It’s a balance any designer with a brief to design an effective, engaging experience has to strike: “You want people to spend money on your game and you want them to spend time in it, but there comes a point where that can become detrimental to what’s good for them and what’s healthy for them.”
If you're wondering whether or not your UI is good or bad for the user's mental health, the problem is that your design has already gone off the rails and into unethical territory.
You're not designing a UI to be good or effective, you're designing it to be manipulative. Worrying about whether that manipulation is good or bad for your users is merely distracting you from the root problem.
In the 80's and into the 90's, user-interface design was reasonably user-centric because the goal was to get the user's jobs done so that they would stay with your product because it got the job done. "Stay with your product" meant buying new versions. These days, the product isn't paid for directly by the user, a lot of what keeps a user in your system is "network effect", and your goals are to prevent the user from leaving your system, rather than helping the user get a particular job done. Don't get me wrong - you're on Facebook because the people you want to do Facebook things with are on Facebook, so to some extent, having a horrible user experience is irrelevant, as long as the experience isn't bad enough to actively drive people away. But that's a really sad place for UI/UX design to be at, and it sets really bad examples for other companies (who can't really afford to screw the user this way, but don't know any better).
Unfortunately, it won't change as long as the primary question is "How do we convince the user to do what we want them to do?" rather than "How do we make it easy to do what the user wants to do?"
Seriously? There's no way I would use Linux for a presentation, there are already a dozen things that could go wrong, why add another gross of things to go wrong? Live-debugging my X config file in front of a room of open-source users is not my idea of a good time.
I have a legitimate question: How does one back up Android, actually? (yes, I googled it, repeatedly, over a period of time)
My experience so far barely backed up anything besides the list of apps I had installed. On iOS all my banking apps and Google Authenticator are ready to use after a restore. On Android I get that only if I root my device and actively copy the app's data myself. And it's not just banking apps. With few exceptions It's pretty much every app that I have to set up all over again.
I had to reset my Nexus a while back because it had a database corruption that prevented Photos from displaying and backing up pictures, and the experience was as described above. Even with a Helium desktop backup.
This. With an Apple device, I can 100% clone everything in an hour or so, depending on whether I already have a backup or not. With an Android device, I can replicate some of the stuff which is installed, but many games won't have their state (unless the developer made extra efforts), and I'll still be finding missing bits three weeks later.
The first time I complained about this at work (Google) was when upgrading from my g1, and the answer I got was something like "Yeah, but the new release handles that". A couple years later, same story, "Yeah, I get you, but the new release handles that." A couple years later, same story, and I gave up complaining.
Indeed. With the prevalent binary thinking of today, people seem to fall into the trap of thinking that if the manufacturer is responsible, the user is not. But responsibility and guilt are not finite resources. Adding it to one party does not reduce it elsewhere; not an iota.
My previous television was secure from network attacks by virtue of not having any intelligence at all. My current television is hopefully secure, by virtue of me carefully trying to prevent it from connecting to the Internet. But that doesn't mean that the manufacturer hasn't cleverly included code to, say, connect to any insecure wifi access point it sees, just in case I didn't realize I wanted whatever crapware they are pushing today.
A lot of this is really on the manufacturer. You can build provably secure firmware update systems for that end of things, and beyond that, nothing should ship default insecure. It shouldn't automatically aim at my foot and shoot, I should have to explicitly aim it at my foot and explicitly pull the trigger before it shoots my foot off.
That thing you just did, where you list terrorist attacks alongside a man who wrote a sober, academic letter thus implying they're the same, what's that called? That's a cool tactic, I should do that too.
I see what you did there, imply that my entire point was invalid, because of a minor sub-point. That's a cool tactic, I should do that, too.
I find it fascinating how "alt left" people have lately become open, enthusiastic apologists for capitalism.
Ha, if anything I'm libertarian.
I'm totally serious, if he's feeling constrained by his workplace environment, get the hell out and start up his own company. It's a big world with a lot of workplaces, and for high-demand jobs like software engineering, you're stupid to stay in a place which you feel is harmful. Walk across the street and give someone else a try, or start your own gig.
Several of his sources said "yep, he pretty much understood our research and got it right."
Wait, the research was done on the top 1% of CS graduates? That's amazing! I mean, just organizing a research project on such a small class of people would be challening!
If they're passing up talented hires due to a quota system, then yes they are. Also, from what some other posters have said in previous/. stories related to this, affirmative action is illegal in California, so they may be running afoul of the law.
