[eddieroger]

It's not only not how you get promoted, it's a pretty good way to get canned as well. If you don't like the work you're being asked to do, your options are pretty limited to doing it or going elsewhere. There are a million UXers and engineers who'd love to work at Apple and would be happy making whatever their boss suggests.

[rdiddly]

That's how you know the "culture" and the "vision" really do have to come from the top, and how you know Steve Jobs really was providing value.

[EGreg]

Seriously. People got canned for resisting the corporate overlords. That’s capitalism. Corporations run by their employees? Guilds? Cooperatives? Hah! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc

Just that usually the forcefed initiatives have to do with corporate profits for shareholders, or trends like shoving AI into everything. Imagine saying no to that!

Even at the supra-corporate and supra-national level, if the organizing principle is competition, no actor not even a CEO or a corporate board or a government can afford to stop racing towards disaster. There is a simple mantra: “If we don’t achieve AGI first, China will and then they’ll dominate.”

Once in a while, the world comes together to successfully ban eg chemical weapons or CFCs, and repair the hole in the ozone layer. Cooperation and restraint takes effort.

Judging by the way we’ve drained all the aquifers, overfished the last fish, destroyed the kelp forests, cut down the rainforsts, bleached the corals, and polluted the world with plastic, I don’t think there is much hope of stopping.

Insects and pollinators are way down, and many larger species are practically extinct, 95% of the world’s animal biomass is humans and their food, and people still pretend environmental catastrophe is all about a few degrees of temperature.

PS: Yes, that escalated quickly. In the real world, it has taken only 80 years… :-/

[mgfist]

I don't think corporate profits are the reason Apple has shitty UX because it's hard to argue how shitty UX correlates to higher profit, especially when it costs more to create a shitty UX than to keep the good one you already have.

I reckon it's more that some Apple VP has to justify their million dollar equity package by creating work for their org, because otherwise why should you still have a job?

[groundzeros2015]

That’s not capitalism. That’s hierarchy. It didn’t start in the 20th century

[EGreg]

Capitalism and competition produce the results I describe further down the comment. It escalates to planetary catastrophe

[groundzeros2015]

Let’s focus on the specific claims in your comment.

> People got canned for resisting the corporate overlords. That’s capitalism

Being told to do things by your boss is a problem as old as time. Except with capitalism you can change bosses — a luxury which has not existed throughout history.

[EGreg]

Okay great. Now keep going with the rest of my comment and address the rest point by point. You’ll find that it expands from that first point, and describes the consequences of capitalism and competition as an organizing principle.

[hex4def6]

We are discussing UI/Icon design, not the geopolitical implications of AGI or the Holocene extinction event.

Why should someone that disagrees with you on whether capitalism is uniquely responsible for bad icon design now be forced to defend it for every sin / shortcoming ranging from the social inequity to ecological collapse?

[groundzeros2015]

Sure, I guess I’m here.

Why is capitalist competition worse than any other form of competition? Wouldn’t wartime competition over land and sovereignty be far worse? Didn’t the Soviet Union have extreme forms of political competition?