How true is this or are we doing the same thing “generation killed industry/way of doing things” that the boomer media is so fond of?

I actually tried a daily slack bot instead. The team HATED it with a passion. And the amount of productivity lost on other teams to a backend engineer blocking a systems designer being blocked by a UX flow etc is insanely large. We have never missed a deadline, hit all our revenue targets, and get much. much larger features done in 2/3rds of the time of the next nearest team. Part of that is because we’ve made sure to reinforce the concept that we are a single team instead of a group of server engineers, backened engineers, frontend engineers, system designers, [removed to protect identity] designers, econ specialists, UX designers, UI artists, and QA working in their own bubble.

I mean it really depends on the team. My role is as much translator as anything else. I have:

Infrastructure/Server

Backend

Frontend

Designers (three different kinds)

Performance/Econ specialists

QA

Hearing “Oh I didn’t know that, yeah we need to sync” is a common occurrence and on a team of nearly 20 people we never take more than 15mins. We have shared deadlines, shared goals, and work on shared user stories. Having that moment in the morning to go “okay, am I blocking anyone without realising it?” or “I gotta remember to make sure design knows the spreadsheet won’t have the thing they were expecting today, it’ll be Tuesday instead” is well worth the time.

On top of that, with WFH it’s a really good way to cement the team aspect. I wouldn’t care so much if we were in the office, but all being remote means we lose the “human” behind the screen a lot.

As I said, different teams and different projects need different things, but I’d argue the reason my team is the number one performing in the entire company is, in part, due to this morning time to get that alignment.

Depends on the team. My team do daily standup and it helps. A lot. “What are you working on today and do you need any help to get it done” is a super powerful question to make sure we’re all focusing on the same priorities and sharing the knowledge we have, especially in a team of mixed disciplines.

“We invented a new kind of calculator. It usually returns the correct value for the mathematics you asked it to evaluate! But sometimes it makes up wrong answers for reasons we don’t understand. So if it’s important to you that you know the actual answer, you should always use a second, better calculator to check our work.”

Then what is the point of this new calculator?

Fantastic comment, from the article.

Work laptops in particular suck, I find. My first one was lagging, freezing, and crashing within months. The second one is three times as expensive but the same brand and is still not happy.

I also use Windows at home and haven’t had the same experience. I think it’s really manufacturer dependent

The fact that you lived here a few years is kidna irrelevant to the history of the people of the country. We have been conditioned to think uprising, violent attacks on the people in power, and the power of masses is “just not British”. When history shows it very much is (there basically wasn’t a period for about 800 years where there wasn’t a civil war or popular uprising within England).

The fact I lived in Nottingham for so long and forgot about the freaking Luddites is damn shameful!

This isn’t a complete list by any stretch of the imagination, and I avoided everything to do with the aristocracies (which includes four civil wars just from the top of my head) and anything to do with imposed rule (i.e. English to other areas of the UK).

Some more: Monmouth Rebellion & Rye House Plot, Farnley Wood Plot, The Gunpowder Plot, Bigod’s Rebellion, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Uprising, The Essex Rebellion, The Oxfordshire Uprising (yes, a different one)

The list really does go on.

EDIT for fun here are a few more:

The Lincolnshire Uprising, Yorkshire Rebellion, The Luddites, 2011 London Riots

It’s actually all English history. I avoided Scottish, NI and Welsh because rebellion against imposed rule of the English felt like a different beast to what was being discussed.

And no one in and English school is being taught about these things either.

Brit and avid history fan here! Stiff upper lip is a myth. We used to be a very rebelious lot:

We’re taught about Henry VIII, but not about the mass uprising he had to put down (The Pilgrimage of Grace)

We hear about the Battle of Hastings but not the Harrying of the North.

We’re never taught about the Enclosure Acts (that stole land from the common folk) and the subsequent uprising and brutal repression (including the Midlands Revolt).

We also had the Peasants Revolt trying to stop the crazy taxation during the 100 year war!

And if we’re looking for other acts of rebellion:

The Peterloo Massacre

The General Strike of 1926

The Miner’s Strikes of the 80s

The Battle of Cable Street (Police protecting Nazis)

The Battle of Lewisham (Police protecting Nazis)

But it is far, far better for those in power to make us believe we have always been meek and “stiff upper lip”

EDIT: for people looking for a complete list, this ain’t it. I just chose a few that were in my mind at the time. I also didn’t include anything to do with imposed rule or I’d just gesture vaguely at the island of Ireland.

I also didn’t include anything to do with aristocrats fighting each other. This is an incomplete list of popular uprisings to make a point.

If I had the money to pay for music twice I would 😅

It’s true, but at least half the artists I listen to I would never have found if it weren’t for streaming. Something is, after all, better than nothing.

And compared to the competition, Tidal’s payments are good:

~30% more than Apple Music (0.01c)

~300% more than Spotify (0.003 - 0.005c)

~500% more than Soundcloud (0.0025c)

~1000% more than Pandora (0.00133c)

Been using tidal ever since Spotify’s Joe Rogan debacle. Main reason? They actually pay the artist. But the sound quality is a nice bonus as well! No regrets…other than people trying to share music with me by sending a spotify link!

Considering how much of the web is AI-generated now (with it predicted to rise to 90% by the end of 2026) we’ve managed to turn a tool for connecting people to a tool for chatbots to talk to one another.

Shovel Knight was kickstarted and they have a total flat hierarchy, fair payment system, and evenly distributed wages and bonuses.

I work for a major games studio and if I started my own studio, I would 100% use crowdfunding. Financing in games is broken.

You tend to need someone with deep pockets willing to eat costs for 2-5 years for 10-100 people (depending on project size) in the gamble it’ll pay off. Because it’s a gamble, the financer (in most cases China’s tencent) are constantly breathing over your shoulder and demanding the impossible (oh all the devs say this’ll take three years? You have six months) and the motive changes from “make enough money for the studio to survive” to “make enough money so your financial backers can get a new boat”.

Then with F2P and live service (where I work) you get the constant demand for growth and perpetual play. Forget that churn is inevitable as people’s moods and desires change. Forget that there’s a maximum number of people in the world that are interested in your game. You have to grow at all costs all the time. That’s what leads to the predatory F2P system.

We also have to remember F2P was born out of Shareware, perhaps my favourite distribution model. In non-corporate hands, it can be a fantastic thing.

Shit ain’t easy for devs. Give them some slack.