The majority of technologies that power the internet were developed in the 80s and refined in the 90s. Everything since then is built as a layer of abstraction on top of those core technologies.
Also, the development and evolution of these open technologies relies on human interest and attention, and that attention can be diminished, even starved, by free, closed offerings.
Evil plan step 1: make a free closed alternative and make it better than everything else. Discord for chat, Facebook for forums and chat/email, etc.
Step 2: wait a few years, or a decade or more. The world will largely forget how to use the open alternatives. Instant messengers, forums, chat services, just give them a decade to die out. Privately hosted communities, either move to Facebook, pay for commercial anti-spam support, spend massive volunteer hours, or drown in spam.
Step 3: monetize your now-captive audience. What else are they going to use? Tools and apps from the 2000s?
We are facing a very real possibility of the end of the web browser as we know it. Google owns the chromium engine. Mozilla is on ever more precarious footing. It’s become logistically impossible to build competing products except for tech giant. Even then everybody else gave up and went with chromium.
And Mozilla is largely funded by Google. We all just hope they don’t pull the rug from them but I have no faith that our inept, slow government would stop that from happening before it’s too late.
But nntpd is still out there. Rebuilding Usenet will suck. But it’s not impossible. Start from the net2 sites again.
Old mail RFCs included an instant message channel. I’m sure I saw code in either sendmail or uw-imap for it too.
I like the fediverse, but the old ways are still valid for their particular payload.
The key word is “majority”. I think IPFS will gain more popularity moving forward especially if fascism and censorship continue to rise.
If you value your privacy and you have a choice between using a browser to access a service vs installing their app, use the browser.
Online services can get much more information about you through an app vs the browser. Browsers are generally locked down more. Apps in general have access to much more information from your device.
Department lead.
The website team is small, but incredibly effective. Everything works. Everything is mobile friendly, responsive, fast. It’s a way better experience.
I love my app developers, but they’re always behind. Not their own fault. Mobile development is complicated. There’s so many screen sizes, iOS vs Android differences, platform permissions, etc.
The big reason for us to push the App on people was to get more brand awareness on the App Store. But the website is so much more better.
You literally can use it as a web app right into your phone and get a better experience.
And it’ll be such a dark day when I have to dissolve the App team (and hopefully convince them into web dev)
Why not a responsive web app packaged into native viewer app? Depending on your utilization of native components of cause.
My team had the same issues you described so we build the web responsive and made that the “Apps” on the App Store + Google Play. There is still a tiny native components that hook into the web so you still need those native developers knowhow, but yes they will have to switch in large to web based development.
Less maintenance, more devs for the main product, faster progress, fewer headaches with Apple and Google tooling.
Edit: forgot to app that our customers loved that more features are available now on the “Apps” and that things work the same between devices
This is the main reason why I quit Facebook and other services. Anytime you access them from mobile via a web browser it corners you into a “download our app” page. Facebook started doing it with messenger and I knew I had to get out.
I’m not giving Zuckerberg that level of access to my data.
Its all useless if the very operating system ur using is collecting info about you. Stop using windows
The interview is a vibe check first and foremost. If you vibe with the team we will overlook other things in your application. If you made it to interview, we already think you’re good enough so don’t stress trying to impress or apologize.
Managers are mostly people who get tired of watching other people do things badly and decide to try to do better. You don’t need a special degree or any magic to be a good manager, you should like people though.
Everyone is faking it to some degree.
The „you have to like people“ part took me nearly 20 years to figure out. I hate people in general with possible remedy for people who are nice. I‘m exceptional at managing people, I just dont vibe with them. This leads to absurd situations where everyone is happy, professionally but folks just hate my guts.
So, I now work alone and am happy with it. :)
I actually am genuinely interested in that fellow’s reasoning behind believing both that his job of managing people is successful, and also that all the people he managed do not like being managed by him.
Anecdotally, I have encountered workplaces containing a manager or employee that was universally disliked, and it was never because they were doing an awesome job. They did appear to think that people disliked them personally but benefited from their results. Often they seem to also believe those results would be unachievable in ways that do not produce the distaste. I am not sure these contradictions are entirely defensible.
people are generally ok. put them in a situation where they can climb over other people to advance and watch the rot begin.
so, while people are generally ok, corporate people are generally not.
Personality, presence and confidence
Natural self confidence, but NOT an arrogant selfish confidence.
