I like articles that discuss out of ordinary approaches. This is one of those, and I relate to the pain the writer also has.
However...
> Different people use windows totally differently.
The older I get, the more impatient I am with this. In the industry, we normalized that high paid software developers (who are way better programmers, or infra people than I am) waste hundreds of engineering hours with their absolutely broken window management, and command-tab hell. Whenever I have to witness a screenshare of a colleague, my time is also wasted.
I wish this would be an interview gating: show us how you manage yourself in this big monorepo, switching tasks, windows, tabs, desktops, SSHs etc. Do not normalize noob time wasting.
Different people also use pianos differently. Yet, we don't appreciate a noob pushing random keys around it. It would be unpleasant to the ear, just how unpleasant (painful) it is to witness macOSs/gnomes bubblegum horror of sloppily animated chaos.
Back to my point: windows (as in viewports) are with us for many decades. I don't care if you tile, stack, infinite scroll them. Just be productive. Invest upfront in learning, be fast, and be able to explain what I you try to show me on screen.
There will be no one size fits for all, and that part I understand. But please have more dexterity with your desktop abilities than my grandma.
It's hard to argue with this, yet, I never learned to touch type or type fast, never bothered to learn a bunch of vim or emacs hot keys or rice a vim setup. I use pretty basic editors and ides that barely qualify as ides.
Everyone else around me blazes at the simple act of typing. And far fewer but some have powerful vim setups where they can do inarguably useful things fast.
You would be agonized to watch me type code.
But for 30+ years it never mattered. I spend 10x more time thinking than typing, or jumping around refactoring 300 things all over the place every 5 minutes, and propduce results that work, are efficient, and fail far more gracefully than everyone else.
(I'm not claiming to trade iteration for get-it-right-the-first-time, I obviously iterate and I'd even say the correctness of the final result is mostly the result of iteration).
Maybe it doesn't conflict with your point because even so I wouldn't exactly say I'm no more functional than your grandma, so maybe typing and vim/ide-ricing are just a couple of exceptions that I can afford to get wrong as long as everything else is good.
Though I don't know what else there even is to be "fast" at. I don't think I really even understand how one can be good or bad at mere window management. ssh-ing? What is there to that? knowing how to manage keys?
However, all in all, I like this. Even if it means I'd currently fall on the wrong side of this idea, I think I agree with this idea to have an expectation of basic competency with the tools in any field one would presume to get paid for. Maybe even now I should just suck it up and learn to type and develop a powerful vim setup.
Yes, the bar sometimes I have to witness, is low, very very low. I say that someone like you who even thinks and can rephrase thoughts about this, is already of the upper percentiles of capability.
OTOH presenting is a different skill. Maybe I should have elaborated that as a field expert of a (not-so-)niche thing, I often get contacted by random colleagues who will ask me to "let them quickly share their screen to show what the problem is". Their demonstrated horrific inability to "do computers" is surprising and upsetting.
Therefore I thought about this a lot in the past. Maybe the windows concept is wrong? Should there be more experiments like OP proposing? And slowly I start to believe, that probably the windows concept is okay, since you and me and thousands of others are capable, and it's just a skill issue.
I think the way both current windows and gnome(1) work out of the box are completely obtuse and when forced to use one I only become functional after undoing a dozen arbitrary, unnecessary, and actively self-inflicted wounds to make the environment minimally sane and utilitarian. So, there is a possible argument to say that bumbling was thrust upon them.
But really that just explains and excuses my mom, who does not work in any proximity to any flavor of IT.
(1) mac too just slightly less so, and I'm no fan just to be clear, I just think mac started out the worst in this way, then didn't get much worse over time while windows & gnome both got insanely worse
Every time I have to do something on someone's bog standard machine, I just think "how do you people live like this?"
Not that many years ago a flat unadorned description of win11 today would be taken as completely unbelievable hyperbole movie gag that could never get that crazy for real obviously. Funny because of recognizable elements of truth but too stupid to be realistic.
The frog has simply been boiled exactly slow enough I guess.
(I had a bunch of descriptions of actual absurd and perverse things to show examples but the comment was a wall of text!)
This is false analogue. Comparing SWE to pianist and using desktop as the similar element is false. Desktop to SWE is like … how the concert pianist arrives at the concert venue. You want the pianist to arrive on time but you really don’t care about their mode of transportation.
Besides it’s good to take things slow when face to face with people.
Honestly, I'd rather work with engineers trying to build maintainable code than engineers who spend all the time trying to be a power user in the command line. It's possible to be both, but bad code wastes my time much more than a demo with a couple of hiccups.
