The is such a fucking sexist program. My wife and I filed joint tax returns, live in a community-property state, and have been married for a long time. Yet Apple’s black box algorithm thinks I deserve 20x the credit limit she does. No appeals work.
Follow
DHH
@dhh
Creator of Ruby on Rails, Co-owner & CTO of 37signals (Basecamp & HEY), NYT best-selling author, and Le Mans 24h class-winner. No DMs, email: dhh@hey.com
dhh.dkJoined April 2008
DHH’s Tweets
"I still can't believe that this is the protest that would prove every Bitcoin crank a prophet. And for me to have to slice a piece of humble pie, and admit that I was wrong on crypto's fundamental necessity in Western democracies."
Oh for fucks sake 🙄. Don’t sacrifice your 20s – or any other decade of life! – on the erroneous belief that unless you work round the clock, you’re not going to be “successful”. The world is full of people who were all work and now are all regret. twitter.com/twobitidiot/st
This Tweet is unavailable.
Replying to
Hilarious how much mansplaining is flowing in this thread. Every single poster questioning my wife’s credit score, a man. Every single defense of Apple blaming GS, a man. Almost like men are over represented in the defense/justification of discrimination that doesn’t affect them?
Replying to
This is such a shallow, disappointing take. If we relegate all responsibility for discrimination to the individuals discriminated against, nothing is going to change! Individual action against structural problems is INSUFFICIENT.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @dhh and @AppleCard
then don't use the Apple Card? Solution seems obvious
Replying to
So nobody understands THE ALGORITHM. Nobody has the power to examine or check THE ALGORITHM. Yet everyone we’ve talked to from both Apple and GS are SO SURE that THE ALGORITHM isn’t biased and discriminating in any way. That’s some grade-A management of cognitive dissonance.
Replying to
So obviously we both furiously signup for the fucking $25/month credit-check bullshit shakedown that is TransUnion. Maybe someone stole my wife’s identity? Even though we’ve verified there was nothing wrong previously. Guess what: HER CREDIT SCORE WAS HIGHER THAN MINE!!!
Replying to
So yeah, I completely stand by my original charge: is a sexist program. It does not matter what the intent of individual Apple reps are, it matters what THE ALGORITHM they’ve placed their complete faith in does. And what it does is discriminate. This is fucked up.
Facebook and Google literally pay engineers an order of magnitude more to trick people into clicking on ads than Boeing pay some of its engineers to write airplane software.
The myth of the collaborative wonders of the open office debunked in new study. A tyranny of interruption, distraction, and stress for workers that require uninterrupted time for creative work. A way to squander the attention of highly paid workers to save money on real estate.
Facebook was tricking 5-year olds into spend hundreds or thousands on platform games, then refusing to refund the charges when shocked parents found out. Facebook employees referred to big-spender kids as “whales”, and kept denying refunds 😦
Replying to
This gets to the crux of how diverse teams make better products. I’d be surprised to learn if the team at Apple working on this wasn’t over-represented with men, or at least women who haven’t had to worry about credit approval. Easy to go with status quo when it flows for you.
Replying to
She spoke to two Apple reps. Both very nice, courteous people representing an utterly broken and reprehensible system. The first person was like “I don’t know why, but I swear we’re not discriminating, IT’S JUST THE ALGORITHM”. I shit you not. “IT’S JUST THE ALGORITHM!”.
"Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere — while still paying San Francisco and New York salaries" 😍. This is making Twitter and Facebook look awful with their if-you-move-we'll-dunk-your-pay policy. Same remote-capable work, same pay 👏
Apple and Goldman Sachs have both accepted that they have no control over the product they sell. THE ALGORITHM is in charge now! All humans can do is apologize on its behalf, and pray that it has mercy on the next potential victims.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @dhh
I had the same experience! Better credit score than my husband, at first they denied credit!! After a day on the phone, an email to Tim Cook I was asked to reapply, got a lower credit limit than my husband, told by an arrogant GS rep “we have an algorithm and have no control!
Holy fuck. The word dystopian is not nearly strong enough to describe the fresh hellhole Microsoft just opened up. Just as the reputation of a new and better company was being built, they detonate it with the most invasive work-place surveillance scheme yet to hit mainstream.
Quote Tweet
Esoteric metrics based on analyzing extensive data about employee activities has been mostly the domain of fringe software vendors. Now it's built into MS 365.
A new feature to calculate 'productivity scores' turns Microsoft 365 into an full-fledged workplace surveillance tool:
Replying to
Apple has handed the customer experience and their reputation as an inclusive organization over to a biased, sexist algorithm it does not understand, cannot reason with, and is unable to control. When a trillion-dollar company simply accepts the algorithmic overlord like this...
Hotwire aka NEW MAGIC is finally here: An alternative approach to building modern web applications without using much JavaScript by sending HTML instead of JSON over the wire. This includes our brand-new Turbo framework and pairs with Stimulus 2.0 😍🎉🥂 hotwire.dev
Every position we open at Basecamp receives hundreds of applications. Our secret recipe: 1) Pay well, 2) Hire remotely, 3) Explain the position thoroughly, 4) Have a reputation for being a good place to work, 5) Stop dog whistling overwork with “strong work-ethic” bullshit.
Quote Tweet
Nearly every entrepreneur I talk so says hiring is their biggest challenge.
The world is starving for competent people with a strong work-ethic.
Life is not a sprint and creatives don’t win by squeezing out single-digit effort advantages. Take fucking Xmas off from whatever the hell you’re doing. Your hustle can wait, gangster.
Quote Tweet
Whatever you’re hustling for, take note: most people/companies are shut down until ‘18. That means you get 2 extra weeks to outwork your competition. That’s 3.8% more time. For perspective: Usain Bolt won his gold medals running 1.2% faster. These 2 weeks are a gift. Get to work.
