HN user
A company wouldn't. I posit that individual middle managers are the problem: whilst they do want the people working for them to be productive, they often subconsciously act to make sure they have the supposed "status" and that this comes (unknowingly, to them) at a cost.
However, there are environments in which there is a social pressure to not take those spots and in fact be present at your desk regardless.
Am I more productive in an isolated room? Absolutely. Do I feel comfortable doing it? No, not necessarily.
Agreed, I intensely dislike having my back to a room (including in places such as restaurants), and this was always my explanation, too.
(Actually, the explanation I give to people is that I'm terrified of assassination attempts, which is related from a scientific point of view but has the bonus of making my life sound much more exciting than it is.)
(and you did compare us to 14 year olds!)
For what it's worth, I read their comment as meaning that some things we desire are the same throughout our lifetimes. In the same way that teenagers want to decorate their rooms to reflect themselves, as adults we have the same drives (though maybe with fewer posters of slightly-shameful bands).
I think that the problem is that "user-hateful" is the opposite of what's actually happening here: we're still at a state where security is something that users don't actually like, because it often puts the burden directly on them. Viewed cynically, what's happened here is that we have received "the software that we deserve".
Oh man. The shot of nostalgia brought on by this brought me almost to tears. I had them all, Geocities, Tripod... Saturday mornings hooked in to ftp.idsoftware.com at 33.6k and hand-crafting updates to my sites in notepad.exe (using uppercase tags, naturally).
It's ridiculous... the web is a much better place, technologically, nowadays, but something for me has been lost. As the author alluded to at the end of the article, it's all frameworks and abstractions. It's high gloss and low content. Bah.
And with this post, I have become my parents.
Impressive, and interesting, but with one problem: I, like a lot of people, have floaters in my eyes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floaters). When I focus on a single point and don't move my eyes around, they tend to congregate at the centre of my vision and in Spritz's case block the words that are being shown.
Potentially, a brief pause every 50 words or so would make sense in order to quickly move my eyes and unblock my vision, though obviously at the cost of some words per minute.
It's worth pointing out that `git stash` (without arguments) is equivalent to `git stash save`.
You might want to check out the Bash completions for Git: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/contrib/completion/gi.... They work with stash names so can take some of the pain away.