The Browser Monopoly - <AUTHOR> http://blairreeves.me/2019/08/20/the-browser-monopoly/ <comment><USER2> >Chrome introduced a lot of neat new features (Porn "Incognito Mode," multithreaded memory changes, tabs and more).

Now chrome is getting credit for in private browsing and tabs? (Safari and Opera respectively. Phoenix/Firefox popularized them long before Chrome was a twinkle.)

>It is mind-boggling that basic tools like these are not yet standard features in browsers.

How long have browsers offered to save passwords? Seems like a lot of bad history in this article.

>The way existing password managers work, the vendor's liability even if they are hacked is minimal. They don't hold any passwords!

HUH? Yes they do.. They absolutely hold a copy of your password ... in the cloud.

>Sure, Chromium and the V8 engine are open-source, but they still belong to Google in a way that, say, TCP/IP or IMAP does not.

Im gonna feel really bad breaking the QUIC / HTTP/3 news. Cuz google totally wrote the new transport layer. They wrote the last one too (SPDY HTTP/2.) With this much market share, what google implements and forces the hands of the standards organizations.

>This is why Microsoft's decision to kill Internet Explorer, once the leading portal to the web, and replace it with a Chromium-based successor says so much about its new direction as a company. I suspect that decision had more to do with clearly understanding Microsoft's strengths and weaknesses than anything else.

Its primarily for two reasons. 1 is battery life, they want to embed blink into the os so programs dont need to bundle it (electron included.) 2 is because 99% of the web just targets blink now. I dont think you can credit "the move to ssas" alone with Microsoft finally abandoning IE derivatives.

<comment><USER3> Chrome had the nifty break away title bar tabs before anyone else.

But the major improvement that made everyone switch was process separation for each tab. One tab could crash while the others stayed functional and a security vulnerability in one tab would have a more difficult time compromising the others.

It's also one of the reasons Chome uses so much memory, they failed to keep optimizing their copy-on-write paging behaviour so that tabs would share more memory among themselves.

Nowadays Firefox has process separation for tabs AND it's not written by an advertising company, so I like it better.

<comment><USER4> _But the major improvement that made everyone switch was process separation for each tab_

Which IE8 had around the same time (It may have launched after Chrome, but in the contemporaneous betas, they both had the feature)

What made people switch was a combination of everything google did having the sheen of "cool" around it, and the fact that I.E development was slow and shoddy.

<comment><USER5> My perspective on browser history is a little different. I've been following and using Firefox since before it was Firefox. At one point in time, I was working in a computer store. IE6 - 8 was letting ActiveX controls and other scripts run rampant, infecting people like crazy. 99% of our business was malware cleanup and removal due to IE. Once you explained to people what happened, they were appaled and were happy to switch to Firefox, despite many sites only working on IE at the time. THIS is what really triggered the migration away from IE. Firefox was taking off (look at the chart in the linked article), and was starting to dominate, well before Chrome ever became a thing. Those of us on Linux also had Konqueror, and it had a decent userbase as well.

I think that's when Google noticed that the IE monopoly was breaking, and they jumped onboard and took Konqueror's code and then launched their own browser. The same code that Apple used for Safari. So they basically came in on the hard work of Firefox and the KHTML team and took over the market by putting Chrome right on Google's homepage.

It's my opinion that Chrome didn't become popular because it was better, or because it was cool (no average user cares about that). It became popular by being right there on everybody's home page, right at the perfect time that people were catching on to the fact that IE had zero security.

Firefox broke the monopoly and freed us, and then Google and Apple came in and shat all over them.

<comment><USER6> I seem to remember at the time Chrome was faster than FF.

<comment><USER7> Way faster

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't get why people (I mean technically minded people who are aware of privacy issues and so on) don't just use firefox. They are pretty much at feature parity (Firefox may even get the edge due to the fantastic extensions ecosystem), except one spies on you and the other doesn't. Why do people find the switch so hard?

In addition, Firefox + ublokc origin is pretty much the only option on mobile if you want to block ads, unless you want to fiddle with hosts files or pi- holes or something.

<comment><USER9> I'm a technically minded person. I've been using web browsers since NCSA Mosaic. I switch browsers probably once per decade (mosaic -> netscape navigator -> firefox -> chrome).

At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and firefox was losing the war because content creators were continually accidentally making things work in IE only. (By "accidentally" I mean that the standards were very confusing, and understanding what would work with which browser was a continual battle, and Microsoft had a good 15 years under its belt of attempting to make the web a windows only affair).

So then Chrome comes along, backed my Google, and people started treating it as a first class citizen. Sites were belt to run with, and tested on Chrome.

Fast forward to now. I actually do want to have a wide array of ad sponsored content on the internet because I appreciate the free content and I'm not going to pay 30 different 5$ per month subscriptions for stuff I _might_ read. Are they tracking me? Yes. When I search for lawn mowers online I get spams (which gmail seems to filter just fine) and my rarely logged into facebook feed is full of lawn mower ads. I use in-cognito when I want to see what a google or linked in search looks like without my user context. I use ABP when sites are too aggressive with their ads.

And it's all fine. I suspect my current experience is common, to answer your question.

<comment> dao- > At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and > firefox was losing the war [...]

This is false. Firefox's market share was continuously rising until Chrome came along (and Google marketed it aggressively). IE was still strong but already losing.

<comment><USER5> You are correct. For some reason, I keep seeing this history repeated over and over, but even the chart in the article confirms you're correct. Firefox was taking over like crazy before Chrome came along...

<comment><USER9> ... I'm talking about before that. Netscape went from 90% to 6% once IE started bundling on Windows. Firefox "taking over like crazy" is a later comeback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _Firefox is a fine browser by itself [...] I have the comfort of knowing > that my personal information is protected (to the extent possible) – and > also that my portal to the web is not custom-built to track me and serve me > ads_

FF _is_ fantastic, but the uncomfortable question is, will it always be, given Mozilla has to found further development and is financed by Google's money as well? Apple's Safari actually has better standing in terms of alignment of user and developer incentives.

For a sustainable web (what's left of it anyway), it would be more helpful to radically simplify the web such that developers have reasonable and feasible specs to work against, and have diversity in browsers once again. Meanwhile, Google is working hard to lead audiences elsewhere via AMP, a Trojan made possible by JavaScript in the first place.

<comment><USER11> >Apple's Safari actually has better standing in terms of alignment of user and developer incentives.

Apple gets credit for being aligned with users and developers?

Out of any of the tech companies, I see Apple the most detached from their users and developers.

Forcing proprietary software, hardware, and accessories is not "for users and developers".

That's Apple's way of generating additional sales and data for Apple.

If they had users and developers as their primary goal, it would be easier to be an Apple customer.

<comment><USER12> I assume they meant aligned _with respect to users and developers_. Google is primarily an advertising company, and Firefox's revenue comes mostly from Google. Apple has no interests in ads these days (and their old ad platform never did browser ads anyway), so you don't have the same sort of competing incentives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I made Firefox as the primary browser even though battery usage during conference call and some webapps is much higher than chrome on a Mac.

I do it on principle and make sure my apps work on Firefox besides chrome. Although many friends and fellow developers tell me why I spend extra efforts.

Web components created a lot of issue when trying to make them run on both Firefox and chrome. But I went ahead with it and my front end team need to put a lot of additional efforts. I don't know why it's so hard to stick to standards. Both chrome and Firefox will behave bit differently for CSS and JavaScript.

Developing a PWA which works good on both browser feels like developing native apps for Android and iOS using cross platform toolkits, which at times require a lot of additional code and testing just so that they work predictable. Still results in not so good experience.

<comment><USER14> What I've heard is that Chrome shipped an unfinished early version of the web components spec, and now there are sites relying on it because it works in Chrome and that's good enough. I think the spec has been more or less finalized now? I'm not sure whether it's shipping in both browsers, though. Something is (eg for firefox it's since 63), but I don't know exactly what.

I believe YouTube uses a whole framework based on the preratified spec?

<comment><USER13> Even though the spec is finalized there are enough variation on support on different browsers leading to substantial efforts to make a web components based pwa work on multu-browser.

If it had been worked out properly there's isn't any need of react or angular except for a state management library, since the views and components is taken care of by the browser directly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Monopolies like these are partially built by the demand side flowing towards the option of least resistance. In such case, the average person will float towards browser X when Y seems to, for example, become slower, take more processing power or pure peer pressure "I can't believe you are still using browser P, it is so slow!".

As demand floats towards few suppliers, organizations with the most value to gain from it will either look to purchase one of the current suppliers or increase investment to outpace its competitors. In time, the market becomes a monopoly/oligopoly due to both demand (customer) and supply (org/biz interests). At this point, the mono/oli has the means to change things, either slowly or drastically, to maximize their gains.

Unless a good portion of society takes further interest in keeping what they believe to be right (e.g. privacy) and put their money and time where their belief is, non-profit orgs or less agressive ones are most likely to lose 99 out of 100 times in the long run. This is a human nature challenge, not necessarily an entity problem.

