To design and develop an interactive globe

They are probably hired to do front-end work to make things look nice and be creative at the same time.

I personally think that Stripe is on point with design. Which attracts more customers.

You don’t need elite programmers to only do the “important stuff”. Visuals are important too.

That tells me their job is easier than we think, so they may face ‘disruption’ soon

Stripe isn't "giant" but it does seem to do a lot of this. They have job postings for their Ruby type checker...

Meanwhile my company is giant by any stretch of the imagination but I've never seen projects like this. It's a cultural thing borne out of the elite circles Stripe folks come from.

That's basically how the phone company gave us Unix.

I suppose if you are not familiar with visual industry, it might be really difficult to figure out whom to contact in the first place.

And even real products that would benefit from actual visual design might just "hack the visuals" together. So this is not that far out.

They do discuss hiring external resources if you read the article -

"If we had known precisely the globe we wanted to build, we’d have been foolish not to hire GlobeKit. Instead, not knowing what we did not know, we decided to figure it out ourselves. "

And they do have internal designers on the task as well-

"To start, the project’s design lead created the best approximation of her vision of the globe in Photoshop."

Unfortunately, with the internet, you can get away with it as the code, help from StackOverflow and help from work colleagues can be done for free, without the need for a 3D artist.

What a shame for the 3D artists out there, but programmers will get their just deserts when GPT-3+ replaces them soon.

A vanity exercise? I think you are really missing the point here. As a 3D graphics developer myself, having published my 13-years long pet-project, a full-featured 3D graphics engine as open source (https://github.com/StylianosPolychroniadis/NthDimension), I can surely tell you that going 3D as well as GPU programming, is The most rewarding, in terms of computer science knowledge, effort one can possibly do.

Now only if UV texture-mapping was any easier, I would love to be in a position to call myself a 3D artist.

Luckily, procedural graphics (both geometry & texturing) has filled the gap for me.

Off course, the biggest school was working along with real 3D artists that shed light and introduced me to engine and shader optimization, my greatest passion at the moment (along with GPU parallelization).

Err what? Stripe's design team for a decade has been so solid, so good, that they literally drive some design trends across the web (at least with tech companies).

I'd say they're probably one of the biggest champions of people in the "visual arts" among tech companies.

There is an interesting chicken-and-egg problem in our line of business, in that we have to convince you that we're not just normal-software-company levels of trustworthy and competent, but trustworthy and competent enough for you to put us solidly in the middle of your revenue. Additionally, due to the way our business works, we might have to do that before you even have revenue.

So we invest quite a bit in "the little things." I don't think we'd call them gimmicks. Error messages, for example, certainly aren't gimmicks; they're a classic product feature for an API, but they're afterthoughts in most places and we sweat them enough such that one of every X,000 developers debugging their integration will praise the error message (specifically) to their colleagues or friends. We aspire to that level of care up and down the stack. This includes our web presences; they're shipping software products of our company, after all.

The same sort of chicken-and-egg problem applies to hiring, by the by. The best reason to work somewhere is the colleagues. How do you let people experience the colleagues before the colleagues have convinced them to work for you? Our answer: you create replete evidence that the kind of people you'd end up working with would spend weeks getting a globe animation right and that the people who manage/promote/etc them would say "Absolutely yes, the home page redesign doesn't ship until we have a globe animation we can be proud of."

Maybe that's because Ford makes cars.

Their business is 100% online, so a front page of their website is likely a big deal for them.

Effective CEOs very often micromanage details of their company's core product. The most famous was of course Steve Jobs. Here is a quote from former Disney CEO Bob Iger showing that he gives creative feedback on their flagship properties: “I’ve probably seen each episode of The Mandalorian three times,” Iger says. “First, to give some notes. Second, to see the rough cut and the impact of the notes. And now, just recently, I watched all the final cuts so that I could be blown away by how it looks.”

Actually, this happens more often than it should. Sometimes high-level execs have a certain hobby horse they care about; a certain idea they want to push through. Company websites are a prime example because they have high visibility, and their importance tends to be overrated internally.

The problem with this is that those execs often don't have expertise in building these things and end up causing more frustration to the people supposed to do the job rather than being helpful. It is some form of micromanagement.

The majority of land data that is used as the backbone for land registry, lotting, road planning, etc etc is stored...

...as datasets based on 2D map projections.

And different places have different projection systems.

2D projections will be with us for a long time.

It would certainly be interesting as an exam question, for example, to compare 2D and 3D for what it would reveal about each, but in the end it's all about choosing an appropriate model for the task at hand. I'd therefore suggest that pitting 2D against 3D is actively choosing to set up some kind of battle that doesn't actually exist in reality - most of the time there is nothing to be added to an analysis by choosing to store data in 3D, and 2D simplifies all parts of the chain i.e. capture, storage, processing, output etc. I'd strongly reject the idea that but for resistance we'd all be in a wonderland of 3D GIS. People in industry just pick the best tool for the task at hand, and that's almost always 2D.

It’s still being projected onto a screen though so you’re still using a projection. There are some pretty extreme trade offs you accept when using a orthographic ‘globe’ projection, not least of which is that you can’t see half the planet for any given moment.

You aren't eliminating projections. You are just settling into the one kind of projection given to you by a lower level layer.

It's not about resistance, it's about compatibility and use case scope. In 3d a lot of assumptions about the shape of earth and location above ground become non-trivial very quickly. When it comes to precisions required in surveying, local systems are usually prefered, because you can ignore the whole thing of shifting global datums due to plate tectonics.

In essence:a patchwork of local references frames per plate is prefereable to a single global one, when having to work with measurements over the time of decades. Which happen to also work reasonably well in 2D when projected.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/StephaneP/diary/390290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20460596

In GIS you are not dealing with true 3D data. Only the surface of the earth matters. Using 3D coordinates would be extremely wasteful.

So you need a projection to map the surface data onto a sphere and another one to map the sphere onto the 2d screen. No way around it. Using the same projection for display as for data saves a transformation. Usually it is some variant on Mercator because it is the one people are most familiar with.

In the end unless you are starting to think about true 3D (multi-story buildings, caves,...) thinking of a "3D globe" is just a bit of projection math that doesn't fundamentally change the problem.

I also checked them out and loved it. With some digging around I think they are in some form of beta now and taking custom orders (hence the black box), but on their instagram (posted about 14 hours ago) they say they are about to release a public 1.0 version which should be affordable for an independent developer and large companies alike based on this link

https://globekit.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=a3ee0f28d3...

Cool, sure, but after several seconds of loading I closed the tab without knowing anything more about the company. I'd say what's on globekit.co would be a bad idea to put on stripe.com, as is.

Comparing something rendered on the fly with a video is a bit unfair.

Yeah I thought their counts for the number of dots they could render performantly were pretty low. I suspect they aren't doing any instancing because from what I know about three.js the API for creating instanced geometry is a bit more complicated than creating and using CircleGeometrys as they do in their example. But of course the example could just be a simplified one.

> slower than a texture-based approach

Try to rotate the globe with a mouse, and you'll see an effect very hard to achieve with a texture.

> makes their website extremely janky for me when scrolling, on an upper-midrange laptop.

Probably a software issue with your laptop, not with the web site. Works fine on my low-range laptop (i3-6157u, 16GB RAM, Windows 10, MS Edge).