I'm getting a little sick of the level of entitlement in tech conversations — every firm must adhere perfectly to some set ideals or else the most vocal members in the community turn the conversation into an end-of-the-internet melodrama.
We laud companies that start by doing something small well, yet the second they don't support our platform of choice, it's time to banish them to the hills. (In this case, clearly there are material differences in video chat performance across browsers, or else why would Slack force Chrome support?)
We preach focus, then act appalled when customization feature X stagnates on the backlog.
We castigate businesses that spend investor dollars frivolously, and are then furious when well-funded companies act frugally and choose to make tradeoffs (like, say, only supporting one browser for a feature that doesn't work the same on all browsers, until they can achieve a certain quality threshold.)
I look forward to the day when we collectively accept that companies are groups of humans generally working in earnest to do their best, not some faceless behemoth that responds only to screaming "you're awful, do my feature or I'm leaving and tweeting about it" like some petulant child. Maybe there are cases where that is a reasonable response, but when the volume is always turned up to 11 it's hard to tell the real crises from distractions.
Without the heated tone ("entitlement in tech conversations") there's often no response to a valid complaint.
We only get clear explanations from a company's engineers after a discussion is raised.
> In this case, clearly there are material differences in video chat performance across browsers, or else why would Slack force Chrome support?
I look forward to a post on https://slack.engineering detailing the challenges. I'm not demanding a response, it's just a wish.
My decision to use a product takes certain principles into account; Slack is the kind of product that is often chosen for you by your company/open source project/community. A bit of "entitlement" — not meant as scare quotes, I just don't share the viewpoint – makes sense here, because sometimes you can't just choose not to use it.
In principal, I agree. I'm certain Slack has run the numbers and decided the ROI of implementing cross-browser video calling is lower than whatever else they're investing engineering time into. Sure, they have a lot of capital, but it's a large undertaking. A vocal minority of Twitter users shouldn't sway this.
In practice, it's pretty lame that they've had voice calling for almost two years, and this has never been available in Firefox. We're not talking about old IE here. A basic implementation of voice only calling is not hard to do.
I disagree. If we let little monocultures exist they grow into big monocultures (Windows "monopoly", Facebook "monopoly" etc). I put "monopoly" in scare quotes because they had the de facto high ground rather than being monopolies in the Standard Oil sense.
I've noticed the same thing -- often people refer to the "hive mind" feeling one way or another.
Rather than assuming individuals are just fickle, I think it makes much more sense that individuals are often only vocal about things they disagree with. We as readers don't know those individuals and lump them into our "hive mind" concept, as mistakenly assume that people's minds have changed.
I'm getting a little sick of the level of entitlement in tech conversations
I'd argue it's gotten worse over the last few years, to the point that even questioning the attitude or bringing it up in conversation is frowned upon and heavily argued against.
We laud companies that start by doing something small well, yet the second they don't support our platform of choice, it's time to banish them to the hills. (In this case, clearly there are material differences in video chat performance across browsers, or else why would Slack force Chrome support?)
We preach focus, then act appalled when customization feature X stagnates on the backlog.
We castigate businesses that spend investor dollars frivolously, and are then furious when well-funded companies act frugally and choose to make tradeoffs (like, say, only supporting one browser for a feature that doesn't work the same on all browsers, until they can achieve a certain quality threshold.)
I look forward to the day when we collectively accept that companies are groups of humans generally working in earnest to do their best, not some faceless behemoth that responds only to screaming "you're awful, do my feature or I'm leaving and tweeting about it" like some petulant child. Maybe there are cases where that is a reasonable response, but when the volume is always turned up to 11 it's hard to tell the real crises from distractions.