</comment><comment><USER16> Am I the only one that doesn't like chrome? There has always been a "weird feel" to it that I don't like. I used to really like Konqueror, so I guess its mostly the interface that gets to me.

...As I type this I look the sandwich menu, and lack of search bar in firefox and I die a little inside.

<comment><USER17> You want a separate search field? Just go to Customise and drag it to the toolbar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I recently ditched Chrome and switched back to Firefox, at home and on my mobile, only to discover that a surprising number of sites don't work in Firefox. In particular: Twitter doesn't work on Firefox Mobile.

Most work fine, but still, I ended up switching to Safari, to discover that it's just not quite as good an experience as Firefox or Chrome.

<comment><USER19> > I ended up switching to Safari, to discover that it's just not quite as good > an experience as Firefox or Chrome.

IMO, I find it to be just the opposite--neither Firefox nor Chrome are as good an experience as Safari.

Maybe the difference is that when a particular site does not work in a given browser, I don't blame the browser, I blame the website.

<comment><USER20> Safari seems to lag a lot in features. In compatibility it's a modern IE

<comment><USER21> Hardly. It took how long for Chrome and FF to support position sticky, or backdrop filter?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why Chrome exists is missing a key driver - A significant portion of Google's search traffic came from business deals where they paid browser vendors (or others) to be the default search option. As they cannibalized the browser market they eliminated this cost or gained significant negotiating power.

"Driving innovation on the web" is the don't be evil slogan that motivates us all to allow them to "vertically integrate advertising and cut costs".

<comment><USER23> _As they cannibalized the browser market they eliminated this cost or gained significant negotiating power._

They still pay Apple a reported $12 billion a year and they have no negotiating power on iOS.

<comment><USER22> Which is to say - "Why does Android exist?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A seemingly minor issue got me really worried about the future of the Chrome monopoly.

For some reason, some developer/product manager at Chrome decided to ignore `"autocomplete"="off". This reeks havoc with the 100s of JS autocomplete addons out there when chrome autocomplete pops up over the custom built on.

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12374442/chrome- ignores-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12374442/chrome-ignores- autocomplete-off)

Seems like there's no resolution yet, aside from a stream of ridiculous hacks that all tend to break at one point or another.

If Google wants to own the browser, they are going to need a more transparent process on these things. It affects everyone now and they have to start governing their changes more appropriately.

</comment><comment><USER25> I was shocked to see the browser market share graph. Chrome appears to be collapsing on itself, dropping from from an all-time high of 65.4% to 55.4% in just 16 months, effectively losing all share gains since 2016.

But then I looked closer at the data, noticing that only net 120 basis points of the change can be explained by share changes in the other browsers. The rest of the data seems to be missing, as the numbers add up to less than 100%.

What the heck is going on?

Edit: It goes without saying that the article's failure to address this point fundamentally discredits the author. It should be obvious that the first thing an article claiming monopoly would need to do is explain the plummeting market share of the thing that is allegedly a monopoly..

<comment><USER26> I am also wondering why Opera (=Presto) is in that graph. Since the latest Opera is Chromium-based I would expect it to be counted as Chromium.

<comment><USER27> Importantly, implemented on top of Chromium does not mean feature parity with Chrome.

<comment><USER26> Neither security parity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This article has a lot of wrong or otherwise misleading information. One I haven't noticed in the comments so far is that the author refers to Chromium as being free and open-source. It isn't [0]. It downloads more Google account and activity tracking related blobs than ever when building the code as well.

While I agree with the gist of the article, this is worth pointing out since a lot of people do use Chromium because it is advertised this way, thinking that somehow they are not playing into the Chrome/Google monopoly. For those interested, there is an alternative build without all the google stuff baked in: [https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled- chromium](https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium)

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724409)

<comment><USER29> I remember seeing an article a few months ago, that Microsoft removed 51 Google services from Chromium while they transitioned Edge to it.

[https://imgur.com/Szwkb0O](https://imgur.com/Szwkb0O)

That list helps to show how Chromium is far from the open-source ideal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> >but what Google was really doing was laying the groundwork for the ability to deliver all sorts of new online ad formats (like video) and complicated Javascript behind them that would help track and target users more effectively.

this is just plain dumb. There are plenty of other uses for javascript and powerful programming features beyond ads, and even google's most complicated ad products barely scratch the surface of what's possible with the new js features that have been introduced since the beginning of the chrome project.

Just because google is an ad company, doesn't mean everything they do is purely and simply about serving ads. And if you're going to try and make the argument that it is, you had better have something to back it up - you can't just make the claim and then skip on to the next bit of your rant.

</comment><comment><USER31> Just a quick rant about Firefox -- an INSANELY annoying bug that they've yet to fix is when trying to copy the URL on Mobile Firefox, 99% of the time I get the wrong address (the previous page I was on), because it seemingly doesn't populate the address as the page you're currently looking at if the page hasn't fully loaded yet. It's so odd.

Other than that, Firefox > Chrome. Privacy situation is vastly superior and web standards support is comparable. I also just feel that Mozilla is a way better company ethics wise, and for the software community at large, than Google.

</comment><comment><USER32> My only use for chrome is to interact with the google web apps that don't work well in firefox or safari. Otherwise it wouldn't be installed.

IMO Google softly requires you to use chrome because their tools, in my experience, are unstable in other browsers (I'm looking at you meet)

The cynic in me is doubtful that this is entirely by accident.

<comment><USER33> So I have a Gmail (G Suite Free) account, and I use Thunderbird on any computer I use regularly. Gmail is painfully slow to being almost unusable on Firefox. Sometimes I cannot get emails to send. So if I'm logging in temporarily, I'm usually forced to use Chrome.

I think is just one example of Chromium being a bit too ubiquitous, and forcing users into the Google black hole.

Is there an affordable paid custom domain email option with good spam filtering?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The only way you are going to get a competitive landscape for browsers is to get away from the paradigm of the browser containing the entire kitchen sink, i.e. its own OS.

Maybe there could be an alternative that only supports markdown. Or maybe markdown/rst and web assembly.

</comment><comment><USER35> I have recently returned to Firefox for my personal browsing after using Chrome since about 2014 and it works great. However...

In work I'm stuck using Chrome due to the amount of time I spend in Google Apps (Docs, Sheets, Google Analytics, Search Console & Data Studio) as they break certain functionality on Firefox, which makes me less productive.

Google has too much power. I work in Search Engine Marketing and it wasn't so long ago that we optimised sites for different search engines, now no-one cares about any search engine other than Google.

</comment><comment><USER36> I only use Chrome when I want to exec into a pod in Kubernetes when using `kubectl proxy`. For some reason this doesn't work in Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER37> I really tried hard to use Edge as much as possible, but it was rubbish until the day MS threw in the towel.

</comment><comment><USER38> Set my default browser to Firefox for the first time in ~10 years.

</comment><comment><USER39> Can we talk about Brave? Its impressed me immensely, and BAT is a profound new approach to monetization on the web. in the context of this article its the only salvation i see; much like telegram for messaging, it provides a privacy and performance focus that makes it infinitely better than the bloat of chrome at getting you around the web; And without the ads and tracking. Awesome.

<comment><USER40> Brave is based on Chromium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Interesting i was just thinking about this yesterday. I should ditch chrome. yet here i am typing more shit for google to harvest from me and sell to the highest bidder.

<comment><USER42> What is the point of making this comment? Why haven't you switched? It's not that hard.

<comment><USER39> Brave, guys. Switch to Brave. Brave is everything.

<comment><USER43> Brave has too much bloatware for my taste.

<comment><USER44> whats your alternative?

<comment><USER43> FireFox or one of the many other Chromium derivatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The number of features that gecko (Firefox) lack vs blink (chromiums) is growing everyday... In a factual sense, mozilla slow down the evolution of the web and what it allow web masters to create.

But it is nothing in comparison of safari which is pathetically behind blink and gecko feature wise. It's a _shame_ that the most popular websites don't team up to block safari and ask to install a browser that supports web standards. YouTube did this with a version of IE and weeks after they were followed by thousands of websites not supporting this antic version.

<comment><USER46> For most front-end web devs, iOS Safari is the new IE6.

<comment><USER47> Truth, mobile Safari is far and away the worst of the "modern" browsers, and it's basically impossible to test unless you have a spare Apple device or you pay for BrowserStack :/

<comment><USER48> Why not use [https://webkit.org/](https://webkit.org/) to test against it? you can usually just get the version of webkit that mobile safari is based on and build it

Yes, it is a hassle, but it works well in my experience.

Also this:

[https://webkit.org/blog/9395/webdriver-is-coming-to- safari-i...](https://webkit.org/blog/9395/webdriver-is-coming-to-safari-in- ios-13/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Signs you're working in a feature factory (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://cutle.fish/blog/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-factory <comment><USER2> Feature addiction is real.

This post points to perverse economic incentives as being one possible cause, but I have also seen this happen in open-source projects. It's a matter of listening to the wrong people, in my view. User feedback is incredibly valuable, but when user feedback comes in the form of GitHub issues rather than careful testing and conversation, the team will inevitably find themselves building more and more and more for no real benefit.

