That makes sense to me, overall it sounds like an 80/20 situation: 80% of drivers are side hustlers and will be harmed when they lose their side hustle, 20% will get a slight pay bump and benefits. The overall economic benefit for California will be a wash (and the overall result for the average driver, reduced income).
The real underlying problem is that we've been papering over our underemployment crisis with these low-skill, low wage jobs. You can't turn them into viable careers by legislative fiat.
> The real underlying problem is that we've been papering over our underemployment crisis with these low-skill, low wage jobs. You can't turn them into viable careers by legislative fiat.
It's worse. We have been papering over the lack of any social security net and lack of affordable healthcare by forcing these things onto an employer-employee relationship.
If you try to rethink the system from the ground up, there is no logical reason health insurance needs to be tied to employment. Employment law should be about removing highly coercive situations, but other than that, adults should be allowed to provide a service in return of a payment without getting embroiled in byzantine regulatory requirements.
I find the paternalism of AB5 to be a little bit problematic. It really assumes that the drivers are too stupid to do their own accounting and figure out if they are making money or not.
Pretty sure most drivers wouldn't be driving for $9.21 if a job at the local ice cream parlor could get them almost double on the spot. Yet you still see folks driving 30 hrs per week for years.
> It really assumes that the drivers are too stupid to do their own accounting and figure out if they are making money or not.
This isn't as easy as it sounds. Much of their income will go towards paying vehicle maintenance costs, and those are not obvious from the start. Your accounting can show you making decent wages for six months and then suddenly you need new tires and recalculating your wage will show you aren't making a ton of money. At which point many of them do quit and work somewhere else.
It's no more paternalistic than any minimum wage law. Society has decided that jobs can't pay below a certain threshold, the law just makes that apply to gig workers now too.
Fair, but that's also not any more paternalistic than all the existing laws which define which kind of work can be classified as a contractor and which must be classified as an employee.
This is my take too - that said, I think this is a structural problem across low-wage jobs. I don't think driving for Uber is inherently worse than working for Walmart or Amazon.
There needs to be greater orientation around skill acquisition that helps drivers, package handlers, etc. move up the skill stack.
>The real underlying problem is that we've been papering over our underemployment crisis with these low-skill, low wage jobs. You can't turn them into viable careers by legislative fiat.
I don't know anything about the business or cultural elements of Udacity, but they have such high quality of courses that this makes me genuinely sad. I hope they can figure out a business model - even if it leans B2B vs. B2C.
Would a member of the Pagedraw team share a postmortem? Seems like this is a huge need and will be the future state of web / mobile design - what stopped you guys?
I think the reality is, no matter how awesome and impressive these tools are, they just don't seem to have a fit in the market.
Prefacing this with the fact I don't know all that much about the product, only a quick glance
For a big team of developers, building a big website with complicated interactions or requirements, a tool like this isn't going to meet all the requirements the developers have
If you're building something simpler, then you're probably better served by something like Webflow or Squarespace.
At a high level, that makes some sense - these tools might not be the most practical way to get from point A -> point B today for a typical web or mobile app.
In my head, I'm wondering if they are just way too early? Going from design -> code -> UI is, in theory, less efficient than just going from design -> UI, in a programmable, customizable, scalable way.
Skuid, which is a page builder for Salesforce (now branching out to more platforms) is doing very well.
At the company I work at we are going to switch away from it due to the limitations you insinuated, but there's definitely a fit for it in the Salesforce world.
Thanks for this - interesting that you focused the postmortem on technical lessons (other than #1).
I'm super curious around what the sales strategy was.
I'd imagine for devs, it would have to be around productivity (time saved by exporting vs. manually coding, adherence to consistent CSS standards, etc.).
For designers, I would imagine it would be around taking more of the software dev lifecycle - e.g. designers can now eat up part of the value that front-end dev provides. Based on that, designers should be more in demand, paid more, and so on.
Those seem like huge levers to pull from a PMF perspective, but to your point, maybe it all sounds great until you get into that conversation, and it's really not something that teams are looking for (at least right now).
Probably the same as every other attempt at this since the mid 90s. People who can code front-ends don't need such a tool. People who cannot code front-ends hire people who can, and still don't need such a tool.
Not all UI-builders are a fail. Visual Basic, Qt, Delphi, MS Access all had/have some very popular and useful UI-Builder. There is always a middle between no skill and high skill.
