Sketchup (free version) also lets you visualize the sun shadows based on location, date, and time. But it's not showing the strength of the sun like this.
Completely agree. What is a tragedy though, is that if Google treats their most hardworking engineers like this they are creating a culture of minimal effort. If this is "just a job" as you can expect to be laid off at a moment's notice with no care for the value of your contributions, then what is the point in doing anything more than what the job description entails. It's just incentivizing people to treat their job the same way the company treats their employees. A culture of distrust and minimum effort. It's very sad to see.
> if Google treats their most hardworking engineers like this they are creating a culture of minimal effort
This is bizarre to me because my impression from three years ago was that they were trying to correct from that, and it sounds like they overcorrected right back to it. I spoke with a Google engineer I think in 2022, he had heard rumors there were going to be layoffs on his team, and he had sent a message to a more senior team member that he hadn't heard from in months to let her know that she should, to put it delicately, maybe manage her visibility better. And she responded that she had lost interest in the job anyway, hadn't done anything except respond to emails and messages in over a year, and had 99% transitioned to managing a collection of properties she had been accumulating over the years, so if he heard she got laid off, he shouldn't feel bad for her. I'm pretty sure that was in 2022.
To see Google go from tolerating being ghosted by highly compensated senior+ engineers in 2022 to laying off people who were doing excellent and high-profile work in 2025 must be surreal for people inside Google. If this is all accurate, they swung the pendulum from one zone of encouraging laxity and disloyalty right through the healthy zone and into another zone of encouraging laxity and disloyalty with dizzying speed.
> If this is "just a job" as you can expect to be laid off at a moment's notice with no care for the value of your contributions, then what is the point in doing anything more than what the job description entails
I guess the half million dollars yearly (I'm assuming he made) and the fact there aren't tons of other places he can get that kind of money and prestige for doing that kind of job.
I'm not saying I'm loving any of this, but yeah the system we've built treats all of us like replaceable cogs. During good economic times we don't really feel it, but we are now in a rough patch and we see the capitalist economic reality for what it is.
This is bad journalism. The writers have not done their research on the effects of the "banned drugs" they are mentioning. Someone who doesn't have ADHD would only get negative side-effects from taking stimulants, like hunger suppression, anxiety, depression and much more. Stimulants don't have the same effect on a brain that is not dopamine deficient. Ventolin for asthma has absolutely no effect on someone who doesn't have an issue with their airways narrowing due to asthma.
Besides, the information they are reporting on is private and was wrongfully leaked. Broadcasting it and even framing it in a bad light is simply wrong.
If anything, the athletes who truly are abusing these TUE rules probably do so out of superstition, to gain any advantage possible, real or otherwise. But I do not believe that they gain an actual advantage over other competitors who aren't taking these drugs.
Well, that's not entirely correct — amphetamines even for people without ADHD are still going to cause stimulation, euphoria, etc. Albuterol (Ventolin) is still a beta 2 agonist whether or not you have asthma, and exercise-induced bronchoconstriction is still going to benefit from that.
> Stimulants don't have the same effect on a brain that is not dopamine deficient
Well yeah you're right, it tends to produce euphoria, stimulation, and improved mood, which is why it's such a massively abused drug.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the article but saying that therapeutic drugs have zero or only negative effect on people without their targeted pathologies is just plain wrong. I know a lot of athletes do things for "superstition" but when competing at the highest levels, I would wager that pharmaceuticals are probably pretty carefully evaluated for risk/reward.
That is a bit harsh. I think the OP had good intentions, but I agree that focusing on breaking habits might be the wrong way to go here. I think medication works for some, therapy for others. But the focus really needs to be on finding your strengths, which are also part of your ADHD brain, and working on those.
It’s not harsh when it’s advice that can literally destroy lives. People like me, who allowed such nonsense to prevent them seeking an actually effective and proven treatment for years whilst I flailed and failed to exercise/meditate/productivity/diet it away. My failure to seek real treatment due to listening to such shit for a long time robbed me of years of productivity, capability, time and outcomes that I’ll never get back.
It’s like telling a diabetic to not take the insulin crutch. “Just eat a salad bro you don’t need insulin pffft.”
People with ADHD should do all those other things as well, in fact most people should. However it’s not going to adequately treat many more, who can be treated, provably and effectively with a real medical treatment. A treatment that has again and again proven to be an effective, gold class standard of treatment and outcomes.
Telling people to break bad habits is one thing, convincing people with real medical problems to explicitly avoid proven frontline treatment for which we know can improve/prolong and save lives is an entirely different thing.
Completely agree with your second paragraph. I don't think it's helpful to label it as a "disability". Although the medical term is "disorder", at least for me, this kind of thinking got me digging a hole for myself that I had to climb out of. According to recent research, ADHD may be the fruit of evolution, making us focus on what's important and discarding the mundane. This makes us incredibly creative, out-of-the box thinkers and very efficient at tasks that truly engage us. Once I focused on that idea, I could start working on my strength, and stop "curing" my shortcomings.
