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Once a company becomes an industry leader, its employees, from top to bottom, start thinking defensively. Suddenly, people feel they have more to lose from challenging the status quo than upending it. As a result, one-time revolutionaries turn into reactionaries. Proof of this about-face comes when senior executives troop off to Washington or Brussels to lobby against changes that would make life easier for the new up and comers.

Years of continuous improvement produce an ultra-efficient business system—one that’s highly optimized, and also highly inflexible. Successful businesses are usually good at doing one thing, and one thing only. Over-specialization kills adaptability—but this is a tough to trap to avoid, since the defenders of the status quo will always argue that eking out another increment of efficiency is a safer bet than striking out in a new direction.

Long-tenured executives develop a deep base of industry experience and find it hard to question cherished beliefs. In successful companies, managers usually have a fine-grained view of “how the industry works,” and tend to discount data that would challenge their assumptions. Over time, mental models become hard-wired—a fact that makes industry stalwarts vulnerable to new rules. This risk is magnified when senior executives dominate internal conversations about future strategy and direction.

With success comes bulk—more employees, more cash and more market power. Trouble is, a resource advantage tends to make executives intellectually lazy—they start believing that success comes from outspending one’s rivals rather than from outthinking them. In practice, superior resources seldom defeat a superior strategy. So when resources start substituting for creativity, it’s time to short the shares.

One quick suggestion: Treat every belief you have about your business as nothing more than a hypothesis, forever open to disconfirmation. Being paranoid is good, becoming skeptical about your own beliefs is better.

“The pressure doesn’t come from the money. It comes from the fact that you’re asking people to trust something that, on the face of it, doesn’t look very trustworthy.” He gives, as an example, sitting in a car park outside Atlanta, asking his Civil War cast to believe that one day the VFX blue screen behind them will be a night sky lit up by mortar fire. Or on Ex Machina where, “Alicia [Vikander] and Sonoya [Mizuno] are trusting that nudity is going to be dealt with thoughtfully and respectfully … [when] cinema leans towards not doing that.”

This is the deep sense of responsibility to cast and crew that “literally keeps me awake at night”.

He is always considered in his responses, typically offering up several alternative answers to a single question, and then self-reflexively evaluating the relative accuracy of each.

Garland’s sombre, anti-war stance doesn’t prevent Civil War from producing some awe-inspiring spectacles of US military might, with helicopters a recurring motif. “They’re very visceral objects and experiences,” he explains. “They make much more noise than people expect, and the noise has a kind of fast, heartbeat pulse in it, that your own pulse rate matches. I’ve done a lot of flying in helicopters for one reason or another. Not least work, actually.”

The film’s warning against our descent into dystopia is urgent and sincere, but it simultaneously declines to map out the specific arguments and ideas that might take us there. Why is Garland both-sidesing like this?

he recognises this as a potential misinterpretation of a film that posits “polarisation” as cause – not a symptom – of our current malaise

“What I’m usually doing in films is presenting more than one opinion, so it’s more like a conversation, rather than: ‘Do this, think that’. So there are several ways you could look at Ex Machina; as a film about sentience, or where gender resides, or objectification. The same is true of Men. And somewhere, coded within that, I will be taking a position. But I’ve tried to do it in a way that isn’t interrupting the conversation.”

Design Engineers at Vercel blend aesthetic sensibility with technical skills. This allows us to deeply understand a problem, then design, build, and ship a solution autonomously.The team is made up of people with a wide array of skills and a lot of curiosity. We constantly experiment with new tools and mediums. This multidisciplinary approach allows the team to push what’s possible on the web.

Design Engineers care about delivering exceptional user experiences that resonate with the viewer. For the web, this means:Delightful user interactions and affordancesBuilding reusable components/primitivesPage speedCross-browser supportSupport for inclusive input modes (touch, pointers, etc.)Respecting user preferencesAccessible to users of assistive technology

Being part of the Design team gives Design Engineers the autonomy and ability to work on things that would often get deprioritized in an Engineering backlog.

