenses and industrial vision camera, along with a few more adapter pieces, and an LED illuminator. It's about $1000 material, plus far more time in terms of assembly and learning process.
What I can do: the scope easily handles scanning large fields of view (50mm x 50mm) at 10X magnification and assembles the scans into coherent fullsize images (often 100,000x100,000 pixels). It can also integrate a computer vision model trained to identify animacules (specifically tardigrades) and center the sample, allowing for tracking as the tardigrade moves about in a large petri dish. This is of interest to tardigrade scientists who want to build models of tardigrade behavior and turn them into model organisms.
Right now I'm working on a sub-sub-sub-project which is to replace the LED illuminator with a new design that is capable of extremely bright pulses for extremely short durations, which allows me to acquire scans much faster. I am revelling in low-level electronic design and learning the tricks of trade, much of which is "5 minutes of soldering can save $10,000".
I had hoped to make this project into my fulltime job, but the reality is that there is not much demand for stuff like this, and if it does become your job, you typically focus on getting your leadership to give you money to buy an already existing scope designed by experts and using that to make important discoveries (I work in pharma, which does not care about tardigrades).
Eventually- I hope- I will retire and move on to the more challenging nanoscale projects- it turns out that while you can build microscopes that are accurate to microns with off-the-shelf hardware is fairly straightforward, getting to nanoscale involves understanding a lot of what was learned between the 1950s and now about ultra-high-precision, which is much more subtle and expensive.
Here's a sample video of tardigrade tracking- you can see the scope moving the stage to keep the "snout" centered. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYaMFDjC1DQ
And another, this is an empty tardigrade shell filled with eggs that are about to hatch, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snUQTOCHito with the first baby exiting the old shell at around 10 minutes.
I have a Blue Yeti, an AudioTechnica BPHS1 (headset), a Fifine 688 (cheap Shure SM7B competition), and a Behringer C2 (pencil mic). I have also used "professional equipment" sent from studios for me to record with.
The professional equipment sounds the best, but the audio device alone (sans mic) was $1200.
These days, I use the pencil mic with a Scarlett device. It sounds good enough for my recording needs (I post-process everything regardless). It is out of camera, and pencil mics (or shotgun) are what pros use in camera studios.
If you don't mind having a big mic on camera, the Fifine is a lot of bang for the buck. If you are a brand person, go for the Shure.
A headset is great for minimizing sound when talking with others (say for a podcast interview), but I have yet to find one that is comfortable for using all day (I'm often teaching day-long courses).
I "invested" in early 2020 when all of my training moved to Zoom. I've gone through a lot of equipment and frequently am complimented on my sound, camera, and background.
My rank order for investment:
1. Mic - See my mic comment in another thread
2. Lighting - It is hard for good cameras to compensate for poor lighting. Good lighting on the other hand, does compensate and helps laptop webcams perform much better. I currently run a Godox ULC60bi with a huge parabolic diffuser. Probably overkill for many. You can get cheap fluorescent or LED lights with a diffuser. Would avoid a ring light especially if you wear glasses.
3. Camera - I have used Canon M50 and Sony A6500 as webcams. These days, I use an Insta360 Link. It's not quite as good as the cameras (you can add more "background blur" with their software), but it's more convenient. I still get compliments on this.
4. Background - Blur, doors, and bedrooms are what you see 90% of the time. A good background helps you stand out. I have a bookcase with the books ordered in color. Folks always comment about it. There are lots of other common looks, look on Youtube or X (Kevin Shen) for office makeovers.
5. Teleprompter - Not for scripts but for "looking in the eyes" of my students or the person on the other end of the call.
Here is a monster pilot forum thread on Concorde that ends up pulling in senior engineers, pilots, aerodynamicists and even a former flight attendant. They lovingly go over every detail of the plane's design and operation.
WARNING, serious temporal hazard. Do not click if you have work to do today or are supervising small children.
I've owned a rm2 since xmas 2020 and really used to love it. I even brought an old obsidian plugin for it back from the dead. But the power button gave up 13 months in and they were dicks about it, and then when the pen nib holder disintegrated and they insisted it wasn't a known defect, I just gave up and it's been sat on my shelf ever since.
For anyone still into them though, a Lamy EMR pen coupled with the Wacom felt pen nibs (pn ACK22213) is an incredible upgrade which makes it feel like a real fineliner. Similarly, I found the various titanium nibs that you can get off amazon made it feel like a real ballpoint [0].
