One of those results which is exactly what anyone paying attention would predict. I'm glad there's hard evidence.

I am curious about what the best way to handle the example in the article of one process spawning many git subprocesses is. Surely it just doesn't make sense to repeatedly start git from scratch in the course of a long-running parent operation. What's the low cost abstraction for the same result, though?

Although maybe it doesn't take much, given that it sounded at one point like the Microsoft execs were addicted already.

If someone gives them shit about their writing, that's on the critic for being shitty. If they use AI to write, that's on them for being fake. But, to write online at all requires being ready to have people be shitty to you and ideally not reacting in a way that makes the situation worse. Sounds like they need work on that part.

Anyway it is basically always possible for someone to find something legitimately bad about anything a person does. The question is, how much of an issue is that? Not much actually. So you have flaws. Fine, just be flawed. It had no affect on your life beyond your reaction to the attack. And putting aside that reaction is a prerequisite for learning anything useful (or discerning that there is nothing to learn) from the experience.

Good people will trust good intentions through the flaws, while shitty people will write off your work and your intentions because of the flaws (and try to make sure you feel bad about it in the process). But it's always they're too weak to express disagreement maturely, or sometimes because they're bitter and threatened by your good intentions directly. Either way, it's their flaw, not yours.

1. Someone links this post in an internal Slack-like app to relevant PMs and designers.

2. Someone in leadership respond "dang we should look at this deluge of CTAs". In doing this they pretend as though it's new information that people didn't have until now, since that avoids anyone being responsible, even though every single engineer and the designers that still have their idealism are full aware of it.

3. Some PM is assigned a project of cleaning up CTAs, which they half-heartedly do, and the situation is slightly better afterwards, although nobody is accountable or really cares and the same problem will happen again for the next round of launches, since everyone's OKRs are tied to getting users NOW and CTAs that stupid people click on / random people accidentally click on are the best way to drive a metric in the near future. Somehow they manage to spin the cleanup as a positive and wholesome metric-moving project instead of what it is, which is doing extra work to fix other peoples' negligence.

4. Nothing like introspection happens because the org is entirely driven by short-sighted metric-maximization. It continues to gradually rot, losing the engineers and designers who care about the users, with the main decision-making roles turned over every couple years so pointless pms and managers can stick stars on their resume.

5. In a few years when the accumulation of misanthropic decisions starts to actually affect metrics in a way that nobody can easily bandaid, some executive will start a new project to do something about modernizing the whole app. A bunch of people will ship things to clean it up, and a new design will launch with a bunch of user studies that validate it as better. It will almost certainly be worse, but nobody cares, they just need work to do, and they'll massage the metrics to make it good enough until they can switch roles again.

6. At no point will the organization be capable of anything like shame, which is a shame because that is what is needed: someone in charge has to believe in doing things because they are good for the users and not for mindless metric-moving, and hold those under them accountable accordingly. Instead we get this, which is basically the long-term symptoms of going public in an industry where user growth and retention are not very quickly correlated with changes in the product. As a result bad product changes alienate users slowly and there is little incentive to make good changes, because neither result affects anything in the next few quarters. So instead you get this bullshit: because it's an easy way to hit OKRs and get promoted, and people's bosses have no reason to disagree because it's a cheap way for them to hit OKRs and get promoted also. Not that they're wrong. When the goal of the company is mindless optimization instead of anything socially positive, maybe this is truly what optimal behavior looks like. Although you can be sure that internal messaging nevertheless focuses on how socially positive the changes are. Gotta keep the illusion going so nobody realizes their job is shameful.

Or maybe that won't happen. But ... I've been around this cycle a few times, at companies who inherited Google's contemptible style of management. Somehow feels like I've seen this before.

Generally it is impossible to understand Dropbox's strategy if you think about individual purchasers as significant. Iirc they mostly serve as a marketing funnel for team- and business-sized contracts. (although this varies from year to year, sometimes they do focus on e.g. family plans for revenue)

(that said I'm just an engineer parroting things I heard while working there, I wasn't involved in any actual strategy)

(at least this was the ambient understanding internally when I worked there a few years ago)

Like: for example, it seems fairly obvious that some societal-level change happened around the 70s or 80s that triggered our modern obesity epidemics. My personal best guess is that it was the rise of processed foods messing up people's gut bacteria, but I have no actual idea. Nonetheless: you can spend as much time and energy (as a society) as you want curing obesity, but if ultimately the cause is in our food quality, then the "right" fix is obviously to fix that. The same claim applies to skin cancer and dietary connections: if the Mediterranean diet or general food quality is responsible for lower incidence of cancers in those places, then ... food quality should be fixed, right? (and sun exposure, of course, is another variable that you can just do things about).

You don't have to be an expert to think that has some validity. It's obvious. I am just quoting the expert theories, anyway.

The point really is: interventions like 'change the quality of food in America' are not things doctors can, like, prescribe to people. But they are things we can aspire to do. They will just take social movements instead of medical treatments to pull off.