I loved IE6 as as user when it came out, and grew to hate it as a developer when the browser standards moved on, but a stubborn, large-enough user base percentage had not. I blame slow-moving IT departments that refused to touch their internal environments when all the Web 2.0 progress made things new and scary. A product my team was in charge of had to support IE6 and IE7 years after the rest of the world moved on because the IT admins at Walgreens straight out refused to update the machines that the pharmacists used at their stores.
The irony is that web standards didn’t move fast enough either, so the browser developers simply bypassed the standards body in favor of their own post-hoc ‘living standard’.
It wasn’t so much about the tempo of web standards; it was rather that W3C cared about the consensus of a far wider variety of entities, and browsers got fed up with being told what they should and shouldn’t do by people that were nothing to do with browsers—people that had interests in HTML, sure, but who were trying to pull it in directions that none of the browsers were interested in. And so, W3C having failed as a venue for browser HTML standardisation, they took it over.
To parody the situation: a consortium of bridge engineers is discussing building standards, but somehow they’ve been lumped together with every girl named Bridget and every young boy making toy bridges with blocks, and they all have voting rights, and the girls are insisting that bridges must sparkle, and the boys think every bridge should be able to support helicopters and diggers.
The risk of updating the machines to support IE9 might indeed be large, for not very obvious benefits. But what did they say about staying as is, and switching to Firefox or Chrome? Was it impossible due to use of some MS-only tech?
It's hard to remember the exact details all these years later... I doubt it was due to MS-only tech, but rather that IE6/7 were tested and approved and everything else was not. The incentives for IT teams are such that it's a lot easier to say no to something than yes, and create a ton of work and liability.
Funny enough, my wife and her parents all ended up with different variations of their last names in English when immigrating: ending in -ky, -kiy, and -kaya.
If you want to work 996 and that is what makes you feel self-actualized - by all means, go for it, nobody is stopping you. May even allow you to get ahead of the pack (or maybe the quality of your work will suffer in your overworked state - big gamble!).
For me, the big problem in your post is the "996 culture". That means the expectation is that everyone is pushing forward with a similar intensity. Now, perhaps you were talking specifically about individual efforts given your examples of artist and self-employed, but when I think about culture, I think about groups of people, and in that context 996 is problematic.
It only provides work-life balance if there is not much of a "life" to balance, where taking a break once in a while is fulfilling enough. Maaaaaybe this can work in your early 20s, but it basically removes anyone with kids, hobbies, outside interests and responsibilities, and really, anyone with life experience out of the equation. It is a highly exploitative culture, sold under the guise of camaraderie, when anyone who has gone through one or more hype cycles can tell that the majority of these startups will fold with nothing to show for them other than overworked, cynical individuals and another level of normalization of exploitative practices.
Thanks for the reply — I really appreciate how I missed the distinction between individual choice and systemic expectation. I was speaking more to personal situations (like artists or self-employed folks), but I see how referencing “996 culture” more broadly brings in serious issues of exploitation and exclusion. Your points about how this affects people at different life stages and the long-term costs gives me more to think about.
Now I'm really curious what kind of answers you're getting. If literally nothing, sounds like this is a great filter (but also makes me wonder what kind of candidates you're choosing to talk to).
Google is usually pretty on top of fast-changing sources like HN. My mind was blown more when I saw that ChatGPT seemed to ingest and regurgitate an HN comment of mine as an answer within 10-15 minutes of my posting (see the thread in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42649774). Sadly this is no longer verifiable as the answer does not match my comment, but at least it correctly answers the original request, which it did not prior to my response.
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