vismwasm (u/vismwasm)

vismwasm commented on Ask HN: Is there an anti-EU sentiment from big tech? · Posted by u/mnewme

dachworker · a year ago

As somebody who criticizes the EU a lot on HN, I want to say that European business culture is just as backwards. It's not just a couple of clowns in Brussels. The whole continent has been coasting on past glory for the past three decades and now the road to catch up to the US and China is long and steep and full of perils.

I have worked at both private and public research institutions and in both cases I witnessed a lot of waste of funding and nothing much of value being produced. I don't know what you could blame this on. I personally like to say it's bad leadership at all levels. I guess, maybe the system is so bureaucratic that the type of leadership you get is the kind that is all talk and no substance.

I have also witnessed a lot of mismanaged oversight: cases where the people overseeing the expenditure of funds were completely unfit to estimate the value of work being produced. Related to this, often time I witnessed instances where people were dealing with bureaucratic procedures so unfit with respect to the task at hand, that they would just sign on the paper, what is effectively a lie. So it's not even that there is a lot of bureaucracy. It's also that a lot of bureaucracy is lies on paper. It does not actually produce any value, track any metric or keep any people in line.

This is only my perception and my experience. But yeah, bad leadership and bad cultural practices that need to be replaced. Unfortunately the people who are to blame are the ones in charge of fixing the problem so nothing will change anytime soon. Maybe this is another problem: bad leadership never gets replaced.

vismwasm · a year ago

>>> cases where the people overseeing the expenditure of funds were completely unfit to estimate the value of work being produced [...] It's also that a lot of bureaucracy is lies on paper. It does not actually produce any value, track any metric or keep any people in line.

100% agree with this and it's extremely frustrating to deal with that. I've got the feeling that our managers look to the US and see people like Musk and Trump (no judgement here!) making .. let's say "bold claims" - aka bullshitting aka lying aka marketing, call it whatever you want - and think they can just copy that. But Europeans just suck at marketing / bullshitting, it's just not our strength. Now we're stuck with bullshitting "leaders" who cannot deliver results. And this creates a vicious circle where actually capable people refuse to take on any kind of leadership roles as they'll be forced to play that game.

vismwasm commented on Ask HN: What can HackerRank do better? · Posted by u/rvivek

vismwasm · a year ago

I can't give specific feedback, but the company I work at evaluated HackerRank for our hiring process (analytics, data science, data engineering). We ended up using Coderpad though and mostly us it to evaluate Python skills (I guess some SQL as well). We'are using it during our interview process for small live coding session - I've seen similar in at least one other company.

Unfortunately I don't know why we didn't choose HackerRank in the end. LeetCode was also an option but it didn't really fit what we wanted to test for.

vismwasm commented on Ask HN: Success stories from McKinsey (et al.) · Posted by u/ramblerman

throwaway1281 · 2 years ago

I don't think anyone really answered your question. I work at McKinsey and can try to provide an understanding of how we add value. I have a PhD in computer science from a T1 university, so I'm not exactly the MBA type; but I am on the exact same track as them as a generalist consultant (called integrative).

Here are the good parts:

1. We are pretty good at being translators. For companies I serve, making sound business decisions requires understanding of the technical details. However, most of the time, the C-suite will not dive deep into them (most have no time; some just refuse to learn). Our job is to distill the complex topics into something that is digestible for everyone, and I mean everyone. The time spent by an analyst or associate is mainly on slide-making for this reason - there is a lot of iteration until the message and storyline are perfected.

2. We provide a voice for the technical working teams. Pretty much every project I worked in, the technical teams have a pretty good understanding of what they can do and what they need, but this doesn't always get heard by higher-ups. Part of our job is to relay these thoughts (again, in a digestible way) - anonymously if need be. Most of the time a representative of the client team also joins our C-suite discussion, which is a great career opportunity for them.

3. In addition to point 2 above, when the technical teams don't know what they need, we build out a plan for them. I built financial models, workplans, capability assessments for e.g., cloud migration for automotive part manufacturers (i.e., high-tech but not necessarily computer savvy companies) directly collaborating with working teams. They can then use these to present their case to higher-ups, enabling them to actually get what they need.

4. We have an understanding of the industry overall, because we go around and see what's happening everywhere. In order to prevent unintended spillage of company secrets, we get "conflicted out" of working with direct competitors when we serve a client, but we can work with different parts of the supply chain. We also have industry experts, internal and external, who can provide insights - which is sometimes very critical to get up to speed quickly.

The burnout is also real, and I am actively trying to move on to a "real" tech job after approximately 2 years at the Firm. But positive client interactions are very fulfilling, and I have learned so so so much about so many different things, it's incredible.