I've quoted this before, but what Don Norman says in The Invisible Computer still applies:

"Don't ask people what they want. Watch them and figure out their needs. If you ask, people usually focus on what they have and ask for it to be better: cheaper, faster, smaller. A good observer might discover that the task is unnecessary, that it is possible to restructure things or provide a new technology that eliminates the painstaking parts of their procedures. If you just follow what people ask for, you could end up making their lives even more complicated."

<comment><USER3> A useful metaphor we use in game dev: Players are the patient, you are the doctor. They're great at finding pain, but not at knowing how to heal it. It's on you to figure out what the underlying problem is and how to solve it.

Also, some of my favorite quotes on this subject:

 _You listen to all your fans and they always say "You should add this" or "You should add that." They never say "Take this out, take that out." They say "add more, add more!" There's an old saying that I love about design, it's about Japanese gardening actually, that "Your garden is not complete until there is nothing else that you can remove." I think a lot of designers think the opposite way - "What else can we add to the game to make it better?"_ -Will Wright

 _" People don't know what they want until you show it to them."_ -Steve Jobs

 _" Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They're not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we're waiting to die.

It's not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn't be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need."_ -Alan Moore

<comment><USER4> I'm not saying this to argue against your points: I'm a fan of Tangerine bank and have been _continually_ and _loudly_ telling them to remove the balances on the account overview screen as it now triggers "burning a hole in my pocket" psychology.

I only mean to say at least a few fans are actively asking for things to be removed, simplified, and (thoughtfully) refined.

<comment><USER5> You're asking a bank to remove visible account balances from a dashboard view?

<comment><USER6> I think it's a valid request. I wish Apple's iMessage App would allow hiding or moving conversations to folders to remove from sight. I may have an emotional or upsetting text with someone that I don't necessarily want to see every time I open the app, but also don't want to delete it. Or may need to use my phone in a presentation etc, and not want to show certain messages.

<comment><USER7> However adding an option to remove it as adding a feature, not taking one away.

<comment><USER8> The app was not complete without that feature. In the ideal state of the app, it was not something you could take away.

Or so I can reason around that logic anyhow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm part of the technical leadership at a company who is transitioning from small to medium-sized company. This article is disparaging virtually all of the initiatives we're trying to actually implement.

It's actually really hard to transition from anarchy into a more process- oriented where each person has a role to play so that Devs are no longer responsible for literally everything because everyone is used to Devs doing everything. PMs used to verbally communicate vague ideas of what the customer was looking for and it was up to us to interpret and decompose and deliver on dates agreed upon without our input.

There is a reason that the points in this article exist at all - because the alternative is actually worse!

<comment><USER10> This article isn't disparaging having a process for developing features or for maintaining a pipeline of features. It's disparaging conditions that prioritize the release of features _for the sake of releasing features_ as opposed to _for supporting the business ' needs_ (as determined by data-- including analysis of the performance of features, market conditions, and other factors).

This article describes the last company I worked for very well: that company was and is struggling precisely because the senior leadership promoted a culture of feature releases without consideration for their impact and consistently changing the focus of feature development not based on data, but whim, so that the product was steadily losing focus and coherence.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. Feature factories build features based on random assumptions, and not based on actual data.

I just wrote about this yesterday ([https://teamsuccess.io/hdd](https://teamsuccess.io/hdd)). I work as a consultant with lots of Scrum teams, and many devs feel like they're just sitting in the factory, cranking out features. Without knowing whether they're adding real value to the end-user.

So what can you do to break free from the feature factory? Something that I recommend for the teams I work with, and noticed that actually works, is "Hypothesis-Driven Development".

In short, replace the items in your product backlog with experiments rather than user stories. Instead of starting with a user story or epic, start with a testable hypothesis. Then run small experiments that will prove or disprove that hypothesis.

My favorite question nowadays is "Wait, why are we building this feature again?" :)

<comment><USER12> In my experience people are afraid to ask that question. The answer to that question may lead to questions around total addressable market which could cause uppermanagement to question the viability of the product or at least the cost / benefit of having a big development and product management team in the first place.

<comment><USER13> This is a terribly sad comment on the structure of our society, people worried they might be making something pointless. And the solution is to make sure the people paying for it don't realize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I suggest re-reading this article in the negative: Assume that your team implemented every single one of these bullet points perfectly, for every feature in every sprint. Now imagine that each of those bullet points is a recurring meeting invite on your calendar. Now imagine how happy you'd be spending all of that time in meetings or reading process-related e-mails so your company could satisfy the criteria of not being a feature factory. Does a feature factory sound so bad now?

I thought this article was great when it first came out, but I've since changed my mind. I've seen too many engineers, especially junior engineers, become overly cynical about their jobs after reading too much into this one article.

1) With 12 different "signs" of a feature factory, it begins to read like a horoscope: Almost everyone reading it can find something to identify with. Multiply this across every different project or initiative at a company, and everyone can think of multiple times their job has resembled the descriptions in this article. Does anyone actually read this article and walk away thinking their company has never once resembled the vague signs in the article?

2) It begins with an implied assumption that working in a feature factory is a _bad thing_. Combine that with the horoscope-like 12 possible indicators of a feature factory, and the reader will always conclude that their workplace is the _bad thing_.

3) It sets unrealistically high standards. The alternative to a "feature factory" is defined in the negative in this article. Can you think of any company that would score a perfect 12/12 on every bullet point in this article across every team in every department? The process overhead would be significant, and it would very easily translate to a lot of meetings, e-mails, and overhead.

The kernel of truth within the article is still very valid. Teams should absolutely take the points into consideration and apply them judiciously, where it matters. However, it's a mistake to use this article as a checklist by which to judge your company's process. Real work is always a bit messy, communication is never perfect, and just because you don't see these things with your own two eyes doesn't mean they aren't happening somewhere in the company.

As a product manager, suggestions are always welcome and I'm happy to discuss reasoning for decision making, but I also don't burden the entire team with every detail of every step of the way.

<comment><USER15> Ultimately it isn't an engineer's place to complain if they're working for a product that needs 100 more features to succeed in a competitive marketplace and win over customers.

I had the exact same reaction as you to this article after seeing it again, and wanted to share why I've also changed my mind on this. I was in "a feature factory" for few years and absolutely hated it. After leaving and going to a "not-feature factory" AKA "employee-happiness machine", I miss the feature factory.

Imagine you're building a Great Pyramid with 100 workers. The workers can't see the Pyramid and don't care about why a Pyramid is important. Is there time to explain to each worker exactly why they're moving a specific block? What about time to "review" why that one block didn't fit?

"Real work is always a bit messy"

Would you care about anything else other than how quickly each block got into place? The Pyramid can only be completed when all the blocks are in place, and most importantly- each block doesn't have to sit perfectly, and also, you can get by without ever delivering a "perfect block".

This is why product managers will never be 100% aligned with engineers. Product managers see "is the block there" and engineers see "is the block perfectly set" and "why am I not being appreciated?" and "why do they only care about putting down blocks".

It's bizarre to read how this person is so opposed to "up and to the right", that's the key indicator of you business and what will pay your bills. Yes, everyone is always going to be obsessed with revenue and you will never stop hearing about it.

Of course as an engineer- Resolve tech debt. You have to. But from the view at the top, it's a very temporary detour and needs to be resolved quickly so they can continue pumping out features.

Yes, I am making the analogy that engineers should accept being a "slave" to the product manager, or more directly, the product itself.

<comment><USER16> > This is why product managers will never be 100% aligned with engineers. > Product managers see "is the block there" and engineers see "is the block > perfectly set" and "why am I not being appreciated?" and "why do they only > care about putting down blocks".

I just want the damn PM to be able to tell me _where_ the block should go instead of fucking around with bullshit vague descriptions like "the block should be in a good place". And after I get instructed to place a block midair somewhere, I'm going to want the PM to show that he actually decided "where" based on some kind of information and not by throwing darts.

It is also totally reasonable to expect that someone is looking at each block as part of the overall goal, and identifying that those blocks which were just placed on the ground next to the pyramid were a total waste of time. It doesn't have to be me - but if nobody is doing it, who says we'll end up with a pyramid at all!?

<comment><USER8> I don't have anything to add, but I really enjoyed your imagery. It also feels true.

Especially building a block in midair. PM just doesn't seem to realize the rest of the blocks aren't there yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sigh... At some point, most healthy adults who are not living in terrible circumstances come to the mature realization and compromise that their job is largely to produce value for someone else, not to be the primary source of personal fulfillment, and they come to understand that there is dignity in being productive, if not creative. Be creative on your own time. Lead a civic group. Be a good parent. Volunteer at a charity. If your main gripe at work is that you're on the value-adding side of a company, which is what feature dev is in software, you have it pretty good in this world. Change jobs if you must, but the realities of companies, especially as they gain traction, rarely means the grass is ever greener. If this is unsatisfactory still, start your own company. I just don't understand the problem here.

<comment><USER18> Disagree. This is an endorsement of accepting the fact that your work, your professional work, done by most of us at a job, makes you feel like a cog, a unit of production. It is better called a surrender than a compromise.

