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shiitake

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You make good points. I wish your posts had a bit more visibility to the folks who hate tipping.

Tipping not only produces different outcomes for employees but it also impacts employers and customers. Even if you raise prices 15% it still won't be enough for most restaurants to keep their entire floor staff. Restaurants will be forced to cut hours and/or staff - this will lead to worse service and more unhappy customers.

And this has been my experience when visiting countries that don't have tipping (primarily the UK). Most of the restaurants are understaffed - there would be a single server covering 10+ tables. And because of that the service was really slow. And slow service is not only frustrating for customers but it is also bad for restaurants (fewer customers = less items sold).

I always get the feeling that the people who hate tipping the most have never actually worked in an actual restaurant.

I hosted a software dev meetup in Texas for several years and also saw this. Especially when we co-hosted with another meetup that was devoted to beginners.

I observed a few common threads:

1. A lot of beginners don't know exactly WHY they want to do XYZ. Why do you want to learn to code? Or play guitar? Or be an entrepreneur? Or make video games? It is perfectly okay to want to do something because it is potentially lucrative. But there really needs to be more to it. If you are passionate about XYZ - which parts specifically? Do you like building things to solve problems? Or writing songs? Or telling stories?

2. Most beginners have done very little basic research about what is involved in actually doing XYZ. I always asked beginner devs if they thought they could be happy spending 6+ hours a day thinking/writing/debugging code. Nobody else had ever mentioned that to them - they'd just been told "learn to code".

If you can get through those beginner questions the advice is always a variation on the same theme: do XYZ to whatever degree you can. Don't get distracted by meetings or tools or blog posts.

The "we use the right tool for the right job" mindset looks good on paper but doesn't scale very well.

Most of the time it tends to favor developers who are the most distracted by the newest and shiniest trends.

It is helpful for any dev team to have 2 or 3 programming languages in their toolbox that they can use to solve their problems. Any discussion about adding a new language to that toolbox would need to involve discussions about QA, deployment and long-term supportability. Unfortunately most developers are less concerned about those "non-technical" aspects.

On Radical Candor 11 years ago

I agree.

A wise man once noted - it is not only easy to criticize - it is fun too! But blunt criticism is not radical - I would assert it is the default; both easy and fun.

What makes the candor radical is that it is rooted in care for the person.

This isn't entirely surprising.

I wasn't a huge fan of Apple Music's UI so we'll see how folks adjust to it. It's a good thing that user preferences will automatically get ported over.

Did Beats Music have any features that Apple Music does not have?