I'm also pretty lucky to have worked mainly in growth or go-to-market strategy. I have never laid anyone off, never led to someone losing their job whatsoever (I actually kinda did the opposite once by helping them overcome a PIP), never participated in political battles, and never did anything that could be considered unethical like the Purdue thing. Just solved cool business problems for tech companies for 4-8 weeks at a time.

vismwasm · 2 years ago

"2. We provide a voice for the technical working teams."

This doesn't correspond to my experience. In my experience McKinsey consultants prefer not to talk to lower-level minions - on the contrary a major incentive for going into (strategy) consulting appears to be to able to deal with C-suite executives directly and not having to care about understanding any of the day-to-day business.

It usually goes like this: The CEO, a former McKinsey partner, hires McKinsey to formulate a strategy for the company: Often on a trending topic like digitalization, AI, etc. The details are usually confidential so there's no involvement of lower-level employees (maybe providing some data but without any context as to why). After a few months of utter secrecy management presents some transformation strategy.

I have yet to meet a normal employee to respect what comes from McKinsey. The average strategy consultant will look down on lowly employees and prefer to have as little interaction with them as possible.

"I have a PhD in computer science from a T1 university"

Why is the "tier" of your university important here? Not trying to offend you, but that kind of elitism is part of the reason consultants have a bad reputation. And unfortunately it is reflected in their work.

vismwasm commented on Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI? · Posted by u/vismwasm

tester756 · 2 years ago

>Github

wtf? I wish other things had as good UI/UX as GH has.

Git's CLI on the other hand, ugh.

vismwasm · 2 years ago

I'm fine with GitHub in general, but I find browsing repositories extremely slow. And I don't remember it always being like that. See my comment here for what I mean: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39403789

vismwasm commented on Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI? · Posted by u/vismwasm

nostrademons · 2 years ago

Hahahahaha. Engineering manager at a FAANG here, churning out collective crap that is far worse than what myself or any individual member of my team would come up with. Here's the dynamic:

Executive sets strategic priorities. Executive may be a user of the product, but their experience (and the things they care about) are usually very different from the average user, simply by virtue of being a millionaire. They're probably way more time-constrained and way less money-constrained than the average user. They care much less what other people think of them. They probably have multiple devices. They're using it in their home or on-the-go, and don't need to worry about things like sharing space with other people. Smart executives realize this and try not to micro-manage product (although they will often give nudges), but this just means that their directives are in super general form like "We need to prioritize these 3 themes" or "We should be competing with these 3 companies."

Directors interpret the executives' strategy. They interpret it through the lens of how it will get them more headcount, more budget and greater responsibility. This is how they get to be executives, after all. So inevitably, problems are overcomplicated to make them seem difficult. Small but high-impact features are deprioritized until the experience is broken enough that fixing it becomes a high-priority task worthy of headcount. If your org manages to keep a project humming along perfectly so that users love it and nobody ever complains, it must not be that hard, so why should they give you headcount? For that matter, why do they even bother employing you when nothing's broken? They should just lay you and your whole department off and return the money to shareholders.

So say you have a problem area that has become broken enough that it's worth staffing up a team to fix it. First step is usually a UX Designer ideating on the problem area to come up with mocks. The UXD's initial design is usually pretty good. There are often some issues because the UXD is not a user and so may miss some of the finer subtleties of using the product, but the UXD usually at least tries to empathize with users and anticipate problems. And since it comes from a single person's mind, the design is at least cohesive.

The bigger problem is the UXD can't code. This results in 3 issues. #1 - the UXD often has no idea what is technologically feasible, and what will take a research team 5 years. #2 - the UXD needs an engineering team to actually build the product, which requires staffing, which needs to go back up to management. #3 - the UXD's work product is mocks, and this is how they communicate with the rest of the org. These are rarely interactive, and so they often have glitches when it comes to specifying exactly what results from every combination of actions a user can take. They are usually of fixed size and language, which means that they don't specify what happens on larger or smaller screen sizes, or when your text is gigantic (like German) or tiny (like Chinese), or when you're writing right-to-left (like Arabic). They almost never use real data, which means that constraints arising from missing or incomplete data don't show up in the mocks.

Because of #2, the UXD needs org buy-in for their designs to actually become reality. This usually comes in the form of a product manager championing their feature and making a business case for it. The PMs work closely with executive leadership to accomplish business goals. But that means that business goals need to override certain aspects of the design. Maybe the UXD made the design nice and clean with plenty of whitespace and bold content-forward images. But you still need to sell ads, and data shows that density is one of the highest predictors of click-through rate, and bold organic content that draws attention away from the ads will negatively impact revenue. Maybe there are legal restrictions on what you need to put on the page, which when adhered to break the UXD's clean layout. Maybe you need to pop up a cookie warning to keep the EU/California happy, or have a consent screen for some feature that few users really care about.