Surely it's often case that life has people in this sort of scenario and there is no realistic way to a new path. In that case, sure, take care of your loved ones and yourself, stay put, and make the most of it. This scenario arises from the messy mix of circumstances and decisions. There is no blame.

But! "Change jobs if you must", must, be changed to "Change jobs if you can.", especially for younger people. It's not mature to accept an unfulfilling job. It's a life-scale bummer. Tenaciously go after fulfilling work. Don't write off 1/3 of your remaining life. An approach that worked for me: distance yourself from the profit motive. It's not that hard.

<comment><USER14> > This is an endorsement for accepting the fact that your work, your > professional work, done by most of us at a job, makes you feel like a cog, a > unit of production. It is better called a surrender than a compromise.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

The problem with cog in the machine analogies is that people only think of the plus sides of having more input in decision making processes.

What people generally ignore is the added responsibility and liability that comes with being more invested in the decision making process. In my experience, after you start holding people accountable for making the wrong decisions, most people quickly go back to being happy about being a cog in the machine and taking orders from someone else. For the few who enjoy calling the shots and accepting the blame when things go wrong, you can always move up into management.

<comment><USER19> > and accepting the blame when things go wrong, you can always move up into > management.

In most companies, accepting blame is career suicide. Most people who move up in management are good at taking credit for wins and pinning down someone else for failures, or moving on to different projects before their decisions come back to bite them. And that's the kind of management that leads to broken process that the OP mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER20> Blame will make problems go underreported and responsibilities shunned. A healthy org will invite organic planning and distribute power while providing psychological safe space for real autonomy. The moment of blame or downward finger-pointing, all of this too easily gets lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've never worked somewhere that could actually take a concept to a complete, well-tested feature delivered to users in a two week sprint.

I've worked at little startups and a medium-sized tech company as well as FAANG. In each case, we spent most of our time working on projects with 2-3 month time horizons. The small and medium companies called their development strategy "agile". In FAANG we mostly just did our work and didn't spend any time on the Kafkaesque exercise of "sprint retrospectives" and "grooming sessions". Our product manager didn't tell us what to build, but acted more as an advisor for the engineering team leads.

I think in some case scrum is an attempt to compensate for inexperienced management.

I assume we just weren't "doing agile", but when I was younger it always left me feeling vaguely inadequate: if I was just more efficient and competent, maybe the 2-week sprint would fit better. Maybe that was the point.

Has anyone here ever delivered useful features to users on that kind of cadence? What was it like?

<comment><USER22> > I've worked at little startups and a medium-sized tech company as well as > FAANG. In each case, we spent most of our time working on projects with 2-3 > month time horizons. The small and medium companies called their development > strategy "agile". In FAANG we mostly just did our work and didn't spend any > time on the Kafkaesque exercise of "sprint retrospectives" and "grooming > sessions". Our product manager didn't tell us what to build, but acted more > as an advisor for the engineering team leads.

Wtf? I've worked mainly for startups, with a couple of large companies in- between, and I've had the exact opposite experience. The engineering in every startup has been fairly lean and efficient with a few mistakes here or there, and every large business has been an 'agile' hell where everything feels ludicrously slow and nothing gets done.

I've always avoided interviewing with FAANG etc because I just assumed they'd be in the latter category with the sheer number of employees they have. It's interesting to hear that Facebook actually runs smoothly.

<comment><USER23> I agree with the parent poster. I've spent 6+ years at FB and the whole time I've just worked on what I thought was important. No one was ever assigned a project to me. The process normally involves managers and PMs highlighting problems and potential solutions and then developers picking projects that interest them. It sounds crazy but it is a controlled chaos. We incent people to work on non-sexy work by aligning with performance reviews. So everyone is required to show some better engineering impact (like writing documentation, unit or integration tests, cleaning up deprecated code etc).

It's the longest I've stayed at a company (worked a decade at startups and web dev companies) because of the freedom to constantly work on things that are interesting. For example I've changed the type of developer I am twice since joining.

So if it's worth a look if that's a style that works for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sadly this is the case in our company. I worked as a dev team manager for the last 9 months and I was constantly wondering why do we work on these features...

The more time I spent with our CEO though, it turned out that he wanted to decide everything feature-wise. When I proposed that we should maybe do some market research or user interviews instead, he boldly declared that he knows the market the best. So go figure. No wonder that the whole company is a shit- show and we're losing a ton of money each year. Also when new features are prioritized I dared to propose to other managers that maybe we should tie the priorities to our business plan. Again our genius CEO told us that the business plan numbers should not be taken very strictly.

The more I thought about this why would anyone give money to such a moron, I figured that he is basically a very effective sales person. He can easily convince you how great he is and his vision, but he lacks all kind of strategic or operational skills. And as someone commented here in HN before, he also has management myopia: "If I can't understand it, it must not be hard" he probably thinks.

There was even a case when we looked for a product manager. This is not exactly the CEO's fault, but even 8 months were not enough to find one, even though that we interviewed perfectly capable and matching candidates. But there was always at least one person in management who found some excuses to ditch the candidate. Now in hindsight I think these people were afraid that the current status quo of the feature factory would change, so they sabotaged the whole PM candidate screening.

So now everything in our company is as it is written in this post. Success theater (this might be the same BTW that is called vanity metrics by Eric Ries), no connection to metrics, no connection to user values, hand-offs, etc.

<comment><USER25> Jesus dude.

Maybe you're spot on 100% right in terms of vision, in terms of business plan, in terms of psychological blindspots, in terms of product market fit, in terms of a path to profitability. You seem pretty smart so maybe it is fairly insulting to you to not be listened to.

In what way is your world view helpful? And I want to be be gentle here, and not mean harm. In what way is it helpful for yourself, for your own wellbeing?

Let's say you could fix the company and stop the losses. Then trying to do that seems worth pursuing. Let's say you can't! We've all come across situations hard and unmoveable. So now, unless some break happens for you (because it's unlikely they will wake up and listen to you if they never did before...just a pragmatic observation), you are stuck being chronicly slightly unhappy.

It's not my place to suggest, and I'm trying to respectfully ask, would either maybe letting go or conversely doubling down and standing up for yourself and finding another job where they value you hurt you less? Completly serious question because everyone deserves to be happy.

And also, a bit of conjecture, but if you're not profitable it's that same CEOs ability to communicate a vision that's funding payroll right? I'm not saying absolve him of every misgrievance because if the company isn't doing well it's ultimately on his shoulders.

My point is maybe there's a softer path to walk here....?

Not my place to ask though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't actually understand what's bad about this, maybe someone who is in a company like this can explain why it's a negative? I am working with a company that is moving more towards this approach and I'm really enjoying it. Isn't this essentially what Basecamp's Shape Up method advocates for? Not everyone feels they need to be building something that changes the world I suppose. Each to their own.

<comment> UK-Al05 This is about making teams completely responsible for the product as you possibly can. Maybe even profit/loss responsibility. The idea being they're closer to product then anyone, and thus should make better decisions.

If you follow the feature factory route, the team will just produce things they are told too. If it doesn't work, it's not the teams responsibility. They did what they were told to.

<comment><USER27> Otoh, those who "tell" are closer to the business/client, and thus should issue better requirements. I honestly can't see what's wrong with doing what you're told to. You cannot play a jack of all trades and program the damn thing perfectly at the same time. (And if you can, you should not waste your time bringing profits to that Corporate, Inc anyway.)

<comment> UK-Al05 Teams that take ownership have a product person, who sits with the team. And is part of the team. Their entire job is work out the best product direction. They interact, sit with, pair, answer questions from developers everyday, talk to customers etc. Work with the team to set future product direction.

It shouldn't be external group pushing features into a team backlog.

Devs talk to customers, look at the logs, debug issues, look at the stats being logged out. As result they have far better understanding of product usage than most people higher up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's very interesting to see a huge cultural gap within the tech industry, from many of the comments here.

Quite a few people are saying : what's so bad about the feature factory ? This sounds like a desirable environment.

Whereas I, and many others here, see it as a living nightmare of endless busywork and improductivity.

(I've once worked in an environment a bit like that, so I know they actually exist.)

<comment><USER29> I agree and think it's a divide between product and engineering. Product managers (at least good ones) love thinking about the problem, while developers love thinking about solutions. I'm generalizing of course, and both mindsets are needed, but it's the product manager's job to make sure the developers are solving the right problems and not just launching features that don't speak to a customer benefit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm surprised by so many negative comments here (actually, I'm not). This great piece summed up a lot of awful aspects about commercial software development that I've also observed over the past 20 years, but have been unable to organize together and articulate as single problem.

People are asking why this is bad. One way to think about why the Feature Factory is bad is that it's mostly open loop: You "launch" feature after feature at the customer, but there's no real feedback coming in to understand whether what you're doing is worthwhile, to understand what to improve or fix, or to drive future decisions. The only feedback that gets measured are things like revenue and sales, and the only thing leadership sees as driving revenue is the constant spew of features--because that's all you're doing. The insights that you get from revenue are very generic: "Money is coming in--keep doing what you're doing" or "We're losing money. Do something different!". The insights you get from salespeople are even worse: "We'll land this sweet-ass deal (and I'll get my bonus) if only you churn out otherwise un-needed features X, Y, and Z!"