I was at Google for 14 years, and over that time I interviewed hundreds of candidates and worked with many groups, and if there is some sort of diversity quota system in place there, it is VERY well hidden. So I think the OP's point still stands.
The purpose of a "townhall meeting" is dialog. Google had already made it clear that they want a monologue. Cancelling it was very sensible.
Jesus, why the fuck do you care? Insofar as "Google" has an opinion on these issues, it's pretty obvious what it is, you don't even have to work there to figure it how. So if you, say, believe that homosexuals should not be allowed to marry, or that transgender people should burn in hell, or that concealed carry in the workplace is your right, or that someone bombing a Planned Parenthood location has a good point, or that women are inherently less capable of doing software engineering, then why they hell would you want to work at Google in the first place? So don't! Get out and do your big John Galt thing out in the wild, free of these restrictions! Or go work at Uber! Just quit complaining because market forces aren't catering to you.
He might well be right. But that doesn't mean he shouldn't have seen this coming.
He was certainly right - at least to whatever extent the science was right. The core of his memo was a survey of the current scientific literature, with citations. Of course, this stuff isn't physics, but it is repeatable measurements with known (if limited) predictive ability.
He's pretty young though, and a PhD, so I suspect he was quite naive. "Should have" seen it coming, sure, I agree, but understandable that he didn't. An engineer addressing an unknown by studying the science behind the problem, and using that as a basis to ask some obvious questions. Sort of what you want an engineer to do.
Also important to remember that he was a computer scientist addressing the "science" behind an issue outside his area of expertise.
We aren't all that far from an Inquisition (not prongs and tongs type Inquisition, but a "your job depends on agreement" type Inquisition).
There are dozens/hundreds of things about any job which I don't "agree" with, but I do them anyhow, because they're not worth getting worked up over. In fact, there are often things which I actively disagree with which I also don't get worked up over. This isn't some giant conspiracy, it's just adulting 101.
ObDisclosure: I worked at Google for 14 years. At no point was I aware of mandatory daily LGBTQIPA affirmations. You could pretty much ignore the issue if you wished.
Steve Jobs-ing it is "You're all fucking idiots, I'm out of here." It wasn't some big plan where he was going to go chill out in the woods for a bit and come back stronger. Jobs intended NeXT to take over everything, he was just 10 years or so too early.
Further, "Steve Jobs-ing it" is selling all of your shares but one, because who wants to invest in idiots? Then after Apple acquired NeXT, he sold almost all of _those_ shares, too.
And so long as that's the only thing people do with flash once it's open sourced (no more feature creep added by Adobe) then it should be just fine.
I suggest you do a review of open-source software. For every case like Linux where there's a core pushing things in the right direction, there's a case like GNOME where rather than actually fix things, every so often they just give up on the old version and tell everyone to convert to the new incompatible version. Whether a project is open-source or closed isn't really relevant.
With battery and storage technology improving these devices got small enough to put on a wrist band. Also, cell phones are not the luxury items they used to be and some are more capable than many low end laptops.
So I can replace $150 worth of dedicated music player with $1000 worth of bluetooth headphones, a watch, and a phone? Sign me up!
Though I guess I can't really fault Apple for dropping it. It's not their duty to support every random long-tail use case.
I got my BA in CS from a school which was in the process of calving their CS program out of the Math program. It wasn't a problem, and I've noticed that a lot of professional programmers would benefit from having had some liberal arts background, because a lot of the work involves communications (between people, not between computers!). It sounds like you maybe were at a school with competing interests who didn't necessarily have the students' best interests in mind.
Of course, then you get down to more philosophical questions, like does a liberal-arts degree create more well-rounded graduates, or does it just filter out students? Of the various people I've seen go through such programs, often the successes started out pretty interesting, and I know plenty of people who came out the other side without broad interests.
Employers should be prepared to ask a lot of "FizzBuzz" interview questions over the next few years, because quite a few under-qualified CS graduates from prestigious schools are going to be hitting the job market.
So the next few years will be pretty much the same as the past couple decades? Good to know.
[At one point I told recruiting to stop scheduling me for phone screens for new grads because it was so depressing.]
The small-town lifestyle is not sustainable, and only works when it's being subsidized by the cities. Most of these dying towns don't have any real industry left anyway, so it's time for the people there to pack up and leave.
That seems rather simplistic, since cities are not self-sustainable at all - they're entirely dependent on products and supplies from the outside. Wall off a city, and people there will starve really fast. Wall off a farming community, and they'll probably last a while.