Hamming's _You and Your Research_ (another HN perennial) has a variant on the theme too:
"Most great scientists know many important problems. They have something between 10 and 20 important problems for which they are looking for an attack. And when they see a new idea come up, one hears them say ``Well that bears on this problem.'' They drop all the other things and get after it. "
I used to be the education director at a makerspace and now run a 3D printing company selling small plastic parts and teaching entrepreneurs how to start small manufacturing businesses at home.
Few thoughts:
- Focus on your hobbies and other industries you know well. What problems exist? Where can you make things better? Are there problems people mention over and over again?
- CAD modeling is often THE fundamental skill needed for people to bring their ideas to market. You can make CAD models that look almost real using software you can get for free. This allows you to work backwards, first determining if there's a market, and also working out many of the design flaws before making something
If you're just excited to make stuff, and want to get your hands on something, you can do all kinds of things in a tight space.
- 3D printers are small and provide many automated opportunities
- Laser cutters are dead simple to set up and use to make real products and are easy to automate.
- CNC machines can be had for under 5k and are super powerful
- Portable MIG welders have a small footprint and welding tends to be in high demand
- Leather working tends to be high perceived value though automation is limited
- Soldering and electronics repair requires little space but again, automation is limited
I've got loads of other ideas too but I'm guessing that's good for now. My contact information is in my profile if you'd like to talk more.
If you're interested in the craft/quality that goes into these products (or frequently doesn't), "Tanner Leatherstein"'s YT channel is a suggested watch.
The bell curve meme is a static taxonomy of people, and if the link you posted is correct, its origins were explicitly political. The version described by Bruce Lee, and anybody who has achieved a high level of skill, is about the process of learning and mastery.
In the bell curve version, the wisdom of grug brain and the wisdom of the monk are presented as equal, and the struggle of the midwit is framed as a pretentious, unnecessary aberration. The lesson it teaches is, don't seek out knowledge and new ideas. Education confuses the "midwit" people who are smart enough to partially grasp it but not smart enough to see through it like the monk.
In contrast, the "a punch is just a punch" version frames the conceptual struggle as a necessary phase in a process that leads to mastery. The beginner cannot engage directly with the simplicity of the master, so the beginner must engage through concepts and through practice. The more they do so, the more simple things begin to feel.
Since this started with a Bruce Lee quote, we can use him to see that it is not just a linear process that passes through conceptual education and ends in mastery. That leads to a dead end, because mastery can only be complete in a limited context. Bruce Lee kept searching outside his zone of mastery to find ways to get better. He studied techniques from other martial arts and fighting sports, even though in doing so he had to engage at a conceptual level since he had not mastered those arts.
For example, his art included trips and throws, and he was a master of his art. Yet when he got the chance later, he practiced judo with expert judoka. To do so, he had to back off from "a trip is just a trip, a throw is just a throw" and learn the techniques of judo. I don't think anybody has ever suggested he was a master at judo, which suggests he had to be engaging with it on a conceptual level. Yet he believed that his practice with judo improved the skills he had already achieved mastery at.
Not only did Bruce Lee preach constant assimilation of new ideas, he also preached simplification by discarding what is not useful. If a punch is just a punch, what do you discard? The whole punch? In order to find something to discard, you must look past the apparent simplicity of the internalized skill and dissect it conceptually.
In this view of things, conceptual thinking is not just a phase you go through on the way to mastery, but rather a complementary way of engaging with a skill. It is a tool for refining and elevating your intuitive mastery. Simplification and desimplification are the tick-tock of learning. A "mastered" skill is not like a video game sword that, once forged, always has the exact same stats, but is more like a Formula 1 car that is continually disassembled, analyzed, and rebuilt.
The bell curve meme does occasionally get used to express a linear ignorance-struggle-mastery story of learning, but its origin and most common use is to caricature the pursuit of knowledge as pretentious foolishness.
I like quick low-stakes browser games like this, something fun and fast to wake up your brain with morning coffee. If interested, here are some others I've come across -
There's another shop which fountain pen enthusiasts might like as well. It's also in Kerala but closer to where I live called "Kim and Co.". They make pens with ebonite bodies. These don't have pistons on any other such reservoirs. You pour ink straight into the body and it stays there. Their claim to fame is that the thread is good enough so that with 3 turns, it locks and holds the ink without leaking. I have one of their pens but don't use it on a daily basis.
https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/304573-a-mast...
My own daily use pen is a Noodlers Ahab. The main reason I prefer this is because the nib is flexible and so you can do simply copperplate or spencerian using it. Great for headings.