The team puts resources towards polished interactions, no dropped frames, no cross-browser inconsistencies, and accessibility. Examples of design-led projects are:Vercel’s Geist font: A Sans and Mono font. An interactive playground to see every glyph and try the font.Vercel’s design system documentation: An interactive docs playground used by engineers across the company to ship Vercel.Vercel’s Design Team homepage: An exploratory page for testing new web techniques and providing design resources.Delighters in the Vercel Dashboard: Features in the Vercel Dashboard that bring it to life and delight the user.

While no individual is expected to have all the skills, the team collectively is able to execute on ambitious designs because we can:Design in FigmaDesign in codeWrite production codeDebug browser performanceWrite GLSL shadersWrite copyCreate 3D experiences with Three.jsCreate 3D models/scenes in BlenderEdit videos using CGI and practical camera effects

You can see our team’s work across Vercel:Creating and maintaining components for the internal design system used on everything from Vercel.com to the Vercel Toolbar and the Next.js documentation.Websites like the Next.js Conf website and Vercel’s product pages.Product work and docs for Vercel and Next.js.Building proof of concepts for branding and marketing.Improving the accessibility of all Vercel web properties.

Players must assume full responsibility for their cards, a strategy dubbed “C.P.E.” — Conception, Planning, Execution — that was designed to combat the male tendency to execute (pick up milk from the market when asked) but leave the conceiving (recognizing that your toddler only drinks 2 percent milk) and planning (monitoring the fridge to ensure the 2 percent doesn’t run out) to the female partner. In other words, as Rodsky told me, “Own. Your. Shit.” Partners also must agree to a Minimum Standard of Care (or “M.S.C.”) for tasks, meaning that even if the owner of the Garbage card is fine with empty pizza boxes piling up on the kitchen counter, he may still have to throw them out promptly.

often, several persistent challenges emerge. Implementing the practice is time-consuming and so is maintaining it. In fact, in all of my interviews, I failed to find a couple who followed the rules to a tee for longer than a few months. Just to get Fair Play off the ground, the initiator has to read the book, procure the cards, create an organizational system (I’ve seen everything from Google spreadsheets so detailed they resemble stock-portfolio trackers to oversize whiteboards dotted with custom Etsy chore magnets), then explain it all to a partner.

A woman recently polled one group to ask whether her spouse should be expected to pick up his own socks if she owned the Cleaning card. Another turned to the Fair Play community after a family member died, seeking advice on how to ask her partner to cover her chores while she grieved. All this time and effort falls overwhelmingly on women by design.

social movements start with the oppressed,” Rodsky says, because “people who want the status quo maintained” won’t push for change. As Rodsky recently said on a podcast, “You teach somebody something now because it will benefit your future hours.” But the prep work has pushed many women away because, as one Brooklyn mother put it, it’s “more than I can handle right now.”

Stories also abound of partners agreeing to cards only to quietly drop them. This sometimes leads to “chore chicken,” a resentment-fueled phenomenon in which Partner A refuses to pick up the slack on Partner B’s tasks, so the dirty dishes fester or shirts languish at the dry cleaners. Partner A silently rages because this isn’t how C.P.E is supposed to work.

Other spouses, when invited to play fair, have responded with “I get it. You want me to do more. But I don’t want to play a game. Just tell me what to do.” That’s what Paige Connell, 33, a Boston mom of four under 6, heard when she first showed her husband the deck. “But that places the burden right back on the woman,” she says. “I don’t want to be his project manager.”

