There are some other interesting dynamics in UX that aren't just cyclical trends:
- Natural language interfaces. You can now communicate with your computer with language, voice or text. There are some situations where this is an improvement, but others where it's not. It'll be interesting to see how interfaces are designed to combine the best of both worlds.
- Adaptive interfaces. The UI/UX of the last period of computing is largely a solved problem. There are standard UX solutions for most types of problems. It's also become significantly easier to build these interfaces, and LLMs are pretty good at writing basic declarative UIs. I think the bar will be raised such that users expect their interfaces to adapt to them, instead of a one-size-fits-all solution.
- Immersive interfaces. This might be similar to "dimensional" but more about the actual UX instead of just how 3D the buttons and icons are. I think using 3 dimensions is a natural solution for expressing higher information density. VR and AR will eventually catch on in some form.
Happiness of a developer writing code can be a misery of a one having to read / debug it.
I worked in ruby for a couple years around 2009 and having to deal with a code that implemented most of its logic via method missing is still one of the strongest negative memories I have about coding.
`binding.irb` and `show_source` have been magical in my Ruby debugging experience. `binding.irb` to trigger a breakpoint, and `show_source` will find the source code for a method name, even in generated code somehow.
Another annoying one from that category is Ruby's forwarded methods. Since they're created via generated, injected code, you can't query which method it forwards to at runtime. Or not easily anyway.
What I advise (and aim for) is only pulling out the sharp knives for "library" code, but application code should stay "simple" (and this much more easily navigable). Otherwise you can absolutely make a bloody mess!
Perhaps OP is referring to the idea that products are killed by apathy, not by hate. People who take the time to complain about something still want the thing, they just want it to be better. People who have stopped caring are lost.
The common argument is that universities offer vastly more services to their students then in the past. Career centers, for example, are relatively new trend. This is in part because students also 'shop' for universities with the best perks - not necessarily the best faculty. The most egregious examples include Michelin star chefs, lazy Rivers, and very fancy scoreboards in their very fancy stadiums. Less egregious examples include better campus security and health support staff. As much as it's convenient to point to administrators as a problem, part of the problem is also the ongoing arms race to attract applicants and students' expectations.
A Unitarian system might be better, faculty run classes maybe without even TAs, your grade is however you do on your final, Spartan campuses without student amenities. The kids would be more depended on themselves to sink or flourish, but it’s almost like that anyways.
But if I had to choose for my own kid and had the money to afford it, I would still go with the full campus experience, although a Unitarian experience would probably be better for access overall.
The unitarian model you mentioned is the norm in Germany and France (and even the UK to a certain extent - a CSU will have better student amenities than Oxbridge tbh).
“Students” might also be the wrong denominator for research-intensive places.
Penn has an army of postdocs and research staff too. Even though they aren’t paid out of indirects, they do need to get paid, have places to park, get safety training, etc, all of which do need admins.
Just because you don’t know doesn’t mean it’s just a bunch of lazy jerks collecting paychecks for doing nothing. You clearly don’t know anything about the state of higher ed regulation if you think nothing has changed in the last few decades. FERPA, HIPAA, Title IX, a huge IT infrastructure and all the security concerns that go with that, the ADA…
I think part of the problem is that universities have lots of people who do one job and that job is not everyday. For instance, where I'm at we have two people in charge of summer enrollment. That seems to be it. They are way way overworked for about two weeks at beginning of the summer. I have no idea what they do the other 50 weeks of the year. I think their boss is happy as long as they deal with summer courses.
“I have no idea what these other people I don’t work with do, so it must be nothing” is a really naive and insulting thing to say. They probably don’t know what you do either, would it be fair to say you do nothing of value?
The thing though, is that they actually are unnecessary.
We don't have these guys here in Sweden, and our university education costs less per head than highschool education. The Russians don't have these guys, and they even have the Indepedent University of Moscow, which is basically a bunch of mathematicians that let anybody who passes three of their courses take the rest and get a degree.
This whole thing where both they and we and some other people let anybody who does well enough on the exams in is also very important, because it means that you aren't forced to jump through hoops to get accepted, and this signals something to people-- that university education isn't about hoop jumping or about satisfying political criteria, and this signals something about the attitude of the state to its citizens which is really important at least to me.
Sure, but this is the US we're talking about, and the regulatory environment is of course different in the US than in Sweden or Russia.
You can argue that the US's regulations are dumb and shouldn't exist, but that doesn't change the fact that they do exist, and that universities need to retain staff that can ensure compliance.