I didn't mention cli on purpose, and I don't care if they can rearrange their commits in the command line or in some fancy gui, as long as they can do it. Also rarely care about aesthetics (e.g. ricing).
I'd rather observed correlation of experts who can navigate their GUIs / TUIs, and being good software engineers.
I'm more on the Apple hater side, but they getting lazy is simply not true.
For many years Apple dominates the Laptop hardware scene, and while there is no comparably performing competitors threatening them, they keep releasing newer, faster, more efficient chips. After using many operating systems, I know that for sure I don't want MacOS, but the hardware itself is hard to beat.
... thankfully. Gives many of us well-paid jobs, and the inexplicable joy of archeology (why certain decisions were made at some point in the nineties, and what buggy implementation a bits header is fixing).
And I'm not even snarky here. I kinda like to do this.
I'm a bit opponent of Apple's walled garden, but the build quality of this laptop is quite far away from a MacBook... Except the display, this OLED WXHQwhatever is stunning.
Source: I bought the same (with core i7, so it's performant, etc.).
Except... a million reasons where they will either not understand, or they should have not become a parent.
The problem with the "The Most Infuriating Answer" is that it entirely neglects facts, and only those say it who do have a good experience with it.
Happy for you, internet stranger. Just like I am happy for all of those around me: you all are the ones who do good parenting.
In case you also want to become a better person in general, I recommend to stop being condescending, and not to say this ever again to anyone. You hurt more than you think you are wise.
I don't see OP's comment as condescending but I'm also not in these "should have not become a parent" shoes to tell, for sure. Insensitive? Perhaps. On a discussion board, it is hard to know who you're talking to. OP likely assumed some "persona" (different to those that might find it hurtful) before they wrote the comment.
> You hurt more than you think you are wise
We are all fighting some demon or the other. I appreciate you for bringing forth the kind most of us are (fortunate enough to be) oblivious to. Ignorance is bliss.
The irony of this fact should be front and center to everyone and thus people saying it should have this forced to be capitalized with exclamation points.
Similar, all invocations of "calm down" should be in all caps with exclamation points. Never in history has telling someone whose upset to "calm down" actually led to them calming down.
Then you must be sad that the "AI slop" is a user friendly, working toy whereas the OSM data one is just a miserable static database-render.
Go and compare them. I love getting lost in data, and I was happy to see all the overloaded, very badly curated, non-dynamic OpenRailwayMap. I cannot click on a railway to get more info, the electrification map is just a mess of many similarly shaded colors. Not user friendly, even if it _has_ the data, it is unfriendly to the user, and makes exploration hard.
I say this as an OSM enthusiast and contributor.
Compare this to the "AI slop"; even though at first I ran into a misinformation (Zambia central links to London Central), it still made me stay on the page and explore some scenic routes. I obviously knew that this is NOT all the railways, but something fun to engage with and maybe even learn / explore some new things, hell maybe start planning my winter vacation.
I guess what I am saying is: your comment has no added value, just sourness, negativity.
I hope the author keeps iterating on this project, eventually make it more OSM-interconnected, fix the tiny bugs and focus on bringing joy to us who are interested. After all, this product is out in public now, whereas your miserable comment will get buried here for good.
I called it AI slop because the first thing I looked for (Tren Maya) is missing half it tracks. Maybe that's not AI's fault, but that was my first impression.
I my mind it's mostly corporate socio-political. Your management have no idea what a (rest) API is, but they saw MCP in countless LinkedIn slop and therefore you are allowed to work on one / use an upstream solution to connect the agents to your 23 year old monolithic unmaintained homebrew CRM that only runs because overcompensated Frank is still willing to pet it manually.
However...
> Different people use windows totally differently.
The older I get, the more impatient I am with this. In the industry, we normalized that high paid software developers (who are way better programmers, or infra people than I am) waste hundreds of engineering hours with their absolutely broken window management, and command-tab hell. Whenever I have to witness a screenshare of a colleague, my time is also wasted.
I wish this would be an interview gating: show us how you manage yourself in this big monorepo, switching tasks, windows, tabs, desktops, SSHs etc. Do not normalize noob time wasting.
Different people also use pianos differently. Yet, we don't appreciate a noob pushing random keys around it. It would be unpleasant to the ear, just how unpleasant (painful) it is to witness macOSs/gnomes bubblegum horror of sloppily animated chaos.
Back to my point: windows (as in viewports) are with us for many decades. I don't care if you tile, stack, infinite scroll them. Just be productive. Invest upfront in learning, be fast, and be able to explain what I you try to show me on screen.
There will be no one size fits for all, and that part I understand. But please have more dexterity with your desktop abilities than my grandma.
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