A developer went to their tech lead and said 'hey we can make the app much better by leaving the camera on all the time saves 200ms on camera startup time'
Tech lead: this is brilliant no potential problems here
Tech lead to management team: got this great new feature, we leave the camera on all the time makes the app 200ms faster.
Management: wow that's great can't see any problem with that, no chance of reputational damage there.
And it's all innocent and noone has any idea why anyone would get the wrong idea?
I see you don't have much experience in development. It probably went more like this:
business: "Opening the camera seems slow", dev: "it takes 200ms for the system to start it", "Can you make it faster?", "Not really, unless we keep the camera on", "Do that!", "Won't it have privacy issues?", "Don't worry about that".
EDIT: And in the end business is correct, because nobody really cares about this. Every happy instagrammer keeps happily instagramming.
This is so true that at other companies it often takes a lawyer (in-house counsel) reminding product that something is legally precarious to stop it, and they still push.
For something that has no real legal ramifications, there’s no way you’re stopping it.
The implicit one we can never admit to is something like: Instagrammer has a different sensitivity for 200ms than the dev and never cared.
Dev has to justify his egregious salary by manufacturing statistics to “experiment with engagement” nevermind the literal reality of having such a gadget is titillating as is, manufacturing belief that specific dev making a camera respond 200ms faster is what really made the app is where that paper is.
Camera start up time actually is quite important in my opinion. For example, I stopped using snapchat primarily because it felt laggy to get the camera open. That really grates on you when an app is mostly used for spontaneous image/video capture.
> Management: wow that's great can't see any problem with that, no chance of reputational damage there.
Absolutely agree, but it also wouldn't surprise me if they didn't think about it or didn't care.
If 2020 has taught me anything, it's that a surprisingly high number of people / companies / groups managers and/or leaders, do not think about or care about long-term repercussions of the vast majority of their decisions.
If 2020 has taught me anything, it's that a surprisingly high number of people / companies / groups managers and/or leaders, do not think about or care about long-term repercussions of the vast majority of their decisions.
2020? I was thinking 1980. To my memory, it seems to have started with the Savings and Loan scandals, and gotten worse.
Companies went from optimizing for 100-year growth to optimizing for the next three months.
Not sure why someone is assuming Facebook did this for an honest reason when Facebook is the best example of an extremely dishonest large tech company
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The founder Zucker berg literally wrote - They trust me, the dumb fucks
He wrote this in college
He has shown a pattern of treating his users as 'dumb fucks'
Again and again more and more data comes up that Facebook is a dishonest company. not a 'by mistake' dishonest, but a fundamentally dishonest company
And always White Knights like this guy show up claiming 'it is to optimize loading speed)
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Now Facebook is finally getting into trouble with even the left, because instead of helping Obama get elected it seems now they are helping Trump get elected
So their own dishonesty is so extreme that they are trying to help both Democrats and Republicans thinking both sides are dumb fucks that will forget what Facebook did to screw them over in past elections
Amoral does no less harm overall than evil, it's just done to 'the masses', not particular targets.
No one at Facebook gets to claim they were just following orders if they have _any_ understanding of the possible consequences of their work.
(If you believe the authors/operators that specifically maximize profits over responsibility are not responsible for their outcomes, you should read back into the posting about PG&E in CA: deliberately ignoring the wear & tear on 100 year old support hooks on high-tension power lines, thus sparking the fire that burned down Paradise, CA.)
A developer went to their tech lead and said 'hey we can make the app much better by leaving the camera on all the time saves 200ms on camera startup time'
Tech lead: this is brilliant no potential problems here
Tech lead to management team: got this great new feature, we leave the camera on all the time makes the app 200ms faster.
Management: wow that's great can't see any problem with that, no chance of reputational damage there.
And it's all innocent and noone has any idea why anyone would get the wrong idea?