It's Humans all the Way Down | Folding Burritos

Nowadays, companies tend to pitch their business models of siloed and quasi innovative problem-solving technology. The whole idea of specialization and offering solutions to particular problems has been haunting us since the time of Adam Smith. Somehow, people seem to forget that no problem arises in isolation. Do we even consider anymore that for ... See more

“The hardest thing,” he told me, “is that the systems you’re interacting with were built decades and decades ago . No one is building them; they were built in the past. You’ve effectively got to go and learn them from scratch.”

So much of how we build websites and software comes down to how we think. The churn of tools, methods, and abstractions also signify the replacement of ideology. A person must usually think in a way similar to the people who created the tools to successfully use them. It’s not as simple as putting down a screwdriver and picking up a wrench. A perso... See more

"In addition, there are problems that humans rather than computers will have to solve for purely practical reasons. It isn’t because computers couldn’t eventually solve them. It’s because in real life, and especially in organizational life, we keep changing our conception of what the problem is and what our goals are."

— Geoff Colvin,  Human

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Software problems tend to evolve over time into philosophy problems, a point that's come up in a few Diff pieces, like the Antithesis writeup and Asana's ontology-as-a-service ($). In this particular category, it's the philosophy of work and vocation: a bond trader, accountant, or social media manager doesn't necessarily have to spend much time nav... See more