I've become that guy, that whenever a sticky fact comes up for debate, people just turn to me because they know I'll be looking it up.

What I really enjoy is when some asshole refutes the evidence and stops talking to me. For good.

Not when you have your entire team/company using gmail as a paid service. And when you factor in the part about the user being the product in social networking, basically you're forcing a paying customer of one product to become a revenue stream in another.

Monopolies find themselves in trouble over this all time, just like when a customer service agent from your credit card company or local energy conglomerate passes you onto a sales rep from a third party without your knowledge. It's how they scam the old, ignorant and uninformed.

tl;dr: you cannot change your bookmarks when you have no other options.

I'm surprised there hasn't been a legal challenge to this.

You're obviously too young to recall the first versions of Facebook or maybe you haven't even taken a good hard look at the latest one. They all suck but they're fun for their users and adoption rates speak volumes.

> Just to be clear, visual design is not about drop shadows, background textures and glass effects.

You have no idea about what you're talking about. You're not even a rookie.

Set your hourly rate, configure it to represent how much time you think you'd waste sifting through online designs and spend that amount on a decent theme that will work with Bootstrap, Foundation or any other framework that a developer can configure.

Designers don't post billable collateral on the web. They're too busy working and keeping their design under the radar is part of the business. They don't have a Github mindset so don't bother trying.

Outside of that, the best thing to is to confirm employment with dates. Oddly enough, some people will list a reference from where they were fired for misconduct. I'd bet that said person doesn't even understand what constitutes misconduct, why they were fired and how to avoid it in the future.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4188473

Points: 41

# Comments: 49

As with every position in every industry, you'll come across good, mediocre and bad people filling the role of an information architect.

Info-architects should not produce code, specs, interaction design or anything visual beyond a high-level site map. And they should not be asked to do so unless they can write production code, produce visual design or architect the full user experience, something most cannot do.

Their role is to understand what information the system is receiving, analyzing and transmitting, how the information relates to itself and how that information should be best organized and disseminated in order to meet business requirements.

If you meet one who knows their shit, cozy up and learn as much as you can because it's been my experience that many of the root causes of adoption failure lie in the engineer's inability to properly organize, relate and disseminate information to the user. Not scale, not coding skills, not lack of design.

What the article fails to address is that a) I'm already sold on the new product prior to its announcement and release and b) as a backup, if I really need it, there's a retail store where I can purchase the good or service that I need to easily complement my previous purchase.

Apple store employees are gophers, regardless of background and pedigree. They're cashiers that fetch my cables, machine or add-ons instead of me having to surf through the isles of a warehouse cum store hoping to catch the eye of someone wiring their third shift. And that's why I readily pay a premium for their products: a combination of hardware excellence and premium customer service.

That Apple doesn't pay commissions and top dollar to their low-level retail employees doesn't surprise me. It's a manifestation of supply and demand and I accept that.