The manner in which the “fewer cards” partner responds to the Fair Play system can serve as a barometer for the health of a relationship, says Jenny Cooke Malstrom, a marriage and family therapist in Seattle. Fair Play doesn’t cause divorce, she says, but it’s more likely to backfire in at-risk relationships where the baseline level of love and respect is already low. “To have your husband straight up say ‘This isn’t important’ makes what’s already implicitly happening explicit,” Malstrom says.

a 2017 Sex Roles study which suggested that the perception of fairness in family labor is a stronger predictor of maternal mental health than the actual division of labor. The study is the primary reason her system intentionally prioritizes feelings of equity over literal equality. Rodsky isn’t the only relationship expert to say that a 50/50 chore split isn’t realistic. Brené Brown famously went viral in a 2020 appearance on The Tim Ferriss Podcast, when she explained that the balance of responsibility in her marriage changes day to day depending on each partner’s mental and emotional capacity — and that constant responsibility trading is critical to supporting one another.

“It was never written to be prescriptive. My intention was to [help women] hold their boundaries in a different way. Any movement towards ‘I’m not going to live this way anymore,’ I consider a win.”

I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early. So naturally I began to lug a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School to work on my Nabokov paper. In one cavernous, well-appointed room sat approximately 50 of the planet’s most suitable bachelors. I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out. Apologies to Progress, but older men still desired those things.

I was competitive by nature, an English-literature student with all the corresponding major ambitions and minor prospects (Great American novel; email job). A little Bovarist, frantic for new places and ideas; to travel here, to travel there, to be in the room where things happened.

Restless one Saturday night, I slipped on a red dress and snuck into a graduate-school event, coiling an HDMI cord around my wrist as proof of some technical duty. I danced. I drank for free, until one of the organizers asked me to leave. I called and climbed into an Uber. Then I promptly climbed out of it. For there he was, emerging from the revolving doors. Brown eyes, curved lips, immaculate jacket. I went to him, asked him for a cigarette. A date, days later.

I used to love men like men love women — that is, not very well, and with a hunger driven only by my own inadequacies.

I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal, and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.

The greater and more visible the difference in years and status between a man and a woman, the more it strikes others as transactional. Transactional thinking in relationships is both as American as it gets and the least kosher subject in the American romantic lexicon. When a 50-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman walk down the street, the questions form themselves inside of you; they make you feel cynical and obscene: How good of a deal is that? Which party is getting the better one?

The truth is you can fall in love with someone for all sorts of reasons, tiny transactions, pluses and minuses, whose sum is your affection for each other, your loyalty, your commitment. The way someone picks up your favorite croissant. Their habit of listening hard. What they do for you on your anniversary and your reciprocal gesture, wrapped thoughtfully. The serenity they inspire; your happiness, enlivening it. When someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them.

There is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. Now he kisses college girls with fresh breath. A boy married to my friend who doesn’t know how to pack his own suitcase. She “likes to do it for him.” A million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colors, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach him. All while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood. Hauling him at her own expense.

My younger brother is in his early 20s, handsome, successful, but in many ways: an endearing disaster. By his age, I had long since wisened up. He leaves his clothes in the dryer, takes out a single shirt, steams it for three minutes. His towel on the floor, for someone else to retrieve. His lovely, same-age girlfriend is aching to fix these tendencies, among others. She is capable beyond words. Statistically, they will not end up together. He moved into his first place recently, and she, the girlfriend, supplied him with a long, detailed list of things he needed for his apartment: sheets, towels, hangers, a colander, which made me laugh. She picked out his couch. I will bet you anything she will fix his laundry habits, and if so, they will impress the next girl.

Adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. But his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on.

we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone.

She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one.

Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty?

There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan.

the great gift of my marriage is flexibility. A chance to live my life before I become responsible for someone else’s — a lover’s, or a child’s. A chance to write.

I dream of new structures, a world in which women have entry-level jobs in their 30s; alternate avenues for promotion; corporate ladders with balconies on which they can stand still, have a smoke, take a break, make a baby, enjoy themselves, before they keep climbing.

the tooling we choose has a profound impact on the work we do, and, in the best case scenario, becomes a standard for how we build products. This is why we put so much care into even the tiniest details in Linear.

Even when doing concept work, you often need to focus your efforts. The design concept should feel like an exciting evolution of the product.

