A man who spent $100K to remove a lie from Google

Re:A man who spent $100K to remove a lie from Google by stareatgoats on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @08:10AM (#16753940)

One of the sad side-effects of moving upwards in the programmer career path can be the loss of direct contact with system users. It was greatly gratifying to sit beside users in the office where I started to develop, to see what their actual needs were and to be able to provide solutions.

As part of a larger team of programmers one is shielded from those situations, and explicitly not allowed to make those decisions. It can probably not be any other way, but something is lost in translation.

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Re:A man who spent $100K to remove a lie from Google by TAForObvReasons on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @12:02PM (#16756000)

I think it's possible to move up and still maintain empathy. The problem is the Silicon Valley mentality captured by the expression "move fast and break things". This frees you to disregard externalities and do what you want. As a result of that mentality, you actively try to forget the people on the other side. And "things" slowly expands to include everything from laws to social norms to human life.

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Re:A man who spent $100K to remove a lie from Google by Retra on Thursday April 05, 2018 @02:57AM (#16762484)

This has nothing to do with Silicon Valley. That's just standard faceless corporation fare everywhere.

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Re:A man who spent $100K to remove a lie from Google by blasdel on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @02:41PM (#16757631)

For better or worse the opposite happens at AWS

The upper parts of the developer career path as an individual contributor have more direct contact with system users

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Re:A man who spent $100K to remove a lie from Google by funkymike on Wednesday April 04, 2018 @06:04PM (#16759666)

This is one reason why I feel so satisfied when I can work on internal tools. If I build something for other people in the office I can get direct feedback and see how I have helped them.

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