That is my prediction as well. It's unfortunate as we'll enter the unindexed web where all that helpful content you can find by appending "reddit" onto any search will no longer be getting produced. All of it hidden in discords, out of sight.
Who knows, maybe there will be an easy way to get stuff published out to the proper web. Things like community FAQs or guides that would be broadly of use. I think the loss of the conversations about minutiae will just be a fact though if that migration happens.
Discord is "where information goes to die", so for that reason I think there's relatively little risk of lock-in from discord. The history there might as well not exist, so there's less reason to stick around instead of jumping to a new platform when discord is inevitably enshittened.
I do wish discord were federated. That's my main gripe with discord, it's not federated and I can't bring my own client like I could on IRC. Oh well, with luck the enshittification will happen soon to put people into the mood for trying something new. Advocating for something like Matrix to discord users now is hopeless, just pissing into the wind. I've tried it, but nobody cares about problems they might have with discord in the future when it's working fine today.
The content being out of sight also makes discord communities harder to grow.
I bet that a considerable fraction of Reddit users became users by googling something and finding an interesting Reddit discussion about the topic in the first results of Google.
Honestly, email lists are better than Discord in a lot of ways. There are standard ways to make them indexable via Google, you can use whatever app you want to, threads are a first class feature most people use, and since it's so open filtering can be very powerful. Bots are also extremely easy to write since basically every programming language has the ability to send email (and usually also to receive it via at least one email server protocol which isn't controlled by the distribution list, but by the bot writer).
I mean, taxes are a real thing and you have to pay them based on where you (the employee) live and do work. In the US for state income tax, it's a confusing mix of both lived location and worked location in various amounts by governments with a "claim" and with plenty of exceptions to go around. Consulting companies have had to deal with it forever (and states have "handled" forever), because you live in Miami, doing work for a company based in LA, and you travel to your client in NYC for 3 days a week for the whole year (60% of your income "generated" there). This is now a complicated Florida, New York, California scenario.
So the choice isn't Big Brother companies who want to know where you are at all times and respectful companies who allow you to get your work done how you want. It's between companies who are following the applicable tax laws or those who are not. A company that is structurally opting to not follow laws seems untenable. A company is a legal construct in many ways. Whether or not the employee can commit something like tax fraud is perhaps a less interesting question, because, yeah, you can probably cheat on your taxes.
That makes sense, but in the consulting case the employee has a motive to file expenses so the employer know. In this case it seems unreasonable for the employer to be heavily fined when they have no real way to determine their employees whereabouts. And because it would likely take an audit to catch the employee, when it does eventually happen it will be a larger hit to the business.
The error in your thinking is that many consultancies are aware of their legal nexus, and actively protect it, so ignorance is not a valid defense for any sensible company.
Talk to people who work for a big consulting firm, they've been taking "tax holidays" for the last 70+ years to ensure they don't spend more than 50% of their time away from their home base.
These companies are no fools; they wouldn't eat productivity and billable hours if they felt the state wouldn't care.
I get that the company wants to know and protect itself. I'm just not sure how they can after reading this article. Short of requiring all employees to check in physically periodically.
Elixir was one of the few languages I saw in companies (albeit, infrequently) that wasn't like Java, C#, Python, or JS (Scala here and there). Was always curious about it as perhaps something that could be reasonably pitched as having some nominal uptake.
Pure anecdata there also. Literally just ones I have personally seen on clients or heard about from coworkers.
We use it at a large company and employ almost 60 people writing it. It’s been great so far. The talent pool is really good and it’s easy to teach to junior devs.
> Maybe it bothers me that using ask as a noun is passive voice, like the request is disembodied. I'm not asking, the ask just appeared there!
I think the latter is the key to corpspeak as a whole and it has ramifications beyond just stripped emotion. It always erases causality from the communication. Everything is just "appearing" with no thought to how or why things are the way they are. Businesses are really, really bad about asking "Why?" at times and this kind of language reinforces that. There is no "Why?", things just materialize into existence and are and you (have to) deal with them.
The emotion part makes sense, because often the answer to a "Why?" is because someone has made a mistake or done something dumb and it provides cover. However, it also leads to rote, wasteful, inefficient behaviors. It doesn't necessitate that there is no reason "why" things are being done, but it does mean that a reason isn't required either.
"Why are we having this sync meeting?" "Well, to sync of course!"
Completely agree! It's not even clear who is asking. Causality is erased, as you say.
"I have an ask for you" - is it my ask? Am I conveying somebody else's ask? Who knows? It's atemporal, acausal, you can choose to investigate by querying but there's a good chance the response is going to be a shrug and a small, apologetic smile accompanied by "ah - you know, the usual" at which point you'll sigh and respond with "yep - ok, let me see if I have the bandwidth and circle back to you on that".
> After the 10th "SMS Service" is created, no one knows what any of them do
Yeah, that's always been my concern. "Descriptive" is a very precarious strategy because it takes very little to go from maybe descriptive to generic and confusing. Multiple variations of the same "descriptive" name are another common issue. I see often a lot of very similar named services that are the bane of naming in my opinion. Someone made a User Management Layer and then someone else made a Person Data Service and next thing you know you see a User Data Service and now it's just confusing. Factor in that each one of those things gets called the UML, PDS, and UDS and it just gets worse (did I mention they each connect to the Person/User Data Store/base).
It's hard to think about because I feel like when they work I don't think about them at all. And when they don't work I think about and stew about them excessively. So the good cases I forget about completely and the bad ones are stuck in my memory.