Birding is what got me into field recording, which is another fun hobby among the far-too-many that I don't have enough time for. I'll save you some trouble: get a Zoom F3 or Sound Devices MixPre-3 II and a Sennheiser MKE 600 plus something like a Rode Blimp with the big fuzzy "dead cat" for wind noise...or two DPA 4060 -- get the DPA KIT-4060-OC-SMK stereo kit from StudioCare or Thomann because those XLR to MicroDot adapters are expensive and the knock-offs aren't as good...not a worthwhile compromise if you're looking at spending this much -- and put those on a DIY Jecklin disk for ambient recording or a parabolic for highly directional sound + another on the handle for ambient.
https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/resources/audio-recording-ge... has more info on microphones and parabolics if you're looking to get into this, but do go out and spend a few dozen hours in the field first before dropping a ton of money on your new hobby.
When I built my house, I took a Matterport scan before the drywall was put in, and again after. Best decision I ever made. It's like X-ray vision for walls.
It's handy to know where wiring runs are, how many studs are between windows when mounting tv's, and a dozen other electrical, ac, or plumbing issues. I used it once a week initially and probably once every two months now that we're settled.
Edit: Note that I have no opinion here, just answering someone's request for a source.
A cursory Google reveals...
> Neither were Feynman's escapades limited to bars; more than one of his biographies have documented affairs with two married women, at least one of which caused him considerable problems.[0]
Charlie Munger seems to be a source for claims that he would sleep with the wives of his undergrad students[2].
And then there are these passages[1], which appear to be from his own autobiography. This isn't necessarily cheating, but assuming that what he's written is true, they serve to make the accusations of infidelity more plausible.
> "... You must disrespect the girls. Furthermore, the very first rule is, don’t buy a girl anything –– not even a package of cigarettes — until you’ve asked her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she will, and that she’s not lying.”
>I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.
>I think to myself, “Typical bitch: he’s buying her drinks, and she’s inviting somebody else to the table.”
>I stop suddenly and I say to her, “You… are worse than a WHORE! ... You got me to buy these sandwiches, and what am I going to get for it? Nothing!”
This Baffler[3] piece also focuses on this subject...
>He worked and held meetings in strip clubs, and while a professor at Cal Tech, he drew naked portraits of his female students.
>Even worse, perhaps, he pretended to be an undergraduate student to deceive younger women into sleeping with him. His second wife accused him of abuse, citing multiple occasions when he’d fly into a blind rage if she interrupted him while he was working or playing his bongos.
Hayao Miyazaki, in the documentary "The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness" (2013):
Interviewer: "Aren't you worried about [Studio Ghibli]'s future?"
HM: "The future is clear. It's gonna fall apart. I can already see it. What's the use worrying? It's inevitable. "Ghibli" is just a random name I got from an airplane. It's only a name."
I worked in a lab studying malaria vaccinology. There a bunch of difficulties with trying to develop a vaccine that I think are well covered here. I also learned some about the history of malaria research.
1. It is a pain in the ass to study malaria. You need to have an insectary to grow mosquitoes (through their muktiple life stages, of course) and have them feed on infected mice just to passage the parasite. This isn't like viruses where you just throw then into vero cells or bacteria that will grow in LB overnight. Parasites require dedication. This kind of operation costs a university hundreds of thousands of dollars to get up and running, and there are not too many places in the US that have robust malaria research because of it. UW and the Boston area are two that I know with good malaria research centers.
2. The lifecycle of malaria is very difficult to make a vaccine against. This is described in the article. Essentially, you go from mosquito -> skin parasite (few hr) -> liver parasite (7d also no symptoms) -> blood parasite -> mosquito. Also, the prevailing idea is that the amplification during the liver stage through red blood cell stage is so great that once the blood stage is established, it's game over. You are going to get sick as a dog. So you have a few options: target the sporozoite in the skin and blood within a couple hours, or target the liver stage where the parasite is essentially dormant and is nearly impossible to find. (My research was finding antigens in the liver stage, there are very few and they don't produce very good immune responses with standard vaccination techniques). You have to remember that for the immune system to work, you need to see the signs of the pathogen, then give yourself 5 days at the absolute minimum to expand your T cells to eradicate the pathogen. And oftentimes we're talking less than 10 infected cells in the entire liver, which is a huge organ with famously tortuous circulation. So good luck on the liver stage.
All this ignoring the fact thatthe mouse model of malaria goes through the liver stage in just 4 days, which doesn't allow expansion of T cells for killing the bug. So even if we found the perfect antigen to vaccinate against, we don't have good models in mice to actually evaluate how effective a vaccine would be because of the differing biology of the model. There are some people who reconstitute human livers in mice so they can use the 7 day parasite, but those mice are pretty messed up and very expensive. And handling mosquitoes that carry human malaria is much more annoying than the mouse malaria. Still a very interesting and compelling model for research.
