Comment by temac

7 months ago

Is this an admission that you accept to implement complete garbage?

If I don’t, there are 100 other people who would do it

  • Tell your product owners that they should actually use the product they’re owning. And not just use it, but be a power user of that tool. Not a professional user, not a casual user; use the tool at least six hours a day.

    I use YouTube 6+ hours a day and I have for probably 10 years, and I don’t even work there. (I have a few annoying personality limitations which make it so that I usually work better with YouTube on in the background, and NOT on autoplay, autoplay always chooses something I don’t want to see/hear; I know that because I use the tool a lot.)

    I can tell you that it has steadily and continually gotten worse in that 10 year time. “I have to come up with stories or I won’t have a job” no you don’t, but even if you did, there are so many things YouTube needs more that enlarged thumbnails with visible compression artifacts.

  • Those we literally words of Japanese Kamikazes in WW2. If not me, then someone else will die anyway.

    • It would be funny to compare suicide bombing to a dev implementing features their team is working on even if they don't sound good to that particular dev if it wasn't so sad and offensive.

  • I'm sorry, but this cop-out really pisses me off. It is far too common and frankly, unacceptable. It really is insulting that you'd expect others to accept this as a justification. It's a lazy dismissal and not even a proper excuse.

    You're excuse for doing something shitty is... that someone else will? What does another person even have to do with it?! Seriously, let them have the blood on their hands. You can't even assume that someone else will! If you do it, you guarantee that it happens. Even if it is likely that someone else will, there's a big difference between a certainty. This is literally what creates enshitification.

    Plus, the logic is pretty slippery. Certainly you're not going to commit crimes or acts of genocide! You were "just following orders"[0], right? Or parents often say to their children "if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you?" Certainly the line is drawn somewhere, but frankly, it is the same "excuse" given when that extreme shit happened, so no, I won't accept it.

    You have autonomy[1], that makes you accountable. You aren't just some mindless automata. You may not be the root cause, but at best you enable it. You can't ignore that you play a role.

    And consider the dual: if you don't make it better, who will?

    I believe you have the power to make change, do you? Maybe not big, but hey, every big thing is composed of many smaller things, right? So the question is which big thing you want to contribute to.

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

    [1] https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incent...