I didn't adhere to a specific method during the exploration phase, but typically, each day I designed a complete set of screens and flows. One day might be dedicated to designing the Inbox view, while the next day I could focus on the roadmap and projects. Other days, I explored upcoming product features. During this process, I experimented with different iterations of the sidebar, visual styles, and colors, and then linked the screens together as a prototype to assess their functionality.

Through this process, I generated hundreds of screens and was able to narrow down a few major directions that resonated most. Around this time, I began sharing the screens with other designers and people within the company to gather feedback and additional insights.

Ultimately, we settled on the main design direction, and I created a few views to showcase it

We started with the concept design Karri had originally imagined, but it wasn’t fully figured out and needed some additional design work. We didn’t know how we would bridge the previous UI design with the new style or if the new design could support all of our application states and options. We were able to make some changes off the bat, such as updating the color system, while other changes had to be punted to later on, such as the different headers you come across while navigating the app.

It’s easy for the scope of UI redesign projects to blow up. Before we got too far down any one path, we needed to get some confidence on the right option to keep everyone focused. So we ran some stress tests (or crash tests if you want to be dramatic) before going into implementation and iterating with engineers. We tested three main focus areas: the environment, the appearance, and the hierarchy.

Our app runs on Electron, so our navigation needed to work not just on macOS and Windows as a native app but also in any browser. That meant that previous/next navigation buttons, history, and tabs needed to be easily removable to work with browsers. We tested a lot of options, from very condensed to more spacious configurations. I often relied on Apple standards, which also helped get close to the feeling of a native app.

I also spent time aligning labels, icons, and buttons, both vertically and horizontally in the sidebar and tabs. It was definitely a challenge given the amount of UI elements we have on this tiny surface. This part of the redesign isn’t something you’ll immediately see but rather something that you’ll feel after a few minutes of using the app.

Karri mostly worked with opacities of black and white during his explorations, which really helped him get results quickly and helped me understand the relationship he had in mind between the elements and their respective elevation and hierarchy. As our system relied on a set of variables, I worked with Andreas on our software engineering team to polish and iterate on both the core variables and the operations we apply to them to generate our aliases for surfaces, texts, icons, and controls.

A while back, we rebuilt the system for generating custom themes in Linear, using the LCH color space instead of HSL. LCH has the benefit that it’s perpetually uniform, meaning a red and a yellow color with lightness 50 will appear roughly equally light to the human eye. This makes it possible to generate more consistently good-looking themes, regardless of which base colors are used.

Yes, the theme generation system also supports a contrast variable which defines how contrasty a theme should be. This allows us to automatically include super high-contrast themes for users who need it for accessibility reasons.

Linear relies on a set of structured layouts that support the navigation elements and content. It integrates additional headers to store filters and display options, side panels to display meta properties, as well as the actual display: list, board, timeline, split, and fullscreen.When I joined the project, Karri had already gathered most of the app's views and their respective states, so I was able to run all of my tests quite effectively. I mostly worked by type of view (list, board, split, etc.) as I found it easier to focus and ensure that every decision worked in all cases.

We divided the project into five milestones:Stress tests: Following the series of explorations made in November 2023, we tested if the direction felt right in the main views of Linear: Inbox, Triage, My Issues, Issues List, Project, Cycles, Roadmap, Search.Behavior definitions: As the direction was refined, we documented and defined the behaviors of the main components of the app: sidebar, tabs, app headers, and view headers.Sidebar and chrome refresh: We implemented the first bits of the refresh on the sidebar, tabs, and view headers. We also improved the appearance and contrast of our theme for light and dark modes. We used a feature flag to allow for internal testing at this stage.Private beta: We started rolling out the new design in Private beta to get initial feedback. Once we felt comfortable, we began rolling out the changes to a percentage of workspaces each day.GA: We released the new UI to all workspaces.

We knew that in order to move quickly and ship our work successfully, we needed to dedicate time and team resources to it. We couldn’t treat it as a side project.

