pumblechook

Am I the only one who is as tired of the 'kids can't use computers' meme as the 'digital natives' meme?

The vast majority of people have never been able to 'use' a computer like the author describes because the vast majority of people don't understand computing. And that's ok - I would consider it a triumph that we've been able to create such effective illusions in the form of UI that people who have no interest in computing can share in the incredible power that it enables.

But at the same time, it is a mistake to assume that mastery of the illusion equals mastery of the thing is abstracts. This is why the digital native meme is so misguided - kids don't know any more about computers than their parents did, they just know the walled gardens that sprang up around them.

Not just students - I experience this in the workplace too, and it just boggles my mind. We hired a recent grad, and after about 10 days of watching him type a password into a terminal ~20 times a day I casually mention how he can use ssh keys. His response? No, I'm not interested in that.

I've found journaling on paper to be one of the best morning rituals for calming anxiety. It really is amazing how just writing a few sentences creates a sense of awareness of what's going on in your head.

I also tried bullet journaling as my 'system', but quickly abandoned it. It is great if you're not a compulsive to-do list maker, but if you follow a GTD-like system where you frequently capture, it becomes onerous to answer the question 'what do I do next?' You either have to constantly flip through pages to review your full list, or regularly copy your to-dos to a master list, which becomes quite tedious, especially if you have a long list.

What works for me is using org mode as my to-do system, with paper for the brainstorming and planning. I always start with paper, then once I have clarity on what to do, I move it to org.

Appalled is probably a better word. I'm not sure how the process is now (I got Global Entry, which pretty much short cuts the entire horrible experience), but I remember coming back into the country as an American citizen and being appalled at not only how difficult the process was as a citizen, but how unfriendly it was to non-citizens.

Not only was a lot of the signage and printed instructions only in English, the customs officers were down right berating people in English (many of whom obviously didn't speak English) for things they had no way of knowing, like standing in the proper line, because they couldn't read or speak English. In many cases the customs officer would simply lead people (who had no idea where they were going) into a line, then leave. The wait for translators was hours in some cases. And if you were lucky enough to get through customs, you were rushed through another security line and required to put your bags on one of five conveyer belts to the bowels of the airport to be screened AGAIN (even if you weren't taking a connecting flight). Only you had no idea which belt you were supposed to choose because there was no signage, only a scant few attendants yelling out which belt you were supposed to put your bags on (in English, of course) while streams of people rushed by.

We obviously won't know until all the data is in, but looking at the county by county results seems to suggest that rural voters (who are predominantly working class whites) in swing states turned out for Trump in much greater numbers than anyone anticipated. Combine that with the fact that Clinton often underperformed or outright lost some number of counties in these states that Obama carried in 2012, and a picture starts to emerge. This was especially prevalent in Michigan and Wisconsin where she won in the cities and democratic strongholds but lost spectacularly outside of them.

Personal reason: in many ways, the old versions are much purer expressions of the timeless concepts of software usability. It is becoming much more difficult now to separate platform convention from actual user tested, researched UX. In the old Apple machines they used to be one in the same, so I find it very useful to often compare old design to new (where applicable) in order to suss out any differences and investigate them. Many times we've simply gotten used to less usable interfaces because we upgraded and didn't think twice, and the old machines can be a useful sanity check.

Edit: when I mean separating platform convention from user-tested UX, I mean that there are some pretty obvious times when platform UX conventions haven't been user tested (or were implemented despite negative user testing results). The most obvious one to me is iOS's flat buttons. I write iOS apps and try to do as much user testing on them as possible, and I've found this to be by far the most frequent struggle for users - discerning which things are pressable and which aren't.

As someone who's lived in the southeast US my entire life, this is spot on. The Bible Belt gets a lot of flack, most of it deserved, but it is hard to overstate the importance of the church community here. I suspect this, not the religious part, is why churches have continued to thrive here.

The problem for me (as well as many others I know), is that the tradeoff isn't worth it. There is an entire generation of people who are receptive to religion and the church community, but who are completely at odds with the traditional interpretations of religion that preach intolerance and other backward moral positions. The so-called 'contemporary' churches that have been sprouting like weeds have addressed this somewhat, but scant few are actually progressive thinkers, rather than just traditional churches that play religious rock music. I would love to be a part of a church community, but not if it means I'm constantly inundated with a message that runs counter to everything I believe in.

I faced this same question on a recent small project. For anyone dipping their toes into React, it's a huge leap of complexity. I thought I could jump into Flux just like React: get familiar with the concepts, do a tutorial or two, and start building. Nope.

I looked into Redux, but quickly realized it was overkill for my simple project. I eventually settled on Reflux, and I would highly recommend it for those who are just getting started with Flux.

