But taking just the first one, the Buffet one. I think maybe that's how we get willing people in the bad companies? Bad companies doesn't even have to mean evil and morally wrong, it can mean bad decision making and poorly run. Companies can still be plenty lucky though and that accounts for a lot. But if the people who hate morally bad jobs or irrational decision making leave and the ones who don't hate them stay that's going to lead somewhere.

Maybe individually a "good" person will be happier (and perhaps poorer, if you have the belief that lower morals is an advantage in business). As a society, you'd probably really like that naysayers remain at companies. As a company leader, I don't know which one you'd like. It depends on your goals I guess. Overall, it strikes me as not capturing enough. The "job you don't hate" is broad. If you have a belief in something that should exist in the world and that company has a way of producing it, it doesn't seem to be wrong to work there trying to make that happen even against a tide of coworkers you hate, existing products you hate, social implications you hate. It's a lot of stress and work though with a low success rate. That's enough for a lot of people to say no, but more curiously it's enough for a lot of people to just change what they hate.

It's been my experience that leaders have rarely had enough of a vision to share, but tell the team to get started anyway. Someone has to suss that out—if not the leaders, then the PM except that the PM can skirt with vague requirements. The designs are the first place where all the ideas (many contradicting, many poorly thought out) hit a little reality. When the ideas that looked good amorphously in the head don't look good on screen, it's the design and not the requirements.

There's an insinuation in some of the comments that the projects (the leaders) are starting with a clear vision and design is muddying it up. I mean there are plenty of bad designers, but most companies have a broken product development process (they mostly all use the same one, despite different products, different team makeups, different leader strengths/weaknesses, etc.). Why are companies still hiring designers? Why is design a step in the process at all? I agree confusing designs keep coming out—there are so many enshittified products. It's design theater, but for who? Design is downstream not upstream.

Some of the user research was around the mental models behind switching to do deep work on a desktop/laptop—though they're still blurry with younger phone-first (or phone-only) users. It's not unlike why the UI for work software should be different than consumer stuff. If you're there everyday, you don't need stuff hidden and progressively disclosed. You'll learn it, adding extra clicks is worse. The cockpit is better this way. It's not clutter. Obviously, with a laptop you get a full keyboard too whereas the iPad's addition is the touch screen, which has it's merits, but is a much blunter fat-fingery input. And people would talk about how you can add a keyboard, but you know, if the user is doing that, should they not just bring their laptop?

I remember at the time trying to pitch a mindset that a laptop is a portable device. Sure it doesn't fit in a pocket, but neither does an iPad. So even the use cases you'd have away from your desk aren't exactly carve outs for an iPad experience.

The requirements are so unstable—the product team has few strong beliefs—that they change the next day. And then again every few days after. Hopefully, the changes are small enough that design isn't full resetting each time, but it's not rare to have big changes. The entire project gets swapped not infrequently. What eventually slows the changes is the engineering deadline and the fact that the developers need to start. But the slow drip of product requirements means whatever time budgeting went to design shrinks. And whatever time went to engineering is eaten into such that now the design needs to be something that can be built in half the original amount of dev time. Each day the designer takes at this point eats into that window and so it's dictated by what can get built.

I don't think that has to strictly be viewed like an entirely bad outcome, but for what it is and how it's accomplished, you could just cut the design part out. Besides, you're going to iterate later, right? Right?

Conversations have various power dynamics where one person may have more of the burden, but it is far from always a speaker pitching something to someone who isn't inclined to it. Peers leave hallway chats regularly having “aligned” on two different things. Lots of things we’re talking about are actually complex and simple communication will effectively be miscommunication.

I think we’ve moved too far to broadly attributing confusion to weak speaking. It can certainly help to keep polishing and reworking your words to overcome worse and worse listening habits. That can take one very far, but it doesn’t change that we’re making the bar higher and higher and therefore more messages/ideas dissipate into air.

Anyways, I think Notion has a learning curve that is a little longer than one expects. I can believe that with some dedicated learning time I could be turned into a believer. But I also distinctly had the impression that it was one of those things where it saved a ton of time for a few narrow-visioned people (the people who championed it), but added meaningful time to everyone else's. Those people were largely project managers or operations folks, and transitively the leaders they reported to. It heavily threw the switch towards "legibility" over reality.

It's like when someone new to a messy project, creates a spreadsheet, and says, "Let not overthink this, everybody just fill in your project details in your row". If your work, which you are the expert on, doesn't fit nicely into the person's columns, it's not easy for you to fill out. Meanwhile, the person who created the spreadsheet, gets what looks like a neat and orderly answer to everything. All the messy things—which are or at least have in them the correct status of the thing—will be masked under a clean and simple, but rather incorrect, thing. That spreadsheet will also travel far specifically because it's neat and therefore portable. There aren't a bunch of "it depends" in it.

Still, yeah, as an experiment it doesn't seem likely to work. There is probably something to putting people a little closer to the action though.

The thing that makes it less likely is that the buyer and seller had multiple transactions together which is uncommon for eBay. And also if the stuff you got was expensive. Maybe buyer really just put the wrong address and neither side can do much to get the item back once delivered?

Obviously, there's a way to do both poorly too. We can make expensive things that don't last. I think a large chunk of gripes about things that don't last are really about (1) not getting the upside of the tradeoff, cheaper (in both senses) more flexible solutions, and (2) just getting bad quality period.