I guess this is fine if you're an agency or consulting shop that just does one-off projects and then moves on to the next client. On the other hand, if you're writing software for actual people to use, trying to be the best in class at one thing, or building a platform to last decades instead of months, then your product will suffer if all you do is bolt half-baked features onto it over and over.

<comment><USER31> I think the reason why I was confused is that it seems there's a very fine line between a feature factory and Google/Twitter/Facebook/Amazon/...

At a lot of these high-functioning places, they seem to have "feature factory" moments with some tweaks (e.g. actually building metrics, refactoring, etc. so that the SW won't implode in 6 months down the line).

<comment><USER32> People complain about it, but Google being able to literally 'pull the plug' and shutdown unprofitable or disproportionately resource draining projects is important to note.

To me, that is a characteristic of the un-feature factory, or whatever the opposite would be called.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've heard this called 'being on the hamster wheel', you are running forward as fast as you can but not going anywhere.

I've had an experience where I dreaded the daily stand-up, it was all about 'story points' in a mad scramble to find traction with customers. Management was stabbing in the dark, we didn't have a direction. Once we did have a direction we lacked the required input to push us in that direction.

</comment><comment><USER34> Feature addiction is exacerbated by VC. Without real consequences to a poorly planned product roadmap due to the years of runway afforded by massive funding rounds, entire orgs fall into the "one more feature" cycle and never focus enough on measuring success in terms of real dollars. No one knows what went wrong when all the money is gone and devs/designers/PMs rinse and repeat at a new well-funded startup.

<comment><USER35> This actually isn't true. VCs don't want companies to build features, they want companies to listen to users maniacally and find product-market fit, then focus on growth (and/or revenue) like mad. That companies focus on features is a management issue and a sign of a failing company, not a sign that VC is somehow bad.

<comment><USER34> I agree that the issue is a problem of management. Though without oodles of cash to wash away missteps, poor management would be much more obvious. The ability to distill user feedback into the minimum number of valuable feature enhancements is what sets successful product orgs apart from failed ones. When cash is largely not a constraint, the tendency is to build exactly what each customer has said they want rather than try to come up with succinct improvements. The result is often bulky products that cost a fortune to maintain and only appeal to small number of customers.

VC is good if used correctly. But dumping wads of cash into a company to develop a product that isn't capital intensive (like web or mobile tech) has the tendency to create bloated product orgs which optimize for the wrong things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I once worked in a place where we spent $100,000+ to add a feature that only two customers used. They paid around $8,000 for the feature. It was deemed a success. Features serve Hope while quantifying the value to customers rains on people's parades

</comment><comment><USER37> What's wrong with feature factory ? If you're delivering something good for clients..

       No measurement / Success theater / core metrics

This takes time and mental space. That you could better use to... crank a new feature! :)

<comment><USER38> > If you're delivering something good for clients...

That's the crux of it, isn't it? How do you _know_ that what you're delivering is any good?

<comment><USER39> > _How do you know that what you 're delivering is any good?_

How do you know it isn't? You need to implement it and see whether it's good or not.

<comment><USER32> If you know it is going to be a nightmare to support, it will consume tons of resources (cpu/storage), and nobody wants to pay for it (or not pay enough to cover its costs), it is not good.

As has been mentioned many times on this site, it is very easy to sell $2 for $1 all day long.

<comment><USER39> > _nobody wants to pay for it (or not pay enough to cover its costs), it is > not good._

And how do you _know_ this in advance?

<comment><USER32> You ask them.

'Will you pay an additional $x/mo for this feature?'

You can estimate your AWS costs for what the feature would cost for that user.

You can estimate dev and implementation time.

It doesn't even have to be 100% accurate, but if the numbers come nowhere close to making sense, don't pursue this further.

Now, there may be a future time where some fundamental cost changes, and it is worth considering again.

<comment><USER40> It sounds nice, but it doesn't work very well.

Users lie. Not even maliciously.

Clients will say they'd pay for it, then when you deliver it they'll say they realized that your competitor provides that and everything else that is really important to them in the standard fee. The competitor is actually no better, and would require the same amount of development to get to parity in other areas, but they win by claiming that everything will be rainbows.

Clients will say they'd pay for X, but once you deliver it they'll suddenly realize that it won't actually work for them until you also implement Y, but they won't pay any more for X+Y than they would for X alone.

Clients will say they'd pay for X, but once you deliver it they'll have shifted direction or something has changed and they don't need it anymore.

Clients will say they'd pay for X, but once you deliver it and they start using it they'll discover that it's not at all what they actually needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> In this thread: When your whole life is based on assumptions of 98% of it is wrong, you're gonna defend yourself to the tooth. It is emotionally challenging and damaging to the ego.

Watch Jim Keller (designer of A4/A4 Apple chips, Ryzen processor, x86 spec co- author and a legendary chip designer) make this point better than I can [Video link copied at 1:22:34 marker]: [https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA?t=4954](https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA?t=4954)

People would say that the author of this post is arrogant and want to reject the status-quo - But I would say the opposite, people who have vested interest in the status-quo because their reputation depends on it, their salary depends on it are the arrogant ones because they reject reality in favor of their own good.

</comment><comment><USER42> Much of this describes some of my past experience at a Fortune 100. That company is now undergoing much discussion at a senior level about agile delivery. Senior executives are walking around talking about tribes and chapters and have no idea what that really means or of the day to day work of teams. It's unfortunate what will come out of it in the end is some people doing stuff now that will have new titles and maybe more ceremonies but not a substantive change from what they do now or the way work gets done.

Middle management thinks they work in a factory and treat people like numbers. If you trust the same group of people to implement the change then you can bet their sole goal is to make it look good. Unless you change the middle then not much will change.

<comment><USER43> I actually feel like agile development can invite some of this behavior, because the focus is on shipping instead of value.

Not saying agile is bad, just feels like a separate problem.

<comment><USER44> In principle agile is supposed to be guided by higher level processes accounting for this kind of strategic problem. In practice, yeah, I do sometimes see agile teams get away with writing "objective: ship my features, KR: 5 features are shipped".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> [2016]. Previous discussions on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13639549](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13639549) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13044685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13044685)

Very good article, so good that my coauthor and I used the metaphor in our book.

</comment><comment><USER46> In this framing, a factory is supposed to be bad? Aren't factories efficient and the best way of producing things at scale?

<comment><USER47> Factories are fine, but if you walk into a factory you're going to be finding a lot of people working on the factory itself. Process tweaks, new machines, maintenance, etc.

In the software "feature factory", people have mostly forgotten about that, usually because someone does it "in their spare time". I guarantee you that no factory worker lubricates the machines off the clock. I am not sure why we should treat software any differently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Been there. Anecdotally, a good indicator of a feature factory is the turnover in marketing, a particularly gruelling department to be in when you are not finding any consistency with the message you've been tasked with communicating. That kind of situation is okay and perhaps even fun if you can count your colleagues with your fingers, but at companies larger than that, the general lack of understanding of what your software does is a kind of debt, perhaps even classifiable as technical debt.

I tried to raise red flags to my bosses when our colleagues in customer support we're making feature requests for features we already had. The company as a whole lacked the courage or enthusiasm to tackle those design flaws, and instead would request additional features. I tried really hard to fight for removing features too...

</comment><comment><USER49> IMO, this is an ego-centric article. Unless you're trying to change the world...be happy you have a continual stream of work. If they don't have a need to keep you busy that's when you should be worried. As a programmer, I try to keep my employer happy and I don't try to meddle in business decisions. I try to understand them as best as possible and give suggestions or ask questions when things are not clear or don't make sense but knowing that my job is to make the things to match specifications. When I see "feature factory" I initially thought it was good as you are building new things but didn't know it was a negative article until I started reading. I'm grateful in other words as I'm pretty normal, not some bright programmer working at SpaceX.

</comment><comment><USER50> At a certain company size, there simply is not the level of control (ODA loops) to know what product to make or features to add - it is a fairly good survival strategy to have multiple teams duplicating huge amounts of work simply because a few will deliver the right thing.

The internal politics of most organisations has a similar feel - lots of duplication looks like competing camps and frequently is, but the duplications is partly survival strategy (what if those others don't deliver) and partly evolution (one team will deliver something that actually fits the market.)

Boy there are better ways to arrange it, but this seems to be a local maxima that's easy to reach.

</comment><comment><USER51> Yes! Very well put together list because at my last role (in the same company) this was essentially what I was trying to escape and when I look at the work that team is doing, it's not impactful or noticeable but the devs are always building some new complex thing that won't even see the light of day once.

On my current team, feature building is the second to last step (right before a retro) because product development requires many non-coding steps to first understand problem. Some times, I believe it should be "problem solving" instead of "product development".