So then the business-bastardized mocks make it to the engineering team. Now they discover the design is impossible to implement. Probably the UXD underspecified what would happen with some edge case in the data, and then handling the edge case breaks all their assumptions in the design. Probably the engineer is really good - world-class, even - and so they can heroically put in a fix to make the UXD's design work by special-casing all the cases they forgot, in the process leaving technical landmines for the next team to stumble on. Except then they get blocked by the not-cleaned-up landmines from the last project that did this. They write the feature, and run an A/B test on it (all the big companies do this, so they can understand the impact and any potential regressions) - and find the metrics are all worse. By now the feature is late, so they're looking for quick fixes that will reverse the metrics regressions and let the feature launch. Any sort of initial consistency to the design goes out the window now, and you're looking for anything that you can implement that will get metrics up and fix the showstoppers, because otherwise you don't get anything launched. So little bugs are overlooked, the designer's careful interactions (to the extent the designer was careful about them) get overlooked, key principles of the original design are reverted - all just to get to the point where the feature is launchable and doesn't regress any metrics.

Eventually something that resembles maybe 30-50% of the original designer's intent launches, and everything else in the design is relegated to fast follows. If you're very lucky, you will actually do the fast follows, and the product may end up halfway decent. But remember the director's incentive: only solve big problems that will get you more headcount, more responsibility, and a promotion to VP. So inevitably the team gets moved off this area and goes on to mess up the next major issue area.

So to answer your question: yes, tech companies would probably benefit from supporting third-party clients. That's why many of them do during their growth phases, when they're trying to capture market share rather than dollars. But the individual executives that run tech companies do not benefit from supporting third party clients. They cannot be controlled, and are a threat to the executive's responsibility and headcount. Potentially they're a threat to company itself, if a client uses its brand and mindshare to build a competing platform. At the point where companies usually shut down their app ecosystems, they're not trying to win over users; they're trying to extract money from them.

If there's another meta-point to extract from this, it's the importance of communication and incentives. The small developer wins because he can make all the tradeoffs between UX, engineering difficulty, adoption, and revenue in his head. Big companies lose because only certain aspects of these, generally the ones centered around mocks and metrics, can be communicated precisely. Everything else drops off in importance because it can't survive the hops between different job functions.

vismwasm · 2 years ago

Thanks for your insightful reply!

> they're not trying to win over users; they're trying to extract money from them.

Fair enough. But was there ever an attempt to extract money and/or data from the users through third-party apps? For example by forcing third-party to serve ads?

I'm actually questioning if it's in the long-term monetary interest of big tech to force users into subpar experiences. My guess is that current big tech apps don't even serve their purpose of maximizing profits & data extraction optimally. I'd expect a talented indie dev to be able to provide a better UX & monetizing users at the same time.

I mean if we want to go the evil route, we might even incentivize 3rd party devs. Let everyone build a Twitter or Reddit client, but they must serve ads and might get a fixed or percentage share. If someone can build an app where users actually like and click on the served ads, great.

vismwasm commented on Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI? · Posted by u/vismwasm

kingkongjaffa · 2 years ago

1. Devs are not working in isolation. Ideally a designer is also involved at some point to decide on user interactions.

2. This is kind of obvious but devs have next to 0 training in design.

3. Devs shouldn't be the ones creating UI/UX.

4. None of your examples were built solely by devs.

I don't understand the thread. The title seems to be unrelated to the description, and the final paragraphs about 3rd party clients is again another topic.

vismwasm · 2 years ago

> - Devs are not working in isolation

Bugs (e.g. the YouTube Shorts one) or performance (GitHub) are the dev's responsibility, aren't they? (correct me if I'm wrong, I have no idea how big tech companies organise internally)

> 3. Devs shouldn't be the ones creating UI/UX.

Why not? Some of the best apps I've used come from devs who do both. E.g. Christian Selig of Apollo. And bugs / performance greatly influence UX.

> The title seems to be unrelated to the description

Sorry, English isn't my mother tongue so I might have chosen a bad title. Wasn't intentional.

> and the final paragraphs about 3rd party clients is again another topic.

Let me explain: My observation is that many first party clients (frontends) are often (sometimes far) inferior to third party clients while the first party clients have the best people in the industry working on them whereas third party clients are often developed by some indie devs without any big tech in their CV.

vismwasm commented on Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI? · Posted by u/vismwasm

solardev · 2 years ago

UX isn't often a high priority, either among management or among devs (who often prefer backend or algorithmic stuff to UI tweaking).

But more often than not, you also have purposeful dark patterns and enshittification, usually for user data collection, advertisement, increasing addiction & interaction, funneling recommendations, making unsubs harder, etc. That's almost certainly the reason the consumer apps you mentioned (AppleTV, Reddit, and YouTube) have such shitty experiences. You're not really their customer, you're just a product who happens to pay them money too, and it's more profitable for them to control your journey and push you towards the most profitable avenues for them (via recommendations) than to really maximize your enjoyment of the platform.