Yes! It needn't be a lot of detail either. Example: I interviewed with a leading UX consulting firm, and they were very up front about the process. It was essentially 1 short take home assignment (30 mins), 1 phone screen (30 mins), 1 longer take home assignment (4-8 hours), and 1 full day of on site interviews where you have to give an hour long presentation. I didn't get the job, but it was by far the best and most transparent interview process I've been through.

Edit: on a side note, I really wish more companies would provide honest feedback to the candidate during the interview process. Especially when you've invested significant time into an interview process and are ultimately rejected, it is beyond frustrating to ask for feedback and just hear crickets, or a generic "other candidates are a better fit", etc...

Man, if this would've been around a year or so ago! The whole 1099 process was by far the biggest pain point for me of being a contractor/sole proprietor.

What led you to address this problem from the banking, rather than accounting, side? For me, the banking part wasn't a big source of friction. It was keeping up with income and expenses, trying to determine what I could safely deduct, and coming up with a reasonable estimated quarterly tax bill (especially for my state taxes, which I could only send in yearly). After that was done, moving the money around was relatively trivial. Even if your product removes all that friction, I would still think that requiring users to open up another bank account and essentially give you control over all their revenue would be a huge hurdle to overcome.

Also, were I still a contractor, not being able to track expenses as well would be a deal breaker for me, especially in months where cash flow was tight. Yes, doing my taxes is a hassle, but compared with the hundreds or thousands I might save on a quarterly tax bill with expenses accounted for, it is a minor annoyance.

Exactly. The lower bound I'm prepared to give is always a raise from my current salary. I may be prepared to accept less if the opportunity is right, but my only purpose in offering this information in the first place is to get to the next stage of the process. It is a tricky thing to keep as much negotiating leverage as possible while still signaling that you can come to an agreement, which is why I only offer the number if I feel like I won't progress to the next stage without it.

A little bit of both (I've been doing iOS for less than a year), but mostly the latter. I don't live near a tech hub or major city, and the cost of living is pretty low. So good data was hard to come by. I essentially just found the range for the closest major city and went from there, taking into account what I wanted with how the current market was going (salaries here are generally 20-30% lower than the major city, while the cost of living is much less).

One technique I've tried that seems to get a particularly stubborn hiring manager or recruiter past the salary question is giving a generic number range. Before talking to anyone I usually do some basic research to get some idea of what a generally reasonable range is for the position, and adjust that based on my situation at the time. If pressed (I still don't give it up right away) I give that range.

Example: today I was talking with a recruiter about an iOS developer position. The salary question came up (in the form of: how much do you make right now?), and I gave the standard deflection about wanting to make sure the position was a right fit, etc... When pressed, I said that based on my research, the base for this position is $75k - $95k, and that a number in that range would be acceptable as a starting point for negotiation, but contingent on the details of the position.

This kind of response seems to give you some wiggle room without giving up all your leverage, while giving everyone a general idea if you're in the ballpark. I only use this as a last resort if I'm getting the feeling that there is little chance I'll be able to proceed with the opportunity if I don't answer. True, by not establishing salary up front you may be wasting each others' time due to different expectations, but that is a very small risk to take compared with the potential upside of a big raise.

I've been meaning to do an agenda view for weekly reviews for awhile, but my master view works well enough. What I'd really like is an agenda view that approximates a burn down chart and gives me a suggested velocity for next week (or some arbitrary period of time) based on the difference between my effort estimates and actual clocked-in time. A task aging view would also be nice to remind me about tasks on my list that have been idle for awhile so I can update them.

But alas, this is the beauty and curse of org mode. I could do this, but will the time investment really make me that much more productive? Maybe, but maybe not.

I combined a few different views into one using Bernt Hansen's custom agenda as a starting point (http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#CustomAgendaViews). It includes everything I need - schedule for today, a list of projects, stuck projects, etc... Typically I will just go by today's schedule, but it is invaluable having my list of projects on the same screen so I can just tab over in a separate buffer to the actual org file if I need more detail (or if I want to see notes for a given project).

Kudos to the author for trying to bring org mode to a wider audience. It was definitely the gateway drug to Emacs for me, and now that I've been using org for awhile I honestly can't see myself ever switching to another personal task manager/productivity tool. I always recommend it to others, but alas, the Emacs barrier is too big for most to overcome.

I do have one suggestion: don't try to emulate the feature set of Emacs org mode exactly. While I love org mode, the setup time and effort was many orders of magnitude greater than any other tool I've used before, and I can't say it enabled me to be many orders of magnitude more productive. I would love to have an org mode with sensible defaults (such as indented bullets, project-based agenda view, etc...) with a narrow feature set. For me, the killer features are:

* Mixed notes and TODOs. It was a revelation to be able to just type a TODO into any notes and know that this will magically appear on my master TODO list. But for this to be useful, you really need...