</comment><comment><USER52> 1) When John Cutler ([https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnpcutler/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnpcutler/)) wrote this article in 2016 - he was working for pendo.io that already got ~$13.3M in funding:

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/pendo-io#section- fun...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/pendo-io#section-funding- rounds)

Eventually pendo.io accumulated $208.3M in funding.

2) John Cutler now works for Amplitude (pendo.io competitor) that received $136M in funding: [https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organ...](https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organizations/funding_total/amplitude)

3) Amplitude looks more successful than pendo:

[https://www.similarweb.com/website/amplitude.com](https://www.similarweb.com/website/amplitude.com)

[https://www.similarweb.com/website/pendo.io](https://www.similarweb.com/website/pendo.io)

</comment><comment><USER53> There is also a perverse incentive for employees to point this out. Why would a product manager highlight that the status quo is flawed? Why would an engineer shake stuff up and optimize tired old code instead of just cranking out a shiny new features?

Raising these issues would ruffle a lot of feathers. I would not do that just to make my own life more difficult and possibly point out that my own position is redundant.

</comment><comment> awinter-py > success theater

such a good phrase. premature 'mission accomplished' is always embarrassing even when you're just the one stuck cringing and golf clapping in the corner

Common thread here seems to be lack of argument / buy-in process. Central leaders need to (1) convince the team that tactics accomplish team goals and (2) _have_ team goals. Bad teams do none of the above.

</comment><comment><USER54> As the average tenure of an engineer (or PM, for that matter) at many medium- to-large software companies edges towards two years, it is BARELY enough time for the average employee to 1) ramp up on HR stuff/culture, 2) understand the implementation of an existing system, 3) make and deploy a change to the system without incident.

Best case, all of that takes 6-9 months, but the reality is more like 12-18.

Having time to understand the "why" behind features in a deeply critical way is a LUXURY given this average 2-3 yr time frame. And all of this assumes an absence of reorgs, mission-critical integration work, etc., which further complicate understanding.

The reality is that customer needs are changing so rapidly that even CEOs and heads of sales fail to grasp the "why" most of the time, and merely focus on just doing whatever it takes to win the next big contract. "When one can see no future, all one can do is the next right thing."

</comment><comment><USER55> Most of the points come from disregarding the cardinal rule that every developer and development company should abide to (obligatory IMO): Fight for the users.

In this case, you can't fight for them if you don't know what they want or how the product is helping them.

</comment><comment><USER56> Dear lord this is depressing to read. My personal annecdote here that's probably not a big contribution, but this puts a label so well on the product organization I just left on a large project @ a fortune 50 company.

What's really bad is that the much larger R&D organization (who is I now know to label a feature factory), absorbed our smaller highly productive team that essentially did everything opposite to this. The things we thought we were good at were suddenly the huge flaws of our team - flaws that lead to a number of us leaving to get away from the huge amount of process that got laid on us.

</comment><comment><USER57> unfortunately this is almost every place i've ever worked. so many good points here - but the most poignant for me is "celebrating shipping" vs celebrating customer success ... so true

</comment><comment><USER58> My software engineering course professor made the below statement which has served me well.

Users know what they want but they don't know what they need.

Figure out your user needs rather than tending to their each want.

</comment><comment><USER59> I worked at that kind of company, wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I could write a very long essay why it sucked so much, meh.

In short, it's very easy to burn out and overall it's just stupid. The pace was surreal, some of the features very complex, many people were overworking. Everyone is super stressed out, the best decision is to just leave that environment.

Bottom line, don't work for that kind of companies, because your value is equal to the speed of your fingers typing.

</comment><comment><USER60> I've found #8 to be very important. If you don't allow for revisions you get code rot and suddenly every new feature becomes exponentially more difficult to implement.

</comment><comment><USER19> Ah man. This makes me realize why my time at a recently IPO-ed tech company, as an engineer was so horrible. Except #10 the company is guilty of every single point.

</comment><comment><USER61> While this focusses on places selling software (features added to close deals, etc.), it is probably an even more pervasive problem in internal IT shops—and a more tragic one, because internal IT organizations _should_ be better positioned to tightly align on business value rather than sales, though this is often hampered by internal organizational structures which sometimes incentivize arms length, contracting-like interactions.

</comment><comment><USER62> I don't know, everyone. All the best software is so great because whatever you want to do, you can find in 1 minute with a Google search. I hate googling and finding "I don't think this is possible. I know you can do this in (a feature factory competitor of what you Googled) but I don't think (what you googled) has this feature."

I've seen comments like that thousands of times. Haven't you?

</comment><comment><USER63> Somebody asks for a feature, you build it, they pay you — that's data.

Data isn't just spying on your users to see how they behave.

<comment><USER64> A big part of product management's function is buffering all the features being asked for so that they can take a step back and design a solution that isn't just 100 new features. The feature factory process is mostly a symptom of product being bad at their job.

<comment><USER63> Sure, but my point was that this article seems to be focused on data-driven product decision-making. Creating good designs with far reach in my view is unrelated. I wanted to counter the narrative that unless you are spying on your users and using that to 'prove' your features are being successful you are doing a bad job at product development.

It's certainly possible in my mind to do requirements gathering, feature design, implementation, deployment, and iteration without automated data collection from user behavior. You can, you know, talk to people. Nowadays when someone says "data-driven" they typically mean "instrument the hell out of your product and observe user behavior." Perhaps that's not what the author is getting at. But if they are, I think it's important to tell people to not feel guilty for not spying on their users. If you are doing the follow-up work to actually communicate with customers to understand their needs, you should feel confident that you're doing your job well. And you should be proud that you are doing so without having to spy on people.

<comment><USER64> totally agree, it's also possible to have built a feature that users have to use but aren't happy about - then the data can be misleading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Here is the update to this article, 3 years later:

[https://amplitude.com/blog/12-signs-youre-working-in-a- featu...](https://amplitude.com/blog/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature- factory-3-years-later)

</comment><comment><USER66> I've never heard of this term before, but when I think of "feature factory", products like Jira and Yahoo! immediately come to mind. Such products feel like a sinking bag of features with no real cohesive, central purpose.

</comment><comment><USER67> What do I do if upper management seems to be driving this process?

<comment><USER68> If your input regarding how the company is run is valued by upper management, then make a clear argument that they are running a feature factory and what they can do to change.

If no one cares what you think, then the best outcome for yourself and the your company is for you to find other employment. You labor is freed from the feature factory for more productive purposes and the probability of survival for your sub-optimal company is diminished, opening opportunities for more optimal companies in the same space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I'd rather work in a feature factory than a bugfix factory.

<comment><USER70> Eventually a feature factory will turn into a bugfix factory as more and more unmaintained and potentially competing layers are added.

<comment><USER64> ..or some features are actually bugs, now your a bug farmer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Does this ever not happen? I am being serious... Have any of you worked at a company for any substantial period of time where some for of this has not become the norm?

</comment><comment><USER72> To a certain degree, and in my experience, all companies have this problem. Sometimes it's at a team scale but for others it's at an organization scale.

</comment><comment><USER73> This sounds like every place I've worked at ever and I don't expect it to change anytime soon

</comment><comment><USER74> I mean, let's say I am. So what? As long as the checks are clearing, not my business.

</comment><comment><USER75> This just sounds like regular software development.

</comment><comment><USER76> Twelve out of twelve for my company. Yah us!

</comment><comment><USER77> Oh man I've seen these signs first hand :(

</comment><comment><USER78> Great article. It should add Technical Debt as a sign.

</comment><comment><USER79> I've had to make the decision to steer my design resources into "feature factories" because my customers are sometimes fickle.

There are a number of instances where features were paid for, developed, and then not deployed.

It hasn't become discouraging yet because there has been professional growth in developing methods for constructing and deploying said features, but I am concerned as to our financial ability to identify and reject contracts that are just un-exciting features. Most of my devs are satisfied with the paycheck despite the work, but a few are showing signs of not being valued. And I'm not sure how to address that yet to avoid losing them. It's like: taking a lame contract for $$$ vs. boring a good employee. I hate how personal it becomes, I feel like I'm cajoling them to do the work, ... it feels icky and toxic.

<comment><USER40> I dunno, if I were an engineer in an environment like that I'd be fine with it if (1) you were up-front about this being a necessary hack to sustain the company for a bit longer, and (2) there is a vision and a process to refine that vision of where you would all _like_ the product to go. (2) is so that these seemingly short-term features could either be seen as prototypes or first cuts at the future you'd really like to get to, or walled off as extraneous stubs that don't interfere with the core architecture. (1) is important because I feel good about helping keep the company afloat, but I feel crappy about just doing stuff that I know is bullshit simply because I'm told to (or worse, lied to that it's "important" for its own sake).

This also makes it possible to track the trajectory of the company over time. When you're doing better, you can afford to turn down these types of requests. Communicate that decision and why you made it to engineering; we love to hear that sort of thing.

The safest answer that a salesperson can give is "yes". The safest answer that an engineer can give is "no". You can't let either side always win, but you can communicate the reasoning and importance to bridge the gap and make it a team decision even if it wasn't the team making it.

<comment><USER79> Thanks for the feedback. That's pretty much how the discussions go. The team is small so I can still be 1:1 with them, and be direct about the state of things.