In 1850, a rural county had substantially everyone working directly on a farm, with a relatively small group of people doing things like running the general store, handling shipping of produce out of town, teaching, etc. This continued past 1950 or so, with the main change being huge gains in the amount produced. After that, automation began removing the need for so many workers. Just in the past 40 years or so, the reach of individual farms has gone up 10x, but the employment has only gone up maybe 2x. Much the same thing has happened on the services side, something like teaching isn't much more efficient, but food delivery and shipping and everything else _is_.
Of course, people _are_ moving out of these towns. 75% of the kids in my family have, though in my extended family it's closer to 50%. But older people have more friction, and they vote and write newspaper articles.
... the program. You get used to it, though. Your brian does the translating. I don't even read the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, probable deadlock. Hey, I think I need a drink.
Why play woo roulette with a chiropractor? There is no reason that a chiropractor is required at any stage in the process. Need a nice back rub? Go to a masseur. Need treatment for a physical problem? Go to a physiotherapist.
What do you do when the "legit" healthcare profession says that there's nothing to be done, and it's going to cost you "I don't know" amount of money to go see a "legit" professional (but certainly hundreds to thousands of dollars), and a chiropractor is offering to give it a go for $120?
Over a decade ago, a chiropractor helped my wife with significant back problems which multiple "legit" healthcare providers hadn't done anything for, and you want to know what the biggest help was? The chiropractor actually sat down and listened to her, rather than immediately telling her what the situation was.
Government systems should be refactored to make government services better. Full stop. Saving money might be a useful side effect, but it might not, but cost-savings should not be the goal. Cost-saving projects run the risk of not actually saving anything while also screwing up things which already (kind of) worked.
As a for-instance, when a bank merges with another bank, they'll often claim some crazy cost-savings from merging backend operations. But it would be stupid to run a bank with multiple sets of backend operations, you'd lose more from lost opportunity due to confusion that you'll gain from literal cost savings from merging things. But nobody wants to hear the story of "There's a huge risk in combining disparate operations systems", instead trotting out cost savings makes everyone happy.
This is ignoring the problem that the government doesn't get to choose its field of operations. A tech company to some extent chooses its field based on whether it will be able to do things efficiently, and then if it takes over the world it can just ignore the detritus. But the US government must integrate, say, service records of veterans across decades, call it ~100 years. They have to take potentially sketchy records from the world wars and integrate them in a useful way into a system which is also taking in 1000x as much data about people currently operating in Syria. There's no possibility of saying "Could we just go regenerate this data to add the missing tags?" It's actually somewhat likely that in some cases you're better off with federated systems rather than a single system of integrated data.
Basically, it's a hard problem. You can almost certainly design a system to handle things better, but any redesign will have huge capital costs. A very likely outcome is that you'll have a new system which doesn't quite handle everything the old system did, and now you have two systems with different groups dependent enough on each that you can't shut either down, so things are actually less efficient.
To use the classic example, we all knew the Titanic was going to sink before anyone walked into a theater.
OMG I hated Titanic. The scrappy underclass dude is surrounded by dead people in lifejackets, and is all like "Nah, I'm just going to die right here." Criminy, make a raft, dude!
Trump hasn't done anything of substance to even mildly inconvenience the wealthy, and the H1-B program (which, let's face it, is what Timmy's talking about) is no different.
No. Cook might be concerned about H1-B (though I think he's a good guy and is probably not as cynical as you put things). But employees are concerned about whether they, as an American citizen, can travel to visit their relatives in a banned state without being hassled about getting back to their home. Or whether their relatives can visit them at home. Or whether a non-citizen (greencard holder or on a working visa) will have their papers confiscated by customs officials with no recourse. Or whether they will be stuffed in a back room for 17 hours without access to counsel or contact with friends and relatives waiting for them, etc.
How do I know this? Because I have heard these kinds of concerns directly from people via the old-fashioned social network, directly talking to people. And it is pretty damn upsetting to hear.
Now, I will agree, only a small proportion of overall tech employees will be directly affected by this. But that doesn't mean it's not a general problem for tech, because those employees are mixed in with all the rest of the employees, so when the shit hits the fan for them, everyone will hear about it and get upset that someone we know is having their life worked over through no fault of their own.
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA:
It’s a balance any designer with a brief to design an effective, engaging experience has to strike: “You want people to spend money on your game and you want them to spend time in it, but there comes a point where that can become detrimental to what’s good for them and what’s healthy for them.”
