This was from a Slashdot link to an article called “What the Bubble Got Right” by Paul Graham, but maybe you didn’t get all the way to the bottom. It’s the best description I’ve heard for why programmers at tech companies don’t dress up. I’ve never worked for a company that made me dress up, and I can’t imagine that I would like it. Maybe this is why:
If you’re a nerd, you can understand how important clothes are by asking yourself how you’d feel about a company that made you wear a suit and tie to work. The idea sounds horrible, doesn’t it? In fact, horrible far out of proportion to the mere discomfort of wearing such clothes. A company that made programmers wear suits would have something deeply wrong with it.
And what would be wrong would be that how one presented oneself counted more than the quality of one’s ideas. That’s the problem with formality. Dressing up is not so much bad in itself. The problem is the receptor it binds to: dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as “suits.”
Nerds don’t just happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity.
So, next time someone asks me if the jeans and t-shirt I’m wearing was what I wore to work, and I say yes, I’ll be reminded that it’s because the ideas we come up with are way more important than what we’re wearing when we come up with them.
It’s starting to feel like this election is never going to end, because the fever pitch of press coverage feels like it couldn’t get any bigger, and yet nobody’s any closer to knowing which way the election is going to go.
Both campaigns, however, point out how important the debates will be, and shockingly, the first debate is only 10 days away. Matthew Dowd, Bush’s chief campaign strategist, remarked that he thought John Kerry was the best debater ever to run for president (better, even, than Cicero), which is part of a strategy to talk up the other guy to lower expectations. Kerry, too, often mentions that President Bush has never lost a debate.
Hmm, debates 10 days away. Is there a new SNL this week?
While surfing with Safari, I got this very strange message when I tried to watch a music video on Yahoo’s Launch website. It reads,
We’re sorry, but you must use Netscape 4.7x to use this application on a Macintosh.
And it includes a link into Netscape’s download archive where, if you chose, you could overlook the links to download 5 newer versions of Netscape and dig down to download Netscape 4.7. Bear in mind that Netscape 4.7 sucks.
Sometimes I just don’t know if they like us.
I went to the monthly BayCHI event at PARC tonight, and it was a great set of talks. And Don Norman was there in the second row, keeping the presenters honest.
John Pinto, a usability researcher and psychologist, gave a talk about user studies and how social factors bias not just the subjects but also the researchers that conduct the tests. Essentially, he gave 7 or 8 examples of psychological studies of the kind where the findings are so contrary to what you’d expect that you almost don’t believe them, but you love the result and tell everyone you know about “this one study” when the topic comes up in conversation. In something called the Hawthorne experiment, factory workers increased productivity any time a change was made (more breaks, fewer breaks, brighter light, dimmer light), showing not that people will work faster no matter what you change, but that being watched changes people’s behavior. In another study, one user and 8 people pretending to be users compared two big cards, one with a line and one with three lines, one of which was the same length as the line on the other card, and went around the room saying which of the three lines matched the length of the line on the other card. When the “plants” all started telling a lie, saying that an incorrect line matched the line on the other card, three-quarters of users went along with the group. And most of them later said that the group had no bearing on which line they thought was the matching line. Check out John Pinto’s website. If that’s not the website of a usability researcher, I don’t know what is. It’s less cluttered than useit.com and the font is just about as big.
Joy Mountford gave the second talk, and I can’t believe that I hadn’t heard more about her before. She was the creator and manager of the Apple Human Interface group for 8 years. Yeah, really.
She talked mostly about her envy of the mature field of Industrial Design as compared to User Interface and Interaction Design. And she uses the term industrial design to mean things that are designed and built out of physical materials, whether it’s cars or refrigerators or HotWheels cars. Companies realize that products that look great sell for a higher price and sell better, but interaction design doesn’t yet garner the same respect.
I have to mention that about the third through sixth slides of her presentation were about the Sculpture/Lemon Juicer that is on the cover of Don Norman’s new book Emotional Design, which is a great example of something that just makes you want to buy it, even if you don’t know if it actually works well as a juicer. She got Don Norman to tell the people there that he bought a gold-plated version of the juicer that came with a specific warning, “Do not use for juicing.” The acid would have damaged the gold plating. He also said that the juicer isn’t in his kitchen, it’s in his entryway, and when she asked if it started any conversations, he said, “We’re having a conversation about it right now.” Pretty cool.
Anyway, she was great. She’s 100% an Interaction Designer, and she threw out little ideas along the way about how she really wants to design a hotel that would know what kind of restaurants you might be looking for and would help you find them, and I thought about how, just like I do, interaction designers have these kind of ideas, all the time. She really struck a chord with me when she talked about the things she wished interaction designers had, like as great a way to showcase interactions as photographs are to showcase physically-designed products.
She talked about how attractive and palpable the things that Industrial Designers make are, and how Interaction Designers should be able to make names for themselves based on what they design the same way that a designer’s name gets attached to furniture and cars and stunning-looking juicers. Apple has recently promoted the fact that the designers of the new iMac G5 were also the designers of the iPod, and although the computer has some to do with the interaction, they are really still promoting their industrial designers.
It all just makes me want to design things that people will love.
I’ve seen about half a dozen people recently who don’t have ClearType turned on on their Windows computer, and I’ve gone in and changed it for each one of them, prompting the inevitable, “I can’t believe I didn’t know that was there!”
For anyone who doesn’t know what it is, ClearType makes the ugly fonts that you’ve been staring at every day perfectly smooth and readable. If you are using Internet Explorer, there’s a web site to help you turn it on here.
ClearType was the best thing introduced in Windows XP. It brought the Windows presentation layer into the 21st century. It’s the best thing to ever come out of Microsoft Research. What more can I say? It rocks.
Ichiro is on fire, with another 5 hits on Saturday. Through 135 games, he is batting .379, which begs the obvious question, “What does he need to do between now and the end of the season to bat .400?” which nobody has done since Ted Williams in 1941, when he actually hit .406 for the season.
By my rough calculations, with 27 games to go and 83.3% of the season already over, Ichro would have to hit .505 for the remainder of the season to bat .400. If he keeps getting more 5-hit games, there just might be a chance that he could do it. At least Mariner fans have something to root for in the last month of the season.
