[civilized]

Many of you will be familiar with this story: military pilot gear was once designed for the average person, but then they realized that actually, most people deviate significantly from the average in at least one way. So they made the gear adjustable, and that greatly improved performance and reduced mistakes.

Why is it that in tech we are often told a seemingly contrary narrative -- that everything is better, or at least more profitable, when targeted to some hypothetical average person, and who cares about the diversity of individuals?

[blargey]

Might be that military pilots are much more engaged with the product than the average google-user with search.

Or how these digital tools pervade spaces where everyone has to be able to use them, even if they're the type that refuses to engage with the text displayed in message boxes or technical jargon like "files" and "tabs", because they have the expertise that is more valuable to the business than the peripheral software. A greater expectation and insistence that things "just work", that the tools get out of the way instead of integrating with the user.

Maybe adjusting some straps and seat positions is more intuitive than digging for advanced options. Maybe it's significantly more difficult to surface options in digital mediums without introducing friction as a side-effect, because you're always fighting over screen real estate and screen legibility, instead of being able to just add a latch on the strap that's there when you need it and invisible when you don't.

[Swizec]

> Maybe adjusting some straps and seat positions is more intuitive than digging for advanced options. Maybe it's significantly more difficult to surface options in digital mediums without introducing friction as a side-effect, because you're always fighting over screen real estate and screen legibility, instead of being able to just add a latch on the strap that's there when you need it and invisible when you don't

You design a different car to win F1 races, to take a couch across town, to drive a family on a weekend trip, to win rally races, to haul a boat … but in software we don’t want to do that. We want everything to do everything because “niche” markets are too small for companies to keep growing into the stratosphere.

See also: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. (zawinski's law)

[evilduck]

There’s a military, and by proxy a government and a country’s populace behind a pilot who are all invested in a pilot’s success. In battle or on missions they don’t get many do-overs and pilots and planes are expensive to mobilize and to lose. Millions of dollars are on the line each time they take off, better to get it right the first time.

For ad driven search engine products the more you as a user flail the more ads you can be served on subsequent searches, so long as they ride the line of not driving you away entirely. A string of ten searches that fail you is bad because their product looks ineffective but two or three searches to get what you want is better for their bottom line than nailing it on your first attempt.

[mbivert]

The military in general seem to be more rationally grounded than civilians, as far as work is concerned. Promiscuity with death must encourage a different "work culture".

[jonathankoren]

I get the feeling that there’s an inverse correlation between the number of people that think the military is a competent meritocracy and the number of people that actually served in the military.

It’s a giant government bureaucracy, with plenty of stupid internal politics, and gross incompetency. No better or worse than any other large organization.

[synecdoche]

Thinking that people that have trait X in common to also have some admirable trait Y is unfortunately wishful thinking. The military may for some be one of the last areas of such thinking.

[mbivert]

Yeah it's probable that I'm idealizing.

My direct experience is very limited, but I've heard a few decent things from people better involved than I am. I suppose "the military" is a wide thing, there must be consequential differences between, say, American bureaucrats and French field soldiers in Africa for example. The former shouldn't be as close to death, or to soldiers who are, on a daily basis.