If you're wondering whether or not your UI is good or bad for the user's mental health, the problem is that your design has already gone off the rails and into unethical territory.
You're not designing a UI to be good or effective, you're designing it to be manipulative. Worrying about whether that manipulation is good or bad for your users is merely distracting you from the root problem.
In the 80's and into the 90's, user-interface design was reasonably user-centric because the goal was to get the user's jobs done so that they would stay with your product because it got the job done. "Stay with your product" meant buying new versions. These days, the product isn't paid for directly by the user, a lot of what keeps a user in your system is "network effect", and your goals are to prevent the user from leaving your system, rather than helping the user get a particular job done. Don't get me wrong - you're on Facebook because the people you want to do Facebook things with are on Facebook, so to some extent, having a horrible user experience is irrelevant, as long as the experience isn't bad enough to actively drive people away. But that's a really sad place for UI/UX design to be at, and it sets really bad examples for other companies (who can't really afford to screw the user this way, but don't know any better).
Unfortunately, it won't change as long as the primary question is "How do we convince the user to do what we want them to do?" rather than "How do we make it easy to do what the user wants to do?"
Seriously? There's no way I would use Linux for a presentation, there are already a dozen things that could go wrong, why add another gross of things to go wrong? Live-debugging my X config file in front of a room of open-source users is not my idea of a good time.
I have a legitimate question: How does one back up Android, actually? (yes, I googled it, repeatedly, over a period of time)
My experience so far barely backed up anything besides the list of apps I had installed. On iOS all my banking apps and Google Authenticator are ready to use after a restore. On Android I get that only if I root my device and actively copy the app's data myself. And it's not just banking apps. With few exceptions It's pretty much every app that I have to set up all over again.
I had to reset my Nexus a while back because it had a database corruption that prevented Photos from displaying and backing up pictures, and the experience was as described above. Even with a Helium desktop backup.
This. With an Apple device, I can 100% clone everything in an hour or so, depending on whether I already have a backup or not. With an Android device, I can replicate some of the stuff which is installed, but many games won't have their state (unless the developer made extra efforts), and I'll still be finding missing bits three weeks later.
The first time I complained about this at work (Google) was when upgrading from my g1, and the answer I got was something like "Yeah, but the new release handles that". A couple years later, same story, "Yeah, I get you, but the new release handles that." A couple years later, same story, and I gave up complaining.
Security is everybody's responsibility.
Indeed. With the prevalent binary thinking of today, people seem to fall into the trap of thinking that if the manufacturer is responsible, the user is not.
But responsibility and guilt are not finite resources. Adding it to one party does not reduce it elsewhere; not an iota.
My previous television was secure from network attacks by virtue of not having any intelligence at all. My current television is hopefully secure, by virtue of me carefully trying to prevent it from connecting to the Internet. But that doesn't mean that the manufacturer hasn't cleverly included code to, say, connect to any insecure wifi access point it sees, just in case I didn't realize I wanted whatever crapware they are pushing today.
A lot of this is really on the manufacturer. You can build provably secure firmware update systems for that end of things, and beyond that, nothing should ship default insecure. It shouldn't automatically aim at my foot and shoot, I should have to explicitly aim it at my foot and explicitly pull the trigger before it shoots my foot off.
They should bring the probe back to earth to recycle the components into new probes.
That thing you just did, where you list terrorist attacks alongside a man who wrote a sober, academic letter thus implying they're the same, what's that called? That's a cool tactic, I should do that too.
I see what you did there, imply that my entire point was invalid, because of a minor sub-point. That's a cool tactic, I should do that, too.
I find it fascinating how "alt left" people have lately become open, enthusiastic apologists for capitalism.
Ha, if anything I'm libertarian.
I'm totally serious, if he's feeling constrained by his workplace environment, get the hell out and start up his own company. It's a big world with a lot of workplaces, and for high-demand jobs like software engineering, you're stupid to stay in a place which you feel is harmful. Walk across the street and give someone else a try, or start your own gig.
WAS. When did you leave?
Not a pointed question; I have no inside perspective. But companies change, to suit the times and their own scale.
3 months ago. I doubt things have changed that much.
Several of his sources said "yep, he pretty much understood our research and got it right."
Wait, the research was done on the top 1% of CS graduates? That's amazing! I mean, just organizing a research project on such a small class of people would be challening!
Is Google being harmed by its gender policies?
