Eldar University - IT and Economy

March 29, 2024 Yesterday, I've got a warning that unless I use my Google Voice account for outgoing calls, my Google Voice number will be taken away. For outgoing calls. And so I won't be able to receive calls and SMSs… Please, hold with me for a moment to see what It really says about modern Google as a company. 12 years ago, when I joined Google, it was very hard to get into the company. In fact, it was harder than to get admitted into Harvard. The company employed the smartest people in the world and it was very proud of that. And so were googlers. With that came trust and loyalty. Tens of thousands engineers were watching confidential TGIFs worldwide with nearly no leaks. And there was enough confidential stuff there, but… no leaks.The company trusted employees. The employees trusted the company. The company was loyal to the employees. The employees were loyal to the company. Did I mention, it was 12 years ago? A quick Universal Evolution 101 Reminder A friend of mine was t

#IT Management #ITHiring #SoftwareEngineering A story Long ago in 1998 I was interviewed by a guy from one Chicago company about C++ and MFC (Microsoft UI library for C++). He asked me: "How would you put 50000 items in UI into a dropdown box." "I would not put 50000 items into a dropdown box." "But what if the customer wants that?" "Then I would talk to the customer and explain why this is a bad idea." "But still..." The guy wanted a hack. Specifically, he wanted to implement scrolling event handlers and dynamically update the list. He clearly was very proud of knowing about those interceptors and his goal in the interview was to show that. I know, odd for an interviewer. The idea itself was horrible, it’s expensive to implement and maintain and the result would be... inferior. For example, the slider would jump around when scrolling. But this is not why the idea was bad. As I wrote before, all Computer Science and things like GUI are

#IT, #Economy This article points out to a rarely considered reason that drives high-tech salaries up: corporate greed. This is a basic premise of Ayn Rand capitalism theory that individual greed (self-interest) produces a common good. How is self-interest of large corporations expressed today? One of the main forms is the pursuit of technology that allows to create products that can do more and that are easier to use. And therefore, to get ahead of the competition and get better profits. Makes sense, right? Right. But now let’s see the other side of it. Reminder about IQ Let’s refresh some background information that will be very useful for our further conversation on the topic. To be factual and not emotional we will need metrics. The metric we will use is IQ. It is well known that IQ is not the best metric to predict people’s success, however we are not talking about success, and for the matter, we will discuss, IQ is quite adequate tool. So, clearly you know that by IQ ( Intelligen

#Social #Attenton #AttentionOverload #Neurophysiology #Locality #ITManagement #ITDesign #UI In the United States there is a legitimate diagnosis called Attention Deficit Disorder. Today we’ve got it on the whole society level. We overload people, their brains and cognitive abilities with irrelevant disruptions and information. This article talks about how to account for it in UI and workflow design. Who owns your time? It’s 2am. You just finished the last important task for today and plan to go to sleep. But there is one more small thing – to pay a bill. You log in to online bank and... ouch... the bank decides that you absolutely need to read changes in the terms of service and agree to them. Like you have an option to disagree, right... And right after, online bank UI starts to wonder if you want a new credit card with this new shiny design on it. After all, how can you be uninterested? They’ve printed a cute husky dog on it! It takes a few clicks to convince them that you are not in

#Economy #Socium #SocialSystem #ITManagement This article explains a different classification of human social systems – cooperative, imperative and servitude, and show why the dominating today servitude system conflicts with the Knowledge Economy and Knowledge Age. It also suggests what to do about that. A different classification of social systems In the article devoted to the knowledge economy we used a most popular today classification of social systems “hunter-gatherers”-slavery-feudalism-capitalism-socialism. This classification is based on economic relationships between people. By meaning it comes to Karl Marx, even though he did not really used words “capitalism” or even “socialism”. While that system is certainly important, we will use today a very different classification of social systems based on the reasons why people stay in society. This is cooperative-imperative-servitude classification . Cooperative society is when cooperation is the reason why people stay inside. A sma

 Finally recorded a video for the  "Office Evolution" article :