Was thinking about moderators, and how users always have plenty of opinions about what moderators are doing wrong, but seems like you see less commentary from the moderators themselves about what it takes to do a good job.
Which is probably true across any situation where there’s a smaller number of leaders and a larger number of people in other roles.
Having experienced it, what does it take to lead a project, be a supervisor/boss, board member, pastor, dungeon master, legislator, etc?
Why is it impossible to do it well?
You are buying a machine that say heats up enough milk to pasteurization temperature to supply a small city for a week. You are dropping about 10 million dollars on this project. Do you really care that the 3k dollar control system has nicely commented code or is it enough that the system works?
Very few customers are buying the products because of the automation. They are buying it for the process. If I make sure the interface looks nice, the code is rock solid, and add in some cute features they might appreciate it but more likely not see the point. Would you buy a car because it integrated well with Siri?
Additionally everyone has a different philosophy of UI and every engineer thinks they are an expert on this stuff. That’s why I have one customer yelling at me that the little motor running light should be green and it always has been green while the other insists that it is red and always has been red. Plus the half remembered fixes that no longer matter. VFDs used to require external chokes, they haven’t since the mid-90s and yet some concrete guy will insist that they do.
Basically I still get to be a job destroyer but with two hands tied behind my back.