As someone who used a lot of screens and was lonely in my youth, I can say with confidence that it was a response the family conflict in my home, not the creator of it. If my parents provided me a stable, non-abusive home, if they prioritized my emotional health and needs, I would've happily spent my time with them, not with randoms I found on the internet.
+1; I know it sounds stupid, but small things like snidely saying 'look who decided to show up' can have considerable impact with children. Made me really, really good at not showing up.
It's not stupid. Your parents are treating you with contempt. People try to jump hoops to act like that's acceptable but no one, no child, no adult, enjoys being treated with contempt. Now imagine getting that from your caregivers who make up the majority of your world.
Kids and especially teenagers in non abusive families end up disinterested in anything outside of screens too. So do adults.
The fact is, youtube, tiktok and games are more interesting then anything real world people can provide. And they dont come with expectations that you behave politely or give regards to others.
I made no comment about what non abusive families are like. This article is suggesting a causal relationship between family conflict and screen time. I'm suggesting that family conflict can cause screen time.
One can argue that `they dont come with expectations that you behave politely or give regards to others` is a family conflict that causes screen time.
> One can argue that `they dont come with expectations that you behave politely or give regards to others` is a family conflict that causes screen time.
If the cause of conflict is someone unwilling to behave politely or give regards of others and then the said person go back to screen, then it is not screen time because of conflict.
It is screentime because someone is unwilling to stop insulting the siblings (or whatever) and parents dropped the ball by allowing it.
You're completely disregarding the root of where lack of politeness or giving regards to others come from. Children's behaviors do not arise from random sources outside of parental control. Children are not naturally impolite or disregarding.
If the conflict is that the child is expected to behave politely, but the parents do not model this behaviour in the first place, then we are back at screentime being a retreat from conflict.
I think the article is arguing that if you build the relationship, you can involve yourself into these conversations early enough to direct them the way that your idea would go. In your cases, for example:
1. Recognizing early enough that this Hot New Thing incentive is here and figuring out how your Good New Thing can live with the Hot New Thing
2. Helping show the Old Bad Thing is unworkable for your Good New Thing
3. Understanding that the org cares about New Buzzword and framing your work under those pretenses.
I think the article is great, in theory; it just NEVER works this way in practice, unless you may be in a technical organization. There are ALWAYS business reasons that cause technical projects to fail. We regularly see the articles about the failure rate of technical projects all the time on the front page.
Why is this? Because the number and weight of the business folk almost always outnumber the technical. You can be the best fucking political engineering wrangler in the world; building relationships, taking people along for the ride, helping others gain understanding and those projects still fail.
For the overwhelming majority of day-to-day, line-of-business software, the nerds are a commodity and the project succeeds or fails on how good or bad the business folks are. They should get the blame for the failures but also the credit for the successes.
For the stuff that is genuinely pushing the technical envelope, it's possible for the nerds to make the difference. In those cases you do see the projects fail for technical reasons like "the code couldn't scale to the required number of users" or "the technical functionality never worked reliably", and those kind of failures are the nerds' fault. But that's the minority of failures IME.
I appreciate you replying. My intent was never to place blame; instead, it was to point out that while the article's author suggests technical folks need to play the game better, I feel that it won't matter and getting the rest of a non-technical-first org along for the ride is more difficult than just being a solid political player.
I've recently been promoted to be a VP (so, an executive) at a large corporation of ~50,000 people. Of the top ~250 people, so the top 0.5% of the hierarchy [who get invited to the annual leadership offsite], I estimate there are maybe 2-3 technical people like me. Also, within the executive hieararchy, these 2-3 are at the lowest level, this is not even where the big decisions get made, we're just put in charge of executing the decisions made by MBAs and Finance people.
>There are ALWAYS business reasons that cause technical projects to fail.
I agree with this concept and what's worse is when a project is technically sound but still fails, or even when a complete high-performance accomplishment fails to be deployed.
But I'll bend the terminology of "always" and "business" because it applies even wider than that.
If you've ever worked for a 19th century company that is an actual bureau by definition, and has had literally over a century to develop from those roots into a much more resilient bureaucracy than could be accomplished in less time, you know what I mean.
What if it's not always a business reason for failure but a bureaucratic component that rises above a tolerable level?
i.e. a non-business reason for "businessmen" to fail.
In a pure bureaucracy that exists solely to maintain standards of some kind, the focus can not be on making money, or the standards could be compromised.
Others will fall by the wayside and only the most successful bureaucrats will prevail in their efforts. Handsomely rewarded sometimes through fees and taxes paid by the real money-makers whom the bureau has evolved to serve.
Yes, rewarded for their efforts, none of which are business-like at all and without any internal focus on making money whatsoever.
These organizations can be some of the most stable and long-evolved of all, plus set the most consistent example of political hierarchy that people in all kinds of places can tend to emulate when they don't have any better ideas.