I don't know if the huge amount of admin jobs at US universities today is actually necessary, but it's plausible that universities in one country might need more admin staff than universities in another.
Ok, I’ll bite. My university has a team of experts to help students with academic writing. Another that helps us figure out how best to organize our classes in the online LMS that we use for distance education, and to ensure that we all are following a similar structure so as to not drive our students insane. Another team that helps support grad students on visas with logistics around immigration law and what-not. We have an office that helps with patents and technology transfer. Another team that helps with data repositories and management plans. We have a whole research computing office that runs our hpc team and deals with random IT things that scientists are always thinking up. Another that runs our IRB and helps us with that whole process. Another that helps us handle data use agreements so we can share data between institutions while staying compliant with relevant laws and what-not. We have an office that deals with contracts and legal agreements so I don’t have to figure out whether a certain clause in a funding agreement makes sense or not. And we have a whole team that helps me with budgets and financial analysis of my grants and research projects to make sure that my staff don’t suddenly find themselves unemployed in the middle of a grant year because I overspent or didn’t understand that certain kinds of expenses weren’t allowed. This is just off the top of my head and includes who I’ve worked with in the last month or two; I didn’t even get into the animal techs, the facilities folks, etc etc.
These are all people who are at extreme risk of losing their jobs in the next weeks and months because of the chaos happening with NIH funding, and I can say with certainty that I as a scientist and an educator am far more effective because I have these professionals working with me. This is what our indirects cover and it is absolutely crucial.
Admin Support for distance education and foreign students would scale with growth of the number of students. And somehow admin growth rate is double the growth rate of student body.
The rest of your examples explain why: regulation and maybe some unnecessary activities? I do not know who you are but seriously: do you need “a whole team” for your budget needs? How big is your budget? In my previous financial analyst role I (i.e one person) supported the accounting and financial needs for about 30 people (5 different teams, total spend including salaries, outside contracts and travel about $15 million/year). All that done in Excel and with plenty of time to spare. My wife is a part time accountant and she supports about 10 consultants with all their accounting needs: payroll, sending and tracking invoices, taxes (federal + state+city), cash reconciliation, etc…
The teams I mentioned all support dozens of investigators and their associated labs, they are shared resources. That’s part of the point of centralizing overhead costs at the university level via an indirect cost mechanism- if every lab had to do all of that we’d be wasting tons of money and time, but by centralizing it we get economies of scale. Tragically, my own lab’s budget is nowhere near the level that I could support enough financial help on my own… ;-)
And yes, many of the examples I listed are there for regulatory reasons, and that’s a good thing. We have laws around IRBs for good reasons, and it’s very important to have professional support in making sure we are doing things the right way in that regard. Data use agreements are important- when subjects share their personal data with me so I can study it, they do so with the understanding that it will be handled properly and part of how we do that is via data use agreements, and we need professionals to help with that because I certainly didn’t learn enough about contract law in grad school to do a good job with it on my own.
There is obviously a conversation to be had about whether a particular regulation is appropriate or whether there’s too much of this or that red tape, and I think every scientist would be able to tell stories of administrative annoyance. But it’s absurd to argue that the solution is to burn it all down indiscriminately, which is what we’re seeing.
If you just want React+Rails, the rails generator command comes with a bunch of options to set that up for you, including setting up and configuring: React/Vue/etc, a bundler like vite, typescript, tailwind.
It looks like inertia has additional features though.
I like SwiftUI, reactive frameworks just make sense to me for UIs. It also interfaces with UIKit in a pretty nice way so you don’t have to commit to one or the other. I’m a newer iOS dev though, I’ve heard many complaints from more experienced devs.
that just means you have too many items together. break them up into smaller components or use something like a Group and that solves it. not a big mystery
- Natural language interfaces. You can now communicate with your computer with language, voice or text. There are some situations where this is an improvement, but others where it's not. It'll be interesting to see how interfaces are designed to combine the best of both worlds.
- Adaptive interfaces. The UI/UX of the last period of computing is largely a solved problem. There are standard UX solutions for most types of problems. It's also become significantly easier to build these interfaces, and LLMs are pretty good at writing basic declarative UIs. I think the bar will be raised such that users expect their interfaces to adapt to them, instead of a one-size-fits-all solution.
- Immersive interfaces. This might be similar to "dimensional" but more about the actual UX instead of just how 3D the buttons and icons are. I think using 3 dimensions is a natural solution for expressing higher information density. VR and AR will eventually catch on in some form.