If they're passing up talented hires due to a quota system, then yes they are. Also, from what some other posters have said in previous /. stories related to this, affirmative action is illegal in California, so they may be running afoul of the law.
I was at Google for 14 years, and over that time I interviewed hundreds of candidates and worked with many groups, and if there is some sort of diversity quota system in place there, it is VERY well hidden. So I think the OP's point still stands.
The purpose of a "townhall meeting" is dialog. Google had already made it clear that they want a monologue. Cancelling it was very sensible.
Jesus, why the fuck do you care? Insofar as "Google" has an opinion on these issues, it's pretty obvious what it is, you don't even have to work there to figure it how. So if you, say, believe that homosexuals should not be allowed to marry, or that transgender people should burn in hell, or that concealed carry in the workplace is your right, or that someone bombing a Planned Parenthood location has a good point, or that women are inherently less capable of doing software engineering, then why they hell would you want to work at Google in the first place? So don't! Get out and do your big John Galt thing out in the wild, free of these restrictions! Or go work at Uber! Just quit complaining because market forces aren't catering to you.
He might well be right. But that doesn't mean he shouldn't have seen this coming.
He was certainly right - at least to whatever extent the science was right. The core of his memo was a survey of the current scientific literature, with citations. Of course, this stuff isn't physics, but it is repeatable measurements with known (if limited) predictive ability.
He's pretty young though, and a PhD, so I suspect he was quite naive. "Should have" seen it coming, sure, I agree, but understandable that he didn't. An engineer addressing an unknown by studying the science behind the problem, and using that as a basis to ask some obvious questions. Sort of what you want an engineer to do.
Also important to remember that he was a computer scientist addressing the "science" behind an issue outside his area of expertise.
We aren't all that far from an Inquisition (not prongs and tongs type Inquisition, but a "your job depends on agreement" type Inquisition).
There are dozens/hundreds of things about any job which I don't "agree" with, but I do them anyhow, because they're not worth getting worked up over. In fact, there are often things which I actively disagree with which I also don't get worked up over. This isn't some giant conspiracy, it's just adulting 101.
ObDisclosure: I worked at Google for 14 years. At no point was I aware of mandatory daily LGBTQIPA affirmations. You could pretty much ignore the issue if you wished.
Steve Jobs-ing it is "You're all fucking idiots, I'm out of here." It wasn't some big plan where he was going to go chill out in the woods for a bit and come back stronger. Jobs intended NeXT to take over everything, he was just 10 years or so too early.
Further, "Steve Jobs-ing it" is selling all of your shares but one, because who wants to invest in idiots? Then after Apple acquired NeXT, he sold almost all of _those_ shares, too.
And so long as that's the only thing people do with flash once it's open sourced (no more feature creep added by Adobe) then it should be just fine.
I suggest you do a review of open-source software. For every case like Linux where there's a core pushing things in the right direction, there's a case like GNOME where rather than actually fix things, every so often they just give up on the old version and tell everyone to convert to the new incompatible version. Whether a project is open-source or closed isn't really relevant.
https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.h...
With battery and storage technology improving these devices got small enough to put on a wrist band. Also, cell phones are not the luxury items they used to be and some are more capable than many low end laptops.
So I can replace $150 worth of dedicated music player with $1000 worth of bluetooth headphones, a watch, and a phone? Sign me up!
Though I guess I can't really fault Apple for dropping it. It's not their duty to support every random long-tail use case.
I got my BA in CS from a school which was in the process of calving their CS program out of the Math program. It wasn't a problem, and I've noticed that a lot of professional programmers would benefit from having had some liberal arts background, because a lot of the work involves communications (between people, not between computers!). It sounds like you maybe were at a school with competing interests who didn't necessarily have the students' best interests in mind.
Of course, then you get down to more philosophical questions, like does a liberal-arts degree create more well-rounded graduates, or does it just filter out students? Of the various people I've seen go through such programs, often the successes started out pretty interesting, and I know plenty of people who came out the other side without broad interests.
Employers should be prepared to ask a lot of "FizzBuzz" interview questions over the next few years, because quite a few under-qualified CS graduates from prestigious schools are going to be hitting the job market.
So the next few years will be pretty much the same as the past couple decades? Good to know.
[At one point I told recruiting to stop scheduling me for phone screens for new grads because it was so depressing.]
The small-town lifestyle is not sustainable, and only works when it's being subsidized by the cities. Most of these dying towns don't have any real industry left anyway, so it's time for the people there to pack up and leave.