So when bureaucracy creeps into a business where it has not yet made an incursion, it has to do so under the radar because it's the opposite of trying to make money.
People get good at this and move up in the hierarchy, and eventually there's nobody who's even good enough at actually trying to make money any more. It's a full-time effort just building & maintaining the bureaucracy.
You end up with people that "look" like businessmen, act the way they think businessmen should act, golf like businessmen, etc.
But haven't got a clue how to make a dollar from a functional technical success that's a complete no-brainer :\
Never works in practice is such a strong statement and I would argue that most of the time is because the technical people avoid politics entirely, like the article says
I dunno, honestly, my organization works a lot like what the post is describing. I think my org has healthy politics but at the same time I can't really tell if the times I thought the politics were "toxic" were simply because I was on the outside looking in, whereas this time I'm an operator in the space.
Engineers are always insufferable with this stuff. I can think of dozen times where everything was perfect, except for <thing we didn’t think of> or <thing we knew but didn’t bother to engage the customer on>.
There’s a million reasons why projects fail, but astute engineering mangers who are able to understand what the business really needs are invaluable.
I mean sometimes you are outruled. That's part of recognizing politics, in my opinion. If your VCs want you to do GenAI and you think it's dumb, you are overruled. But you can still benefit from this in a lot of ways. You just need to recognize what you can benefit from.
Sure,though this stands in contrast to the author's thesis: "It’s the loud person who’s wrong getting their way because the quiet person who’s right won’t speak up."
Politics involves understanding the hierarchy though. And understanding when you are overruled.
If the hierarchy is saying "it's time for GenAI", you have the option to participate in a way that raises your profile and positively influences the company (involving politics), if you hate GenAI so much you can leave, or you can stay silently and opt out of the process. These are all choices. Personally I'm fine with my VCs making strategic decisions since they trust me to make technical decisions. So we can do GenAI, we'll just do it in a way that works and is sustainable for the codebase.
You should realize that as a technical person your domain is not business strategy. Similarly I'd be shocked if any VC ever came in and told me "to use PostgreSQL" or some other nonsense. If you want to be the person deciding what we build, go into Product.
I will repeat again, this is in direct opposition to the author's thesis: "It’s the loud person who’s wrong getting their way because the quiet person who’s right won’t speak up."
Given that, I'm not sure what your message is in response to. I will say that 'learn to parcipate in the hierarchy' and 'everything is a choice, just quit!' are hardly solutions at all, and read more as truisms.
I'll add that I'm not sure what VCs have to do with anything here, though as someone who formally took VC funding, I wouldn't want them making technical or strategic decisions on my behalf, and I suspect the majority of founders (and others on my cap table) would agree.
I think if you're in the position of being a founder, this article isn't for you. And our conversation isn't really talking about the same thing, which explains the lack of common ground here.
> So JSX is pure Javascript and not, say, a dialect of XML embedded in JS?
This is actually the selling point to me. As someone who started learning pure HTML, JSX just makes a lot of sense to me intuitively. It feels like intelligent HTML
Wow, I enjoyed your comment deeply and it reminded me of 15+ years ago on the internet, where your experience really matched mine. I still am friends to this day with the people I met 15+ years ago. I haven't made an internet friend in over 10 years though.
I personally believe that part of this is due to the upvote/downvote culture of Reddit. We're all incentivized to say something that will attract upvotes. There's a positive side to this -- thanks to this I regularly read really funny, entertaining comments. Genuine genius in the comments section.
On the other hand, its just to entertain. There's nothing really human or of substance there. Or, what's especially dangerous, to say something that bucks the trend, the status quo, admit an unpopular vulnerability outloud and suddenly you're hit with waves upon waves of downvotes. Not only that but I genuinely believe that the downvotes empowers angry debaters to come in and pick apart whatever it is that you said, just to enjoy the upvotes. I perceive it as a kind of bullying.
At any rate, I don't think these spaces are designed for intimacy. They're designed for memes and funny jokes, not genuine conversations.
It's really the small communities on reddit where you get less of the upvote culture mattering much and the same regular few dozen to hundred people that are interesting.
imo, if docs never give a clear example of what something is for, that's a pretty good sign that this was just tacked on without considering any particular use case. i've come to realize that nextjs probably intends for us to use RSCs for most middleware-like behaviors
I love small space office builds! I also have a tiny den. I would love to see more inspiration of how people use that kind of space, especially if it's (sadly) windowless, which I think makes it pretty hard
Narrow down clearly what exactly I want to do with this side project.
Too many of my early projects sort of became a jumble of different aspirations, most of them unrelated to the core product idea behind the side project. I want to learn Elixir, I want to try Next Auth, I want to try Remix, I want to learn Haskell, I want to build my own Shopify, I want to -- and the list goes on. Being clear and honest with myself about what those things are makes the scope of a project more clear to me and I can make judgment calls this way on what stays or goes.