SDLC is a frequent pain point. Often non-existent or hacky, e.g. export this giant XML doc and you can re-import it if needed. If any step requires clicking on buttons it generally leads to that kinda pain. Almost fundamentally, if I need to go copy paste or click on something for the product to work, I won't be able to automate it. Hence, it needs to be completely automatable. Similarly, if the config / set up / customization one does is obfuscated after it is specified it can be a headache to try to work around. Also maybe not the end of the world but many also decide to "handle" version control on your behalf, which can maybe be fine, but will also then almost by definition be divorced for your usual approach and processes.
On the last question, I think this boils down to how well can one operate at the surface level. It is not uncommon in these low code apps to have to understand in detail what is happening below the hood. So yeah, the top layer abstraction might be very simple in practice, but if working with it frequently necessitates me knowing how that abstraction will be executing it leads to an extra layer of complexity that has not abstracted anything. In a way they often function like a second language going through a translator: if I have to be considering the Spanish version the no-code cares about and also how and what it will be translated to in English under the hood, it's just extra confusing for perhaps little gain. What makes it extra pernicious is you can be operating entirely off intuition for what that under the hood English really is, rather than some open spec you can at least drill into.
Worst part here is I feel like this is really often something that will come with using the product. Often the use cases documented and sold really seem like all you'll need.
I've dealt with that pain before with other tools (promoting DataDog montiors + dashboards comes to mind). This area seems like it'll be even more painful so I'll definitely be filtering by that critereon.
> On the last question...
My particular use case would be for some human checkpoint in an otherwise-automated system. I'd hope to pull in all the contextual information, provide the decision-maker with a text box and an approve/reject decison.
> Worst part here is I feel like this is really often something that will come with using the product. Often the use cases documented and sold really seem like all you'll need.
Yeah, that's what worries me about low-code. I know it'll be a bit of a slog to do all these full-code, but it's a known quantity.
It likely depends on the broad culture behind it. If someone sends a "Hey" and then is a fast enough typer and immediately can get the context going as I look, that's not a huge deal. Sometimes it's an opening to a more synchronous conversation and then it's less of a big deal because we're gonna be going back and forth with quick messages. Part of the irritation is you can still just always open a message with "Hey, something something something" and keep it all in one.
The problem is people who send a lone "Hey" and then... nothing.
Some will wait for you to say respond with your own greeting (which is all you can respond with because you don't know what you're even talking about yet). Other's don't wait but do delay and the initial greeting was just a warning or something that a "real" message is incoming. I've had folks ping me the "Hey" and then I respond immediately with a "Hey" (to stave off the above "permission to speak" people) and they get distracted and say nothing else for 10 minutes.
Some will message you while you're busy, so you don't respond to their "Hi". You then respond to it a half hour later with the only thing you can say to that contextless message: "Hey, what's up?". Only now maybe they are busy, and they respond again to you a half hour after that. You've had a conversation "opening" for an hour for what purpose?
Some will immediately begin typing out a gigantic block of text and you are sitting there waiting while the "XX is typing" message unwaveringly sits at the bottom. Bonus points here if they were editing and revising as they went and you get an eight word sentence after what appeared to be 3 minutes of continuous typing.
Some will do all of those things so you end up having your attention taken multiple times for minutes at a time for a message that realistically might take you a couple seconds to read, parse, and respond to if it had been sent all at once.
Even more relevant to the question: it introduces complexity that harms citizen's basic needs by putting in place knowledge inequities. You can make the tax code as complicated as you want, and the hyper wealthy will still be able to pay for people to understand it and squeeze out every drop of value because the absolute amount of money in play makes it feasible. Spending $200k to "save" $1million is a good deal. That's maybe a couple full time employees. If you wanted to save $100 instead, throwing $20 at is isn't gonna get you anything.
So all those people who can't "subcontract" their way through the complexity with specialists are left to their own devices. And they don't have the time or expertise to navigate it themselves. So the tests and checks and processes and discoverability weeds out deserving people constantly just in the hopes of preventing some "undeservings" from having access.
It'd be like writing an algorithm and every branch of logic you put in you have to do a random roll and throw an exception some percentage of the time. Each new branch compounding to filter more and more while also costing more and more to facilitate. But that execution reality is ignored so that the pure logic can be focused on in a vacuum.
It's all like the opposite of Blackstone's ratio regarding crime that "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer". Social programs are designed such that they would often rather let ten innocent people suffer than one guilty person benefit.
Choice is the real thing though more than actual value add. I feel like I see it less now, but recall seeing how vendors would only accept certain cards and not others (frequently, not American Express) which was as far as I know stemming mostly from higher fees they didn't want to pay. Similarly, places would not accept credit cards at all if they had razor margins and didn't want to eat the fee. I still know of a few places like that, often with an ATM near by so the customer can pay a fee if they are caught unaware.
That was the thing though, a business could decline to accept particular cards or cards at all and still perform transactions. That "opportunity" has generally not extended to the app store world in a practical way. If you want to play, they had their cut and customers and vendors didn't have a whole lot of say in what was reasonable. There is no simple default transaction (like cash) that they were trying to out compete.
Survivor in 2000, American Idol in 2002, The Bachelor in 2002, The Amazing Race in 2001. That always felt to me like when they found their "reality game show" formula that was then replicated off of those base archetypes into the entire rest of the genre. So mid-aughts does feel about right for when the explosion happened.
The more pure reality shows like original Real World or COPS seem more like ancestors than anything and didn't spawn as much of an immediate copy cat proliferation. Real World if anything morphed to be more like those later incarnations.
Who knows, maybe there will be an easy way to get stuff published out to the proper web. Things like community FAQs or guides that would be broadly of use. I think the loss of the conversations about minutiae will just be a fact though if that migration happens.