That seems rather simplistic, since cities are not self-sustainable at all - they're entirely dependent on products and supplies from the outside. Wall off a city, and people there will starve really fast. Wall off a farming community, and they'll probably last a while.
In 1850, a rural county had substantially everyone working directly on a farm, with a relatively small group of people doing things like running the general store, handling shipping of produce out of town, teaching, etc. This continued past 1950 or so, with the main change being huge gains in the amount produced. After that, automation began removing the need for so many workers. Just in the past 40 years or so, the reach of individual farms has gone up 10x, but the employment has only gone up maybe 2x. Much the same thing has happened on the services side, something like teaching isn't much more efficient, but food delivery and shipping and everything else _is_.
Of course, people _are_ moving out of these towns. 75% of the kids in my family have, though in my extended family it's closer to 50%. But older people have more friction, and they vote and write newspaper articles.
I don't have any funding, or a launch vehicle, or a landing vehicle, or a return vehicle, but I have plans.
... the program. You get used to it, though. Your brian does the translating. I don't even read the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, probable deadlock. Hey, I think I need a drink.
Why play woo roulette with a chiropractor? There is no reason that a chiropractor is required at any stage in the process. Need a nice back rub? Go to a masseur. Need treatment for a physical problem? Go to a physiotherapist.
What do you do when the "legit" healthcare profession says that there's nothing to be done, and it's going to cost you "I don't know" amount of money to go see a "legit" professional (but certainly hundreds to thousands of dollars), and a chiropractor is offering to give it a go for $120?
Over a decade ago, a chiropractor helped my wife with significant back problems which multiple "legit" healthcare providers hadn't done anything for, and you want to know what the biggest help was? The chiropractor actually sat down and listened to her, rather than immediately telling her what the situation was.
Government systems should be refactored to make government services better. Full stop. Saving money might be a useful side effect, but it might not, but cost-savings should not be the goal. Cost-saving projects run the risk of not actually saving anything while also screwing up things which already (kind of) worked.
As a for-instance, when a bank merges with another bank, they'll often claim some crazy cost-savings from merging backend operations. But it would be stupid to run a bank with multiple sets of backend operations, you'd lose more from lost opportunity due to confusion that you'll gain from literal cost savings from merging things. But nobody wants to hear the story of "There's a huge risk in combining disparate operations systems", instead trotting out cost savings makes everyone happy.
This is ignoring the problem that the government doesn't get to choose its field of operations. A tech company to some extent chooses its field based on whether it will be able to do things efficiently, and then if it takes over the world it can just ignore the detritus. But the US government must integrate, say, service records of veterans across decades, call it ~100 years. They have to take potentially sketchy records from the world wars and integrate them in a useful way into a system which is also taking in 1000x as much data about people currently operating in Syria. There's no possibility of saying "Could we just go regenerate this data to add the missing tags?" It's actually somewhat likely that in some cases you're better off with federated systems rather than a single system of integrated data.
Basically, it's a hard problem. You can almost certainly design a system to handle things better, but any redesign will have huge capital costs. A very likely outcome is that you'll have a new system which doesn't quite handle everything the old system did, and now you have two systems with different groups dependent enough on each that you can't shut either down, so things are actually less efficient.
To use the classic example, we all knew the Titanic was going to sink before anyone walked into a theater.
OMG I hated Titanic. The scrappy underclass dude is surrounded by dead people in lifejackets, and is all like "Nah, I'm just going to die right here." Criminy, make a raft, dude!
Trump hasn't done anything of substance to even mildly inconvenience the wealthy, and the H1-B program (which, let's face it, is what Timmy's talking about) is no different.
No. Cook might be concerned about H1-B (though I think he's a good guy and is probably not as cynical as you put things). But employees are concerned about whether they, as an American citizen, can travel to visit their relatives in a banned state without being hassled about getting back to their home. Or whether their relatives can visit them at home. Or whether a non-citizen (greencard holder or on a working visa) will have their papers confiscated by customs officials with no recourse. Or whether they will be stuffed in a back room for 17 hours without access to counsel or contact with friends and relatives waiting for them, etc.
How do I know this? Because I have heard these kinds of concerns directly from people via the old-fashioned social network, directly talking to people. And it is pretty damn upsetting to hear.
Now, I will agree, only a small proportion of overall tech employees will be directly affected by this. But that doesn't mean it's not a general problem for tech, because those employees are mixed in with all the rest of the employees, so when the shit hits the fan for them, everyone will hear about it and get upset that someone we know is having their life worked over through no fault of their own.