3. Interest in protein based vaccinations. There was a study long ago that used irradiated parasites that protected people from subsequent infections. The problem is that it took a LOT of parasites, and 5 doses of the vaccine. This strategy is similar to the inactivated virus kind of vaccinations that we all likely have received. But these parasites needed to be injected IV, 5 doses, and the parasites need to be kept at -80C until injection time. That might work for a vaccine delivered in a metropolitan area, but good luck finding -80 freezers in an African village. Around this time, researchers got interested in protein based vaccines, like the pertussis vaccine. So people went looking for a protein that was highly immunogenic, and they landed on CSP, which the article describes nicely. However, this again is mostly expressed on the skin parasite so you have just hours to recognize that protein and kill the parasite. Much less than the ideal 5-7 days.
4. Financial incentives are of course a problem. Though many would argue that financial incentives are bad for vaccine development in general because they prevent any disease from occuring, so you are eliminating your market if they work well.
So where does this leave us? If we keep thinking of vaccines as we typically do, we are going to just create marginally better versions of RTS,S, which isn't great. In my opinion, the most likely way to vaccinate against malaria is transmission blocking vaccines, which would eliminate only the blood stage parasites that need to be picked up by a feeding mosquito to allow replication in the mosquito foregut. But this kind of vaccine wouldn't prevent the individual from getting sick. It would take a replication cycle of a fully vaccinated population to take it out, which is a very unappealing proposition.
Many of these were common in the "science" books targeting younger audiences when I was growing up.
No doubt if you examine each one of these kinds of tricks there are some that are better than others, but I think collectively these kinds of things sparked curiosity and caused children to start to look at the world differently, question things. It might also be argued that this is the start of the path towards either a pursuit of the sciences or at least science literacy.
I hope that there is something replacing these (or science books for the younger set in general) because I would hate to think generations of kids are missing out on this kind of mental stimulation.
Edit: Kenneth Swezey, as an example, had a number of "science trick" books many years ago; some of them a little more sophisticated and targeting more of a teen audience:
This is very common in retail. What tends to happen is that a retail buyer would work with a supplier and order a product in . That product packaging will have a promotional or information site it will link to & is printed as a QR code. From a buyers perspective they are doing this as it’s a way to provide value or information to their customer and supplier fronts the cost of this.
The IT teams within retail aren’t kept in the loop and neither are they aware of a site that is hosting any of this content. All the content and marketing of this is done by a agency who are hired and managed by the category or merchandising teams in the head office .
Product sells for a quarter or maybe 6 months at the most . Products get rotated and goes back to warehouse until such time in a year they need to liquidate the stock and do promotional discount pricing as part of back to school or Black Friday etc.,
By then the agency that fronted this and created the site has lost its domain or the site isn’t maintained/ gets compromised etc.,
At that point the product is on the shelf , domain is hijacked or the hosting provider / host gets taken over by a malicious actor.
Then the IT / security teams in the retail organisation are asked to step in and support their business colleagues.
Every major retail corporation will have this happen to them at least once a year. IT teams will have a laugh about this and nothing ever changes as a process as it doesn’t really affect the share value or damage the reputation of the retailer as such
Steve Jobs would always make up stuff ("reality distortion field") to motivate and push people. One of his famous stories that I found very funny --
According to Mike Slade, he was working at Microsoft around 1990, and Jobs was trying to recruit him to NeXT. (Bear in mind that Microsoft was only a few years from launching its mega-hit Windows 95, while NeXT was struggling to sell computers.)
During a conversation, Jobs told Slade he would find his talents wasted in Seattle. In contrast, Jobs called Silicon Valley a hub of excitement and activity where Slade could blossom.
Jobs then launched into a spontaneous, impassioned speech. He described Palo Alto, California, as a “special place” and likened it to Florence during the Italian Renaissance. There was so much talent in the area, Jobs said, that you could walk down the street and bump into a scholar one moment, an astronaut the next.
Jobs’ off-the-cuff description of the place bowled over Slade. It was a twist on Jobs’ famous pitch to Pepsi CEO John Sculley. (Jobs asked whether Sculley wanted to sell sugar water his whole life or join Apple and change the world.)
After the talk, Slade agreed to pack up his stuff and move to Palo Alto.
