"...lighter and more fun than the lumbering, self-serious processes of the past".
This is a great line and encapsulation of what I think we all find so refreshing and fun about the AI-era. Tech got awfully boring, and bloated to your point, over the past 15 years. It now feels adventurous again.
Only the good die young!!! And the best die a thousand deaths. (I mean for real: commerce is hell for many kinds of creativity. I was only ever really good at drumming, and I couldn’t survive being a drummer for a company!).
Ironically, this returns the designer to the area we ostensibly all wanted to protect with our “artists’ studio” bureaucracies: that of the creative whose invention from particular knowledge is illegible to systems but resonant with humans.
I also see the creative/design industries headed in this direction when people want to make something really novel, they’re going to need to consult an expert who has the knowledge and nuance to make the right calls.
On the downside, I wonder what kind of effects this would have on the job market for designers. To some extent, cheap labor has always been available from sites like fiverr but this is taking it a step further. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
It weighs on me. I think a lot of people will be able to move around and find ways to thrive, but I’d be stunned if eg Meta ever gets back to the ~600 product designers they had when I was there! Quora had 250 employees and like 25 people on the design team, and Substack has like 100 people and 5 people on the design team. Those were real boom times, and even without LLMs a correction was inevitable I think.
Well, I hate it! I've been a marginal participant in the market for most of my career; ZIRP was wonderful for me, permitting me to get experience I wouldn't have been able to achieve if companies were running leaner. I don't have a good academic background and never really had the right array of skills anyway.
I'm not sure there's anything to be said about this sort of thing beyond a general lamentation for how hard life can be. There's really no stopping it, and it's hard even to feel that it's unfair; I'm really glad Facebook took a chance on me, but I can't say it was "deserved" or that a world where they don't do that sort of thing is outrageously evil. So many prior roles have been subsumed this way, whole fields, whole communities. It's a grisly planet. And it's still very possible LLMs will take my career from me!
If that happens, I'll have to do what I did before design, I suppose: catch as catch can, do my best to find work, etc. I will definitely complain about it, but I can't imagine it summing to more than that?
"In fact, usually the bigger things get, the more difficult it becomes to grow them any more. Adding things is an additive process, hence the name, but the number of potential connections between things grows multiplicatively. So things get exponentially more complicated as they get linearly bigger. More effort needs to be put into their plumbing, metaphorically but also literally. There are more people who will be inconvenienced by the new thing, and there is just more … bloody … stuff in the way. (My mind keeps going back to the parable of the Welsh slate heaps). Pretty quickly you get diminishing marginal returns and after a while it’s entirely possible to get diminishing absolute returns."
"Shortly after submitting the final set of edits and queries, I realised that the joke I should have used in it is that my contribution is the planning and regulation equivalent of “guns don’t kill people: people do”. Rather than the regulations themselves, we need to look at the overall system by which the regulatory state is brought to a place where it prevents things happening which have majority support. Because if you look at that system, you often find that the actual role of NIMBYs is pretty small. There aren’t very many of them, and whenever things end up in an actual court, they tend to lose. Their role in the system is to be a bogeyman to frighten developers into crazy, over-engineered solutions to forestall hypothetical risks."
This post is a good illustration of the fact that those dynamics are not confined to government, and that Dan's framing of, "is there a balance between management capacity and the complexity of the problems to resolve?" is widely applicable.
You may already know that I largely subscribe to the theory that we see in others the faults we agonize over in ourselves, and I think it's not that surprising that many in the corporate world and capitalist enterprises are perpetually anguished over state bureaucratization (and "overreach")!
I think there's something to that theory, but I'm not sure it describes this situation exactly. I often see the opposite -- that people believe the problems they are dealing with are an aberration and want to imagine that there's some other domain in which it isn't an issue (and, amusingly, often that's people interested in politics saying some version of, "private industry would never behave like this" when, in fact, yes it would).
Another great peep into how big companies work.
"...lighter and more fun than the lumbering, self-serious processes of the past".
This is a great line and encapsulation of what I think we all find so refreshing and fun about the AI-era. Tech got awfully boring, and bloated to your point, over the past 15 years. It now feels adventurous again.
