Created at: 2024-07-16
It is common to hear someone complain about the design of an object or tool and
say "this
This is a fun, short, and interesting read. It's written in a very personal level and can come across as a massive rant. Many swearing words are present on the text. If you are not up for it, or if you are not sure yet, at least have a look at the author's (Mike Monteiro) talk "F*ck You, Pay Me" on Youtube. It is not the exact topic of this book, but it gives you some insight into the brilliance of some of Mike's arguments.
This book also covers some interesting ethical dilemmas that are common in work environments, and some professional advice on important matters like when to walk away from a job.
The below are some quotes I've captured while reading the book:
The goal of this book is to help you do the right thing in environments designed to make it easier to do the wrong thing. (If you work at Uber or Twitter, just quit. We’ll also be talking about when to walk away later in this book.)
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
For years, the libertarian con artists of Silicon Valley have been telling us they want to change the world. But when the people at the top tell you they want to change the world, it’s generally because they’ve figured out how to profit even more from those below them.
It should freak you out that gangsters can agree on a code of behavior but designers can’t. Crime is more organized than design.
You can’t fix a cake once it’s been baked. This is why criticism should be asked for and welcomed at every step of the design process.
Not hiring someone because they’re not a good cultural fit is either elitist, racist, or sexist, or all three.
The cavalier attitude of “moving fast and breaking things” is deadly at that scale.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
I composed a little thing we tell our clients before they agree to work with us: “You may be hiring us and that may be your name on the check, but we do not work for you. We’re coming in to solve a problem, because we believe it needs to be solved and it’s worth solving. But we work for the people being affected by that problem. Our job is to look out for them because they’re not in the room. And we will under no circumstances design anything that puts those people at risk.”
James Liang was hired by Volkswagen as an engineer. This doesn’t change the fact that he designed the tool that landed him in jail.
(So many crimes are committed under the label of “culture fit” that it’s not even funny.)
women are forty-five percent more likely to leave a tech job after a year than a man.)
We have everything backward right now. We’ve got the people with the least amount of experience, sometimes fresh out of school, making decisions at the largest platforms in the world. Services that affect billions of people. Services that need to understand the effects of their decisions on multitudes of communities.
We learned this when McDonald’s cleared the Amazon rainforest to grow soy to feed factory chickens and cattle.1 Society simply can’t afford for your business to make money without regard to the impact it has on your clients’ physical well-being.
ProPublica found ninety-one recruitment ads posted by Uber. Of those ninety-one ads, eighty-seven were specifically targeted to men, one was targeted to women, and three didn’t target a specific sex.
I’ve seen way too many designers present their arguments with incredibly long lead-ins. They’re trying to justify their work, lay the groundwork, show their process, and end with a big reveal. This is exhausting. It takes forever to get to. It bores people. No one cares about your process. No one wants to sit through twenty minutes of background.
The person who convinces the boss that you need more time for research has done more to influence the design of the product than the person placing the pixels by a long shot.
“But Mike, those other professions do dangerous things. They could get us killed!” Seriously? We’re dealing with the data of most of the world. We’re dealing with privacy concerns of the human beings. Elections have been hacked using tools we built. We have the CEO of Facebook saying that what’s good for the world isn’t necessarily what’s good for Facebook. (He did.1) And yes, decisions we have made or failed to make have gotten people killed.
To believe this is to believe there is a lack of innovation in licensed fields. Can you seriously tell me there’s no innovation in the medical field? Take a look at Dubai’s skyline and tell me there’s no innovation in architecture. Telecommunications is one of the most regulated fields on Earth. Anyone who remembers the sound of a 2400-baud modem knows we’ve come a long way.