For me it is helpful to think of it as a disability in the social model of disability. I wear glasses too and it's interesting to compare these two things.
Having poor vision doesn't negatively affect me much because I can easily access effective accommodations for it. ADHD can be the same, and is not mostly because of my lack of power & rights in respect to choices my employers make.
Unfortunately, Jira work is sometimes massively important (to your boss), and also tremendously boring. That was the biggest obstacle I had, and the biggest improvement after medication – the ability to easily do work I’d rather not be doing.
But do you agree that not everyone is meant to work on Jira tickets? I think a lot of people's ADHD flies under the radar until they face the unescapable tedium of corporate work and bureaucracy. Perhaps under different circumstances people with ADHD would shine without needing any medication.
> But do you agree that not everyone is meant to work on Jira tickets?
Most definitely. There is probably some archetype of person who delights in creating tasks, epics, etc. More power to them.
> Perhaps under different circumstances people with ADHD would shine without needing any medication.
When I first got into tech (I did a mid-career shift), I was a shining star that would grind out ticket after ticket, so long as the work was interesting. It helped that we did Kanban, so there was always work to do. The first time I had to do some monotonous administrative work, though, I just kept putting it off, and putting it off, and putting it off... then when the deadline loomed, I suddenly had motivation to get it done.
As an aside, this style of work did _not_ do well with Scrum, because of the absurd insistence on sizing tickets based on the average team member's capabilities. I have no idea how long it will take Person Foo to get that done; I already know exactly how to do it, and can knock it out in a few hours. Why don't you let Person Foo figure out how long things will take _them_, instead of making me artificially slow down? Presumably they have some specialties they could also zero in on, and the entire team would then move faster.
I have been through hell becoming a new dad, thinking that my mind was broken, and I would end up making the same mistakes as my own father because of our common traits due to ADD. I tried all kinds of medication, started doing therapy, had sleep deprivation and started being extremely anxious.
What I learned coming out of it is that I am not broken. ADHD is not a condition, it is simply the way my brain was designed. All that medication could not do what I wanted it to do which is make the ADHD disappear. That's not going to happen. It's just that the majority of people have non-ADHD brains and we are therefore expected to be the same.
Think of it like being left-handed. It used to be that kids in school were punished for being left-handed until they became "right-handed". Turns out they were never right-handed in the first place, they were just forced to be. When that practice stopped, suddenly numbers of left-handed people in the world went up and stabilized around 10%. These people are not broken, but if all of the tools, scissors, cars, and everything they interact with were designed only for right-handed people, they would feel broken.
The truth is a lot of what makes us "different" as ADHD people is also a strength. Creativity, great ability to recognize patterns, to think outside of the box, are all really great assets. Even some of our faults are simply there because our brain was designed to do that. For example, when you leave the house and forget the trash for a 100th time, it's not that you stupidly forgot the trash that was right in front of you. It's because your mind is really good at focusing on what's truly important to you, and the trash was automatically discarded from your thoughts so you could do that.
There was a study where they had "neurotypical" and ADHD/Autistic people picking berries in a field and they found that ADHD/Autistic people were consistently able to pick more berries because they did not spend as much time on a single bush as neurotypical people [https://www.sciencealert.com/adhd-traits-may-have-evolved-to...]. This study suggests that ADHD might have been promoted by evolution, and not a "disorder" like we may think.
To conclude for my issues as a new dad, I have found that my own father's shortcomings are not due to his ADHD, but rather an overall lack of empathy and some unrelated mental issues he has to deal with. I have found it much easier now to accept my ADHD as a part of me instead of a disorder and have moved on from it to work on other aspects of my personality. Since then, I have found that even my shortcomings due to ADHD have been less severe because I understand and accept that they happen and give myself tools to work around them instead.
I agree with you on that. It probably is a great product but that marketing point makes it seem sketchy. I found the video looked suspiciously like Apple's late ads too.
This is very obviously trying to feed off Apple's fanbase.
It made me do a double-take when I saw the Windows logo in a screenshot as Apple would never market that, not that it is a bad thing, just that the branding of this app's marketing strikes too close to Apple's.
From a usability perspective I totally agree with this article. From a design standpoint though, people generally prefer minimalism over realism in UI design. I also much prefer the design of macs today over PCs, even though I prefer Windows for usability. Apple these days is more looks over function, while Steve Jobs thought the other way around was the way to go in my opinion. So there is a decline over what Apple stood for after Jobs.
Ooooh, interesting article, it's talking about... Oh, sorry I was reading... You don't like ad blockers you say? Oh well, guess it must be a pretty boring article anyway. Farewell.
This is a bit insulting. If you find my comment unsubstantive, please delete it. I think this kind of paywall is threatening the web and thought important to point it out.
I certainly didn't intend to insult you! It's more that that kind of snark is deprecated on HN, because it's associated with lower-quality internet discourse and we're trying for higher quality here.
The point about paywalls also comes up so often that we've asked people not to post such complaints in the threads; for the most part they're off-topic ballast. Few people here like paywalls, but it just gets tedious reading the same complaints over and over, even if one shares the complaint.
