How I learned to become a failure

http://digitalmash.com/journal/articles/how-i-learned-to-become-a-failure

by 16g • 16 years ago

28 5 16 years ago

digitalmash.com

alexkiwi• 16 years ago

jason fried is not going to be happy with this guy haha

p0larboy• 16 years ago

excellent article.. upvoted~

InfinityX0• 16 years ago

Like. I have no interest whatsoever in the article, but this headline was paradoxically motivating for some reason. I really like it.

Don't get me wrong, the article is good and all that but the title informed the article pretty obviously, and I knew what was to come. But since I did know, that meant the title itself transfixed a little motivation to become a bigger failure in my own life.

tom_ilsinszki• 16 years ago

%s/small failure/reality checking/g

joe_the_user• 16 years ago

I had a job where my boss expected our small group of consultants to maintain this "talk to clients a bit and then pull a rabbit out of your hat without further feedback" approach. It's good to hear it broken down in the article.

For my ex-boss, this "magician" image was what justified a consultant's high fees. Our actual assignment was a complete failure on multiple levels. Among those levels, what I think is the most awful part of the create-a-gold-plated-thingy-that-'just-works' paradigm is that it discards the human interaction part of development.

"Make it 'just work'" is a problematic meme now that it has come to permeate society (Apple Computer's huge prestige clearly being a driver of this). The problem I see is that algorithms/designs/platforms/technologies that "just work" make the trade-offs involved invisible to the end user but the end user is still effected by them and sooner or later they need to actually think about the trade-offs. Certainly, making your program "just work" - ie, not require excess thought, training or manual configuration on the part of the client, can be a good thing. The problem is when this approach dominates the entirety of design and development.

How I learned to become a failure

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