Google is not a search engine, it’s an ad engine. You search to find stuff, they respond with a full page ad. This is so ludicrously user hostile that it’s only tenable when you operate a monopoly. Break. Them. Up.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @jasonfried
Full screen on Mobile phone is just an Advert of your competitors ! 
"Google will eventually kill every single service you care about, if they can't find a way to directly monetize it with ads at a scale of billions. They're institutionally incapable of being in the product or service business for the long term."
There are many days where I think I’m wasting my time on Twitter. Maybe even most days! But then I think of ceding this place to the narrative of hustle porn and odes to overwork, and I think fuck no. It’s my obligation to play the countermelody and share our story.
Quote Tweet
Watching @dhh fighting with this silly US-style, VC driven, American-dream-bullshit workaholism is the greatest thing on Twitter
So sad to read this 😢. Whenever I read about a software service I like hopping on the venture capital train to unicorn-ville, I fully expect them to go to shit. 1PW now need to beome a many billion dollar company OR DIE TRYING. That usually lead to desperate/shitty decisions.
Quote Tweet
1Password raises $200 million in Series A funding. Uhhhhhhh, what? techcrunch.com/2019/11/14/fou
“This means that Apple knows when you’re at home. When you’re at work. What apps you open there, and how often. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend’s house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel.” 😞
Using the delusion that you’re going to “change the world” to justify your workaholism is the void of meaning in your life desperately crying for help.
Quote Tweet
Most people that changed the world were workaholics. MLK, Gandhi, Hamilton, Thatcher, etc all worked nights and weekends.
But if you are not interested in changing the world, then working more than 40 hours a week is optional.
I choose to try to change the world. twitter.com/twobitidiot/st…
We've decided to become a Facebook-Free Business at starting today. No Facebook, Instagram, no WhatsApp. No ads. No profiles. No pages. No usage. No more. Run your own business? Consider joining up. m.signalvnoise.com/become-a-faceb
New in : "Any time a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, deposits a cookie in your browser, that cookie is confined to the cookie jar assigned to that website, such that it is not allowed to be shared with any other website." blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/
Replying to
That THE ALGORITHM often ends up being a biased, discriminating mess isn’t exactly novel ground either. Here’s Amazon shuttering an algorithm for hiring that systemically discriminated against women.
Replying to
What’s even worse is how complete and unquestioned the faith of these Apple reps were in the wisdom of THE ALGORITHM. To be point of essentially credit shaming my wife, assuming her score must have been lower than mine, and roping us into a TransUnion shakedown to check.
Replying to
The customer service experience is infuriating too. They’re quick to respond, but nobody is authorized to discuss the credit assessment process. No opportunity to present evidence. Just a “sorry, your wife is deemed to be 1/20th the credit worth you are, check again in 6 months!”
The solution to a big mess of code isn’t a big rewrite but changing your programming habits, so every small change turns the tide and leaves the codebase better every time. “Everyone has to do the dishes” - #RailsConf
Rails 6.0: Action Mailbox, Action Text, Multiple DBs, Parallel Testing, Webpacker by default, and Zeitwerk! What a monumental final release. Massive upgrades, intense conceptual compression. Our Best Rails Yet!
This is pretty amazing. Both GitHub and Shopify are huge, billion dollar companies running on the original apps made over a decade ago. And they now both on the latest Rails, helping to push the framework forward 🙏🌟👏
Quote Tweet
As of Wednesday, @github is running on Rails 5.2.1. This is the culmination of a year and a half of hard, grueling work and it's so exciting to be on the newest version of #Rails! 
I have a confession: The idea for Basecamp wasn’t eating me alive inside. It was just something we needed, that we knew how to build, and then other people asked if they could use it too 🤷♂️
Quote Tweet
If you want to start a company because it sounds like a nifty way to make money, you are wasting your time. Start a company because you have this idea that is just eating you alive inside and you have to get it out into the world for the pure satisfaction of making it happen.
Replying to
I wasn’t even pessimistic to expect this outcome, but here we are: just gave my wife the VIP bump to match my credit limit, but continued to be an utter fucking failure of a customer service experience. Let me explain...
Work on behalf of users, not by their request. When they bring you ideas for features, dig for the problems they’re trying to solve. Few users are experts at designing software, but most of them are very good at sharing where it hurts and why.
Quote Tweet
"A primary cause of complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want."- Niklaus Wirth
Gig exploitation math is very simple. IRS sets the standard mileage deduction every year based on avg costs for fuel, maintenance, tires, insurance, and depreciation. In 2019, it’s 58 cents/mile. Doordash pays $5 for 10 mile delivery INC tips. Net loss to driver: 80 cents.
Quote Tweet
And orders like these that are NOT IN MY STARTING POINT. I guess I'm supposed to travel 20-30 minutes out of my zone to appease doordash. And then travel that distance back so I'm in zone and can get another order? @workingwa @DoorDash @t_xu Your greed is showing!!
The reason you shouldn't use Rails is that the community is full of experienced, senior developers who might have families and therefore are EXPENSIVE. No, listen, you should pick whatever new thing those 20-year olds without demands are using 😂 #StartupAdvice #HackerNewsHits
Shiiiiit. We better throw out Basecamp, Ruby on Rails, and every other project or product I’ve worked on for the last 20 years. Mustn’t have been real “creation”, I suppose. Can’t believe I fooled myself for two decades!!
Quote Tweet
After nearly a decade of remote work I have come to a hard realisation:
Remote creation is almost impossible.
If you have a working business or simple project, running it with a distributed team is fine.
If you really want to make something new, teams around whiteboards win.