Some people naturally have confidence and presence and some people need to build it as a skill.
I know guys and gals with little to no knowledge or skill build up careers because they just knew how to talk and connect to people.
I also know guys and gals with years of education and degrees but have little to no way of politely or easily getting along with people.
Can confirm with a very condensed anecdote: I once applied for a job that required engineering degree in electronics or mechanics. I’m a hischool dropout. Interview went well, and I got a job offer a month later. I got the impression that they were more interested in the right type of person with relevant hands-on experience, and in my case that experience meant IT/Linux (I was always a hobbyist geek)and being used to operating heavy machinery (Grew up on a farm).
I’m still in the same industry, and I earn more than my friends with masters degrees.
Former process engineer in an aluminum factory. Aluminum foil is only shiny on one side and duller on the other for process reasons, not for any “turn this part towards baking, etc” reasons.
It’s just easier to double it on itself and machine it to double thickness than it is to hit single thickness precision, especially given how much more tensile strength it gives it.
Also, our QA lab did all kinds of tests on it to settle arguments. The amount of heat reflected/absorbed between the two sides is trivially small. But if you like one side better you should wrap it that way, for sure!
The amount of heat reflected/absorbed between the two sides is trivially small.
Your particular choice of wording here makes me very curious: Do you mean that there really was a measurable difference (which was trivially small)?
Yup, the lab could tell a difference! Shiney side (so mill roller facing, as opposed to the dull side which faces the other layer of aluminum) was marginally more reflective, but I believe (and a former coworker also remembered it as) it was less than a tenth of a percent (<0.1% for the visual folks)
Anyone who says it affects cooking time or something is mistaken, I’d wager.
Jokes on you.
I baked my casserole with the shiny side up and pulled it out at 59 minutes and 55 seconds, when it was supposed to go for an hour.
So take that Dull Side!
Any info on surface roughness? I’m thinking shiny side would be smoother and therefore less sticky, though I don’t know how much the passivation layer would affect it. Probably no where close to making a difference at the end of the day, but I’m curious.
Okay, my buddy is gonna take foil tomorrow and run it over the profilometer (?) tomorrow and see. I’ll report back with more numbers and less hand waving when I have it
I’m an engineer in a totally different industry but I want to know what the numbers are
Reynolds wrap literally has this as a faq on their website because so many people think it.
There is no financial motive for software to work well. The people who sign the check for it almost never have to use it.
That’s where you need people like me who give a fuck about nothing but customer experience and if my employer manages to make a buck, good for them. My employer is generally just a middle man who siphons money out of both our pockets. And makes me fill out a second, useless timesheet while you’re paying me to work.
Jokes on me though because I’ve been out of work for 3 months, so take my suggestion of fuck your employer with a grain of salt.
If they do a bad enough job they’ll create a niche for a competitor to fill.
That’s a dream. The googles and such just buy them out and shut them down. There is always a bigger fish that spends more money preserving the status quo than making a product.
I would love to see exactly how many people dropped Adobe after the latest drama, I would bet it would look exactly like the Netflix micro dip after shutting down password sharing.
No one that works in the industry is going to drop Adobe, because there’s no other functional alternative that offers an even remotely similar feature set. A lot of the files I get from clients are .ai (Illustrator) or .indd (InDesign) files, and I have to use the appropriate programs to open them, and the most up-to-date versions of those programs, or else I end up missing parts of their files.
Users that are 100%, fully independent don’t have to worry about any of that. But those people are rare.
That is true for outsourcing companies, but not true for product companies usually.
I think it’s equally true for product companies. Do you know how hard it is to get a company to prioritize bug fixing over feature work? Shy of a user revolt, or a friend of the CEO reporting an issue, bugs are almost always second priority or lower.
I’d say this strongly depends on the industry.
In an entertainment or ad sales product, I’d completely agree with you.
In a medical or financial product, the bug will take precedence.
No idea what you are talking about. Product companies are exactly what I am referring to. Some director signs off on the purchase, probably has never even seen the software. But he has seen the sales pitch. That is what the C suite of small companies are for, mingling with the decision makers.
I mean that describes most things. For example, if I worked for a dentist to make oral braces for people, that doesn’t mean I myself am going to ever need or use them.
No… the decision maker on the purchase is the user in that case. For software, the decision maker is almost always someone who won’t use it. Like ticket tracking software. The people filing the tickets, and the people responding are not the people who decided which ticket tracking software to buy.
