Discussion
"You should never be angry at work" by Sean Goedecke https://www.seangoedecke.com/you-should-never-be-angry-at-work/
I feel like, if you want to succeed in big tech, you should just read everything Sean Goedecke ever wrote. And a lot of the advice still applies at smaller companies.
@nolan Some good advice in there, but when he wrote, "the stakes of a technical decision are fundamentally not that high in the grand scheme of things," my immediate reaction was, "you've never worked in accessibility, at least not from the perspective of someone for whom it really matters."
@nolan I wouldn't get worked up about React state management per se, but I do feel strongly about implementing a whole application as a SPA in the first place, and might be inclined to show emotion about it, because I believe that the SPA navigation pattern, as still usually implemented (IIUC the major frameworks still don't use the Navigation API), compromises the experience of screen reader users.
@matt Accessibility is one of those things where it's reasonable to get angry. But I think to his point, being visibly angry usually doesn't achieve your goals.
Sometimes the goals are truly unachievable – even when what you're fighting against is completely user-hostile. I gave up so many of these battles, and eventually decided I was tired of big tech in general. 😅
@nolan I guess one big reason why I left Microsoft in 2020 was that I decided I could have more success working on accessibility outside of big tech.
Probably the biggest surprise for me when I first joined big tech, which the article gestures at, is that people's personas on social media or blogs are not at all indicative of life inside a big tech company. If you assume that the loudest voices on social media from <Company X> are representative of life inside that company, then you're going to be sorely mistaken. The power hierarchy and information economy inside a company are totally different from what you see outside it.
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