* The agenda view. For those not familiar, this is essentially a consolidated list of todos across all your org files. But I never found the default agenda view that useful, so I again spent lots of time writing one myself. Now I use it many times a day.

* Timers. The way org mode does timers is miles better than any other time tracking software I've ever used.

* Flexible 'projects'. In org mode I have a lot of flexibility in how I treat projects (for me a project is simply a TODO with 1 or more nested TODO). With my agenda view I can quickly see all my projects with two keystrokes.

* Flexible TODO recurrence. Most task managers only let you repeat a TODO every so often, but org has a powerful syntax for defining whatever recurrence pattern you want (i.e. do this task every week on Friday and have it done within 3 days)

* TODOs dates as scheduled or deadlines. It is always surprising to me how other task managers don't recognize this difference. If you schedule yourself to do something on a certain date, it is very different than saying 'you have to get this done by this date'.

* TODO workflows. Most task managers have tepid support for a TODO as a workflow with potential alternate and blocking states (such as waiting on someone before you can do the TODO), but with org mode you can precisely define TODO workflows and do all sorts of cool stuff with them.

* Habits. The way org does habits is simply brilliant.

Keep up the good work!

The saddest part is that this kind of 'feedback' isn't out of the ordinary, but is actually pretty common. I've found in my own reviewer feedback a striking tendency towards pedanticism that would put Internet grammar nazis to shame, not to mention completely asinine comments that give no clue as to any objections the reviewer had ("You aimed for the bare minimum, and missed!").

This is, to me, just one example of the perverse incentives in academia. You are constantly pushed to publish, yet the gatekeepers who ultimately decide whether your research sees the light of day rarely give it more than a cursory glance, and many have no interest in giving helpful feedback to actually, you know, make the work better.

This is all good advice, but this article falls into the same trap that most other career related advice does: it assumes only one type of job seeker (in this case - ambitious, experienced, and passively job seeking).

The truth is that there are lots of different ways to get a job, each with varying levels of effectiveness that depend A LOT on your situation. An effective job search is one where the techniques are tailored to the situation, and the amount spent on each reflects the expected effectiveness within that situation.

Example: A few years ago I got laid off. I had a few weeks of notice, some severance, and savings, so I decided I would be a job seeker full time until I got a job I really wanted. I followed the advice in this article almost to the letter and specifically avoided lots of the typical job hunting techniques (sending resumes, filling out job applications, talking with recruiters, etc...)

I did a lot of research on companies I wanted to work for, started meeting with people (I didn't know anyone who worked at those companies), sent a lot of unsolicited emails to get an 'in'. And after a few months of doing this I'd made a lot of new connections, but no legitimate opportunities. By this point I was starting to panic, so I broke down and started doing the 'traditional' job hunting stuff. Two weeks later I had an offer from an application I had submitted online.

Don't limit yourself to just one technique. Try a lot of different things to see what works for your situation.

Perhaps it has to do with someone's dominant behavior style? Someone who is naturally gregarious probably doesn't enjoy sitting still for an hour during a lecture, just like someone who is naturally analytical might not enjoy a lot of group work. If each person's brain learns the same way, but the effort required to cope with the format of delivery is different, it could lead to differences in the amount learned.

When Bonobos first came on the scene, it was difficult to find a pair of men's pants with a decent fit at a decent price. I don't consider myself a Bonobos enthusiast, but I can say that putting on a pair of Bonobos pants after years of billowing tent pants was revelatory insofar as a pair of men's pants can be. It is worth noting that I bought these at a heavy clearance discount ($20 to the normal ~$90).

But now, it isn't difficult to find well fitting men's clothes. Since buying that first pair of Bonobos, I've found clothes that fit just as well, for similar quality and much lower prices.

Most companies don't have interesting engineering problems to solve, so all they have to attract talent is a shiny new stack.

NPR is targeting ARC, but this is actually a bigger, more difficult problem for the charity industry than one organization not disclosing where it spends its money.

I used to work for a large ($500 million+ annual revenue) NGO fundraising department, both in major gifts and direct response marketing (digital), and I have colleagues who now work for similar organizations (including ARC). We would all tell you that most organizations, even (maybe especially) the largest ones, are absolutely horrible at having any idea whatsoever of the impact of their programs. Even worse, the leadership in these organizations are ambivalent at best at assessing the impact.

Why? Because organizations simply don't have much, if any, incentive to do so. And perhaps more shocking to me, the vast majority of donors don't care. Most people are content to give and reap the warm/fuzzy feeling they get, then not think about it again until year end when taxes are due. Simply put, most people treat giving like buying a product at the store: they hand over money in exchange for the warm and fuzzies. Transaction over.

The people who actually demand some sort of accountability are a minority who are often treated as anti-charity, as in, "Why would we spend money on assessing impact when we can spend that money helping more people?". The result are token 'watch dog' groups like Charity Navigator that latch on to red herrings like 'efficiency' ratings which non-profits have learned to manipulate to the point that they are functionally useless.

