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By knowing the customers business and needs better than the customer, and be able to convince them that the best product possibly conceivable is not a Frankenstein’s monster put together from “100 ideas gathered from the costumers, prioritised by a PM”, but an opinionated tool created by opinionated people.

Of course you need the right developers for this, not code monkeys or offshore outsourced companies with a time zone and cultural barrier to overcome…

I think US culture, which I suppose you're from, is on a very lonely path food-wise - people from all over the world enjoy trying and making other culture's dishes, not everything is for everyone, but this American-style "I can't get into anything, ever, which I am not used to" is so unique.

I have the theory that this is due to digitalisation. We are now at the stage where "everybody" needs to know Tech, and everybody now wants to work in the hip Tech companoes, regardless of own technical skills or mindset: Project managers, legal, accounting, etc. nowadays all want to have a say in Tech aspects, and this creates pressure on the actual tech departments of a corporation to create reports and documentation and explain themselves much more than it used to be.

It's a bad situation for tech people to have to deal with the FUD of all other departments because those departments want to present themselves as knowledgeable and contributing to the technical aspects, when they are not able to at all.

Usually these people are financially secured enough to run their stores or bars or cafés as a hobby, to have something to do and meet some people instead of just sitting at home.

I know a guy in Tokyo whose family owns a small plot of land in the 23-ku area and he leased it to some company who built an office tower on it. They get an upper-5-figure USD amount every month for rent.

The guy runs an import streetwear store just for fun, he's in the red all the time but doesn't care.

I've witnessed some hard negotiating in the car industry about the price of a cable lug for a 6-figure luxury car. The car maker wanted to bring down the price for one lug from 0.05 Euro to 0.03 Euro at a order volume of about 100.000 pieces.

This kept about 50 people (on both sides of the deal) busy for 3 months: Engineers, CAD-Ops, Buyers, Sales, Project Managers...

It was obvious that the amount of extra-work to see if the price could be lowered was a multiple of the savings of the car maker. Yet nobody complained.

Apple Weather's forecast is unusable in the whole of Europe because of the data providers they use. Pretty disappointing to have such a US-centric view on an app that's so integral to a smartphone. They either should work with European data providers or make the app unavailable outside of those markets similar to how they do it with the "news" app.

Isn't it the most rational thing to assume that a company that is extremely experienced and successful at analyzing business processes and digitalising them will know better than any newcomer with less resources and less experience who operates mainly on "we're disrupting for the sake of it" swagger?

Telling SAP that you want them to change their ways to accommodate your brilliant idea is akin to a layman telling a brain surgeon how he wants his surgery done.

A very good explanation. Yet what I think is confusing a lot of (very?) good programmers (not me) is that they already do that intuitively by not letting methods become longer than 3 or 4 lines, and whenever implementing a new method, by writing the return statement first (i.e. returning a mock object or similar) and working backwards, i.e. only writing enough code to be able to return the desired value.

If one then goes and tries to write tests for these kind of methods, it feels like superfluous busywork.

A disappointing aspect of being a Programmer at 40, 50, or even 60, is that you’ll meet a lot of people, often your managers, who will think of you as an non ambitious loser. “I used to be a coder but now I’m 32 and the ‘Director of User Experience’ - did you never feel the need to do a little more than coding?”

The difference is that no "developers are just tools that should be outsourced whenever cheaper" company has a chance against a true software company (which I count Apple towards even though they're more known for the hardware) deciding to enter the competition.

Nokia was not a software company at all. They treated their OS and UX as an afterthought and put hardware features first.

The same is currently happening in the automotive world with their in-car software. Auto makers aren't thinking of their OSs and UX and the people who develop them as the absolute center point of their industry, when they are.

I worry that this would essentially make it easier for airlines to drop passengers in the long run.

That should be easy to prevent. It has to be designed so the airline (i.e. the party that holds all the power in this contractual agreement) cannot cancel the contract, but the customer's money can only be collected the moment the flight touches ground on the destination. Like a reserved amount on a credit card that car rentals use.

Flights are already "connected", it should be easy to auto-bill once the destination has been successfully reached.

Doesn’t it come down to „be a critical thinker instead of a mindless consumer“? From that follows that you don’t just scroll through the homepage but should use the search function, in an informed way.

Which in turn already fails at the majority of people being too lazy to type, and not knowing how to search for things they want. They quickly give up, and just take the easy route of consuming what’s served to them.

It’s the modern equivalent of falling on the sofa, switching on the TV, and just watching whatever’s on until they fall asleep.

Getting a majority of people to care about their media consumption is probably a hopeless cause.

Hydrogen was mainly Toyota, no German maker for instance made any serious commitments into that technology.

I suppose you mean that Tesla was the dragging force in the EV sector and all others were reluctant until they saw Tesla become successful?

If you look at the timeline of global auto makers putting EVs on the market, that claim is unsubstantiated, they would have been years later if that was true.

I get it though, Tesla is the first product of the American auto sector that is somewhat innovative, after decades of being behind all others. So it’s natural that many Americans are proud of Tesla’s success and will basically defend that pride with their lives. It’s a cult because they and facts the contrary will be seen as an attack.