AppleTV is especially bad in this regard, being a content aggregator among different channels & content networks, so they're incenventived to pay-for-play their recommendations and pit publishers against each other for your eyeballs, while simultaneously charging you to view those shitty recommendations. They get to profit from both sides!

For Github, are you sure it's even a frontend thing? Seems like a lot of the complexity in their app is backend, especially when you ask it to a dynamic diff between two random commits or whatever. I see similar latencies just using Git commits against a repo in the cloud. Meanwhile, something like using VScode running in Github is reasonably performant.

-------------

Side note: In my personal experience, a lot of smaller "boutique" apps from smaller companies and lone wolves have a much higher focus on UX, often because their business models revolves around it, attracting users through a superior experience instead of forcing the product on users by selling to management.

There is still a small but vibrant market for macOS desktop apps, for example, many of which have decent enough UX, like the bundled ones in Setapp (https://setapp.com/apps).

That's what you get when you the user are the primary customer, which is almost never the case in most consumer-facing big FAANG services. IMO it's why Dropbox used to be so much nicer than Skydrive (or whatever it's called now, the bundled Microsoft service); they started as a user-facing service before pivoting to enterprise (original YC app: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/dropbox).

I find Discourse (the forum software) to be much nicer to use than Reddit or Google Groups, too, because they sell ONLY a UI and not advertising.

For Git stuff, there are many nice paid Git clients out there. For Github in particular, there's also some third-party integrations (like in Jetbrains IDEs) that can help make reviews/comments more seamless, though I still sometimes prefer Github's official UI.

At a certain scale, winning over users' hearts is no longer the prime driver of profit, and that's when companies start enshittifiying, especially if they're VC or publically owned and need to scale :( Small bootstrap businesses usually stay nicer for longer.

vismwasm · 2 years ago

> For Github, are you sure it's even a frontend thing?

Well where do we draw the line here? I'm not even talking about diffs etc.: Just browsing through a repo and looking at single files is noticeable slow. As an end user I don't really care if it's the network request latency or because inefficient DOM rendering, it's not a great UX. For example loading this site here: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gsutil/blob/master/te... took 1.26 seconds. And it's like that for any file or folder. Gitlab seems to have a similar initial load time however only once, after that it's faster.

vismwasm commented on Apple Vision Pro review wsj.com/tech/apple-vision... · Posted by u/fortran77

aloer · 2 years ago

It is interesting how many here are excited about this for productive computer work. It’s also what Apple advertises with.

But what is the account situation like?

For years I’ve been complaining that I can’t easily use my private iPad with my company Mac because they have separate Apple IDs. Things like sidecar for a quick virtual whiteboard are basically impossible.

AirPods have gotten better over the years where today I can freely switch between devices belonging to different Apple IDs with the same AirPods.

But is the Vision Pro like that as well? It would seem weird to exclude the not-so-small group of people working from home but with company MacBooks

vismwasm · 2 years ago

I thought I was the only one bothered by that! I'd love to use my private iPad with my work Macbook. And at least in my case preventing that definitely won't increase iPad sales: My company won't provide me a work iPad and even if it did it wouldn't work as there are no iCloud accounts attached to our work Macbooks.

Locking you customers into your ecosystem? Fine, whatever. But even within the ecosystem restricting usage in such a way!?

It's been said for years but the iPad could be so much more than a mere media consumption device if it weren't for short-term-profit driven design decisions.

Maybe they do better with the Vision Pro.

vismwasm commented on Ask HN: Does (or why does) anyone use MapReduce anymore? · Posted by u/bk146

dijksterhuis · 2 years ago

> Because my data comes from a variety of unstructured, possibly dirty sources which need cleaning and transforming before they can be made sense of.

Seattle data guy had a great end of year top 10 memes post recently and one of them went like this

> oh cool you’ve hired a data scientist. so you have a collection of reliable and easy to query data sources, right?

> …

> you do have a collection of reliable and easy to query data sources, right?

—-

Like, most of the time in businesses… if the data can’t be queried with SQL then it’s not ready to be used by the rest of the business. Whether that’s for dashboards, monitoring, downstream analytics or reporting. Data engineers do the dirty data cleaning. Data scientists do the actual science.

That’s what I took from the parent at least.

YMMV obviously depending on your domain. ML being a good example where things like end to end speech-to-text operates on wav files directly.

vismwasm · 2 years ago

That's true. With dbt (=SQL+Jinja-Templating in an opionated framework) a large SQL codebase actually becomes maintainable. If in any way possible I'll usually load my raw data in an OLAP table (Snowflake, BigQuery) and do all the transforms there. At least for JSON data that works really well. Combine it with dbt tests and you're safe.

See https://www.getdbt.com/