ARC is simply the product of a rotten system, and it is far from the only one. If you want to help cure this sickness, only give to organizations that can demonstrate the impact your dollars are having on the cause you care about. Ignore the so-called efficiency splits that say charity Y gives z% of your dollars to programs. These are accounting shenanigans, and nothing more

Blindsight, by Peter Watts. One of the better sci-fi novels I've read in awhile. Reminds me a lot of Arthur C. Clark in that it successfully strikes a really hard balance between scientific accuracy/feasibility and imaginative storytelling.

The ironic part about this is that companies think this is a benefit to the employee, when in reality this seems to be a classic example of the psychological anchoring bias that influences people to take LESS vacation. For those who aren't familiar, this is a well established psychological heuristic that says our decisions are heavily influenced by some 'anchoring' information, in this case, the number of vacation days allowed.

I'm heavily paraphrasing Kahneman here, but numerous experiments have shown this effect in a variety of ways. Perhaps most counterintuitively, in an experiment where an arbitrary limit was set on the purchase of soup on sale, the amount of soup people bought was twice what was bought when no arbitrary limit was set. I'm not aware of any empirical studies examining this with vacation days, but anecdotal evidence like this seems to support the influence of this effect. I'd be extremely interested to see the data on the number of vacation days taken by employees at the no set vacation companies vs. others.

Honest question: is this not a classic example of the fallacy of claiming causation in an observational study, in the presence of a potentially infinite number of confounding variables? I'm not a statistics expert by any means, but this is one of the first things taught in an intro stats class: observational studies can establish relationships (correlation), but only well designed experiments can establish causation. This is quite obviously an observational study, and a tiny one at that.

Furthermore, wouldn't the fact that marijuana was legalized in Washington violate the parallel trend assumption that has to hold to use difference in differences when comparing with San Francisco?

I understand the powerful incentive for Uber to provide this narrative, and I think anything that encourages people to not drive while intoxicated is a good thing. I just find it disheartening that companies feel the need to start with these powerful marketing narratives (which these types of 'studies' really are, not honest efforts to uncover useful knowledge), and use dubious analysis to give those narratives credibility.

It's not that I'm disputing there is a relationship - they've obviously identified that. I have a problem with statements like these: "We estimate that the entrance of Uber in Seattle caused the number of arrests for DUI to decrease by more than 10%." And, "We can reasonably extrapolate these results and apply them to what we consistently hear from our riders in Chicago and elsewhere." It is quite a stretch to claim that Uber caused anything based on an observational study with a minuscule amount of data, and it is even further of a stretch to claim that you can combine this claim with anecdotal evidence and somehow generalize it into principle.

Came here to say this, and also add that this entire effort rests on the assumption that "natural" ability or "talent", in this case predisposition to language learning, actually exists. While certain people are no doubt born with enhanced cognitive abilities and all of us have genetic predispositions, the validity of this idea that people are naturally predisposed to acquire certain concrete skills is tenuous at best.

At least to me, a much better approach would be to test changes in your SYSTEM for teaching languages, rather than trying to select the inputs most predisposed to your system. Selecting "better" inputs might improve your success rate, but is it the most effective method of achieving the outcome you're looking for? Probably not. Most likely, the main failure is in the method of teaching languages, not the people being taught.

As Nielsen said, the ultimate goal of usability is cash. Unfortunately, this article comes off more as a designer rant, as if startups should invest in usability just because it somehow makes the world a better place.

When, in fact, the positive ROI of usability improvement has been established for awhile: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/roi.html

A good UX guy will realize this and design to the situation, rather than preach some esoteric heuristics.

It may be hard to see it now, but the school you went to will be much less important in a few years. An Ivy League education surely gives you a leg up right out of college, but after that, it is all about the quality of work you do.

I went to UGA and had a friend who was a Comp Sci graduate, and he was a rockstar before he ever graduated because he had a large body of open source work, beating out Ivy Leaguers for desirable jobs at big companies. If anything, going to UGA was an advantage for him because the course load wasn't as demanding as a tougher school, leaving him time to focus on actually building things.

Seriously, it doesn't matter as much as you think.

The mistake in this (and in similar articles) is conflating activity and purpose. Programming is an activity, not an end in itself. To love programming is to love solving challenging problems with a computer, not the act of typing code for 9 hours a day.

That is why articles like these just end up being psychological mirrors - those who aren't being fulfilled in a programming job will always perk up at the idea of "bluer skies". Job unhappiness almost always has a root cause that has little to do with the activity of the job itself, and more with the job situation.

I live in a major metro area and have moved each year for the past 5 years, and each year is worst than the last. Renters need SERIOUS help.