Jump forward a year, and Slade and his wife were eating in Il Fornaio, an Italian chain restaurant with a location on University Avenue in Palo Alto.
“We were sitting there, in early ’91, and I’m reading the menu,” Slade recalled. “And on the back of the menu at Il Fornaio it says, ‘Palo Alto is like Florence in the Renaissance…’ And it goes through the whole spiel! The fucking guy sold me a line from the menu! From a chain restaurant!! Bad ad copy from Il Fornaio, which was his favorite restaurant, right? Such a shameless bullshitter!”
I recently read two books about industries that previously seemed dreadfully boring: property/casualty insurance, and community banking. I'm not sure what possessed me to read these books but I was curious about both industries since they are significant parts of the economy but I knew next to nothing about them.
The banking book is called "The Most Fun I Never Want To Have Again: A Mid-Life Crisis in Community Banking"[0] and it tells the story of an attempted bank startup in Georgia just before the financial crisis. It has a very clear explanation of the bank business model and how small banks make money. One of the surprising things I took away from it is that bank founders think of starting a bank in ways that are very similar to how tech founders think of starting of company. The main difference is that the bank business model is already well understood to those in the industry and success depends much more on your positioning in the market than it does on innovation.
The insurance book is called "Risk & Reward: An Inside View of the Property/Casualty Insurance Business"[1] and is by Stephen Catlin, who founded an insurance company that he grew to several thousand employees with offices around the world and later sold for $4 billion. Very UK centered since that's mostly where his career took place but I don't think the fundamentals of the industry change that much around the world. Pretty detailed on the mechanics of how insurance underwriting works and what insurance underwriters think about when pricing risk. Made me realize insurance is much more like trading than I'd previously thought.
The reason Kundera never returned is because he was ashamed that he snitched to secret police and other intellectuals knew it.
Author of the article tries to downplay it with
> The article didn’t produce any evidence apart from hearsay and a police protocol mentioning that Kundera was the source of the information.
But the evidence was solid, he ruined a young man's life by putting him for 20 years into prison that was almost gulag-like.
I think Kundera always regret it and that's why he withdraw to France and stayed there. Yet he never apologized or even commented on that topic.
I grew up with his books and they had great impact on me when I was 18. He's a great writer. I wouldn't even mind that he snitched if he went through some acknowledgment and redemption. But he hasn't and remains a flawed character in my eyes. Almost every Czech author who emigrated helped the dissent that stayed home in some way. He didn't.
Havel is a great man, one of our greatest. He's a fine author. Kundera is a great author. Not a fine man.
Back in 1989 I worked as a one-man-IT-department for a bunch of ex-academic economists doing econometric modelling on a Digital VAX 11/750. This mini-computer was running VMS - a multi-user operating system. All users had admin rights and each one thought that they could make their models run faster by bumping up the process priority as far as it could go - which of course interfered with the realtime processes needed to manage the effective running of the computer. Unsurprisingly, this had the opposite effect to what they intended. When I discovered this was what was happening, I revoked their privileges and after a system restart, sanity was restored. I was thanked for finally making the system work faster.
There was no beancounter takeover and it never was so obsessed. I worked there from 2006-2014 in engineering roles and found this statement was particularly jarring: "User obsession means spending time in support tickets, talking to users, watching users struggle, asking “why” until you hit bedrock"
When I worked on user facing stuff (Maps, Gmail, Accounts) I regularly read the public user support forums and ticket queues looking for complaints, sometimes I even took part in user threads to get more information. What I learned was:
• Almost nobody else in engineering did this.
• I was considered weird for doing it.
• It was viewed negatively by managers and promo committees.
• An engineer talking directly to users was considered especially weird and problematic.
• The products did always have serious bugs that had escaped QA and monitoring.
In theory there were staff paid to monitor these forums, but in practice the eng managers paid little attention to them - think "user voice" reports once a quarter, that sort of thing. Partly that's because they weren't technical and often struggled to work out whether a user complaint was just noise or due to a genuine bug in the product, something often obvious to an engineer, so stuff didn't get escalated properly.
This general disconnection from the outside world was pervasive. When I joined the abuse team in 2010 I was surprised to discover that despite it having existed for many years, only one engineer was bothering to read spammer forums where they talked to each other, and he was also brand new to the team. He gave me his logins and we quickly discovered spammers had found bugs in the accounts web servers they were using to blow past the antispam controls, without this being visible from any monitoring on our side. We learned many other useful things by doing this kind of "abuser research". But it was, again, very unusual. The team until that point had been dominated by ML-heads who just wanted to use it as a testing ground for model training.