Each afternoon, we divided the coding portions into groups of two engineers while designers iterated on other parts of the project, building a pipeline for us to work from. This daily back-and-forth between designers and engineers helped us get the first working version of the new UI by the end of the week

Next, we worked on the Inbox. We redesigned notifications to be more centered around the notification type and emphasized the faces of your teammates. We simplified headers and filters to improve the overall navigation. We also reviewed comments alignments and harmonized the look of our buttons with the new themes.

We started using Inter Display to add more expression to our headings while maintaining their readability and kept using regular Inter for the rest of the text elements.

The challenges start from the fact that it's never a good time to do a redesign. It's hard to make it a priority. It's difficult to calculate the ROI on it. And if you run your product with A/B testing, every global redesign will tank the metrics in the short term.

The real need for redesigns often comes when you have created a successful product and it has evolved with the market and users over time.

We ship small changes daily, and something major almost every week. Every year, it's almost like a new product. This incremental way of building the product is hugely beneficial, and often necessary — though it unbalances the overall design, and leads to design debt. Each new capability adds stress on the product's existing surfaces for which it was initially designed. Functionality no longer fits in a coherent way. It needs to be rebalanced and rethought.

If your product evolves fast, you should be paying this debt every 2-3 years. The longer you wait and the more successful your product becomes, the more you will have to untangle.

Slowly the user sentiment and perception might start turning negative and you might start looking like a dinosaur incumbent. This leaves an opportunity for some nimbler player to come along and compete in your market. Companies often try to address this with brand refreshes, but if you don’t refresh the product, nothing truly changes about the experience.

While the design debt often happens in small increments, it’s best to be paid in larger sweeps. This goes against the common wisdom in engineering where complete code rewrites are avoided. The difference is that on the engineering side, a modular or incremental way of working can work as the technical implementation is not really visible. Whereas the product experience is holistic and visual. You cannot predict which path the user takes. If you update just one module or view at a time, the overall experience becomes more disjointed. Secondly, if your goal is to reset and rebalance the whole product UI and experience, you have to consider all the needs simultaneously. An incremental approach doesn’t let you do that.

I’ve never seen redesigns successfully executed without the CEO behind it. While design might have a seat at the table generally, they are usually not able to convince everyone around that table. Only the CEO can push through all the excuses and give the latitude to a project touching all of the surfaces the product needs.

The way to get the CEO involved is to tie a design reset into a larger company shift or directional change. For example, if a company is looking at a new product, or major new feature, a redesign project can be a way to imagine how it might look or feel. This can be the justification for why you need to spin up the team (and at the same time, you can make a case for updating the rest of the product experience).

Organizations are often quite stuck in their views and ways of doing things, making them less enthusiastic about something new. When I was at Airbnb, the mobile redesign project was a way to shift the company to become mobile-first. It set the tone and got the message across to the whole company that mobile was happening and that it was happening now. While it looks like an obvious change in hindsight, there were many arguments against it at the time and it took a lot of convincing. Switching to think about mobile meant the design and features had to be rethought to work in that platform.

While Linear is a smaller and younger company, we’re also undergoing a shift. The product vision has widened from a simple issue tracker to a purpose-built system for product development. We are now moving into planning workflows that naturally come before the building or execution phase of building products. This product evolution creates new future needs from the product design, and we have to make space for it.

When you realize that a design reset is needed for your product, how do you actually get started with the project? You start with a standalone team to explore the new concept design and create something the company can rally around.The auto industry has a practice of building “concept cars”, where they explore the next version of the car freely and boldly without considering practicality. A concept car sets the direction, but usually is not expected to land in production because it’s too impractical or costly to manufacture.

A secret I've learned is that when you tell people a design is a "concept" or "conceptual" it makes it less likely that the idea is attacked from whatever perspective they hold or problems they see with it. The concept is not perceived as real, but something that can be entertained. By bringing leaders or even teams along with the concept iterations, it starts to solidify the new direction in their mind, eventually becoming more and more familiar. That's the power of visual design.