>This also makes it possible to track the trajectory of the company over time. When you're doing better, you can afford to turn down these types of requests.

Yeah, this is a really good indicator. Heck, if this keeps up -I- won't want to do it anymore! Which I think is perfectly natural.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> This seems written by someone with an axe to grind.

<comment><USER31> Don't we all have axes to grind?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Launching a side-project - <AUTHOR> This is a SaaS webapp targeting devops.
1. When to launch: too soon or too late?
Rather launch 'embarrassingly early' than later to benefit from early feedback. It has been used at my day job and does make some tasks faster and easier. I made basic changes so that it can run multi-tenant.
2. Pricing
Going to use an open-source core. The back-end and front-end will both be AGPL open-source from the start. Client access libraries to the API will be MIT licenced. The 'core' is that which is needed to run the app standalone in one's own environment, similar to what is run at my day job. Other non-core changes are infra-related e.g. supporting more scalable dbs.
Having the core open source also makes any service provider (including myself) use value-add-based pricing. I'm planning on $5, $29, $150 per month for Hobby, Startup, and Business tiers which have different limits and all with a free trial. Using a PayPal checkout button which seems to support the free trial bit.
3. Marketing
Being a side-project I'm not spending on marketing, just on operating the platform. The main places I hope to get traffic from are HN and Product Hunt. Also thought I'd give out some free accounts (can I call it Beta if I'm charging others?).
Other ideas are to write dev blog posts and possibly tech talks on software development with the related product plug. I don't have any significant online presence (Twitter etc).
Materials I have so far:

  a. the webapp (static served from Netlify+CloudFlare)
  b. single landing page
     (unspalsh bg, screenshot, features, pricing and checkout)
  c. API documentation
  d. try it playground/sandbox
     (like cURL requests in web forms)
  e. favicon (i.e. low quality logo)
  f. an .io domain name
 So there's where I'm at, any pitfalls or suggestions for making a better first impression? Any comments much appreciated. <comment><USER2> It's a niche market so you need to be aggressive if you want it to be sustainable. You might consider zeroing in on that Business tier and see if you can quietly sell it to ~10 customers as beta users. That would give you a revenue stream to grow the rest of the business.

The cheapie accounts will be very low return / high maintenance. The real sustainability of the business is all going to be $100/mo and up (even that is too cheap).

last but not least, you might use this as an opportunity to build your personal social presence. Start tweeting/blogging your entrepreneurial journey. might consider starting a DevOps podcast, sponsored by your app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your perspective. I think I just wanted to 'release' and get it into many hands quickly without as much consideration for operating the business. The cheap accounts were either to help spread the word or if it didn't offer enough value for the $100+ plan.

I thought of doing the blog/tweet thing after launch, but your suggestion sharing the journey first makes for good marketing. [Co-incidentally my day- job makes a live podcast-like platform getdialog.am which can promote each other.]</comment></comment>


Jess Frazelle - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/open-source/stories/jessfraz <comment><USER2> If you haven't heard of Jessie Frazelle, _definitely_ check out her work. As others have expressed, she's a brilliant engineer, speaker, and writer.

If I were in charge of hiring, I'd have recruiters pestering the hell out of her to join my team.

Seriously, she's one of my favorite people that I've never met :)

<comment><USER3> I tried to hire her and failed. :-(

<comment><USER4> I think that's the first time I see someone publicly saying that they tried to hire someone and it failed, very interesting.

<comment><USER3> Really? Well, perhaps it's just that I'm not ashamed to say when I failed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I attended her talk on "Containerizing Your Desktop" at LinuxCon NA 2015, and she maintains this open source repository filled with awesome Dockerfiles that can run anything from Spotify to Chrome. Truly amazing

[https://github.com/jessfraz/dockerfiles](https://github.com/jessfraz/dockerfiles)

<comment><USER6> What is the point of running Chrome in a Docker container? Is it useful only for developers which want to test stuff using a fixed version of the browser, or is it something that everybody surfing the web should really want to do?

(I am not a web developer, so this is a sincere question. I am genuinely curious!)

<comment><USER7> There are lots of potential reasons. Some things I've considered doing it for (many of which have alternative solutions, but nevertheless)

Different network configurations per browser. This is useful for doing things like checking geo-targetting via VPNs etc.

Better security isolation. Chrome is pretty good at this, but if you want to run a suspicious add-on this is a good way to do it.

Better isolation for scriptable browsers.

I'm sure there are plenty I haven't thought of.

<comment><USER8> Not the best isolation however because containers aren't sandboxes (yet). If you're really serious you need to run something like [https://firejail.wordpress.com](https://firejail.wordpress.com) .

<comment><USER7> I think (hope?) people would realize that by now about Docker. But it is a non-trivial amount of protection against things like local file access.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing that tends to be undervalued is sheer positivity and passion. Jess reminds me of Julia Evans, both radiate excitement whenever they talk at conferences, regardless of topic. More joy like this, please.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. We need way way way less drama.

<comment><USER11> We need fewer sources of drama. As long as there are still sources of drama it serves a purpose.

<comment><USER12> You may wish for fewer sources of drama, but there is always the risk that your wish will not be granted.

One particular problem is that drama has a certain amount of "background radiation" in the world, a noise floor you can't eliminate. The right solution is to have a gate in the sense that you just ignore things underneath the noise floor.

Lowering drama is possible, but elimination is impossible IMO. Hence, you end up in a situation where the perpetually outraged keep being outraged, because there is _always_ some kind of noise floor you can grab onto.

You need to gauge "drama relative to other situations" in order to figure out where we stand. And once you do, you will realize that some people are feeding off of perpetual outrage.

In short, I think we need to define when we activate the gate. And for me personally, the amount of drama in tech is actually not that high. Try Sales&Marketing for a change :) It is just that social media is an excellent amplifier, so now we have far more focus than you had back in the 80'es and 90'es where the situation is likely to have been worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Jessie Frazelle is not only an inspiring and talented engineer but she is also an excellent community leader and a much needed and valued voice. On top of all of that, I echo the sentiments below, awesome human. Glad to see her being recognized!

<comment><USER14> For having worked with Jessie while she was still working at Docker (I no longer work there either), I can confirm that. She is genuinely radiant and her excitement for technology in general is contagious.

She was always around to help or hack something cool. I remember the night of the release of Docker 1.9, we stayed late at the office to merge the last PRs and run test suites before releasing the binaries. Jess did not have to be there but she stayed to help Tibor (another amazing human being and prolific contributor) and myself 'til 23pm on the release process. You know you are surrounded with talented engineers when you can count on them regardless of the difficulties encountered. That night, her presence lifted a big burden off my shoulders.

I'm not sure I would have had the same excitement for Docker before joining if she was not working there. To me, she had a huge impact on the craze towards containers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seeing a living breathing hue-man reminds me that none of the projects I use happen for free. And seeing people being turned into marketing material also reminds me that Github ain't free either.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's not too obvious, but this is a Github "Story" (not just the profile of an OSS contributor). Pretty interesting content in the article. I know of her from Twitter (guess I randomly followed some time ago) - definitely worth a follow.

<comment><USER17> > It's not too obvious, but this is a Github "Story"

This should be part of the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hmm, is there a reason this is on HN today? Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to learn about interesting individuals, I just feel like I might be missing some context here. Did she win an award or do something particularly noticeable recently?

<comment><USER19> It _could_ be because she's been outspoken about the issues surrounding women in tech [https://twitter.com/jessfraz](https://twitter.com/jessfraz) . She's dealt with workplace inequality as has been described as going on at Uber [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/business/uber-sexual- hara...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/business/uber-sexual-harassment- investigation.html) . That isn't to say her portfolio isn't impressive enough on its own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "The greatest contribution need for Docker" I believe less is more. Docker has grown into an all consuming piece of complexity. The best code is code you never write.

<comment><USER21> Docker has taken the direction of a loose collection of tools tied together by an integrated interface. So you have the choice of using the platform as a whole, or standing up your choice of individual components on their own, without any dependency on Docker.

Based on your comment, you're probably not the target audience for the platform. I recommend checking out some of the components to see if they meet your criteria of simplicity.

A few examples:

[https://runc.io](https://runc.io)

[https://containerd.tools](https://containerd.tools)

[https://github.com/docker/swarmkit](https://github.com/docker/swarmkit)

[https://github.com/docker/notary](https://github.com/docker/notary)

[https://github.com/docker/infrakit](https://github.com/docker/infrakit)

[https://github.com/docker/hyperkit](https://github.com/docker/hyperkit)

We are continuing the work of carving out more and more usable components from the platform.

<comment><USER22> One tricky issue with Docker is its overlap with systemd. Both can be responsible for running services. It is unclear how to integrate them well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I recommend this:

[https://blog.jessfraz.com/](https://blog.jessfraz.com/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Jess has a passion that is rivaled by few, a truly inspiring engineer. Keep up the awesome work!

