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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?!"
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.
> 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.
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.