Sonos has pissed me off. After the latest update, the app cannot locate the speakers in any of my rooms. The TV speakers still work with a signal from the TV, but the speakers in all other rooms basically cannot be used.
I’ve factory reset them, set them up in the app, and as soon as that is done, they disappear from the app again.
They worked fine for years, then this bullshit. I’m researching a home theater setup that doesn’t use Sonos and am planning on selling it all once I’ve found replacements.
It feels like I don’t own the very expensive hardware that I have bought. I guess since they are software controlled, I really dont.
I don’t really get this point. Of course there’s a financial motive for a lot of software to work well. There are many niches of software that are competitive, so there’s a very clear incentive to make your product work better than the competition.
Of course there are cases in which there’s a de-facto monopoly or customers are locked in to a particular offering for whatever reason, but it’s not like that applies to all software.
Software just has to be good enough that people put up with it. Once you get users on the system, you make it difficult to move your data out which acts as a lock in mechanism. The company that can make a minimally usable product that people are willing to put up with will typically beat one making a really good product that takes longer to get to market.
To wit, WorkDay is universally regarded as trash. But companies keep writing checks, so employees on both sides of the time clock have to keep tolerating it
When the buyer isn’t the user (which is most of the time), no there isn’t. Competitors try to win with great sounding features and other marketing BS because that is all the director will see. The users are then left with the product that has all the bells and whistles, but is terrible at doing what actually needs to be done. And the competition is the same, so they don’t really have much choice. Bell’s and whistles are cheaper than making it work well.
So you’re talking about SaaS / business tooling then? Again though, that’s just one of many segments of software, which was my point.
Also, even in that market it’s just not true to say that there’s no incentive for it to work well. If some new business tool gets deployed and the workforce has problems with it to the point of measurable inefficiency, of course that can lead to a different tool being chosen. It’s even pretty common practice for large companies to reach out to previous users of a given product through consultancy networks or whatever to assess viability before committing to anything.
I support accounting professionals using one of perhaps four or five highly complex pieces of software that handles individual, corp, trust, and other misc tax forms
The churn rate is very low YoY, because it’s what they know. They have the freedom to move their data, and we will help them to the extent possible, but at most they’ll get a subset of client data and lose the ability to query agai t prior year datasets, etc.
They’re not locked in, but between 10/15 and, say, 2/15 is a damn short time to implement and learn a new piece of software with that level of complexity.
Interestingly, I’ve never seen a long-standing calculation bug in the program. The overwhelming majority of support is d/t user error or data entry error. From that standpoint, there is of course a financial incentive for it to work well - arithmetic errors would be unacceptable - but in terms of UI/UX, no one cares and if anything were improved folks would just whine about the change anyway - even if it made their life easier
Not a CPA/not your CPA, just a software guy who got lucky enough to be in the right time/place when I decided I didn’t have the energy for the startup world anymore.
I mean, no? If you are at a SaaS company the software working well is the most important aspect. Loss of quality leads to loss of subscribers.
Subscribers? 90 some odd % of SaaS is sold to businesses, not individuals.
And if the business needs aren’t met, said businesses will go to another SaaS company that promises them a better, brighter future.
The user might not be the subscriber, but the user being less productive because the software is getting in their way, will irritate the subscriber.
I know a SaaS company that put thousands upon thousands of engineering hours into making small (and sometimes large) optimizations over their overall crappy architecture so their enterprise customers (and I’m talking ~6 out of the top 10 largest companies in one industry in the US) wouldn’t leave them for a solution that doesn’t freeze up for all users in a company when one user runs a report. Each company ran in a silo of their own, but for the bigger ones… I’m not going to give exact numbers, but if you give every user a total of half an hour of unnecessary delays per day, that’s like 500 hours of wasted time per day per 1000 employees. Said employees were performing extremely overpriced services, so 500 hours of wasted time per day might be something like 100k income lost per day. Not an insignificant number even for billion dollar companies.
I’ve since left the company for greener pastures and I hear the new management sucks, but the old one for sure knew that they were going to lose their huge ass clients over performance issues and bugs.
Depends on business model. Saas - quality is very important. Non-profit insurance/bureaucratic type - they’ll burn millions to hire plenty of QA then treat them like shit, ignore them, and push trash software all day
False. Have a 70% up time and let me know how many clients you have left.