P.S. Her twitter timeline is a must-follow - [https://twitter.com/jessfraz](https://twitter.com/jessfraz)

</comment><comment><USER25> I saw Jess speak at Kiwicon 9 in New Zealand. She did the whole thing live, from the command line, with no slides. It was probably one of the most compelling talks I've ever seen and an absolute honour to witness such skill and passion. Myself and the several hundred other attendees were all in awe.

</comment><comment><USER26> Her uses this setup is pretty interesting: [https://usesthis.com/interviews/jessie.frazelle/](https://usesthis.com/interviews/jessie.frazelle/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I was kind of hoping she won an award or something, she radiates so much positivity and is an awesome hacker.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is kubernetes a company?

<comment><USER29> No, but all of the founders (and one of the top k8s guys from redhat) are at a firm based on it now: [https://www.heptio.com](https://www.heptio.com)

Jessie is an incredible speaker and a really funny engineer. It was genuinely hard to not laugh watching her talk @ Monitorama last year titled "Everything is Broken":

[https://vimeo.com/173704265](https://vimeo.com/173704265)

Kubernetes is a project started by Google to make managing containers at scale, on premise, or on the cloud, streamlined and dead simple. So far it is "winning".

<comment><USER30> Two of the three Kubernetes co-founders (Joe Beda and Craig Mcluckie) co- founded Heptio. The third (Brendan Burns) left Google for Microsoft, where Kubernetes on Azure reached GA today [0].

[0] [http://blog.kubernetes.io/2017/02/caas-the-foundation-for- ne...](http://blog.kubernetes.io/2017/02/caas-the-foundation-for-next-gen- paas.html)

<comment><USER31> I am using k8s on azure container service. It's good! One thing I am unable to do is re-scale the cluster (add more nodes). They don't allow that somehow.

<comment><USER30> That limitation was apparently lifted today.

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/21/kubernetes-on- microsofts-a...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/21/kubernetes-on-microsofts- azure-container-service-is-now-generally-available/)

"This means the service is now backed by an SLA, and users will be able to get support contracts from Microsoft. Maybe more importantly, though, Microsoft also added two pivotal new features with this update: the ability to easily scale Kubernetes clusters up and down and support for high-availability setups with multiple masters."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Glad to hear she is working on Kube now instead of Mesos!

</comment><comment><USER33> one of the sharper people out there.</comment>


The Privacy Revolution in Action - <AUTHOR> https://tcsltesting.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-privacy-revolution-in-action.html <comment><USER2> I'm deeply frustrated on reading this, but not shocked really. It seems like people are being numbed into helplessness and powerlessness while they're still ignorant and unaware. By the time many people realize how bad the privacy situation is and the impact it could have, resignation to the status quo may be the only choice — corporations and governments collecting and using data in ways people consider grossly inappropriate, creepy and a violation of their dignity and freedom — would be "too big and too rigid to change".

I fear the worst is yet to come, and people's neglect of these issues (for whatever reason) is going to be _an irreversible crime against future generations_ (like climate change). How dare we consent to these or accept these or let these be?

<comment><USER3> You hit the nail on the head.

The method they are using is take advantage of the size and complexity of our society -- if they make subtle changes in small silos within our society, we will fail to notice as very few people watch the world at such a macro-level.

> people's neglect of these issues

SJ Res 34 was a prime example -- most major social mediums attempted to censor it among other things from the general society. Now, ISPs are allowed to harvest and sell your data to the highest bidder. Terrible.

How can we fix this?

1\. Vote for the right people.

2\. Write them letters (not emails) telling them how much they suck if they don't do things for the benefit of people.

3\. Stop using things like youtube etc. This gives WAY TOO MUCH narrative power to the overlords running those sites (and their overlords who control them -- do you seriously think the Alex Jones thing was a bunch of unique, coincidental decisions to ban Alex Jones independent of what any other site will do given that they all cut him collectively, at the same time? I'm not in any way saying his rhetoric is good or not -- but he was censored, and his free speech was blocked).

4\. Understand that the constitution was a draft of laws from a long time ago and our overall makeup/structure of society has changed -- we really need to make new laws to keep society safe, secure and prosperous.

<comment><USER4> Which specific parts of the Constitution would you change?

<comment><USER5> Rewrite it to something like that, I suppose.

> The constitution repealed restrictions on voting and added universal direct > suffrage and the right to work to rights guaranteed by the previous > constitution. In addition, the constitution recognized collective social and > economic rights including the rights to work, rest and leisure, health > protection, care in old age and sickness, housing, education and cultural > benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The author states that RSA collecting data isn't "wrong."

Let me share a harsh reality: Nobody has to do anything wrong other than the act of collecting and storing the data itself - someone else can infiltrate, hack and leak the data - look at equifax.

The privacy revolution is very well under way.

The other day I was reading this post from APNIC and realized that even they are data mining[1], and nobody noticed because they just used different vocabulary.

[1] [https://blog.apnic.net/2018/05/21/what-drives- ipv6-deploymen...](https://blog.apnic.net/2018/05/21/what-drives- ipv6-deployment/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Highly recommend everyone to read "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O'Neil. I have tried to stop using services that collect my data as much as possible, and when anyone throws the arguement "you must have something to hide" it's good to have a few real life examples of why everyone should fight back against data collection and information brokers.

</comment><comment> open-source-ux _"...the realization hit me, that if Good Guys like Google and RSA were collecting all this information, it was a given that Bad Guys were too, and we have no idea just who is."_

Google is neither the 'good guy' or the 'bad guy'. They aren't there to look out for your best interests and we'd all be much better if we stop ascribing human qualities to gigantic corporations.

No other company tracks your online behaviour at such industrial scale as Google - and gets so little scrutiny for it.

For most of the tech community, Google's level of tracking is perfectly fine because Google has never had a data breach (that we know of). That somehow makes everything fine.

When it comes to matters of privacy, there's a lot of hypocrisy from the tech community.

<comment><USER7> "Don't be evil" was one of the most successful pieces of feel good propaganda I've ever seen from any corporation. People still regularly quote it as "proof" that Google is an altruistic entity which only spies on you to "provide you with a better experience" and "change the world" (with "for the better" being implied).

It's amazing how easy it is to get the majority of people to completely shut down their critical thinking abilities. In this case, it only took 3 words.

<comment><USER8> >It's amazing how easy it is to get the majority of people to completely shut down their critical thinking abilities. In this case, it only took 3 words.

One amusing thing I have noticed is that how fast all of the internet got converted into google catcha system which was originally supposed to convert books, but now a days just show traffic lights, cars, buses and fire hydrants. And no one, bats an eye. And even worse, still calls google the "good guy".

Do you know how many images it makes you click if you try to access it with a clean state?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Amazing write-up.

"Mass psycological persuasion" \-- isn't that just politics, though? I am wondering if the privacy revolution isn't just a cheapening of a service (effective one-to-many communication) that only governments and churches could afford in the past?

I think the real scary stuff hasn't happened yet, thankfully. When identity becomes enough of a _fuzzy_ notion for most people, borders will need to be redrawn, or eliminated completely. Then there will be a big war.

</comment><comment><USER10> Bruce Schneier's most recent newsletter had an excerpt that shows a fictional account of this playing out at the Nation-State level: [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/08/future_cyberw...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/08/future_cyberwar.html)

This would seem to me to be the next logical step, given what humans have now in information collection and what can be done with current tools...

</comment><comment><USER11> I personally think this will all go back somewhat. With which I mean, information about us being collected without our knowledge and everybody having all their data made available to big companies.

One reason for me to believe this, is that it's already getting somewhat creepy, even for the general public. When the new invigilation systems at china get demonized in public media, people will start to care about privacy a lot more. Which will open a lot of market space for companies focusing on privacy. Apple is one company I have in mind here. But, especially with articles about homomorphic encryption coming up more regularly and a lot of research on how to train ML systems with anonymization on end user devices (a blog post about Siri and differential privacy comes to mind) going on, I think companies will start to cater more to those needs of society. End-to-end encryption is already a standard feature in new messenger applications.

Another good sign, at least in Europe, is GDPR.

<comment><USER12> I disagree. I think that companies have such a vast and strong grasp on public discourse, opinion, and even whole countries, that it will only get worse and worse. I'm sure some companies will sell "privacy" at a premium for the few that can afford it, but I don't see any future where there will be actual riots in the streets for privacy.

<comment><USER13> Yeah I have to agree here. I don't see this getting any better. Look at how many people are willing to give up their entire lives worth of privacy to FB just so they can chat to friends, which they could do on any number of IMs and other services.

People just don't care.

It's a very very tiny minority who actually do, and the big companies and Governments are quite happy to ignore that problem until it goes away, as the vast majority pf people are steam-rolling any chance of privacy mattering in the future by accepting all this.

<comment><USER11> I agree they don't care, now at least.

My opinion's that they will, after the situation in China will have been demonized in public media / books.

<comment><USER12> But it won't, there's too much money involved to demonize China. And there are many other such examples of mass surveillance from the five eyes, CCTVs in major cities, less and less "freedom" in the web. Just this week in my country (western European) the whole database of everyone that enters and leaves the country was moved from the police to the secret services, to avoid any kind of scrutiny.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>