I've built many such forms, and all of them have included traditional forms of address. I may build another with traditional forms of address, but I certainly have no problem discussing the subject without laughing the idea off.

Is that your intention?

For whatever reason you find yourself doing a task. Gardening, washing dishes, building a web form, saving a life. Whatever it is you choose to do, why not do it as well as you know how? Why denigrate something as not being worth doing well because there are more important problems in the world?

Speaking as a person with a fair chunk of experience managing software development, I find it difficult to believe that management's only choices are frat-boy culture or soul-sucking bland corporation.

I'll speak very frankly. When a company has a half dozen or a dozen employees, when a company is scrambling for traction, it can be a great motivator to have a strong insider culture. Steve Jobs hung a pirate flag up at the Macintosh offices for a reason.

But companies grow, and part of growing is, well, growing. You need to select from a larger pool of prospective employees. You need to bring in some new DNA instead of doubling up on the DNA you already have.

I can't speak to this specific company, but as a general principle, successful companies become less exclusive and possible--I am not speaking about Dropbox--less discriminatory as they grow.

If you want an example, look at Apple. It's hyper-successful, and famous for how hard they work at inclusiveness and tolerance.

I suspect that the title is wrong, and that the thesis of the article is that there is something strongly biased about Dropbox's culture and the experiences recounted about interviewing there are one symptom of many.

I'm speaking to what I read in the article, of course. I'm not a woman and I don't work at Dropbox.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7241742

Points: 19

# Comments: 13

This seems to confirm your suggestion :-)

eS6 will have fat arrows, but comparing CS today to JS today, I find the -> and => constructs are more than just an abbreviation, they make it radically easier to write AND READ code that makes heavy use of functions.

YMMV, of course!

Imagine, if you will, that Silicon Valley is THE place to live if you want to be a programmer. Alice has job advice: "Move to Silicon Valley."

Now imagine that Bob wishes to open a hackerspace code+cafe in New York. Should we really tell him that this is a bad idea? Is it somehow a terrible idea to help programmers who chose to ignore Alice's advice to be productive? Is it somehow undermining TheGrandPlan™ to support a programmer in New York City?

Are we "fragmenting the hacker community" by opening a cafe in NYC?

I can't think of any good reasons not to make Stack Overflow available in Portuguese. And any or every other language. An argument to keep SO English-only might as well be accompanied by an argument that there should be no conference talks in any language except English, no programming books in any language except English, and no help or online documentation in any language except English.

This is one of the most important (and neglected) insights in business. People often optimize for the indicator at the expense of the thing it is supposed to indicate.

Example: One metric is of customer dissatisfaction is unsubscribes. If you make your unsubscribe process difficult, unsubscribes go down. In reality, dissatisfaction might be climbing through the roof, and a difficult unsubscribe process may actually make it worse, not better.

That being said, there is a difference between: "If you don't care, go work somewhere else so that the only employees left here are the ones that care," and, "Do it even if you don't care or else I'll fire you."

The former might be about getting rid of unmotivated dead wood. Some people are good no matter what, leave them alone. Some are terrible for your company no matter what, fire them or entice them to quit. The remainder are the ones to manage.

But then again... You don't want to fire or push out the people who might be able to tell you that the dogs hate the dogfood because it tastes like shit. Which was the punchline of the joke that the entire "eat your own dog food" expression is based on.

Vendors A and B have roughly equal parity on features and services, but vendor A's employees eat their own dogfood and vendor B's don't.

Now in one sense, who cares? Eating your own dogfood is a means to an end, not the end itself, so it's like finding out that McDonalds employees don't eat McDonalds food. As long as they wash their hands, who cares what they eat themselves?

But on the other hand, I'm a human being, and I'm personally a lot more comfortable doing business with a company that seems to care about its product from top to bottom, and isn't staffed with people who don't like their own product enough to use it.

While this statement is usually true, let's not generalize. There are some kinds of business or services where you are doing a disservice to the world by being in over your head.

Example: If you decide to "disrupt" home construction and sidestep the various annoying and taxing construction regulations. You simply must not go around selling houses to people unless you are actually very, very confident that you are not building a dangerous product.

Same thing for making food that people eat, pacemakers, radiation devices, and taking people's money to safeguard. It's not a crime to make mistakes that nobody with reasonable experience could foresee, but it is absolutely wrong to make avoidable mistakes that hurt your customers due to industry inexperience.

Point, set and match.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Calvi#Death

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