Much of blogging (and creation in any form) is often exactly that: an existing idea remixed or reconsidered from someone else’s perspective.
After-all, the telephone wasn’t all that an original idea for a long while before the idea finally reached a salient and effective point.
My take has always been: just because you and I have heard the concept before does not mean everyone has. And if one person finds it helpful to read in this way, that’s a nice thing to have provided the world. :)
In my experience, when you’re applying to hundreds or thousands of jobs, odds are you aren’t clear on what your strengths are and what you want from your career.
And, unfortunately, that often comes across in a résumé and application.
Much better, I think, to spend time better conveying your strengths and interests as they relate to a specific job (or type of job). You’re much more likely to get the interest of relevant recruiters and hiring managers in this way.
The discourse around "are social websites too powerful?" is important to have, and part of the reason is, I think, specifically around the role individuals within those websites.
Elon's public statements around the purchase of Twitter are a prime example, having impacted the company's stock and morale. What's the responsibility individuals have when it comes to making statements on a social website? What responsibility do websites themselves have related to those statements?
This is an excellent take. I personally never want to work in an office again, but I know many—many, many—people who never want to work remotely again after the past two years of pandemic.
We need both: companies that want to support fully remote staff and those that want everyone in-office every day. Having companies with strong stances is a good shift for everyone because enables workers to easily figure out where they do (or do not) want to work.
I believe we're conditioned to understand various fidelities of information based on the principles of design. These fundamental principles—things like contrast, balance, proportion, hierarchy, motion, and variety—help us determine how to interpret what we experience.
For example: a webpage that has clear hierarchy of information, is visually balanced, uses motion to attract attention and convey concepts, is much more likely to be interpreted as a final product. Whereas a page that is a bit disorganized may be understood as in early development.
The problem is most landing pages are one page, so the creator invests considerable time in making them look and work well, leading to the perception of a complete project.
Then when the time comes to build a fully functional website/product, there's a lot more to invest in and so less time is spent.
Paradox of shipping an MVP product or business, I guess.
When someone comes to me and asks how to improve their knowledge of front-end or interaction design, I always recommend reading through these guides.
Why? Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have put a ton of work into identifying usable patterns which have become convention across platforms.
If you want to be a better designer or front-end engineer, take advantage of the work these companies and organizations have done by identifying and sharing these guidelines!
I certainly appreciate learning from history rather than repeating mistakes --- Understanding the change over time lets you at least identify why some things worked and some things didn't. This allows you to make new work more easily and more completely.
Gem | UI Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA (remote until 2022) | Full-time
At Gem, our mission is to build the operating system for modern recruiting. Gem is an all-in-one recruiting platform that integrates with LinkedIn, email, and your applicant tracking system. Enabling recruiting teams to find, engage, and nurture top talent.
Our technology stack is configured with velocity in mind. GraphQL, React, and Python are just a few of the technologies we use to enable velocity. Reliability and consistency are also very important to us. We sync millions of emails, resumes, and applications and rely on that information to inform our customers (has anyone on the team reached out to this person?) and services (should we send a follow-up email?). This would be the first front-end engineer to partner closely with design and engineering to help implement and design a seamless recruiter experience.
Gem | Senior Product Designers | San Francisco (ONSITTE only) | Full Time | https://gem.com
Gem is creating the modern platform for talent teams, from recruiters and sourcers to recruiting agencies and talent operation managers. We just had our third anniversary and are about to announce some big things in the coming weeks.
I'm Head of Design at the company and looking to build out the team with two-to-three senior product designers. Whoever joins me will work to produce tangible designs but also: define culture and processes for design in the company, conduct research and share insights, and much, much more. It's a really exciting time to be in the company.
Self-driving tech is expensive. It's costly to design, create, and manage. I wonder how quickly that $2.25 billion will be used up.
For comparison (because I was curious how this ranks amongst other big funding rounds): Uber raised $7.7b from secondary funding in 2017. Airbnb series E was $1.5b. WeWork series G was $4.4b. And in 2018 Ant Financial raised a whopping $14.4b series C!
Not every solution will solve every problem for every person.
Some people thrive in open environments, some don’t. Some people need accidental encounters to propel innovative change, some don’t.
To say these types of cultures are “dumb” (or even the opposite) is akin saying “peanut butter is the worst possible thing you could ever eat!” just because you’re allergic to it.
A randomized controlled trial with some clear prospectively defined measure of detriment would be how to prove that. Actually running a trial like that is going to be logistically near impossible though.
The OP's point is that open plan offices don't even encourage things they claim to encourage, like those "accidental encounters" that may be helpful for some people. In an open-plan office, everyone ends up avoiding in-person interaction because of how distracting it can be to those around them.
A research paper with n = 2 (companies) isn't exactly representative.
Anecdotally, I've seen the complete opposite (where in-person interactions happen far more because of the open floor plan) at three large companies. So the point stands: open floor plans will not produce positive results for every organization, that's to be expected.
After-all, the telephone wasn’t all that an original idea for a long while before the idea finally reached a salient and effective point.
My take has always been: just because you and I have heard the concept before does not mean everyone has. And if one person finds it helpful to read in this way, that’s a nice thing to have provided the world. :)