Here lies Alex, a tortured separatist
Only the good die young!!! And the best die a thousand deaths. (I mean for real: commerce is hell for many kinds of creativity. I was only ever really good at drumming, and I couldn’t survive being a drummer for a company!).
Great essay!
This part particularly stood out to me:
Ironically, this returns the designer to the area we ostensibly all wanted to protect with our “artists’ studio” bureaucracies: that of the creative whose invention from particular knowledge is illegible to systems but resonant with humans.
I also see the creative/design industries headed in this direction when people want to make something really novel, they’re going to need to consult an expert who has the knowledge and nuance to make the right calls.
On the downside, I wonder what kind of effects this would have on the job market for designers. To some extent, cheap labor has always been available from sites like fiverr but this is taking it a step further. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.
It weighs on me. I think a lot of people will be able to move around and find ways to thrive, but I’d be stunned if eg Meta ever gets back to the ~600 product designers they had when I was there! Quora had 250 employees and like 25 people on the design team, and Substack has like 100 people and 5 people on the design team. Those were real boom times, and even without LLMs a correction was inevitable I think.
Well, I hate it! I've been a marginal participant in the market for most of my career; ZIRP was wonderful for me, permitting me to get experience I wouldn't have been able to achieve if companies were running leaner. I don't have a good academic background and never really had the right array of skills anyway.
I'm not sure there's anything to be said about this sort of thing beyond a general lamentation for how hard life can be. There's really no stopping it, and it's hard even to feel that it's unfair; I'm really glad Facebook took a chance on me, but I can't say it was "deserved" or that a world where they don't do that sort of thing is outrageously evil. So many prior roles have been subsumed this way, whole fields, whole communities. It's a grisly planet. And it's still very possible LLMs will take my career from me!
If that happens, I'll have to do what I did before design, I suppose: catch as catch can, do my best to find work, etc. I will definitely complain about it, but I can't imagine it summing to more than that?
damn!! a little more depressing of an answer than I expected.
Was torn between “builders > guilders” and “builders > gilders” but I suppose both work.
yo that title would've done numbers!!!
One day I will apply this creative ability to my own wildly successful substacks
I have many thoughts about this but I immediately want to connect it to some of the discussion over the Klein/Thompson book _Abundance_. In particular Dan Davies work on management and his comments here: https://backofmind.substack.com/p/cybernetic-abundance-and-its-limits
"In fact, usually the bigger things get, the more difficult it becomes to grow them any more. Adding things is an additive process, hence the name, but the number of potential connections between things grows multiplicatively. So things get exponentially more complicated as they get linearly bigger. More effort needs to be put into their plumbing, metaphorically but also literally. There are more people who will be inconvenienced by the new thing, and there is just more … bloody … stuff in the way. (My mind keeps going back to the parable of the Welsh slate heaps). Pretty quickly you get diminishing marginal returns and after a while it’s entirely possible to get diminishing absolute returns."
and here: https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-most-ambitious-crossover
"Shortly after submitting the final set of edits and queries, I realised that the joke I should have used in it is that my contribution is the planning and regulation equivalent of “guns don’t kill people: people do”. Rather than the regulations themselves, we need to look at the overall system by which the regulatory state is brought to a place where it prevents things happening which have majority support. Because if you look at that system, you often find that the actual role of NIMBYs is pretty small. There aren’t very many of them, and whenever things end up in an actual court, they tend to lose. Their role in the system is to be a bogeyman to frighten developers into crazy, over-engineered solutions to forestall hypothetical risks."
This post is a good illustration of the fact that those dynamics are not confined to government, and that Dan's framing of, "is there a balance between management capacity and the complexity of the problems to resolve?" is widely applicable.
You may already know that I largely subscribe to the theory that we see in others the faults we agonize over in ourselves, and I think it's not that surprising that many in the corporate world and capitalist enterprises are perpetually anguished over state bureaucratization (and "overreach")!
I think there's something to that theory, but I'm not sure it describes this situation exactly. I often see the opposite -- that people believe the problems they are dealing with are an aberration and want to imagine that there's some other domain in which it isn't an issue (and, amusingly, often that's people interested in politics saying some version of, "private industry would never behave like this" when, in fact, yes it would).
lmfao god that's really true; I've had friends in academia in particular express that sentiment and whoo-boy, I hate to disappoint them, but...