Tulpa is a concept originally from Tibetan Buddhism and found in later traditions of mysticism and the paranormal of a materialized being or thought-form

The Theosophist Annie Besant, in the 1905 book Thought-Forms, divides them into three classes: forms in the shape of the person who creates them, forms that resemble objects or people and may become ensouled by nature spirits or by the dead, and forms that represent inherent qualities from the astral or mental planes, such as emotions.

The Slender Man has been described by some people as a tulpa-effect, and attributed to multiple people's thought processes.

These days hate has roughly the same role in popular culture that original sin has in traditional Christian theology. If you want to slap the worst imaginable label on an organization, you call it a hate group. If you want to push a category of discourse straight into the realm of the utterly unacceptable, you call it hate speech. If you’re speaking in public and you want to be sure that everyone in the crowd will beam approval at you, all you have to do is denounce hate.

At the far end of this sort of rhetoric, you get the meretricious slogan used by Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign last year: LOVE TRUMPS HATE. I hope that none of my readers are under the illusion that Clinton’s partisans were primarily motivated by love, except in the sense of Clinton’s love for power and the Democrats’ love for the privileges and payouts they could expect from four more years of control of the White House; and of course Trump and the Republicans were head over heels in love with the same things. The fact that Clinton’s marketing flacks and focus groups thought that the slogan just quoted would have an impact on the election, though, shows just how pervasive the assumption I’m discussing has become in our culture.

what happens when people decide that some common human emotion is evil and harmful and wrong, and decide that the way to make a better world is to get rid of it?

The example I have in mind is the attitude, prevalent in the English-speaking world from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, that sex was the root of all evil.

I know that comparing current attitudes toward hate with Victorian attitudes toward sex will inspire instant pushback from a good many of my readers. After all, sexual desire is natural and normal and healthy, while hate is evil and harmful and wrong, right? Here again, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that people a century and a quarter ago—most likely including your ancestors, dear reader, if they happened to live in the English-speaking world—saw things the other way around. To them, hate was an ordinary emotion that most people had under certain circumstances, but sexual desire was beyond the pale: beastly, horrid, filthy, and so on through an impressive litany of unpleasant adjectives.

Make something forbidden and you make it desirable. Take a normal human emotional state, one that everyone experiences, and make it forbidden, and you guarantee that the desire to violate the taboo will take on overwhelming power. That’s why, after spending their days subject to the pervasive tone policing of contemporary life, in which every utterance gets scrutinized for the least trace of anything that anyone anywhere could conceivably interpret as hateful, so many people in today’s world don internet aliases and go to online forums where they can blurt out absolutely anything

The opposite of one bad idea, after all, is usually another bad idea; the fact that dying of thirst is bad for you doesn’t make drowning good for you; whether we’re talking about sex or anything else, there’s a space somewhere between “not enough” and “too much,” between pathological repression and equally pathological expression, that’s considerably healthier than either of the extremes. I’m going to risk causing my more sensitive readers to clutch their smelling salts and faint on the nearest sofa, in true Victorian style, by suggesting that the same thing’s true of hate.

Hate is like sex; there are certain times, places, and contexts where it’s appropriate, but there are many, many others where it’s not. You can recognize its place in life without having to act it out on every occasion—and in fact, the more conscious you are of its place in life, the more completely you acknowledge it and give it its due, the less likely you are to get blindsided by it. That’s true of sex, and it’s true of hate: what you refuse to acknowledge controls you; what you acknowledge, you can learn to control.

the blind faith that goodness requires amputation is so unquestioned in our time.

Human beings are never going to be perfect, not if perfection means the amputation of some part of human experience, whether the limb that’s being hacked off is our sexual instincts, our aggressive instincts, or any other part of who and what we are.

We can accept our sexuality, whatever that happens to be, and weave it into the pattern of our individual lives and our relationships with other people in ways that uphold the values we cherish and yield as much joy and as little unnecessary pain for as many people as possible. That doesn’t mean always acting out our desires—in some cases, it can mean never acting them out at all

There's complaining for fun, and then there's complaining. I'm going to be 30 this year and it is dawning on me that I don't have time to waste on these people. While writing this, I reached out to my manager and let him know I'm looking for new work, which I promised to do when I took the job (they can hate me as much as they want as long I have fulfilled all my personal promises).

Ah, to believe that people surface real issues at retros in dysfunctional organizations.

Design Engineer is the latest label we're chucking onto the pile of obfuscatory design titles alongside interface designer, interaction designer, software designer, web designer, product designer, design systems architect, UI/UX designer, UX engineer, UI engineer, and front-of-the-front-end engineer.

Throwing this extra label onto the pile feels necessary though. Design engineer captures something simple, important, and worth distinguishing: a person who sits squarely at the intersection of design and engineering, and works to bridge the gap between them.

They're people who know how to run a design process to decide how something should work, look, and feel, and have the engineering chops to implement it. They can quickly iterate on ideas by cycling between design exploration, research, and live code. The skillset is ideal for prototyping, exploratory interaction design, and building robust design systems.

Most from a small set of companies like Vercel, Linear, The Browser Company and Replit, known for their attention to interface design detail and slick product interactions, who are clearly encouraging and cultivating design-engineer hybrids.

People are incentivised to only share their sexy, shiny, flawless creations, rather than their messy process or shameful failures. Some of the especially tedious and labourious work isn't easily shareable, such as advocating for robust design systems and cleaning up legacy code.

I am not under any illusions that these public works constitute the entirety of what design engineers create or spend all day making. I'm sure some spend their days “aligning stakeholders,” buried under a mountain of strategic documents and trapped by heirarchical approval chains. Say a small prayer for them.

Emmy mainstays like “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Better Call Saul” and “Succession” have all ended their runs, and the newer Emmy parvenus, such as the comedies “Abbott Elementary” and “Jury Duty,” while excellent, harken back to an earlier, mass-market era of television that was dominated by sitcoms and hourlong procedurals.

Even when physically present, Huberman can be hard to track. “I don’t have total fidelity to who Andrew is,” says his friend Patrick Dossett. “There’s always a little unknown there.” He describes Andrew as an “amazing thought partner” with “almost total recall,” such a memory that one feels the need to watch what one says; a stray comment could surface three years later. And yet, at other times, “you’re like, All right, I’m saying words and he’s nodding or he is responding, but I can tell something I said sent him down a path that he’s continuing to have internal dialogue about, and I need to wait for him to come back.”

When they fought, it was, she says, typically because Andrew would fixate on her past choices: the men she had been with before him, the two children she had had with another man.

Another friend found him stressful to be around. “I try to be open-minded,” she said of the relationship. “I don’t want to be the most negative, nonsupportive friend just because of my personal observations and disgust over somebody.” When they were together, he was buzzing, anxious. “He’s like, ‘Oh, my dog needs his blanket this way.’ And I’m like, ‘Your dog is just laying there and super-cozy. Why are you being weird about the blanket?’”

Describe things that someone can explain to someone else, or you'll miss out on word-of-mouth growth. Imagine you wandered into some party and met an investor/donor/customer named Emily. Even if you're the most persuasive person ever and she walks away from the conversation energized and excited, your time is wasted because Emily can't explain to her coworkers/friends/legislative-body what specifically she's excited about.

If Emily is a potential customer and all she heard was nothing-language, then you've gained no information. She might be interested! But that interest might only be in something she's imagined — not what you're actually making.

Nothing-language is describing your product as "an investigation into how we generate dispersed intimacy, signify alliance, and physical representations of our digital coordination praxis"1 instead of saying you're an investment fund. If you're going to "revolutionize", "create the operating system for", "build at the intersection between", "empower", "democratize", "individually flourish", or "be interdisciplinary", the universe should pause, rewind, and let you explain again. It's kind and wants you to succeed.

Be boring. Say you're "plaid for messaging apps" or "a figma plugin that generates svg icons from gpt-3" or "chrome extension that adds cmd-k to every website".