These apps also include ad sales to the IAPs. The money no longer needs to come from the initial download.
Zynga was one of our biggest clients. Hasbro came in second. As well as a few white label advergames (eg. Vans shoes). We rarely made more than a small cut on profits (if that) and were generally paid upfront and on delivery.
We had a product manager who would regularly play our builds and speak with the clients. If the clients were unhappy, had feedback, or found bugs, he would chat or hop on a call with the lead developer (usually me). We’d write it on a sticky note or put it in our mind palace as a Todo (or if you were a defensive programmer and planned that a certain piece of code needs to be flexible, you were fixing it while he was explaining the problem).
So, we had communication, but not in the form of formal meetings. Product set the delivery dates, we set goals/cadence as engineers around those dates, and based off of continual feedback we iterated on the design.
Daily scrum and weekly grooming and quarterly planning. That’s for product. That’s counting beans and making sure no one goes rogue and accidentally innovates.
Daily scrum is nothing more than a product status meeting. If you’re a dev and you’re waiting for that meeting everyday to tell someone you’re blocked or need something.. then there’s a communication problem.
My current job has zero planning meetings and a standup twice a week with 20 people attending that lasts about 7 minutes on average; standup is literally "what are you working on and are you blocked?". If the person rambles in standup, our boss cuts them off and has the next person go. It's been this way for at least a year and a half (when I started). We're given wire-frames or high-level designs of what needs to be built and the target goal date. Developers are then left to code with nearly full autonomy. We always deliver the product early. I've worked in so very many places over the last decade and a half - from huge corporations to small startups - and if all of them took this approach, they would've increased their productivity at least 10-fold.
(At least I feel what I do give me meaning)
Not to say there aren't differences, of course. But I feel like your comparison is condescending. These people do valuable work too.
There are 100 options. Wasting a wonderfull mind just because... sad
It's either a big drop in revenue or bullshit projects
People value what they value, and should be able to work in fields that bring them happiness and don’t break the law without your judgement. Who are you to tell anyone what’s meaningful?
I wish I could do wildly unpopular things without people criticizing me.
Who the hell is everyone else, to dare judge me?
I am above judgement.
The sentiments from you, and the original post I was replying to, have inherent privilege baked into them. A South Asian person with family who depends on them for remittances is ignored. A family with a child with special needs that require specific health insurance coverage is ignored. There are so many reasons people do the work they do. Presumably you think people who work in adtech, for example, are somehow morally inferior. It's this sophomoric view of the world that's bothersome. To tell anyone they should consider teaching at a coding bootcamp instead of what they're doing ... I have no words.
I'd love to hear how these folks are changing the world for the better. It's much easier to tell others what they should do with their time and money.
The truth is there are underprivileged people in every type of industry, doing every kind of job. When people criticize adtech, it is not poor people they are criticizing, and I think we both know the picture you're painting is nothing like the median adtech worker.
You're using disadvantaged people as a blanket justification for the whole industry. But the industry targets everyone, whether they're disadvantaged or not. With that reasoning you can justify anything, but that's not even the core of the problem.
There are scammers who target the elderly over the phone, that have the same justification. You might think I'm picking scammers because they're so hated, but the truth is scammers are people too. They have families that depend of them, they have kids to feed, and they deserve empathy just as much as you do.
But who does their work hurt? Old people, poor people, rich people, and also other underprivileged people.
That's the real problem with the idea that doing the right thing is a privilege. You don't care who's being hurt, and you don't care what their privilege is.
If you're hurting more people than you're helping, you don't get to demand that people also love you for what you're doing, is the problem.
No. I think that's being presumptuous.
The point is not about calling people "morally inferior". Before thinking of yourself as underprivileged and above criticism, you should try to see that there are people less privileged than you that adtech is targeting (or preying on), and people much more privileged than either of us that profit from this work.
>I'd love to hear how these folks are changing the world for the better. It's much easier to tell others what they should do with their time and money.
No, absolutely not. It's really not me who has a pet peeve against adtech in particular, it's a whole lot of people from all walks of life. Do you think I want to feel "superior" and tell you that you're "inferior"? What good does it do to anyone to think like that, exactly?
Maybe I happen to do something that is less unpopular than adtech. Or maybe not. But if you think that's why I replied to you, you're missing the point.
My fiends and I really wanted to do good when starting our careers and looked at many non-profits, all of them pay sub-market rates. And then we learned secondhand that most of these non-profits were run by narcissists leaders with worse office politics than regular offices.
We got jobs in regular companies building some of most critical infrastructure of the internet. We felt like we were contributing to advancement of humanity and freedom. But after 10 years, we realized we just made rich kids richer, divided humanity like never before, destroyed privacy, and made sure everyone is addicted to their screens.
I mostly helped in the building of the cloud, and I know what business most of our clients are in. Very few are doing something that is not harmful.
Teach in bootcamp? So that these rich-kids will have more workers?
Start your own business? Consulting? Helping other companies do evil? Another app to get hooked on? Restaurants? There is already obesity epidemic? Build new homes or rehab? I can respect that but it is capital intensive.
Anyways, I see whenever trading is mentioned people call it a useless activity while most of us are engaged in actual harmful activities.
I've worked for a tech-focused nonprofit for the last decade, and know people who have worked for other tech nonprofits. My experience (direct and secondhand) does not match what you said here. There are lots of good mission-focused tech companies to work for (both non- and for-profit). If, as a sibling comment suggested, you want to bring clean drinking water to the world, I know people who have worked at charity: water and enjoyed it.
It's true the pay will usually be below market rate for software engineers. It still can be much higher than most people in US[0] will ever make, and not an obstacle to living comfortably (by any definition of "comfortable" I consider reasonable). It's possible it could make it more difficult to buy a nice house in a central location in one of the more expensive cities, but that's true for most people and needs systemic changes to address it.
0: I assume we're talking about the US, since that's where the really high tech salaries are (and it's the place I live and have experience)
Some meaningful tech work can be found in healthcare, social work, some portions of national security work, environmental research, teaching, and other places, but they are the exceptions. My definition of meaningful is that it either helps people, in a real way, or furthers knowledge or adds to the expression of humanity (i.e., art).
In my opinion, if someone can siphon off value from the human constructed rivers of the financial markets, and then use that value to live a good life, then I don’t see the problem. Some loose arguments about market liquidity could be made.
There are more ways to make an impact, such as earning a good salary and re-investing / donating to build trees, renewables or serve any of the UNDP goals that are helping society.
In fact that is probably more impactful that personally picking fruit in the garden.
I guess it just depends on the place itself not being generally net negative to society compared to the impact you can make with it.
Here is a good primer: https://80000hours.org/
Later, I learned that winning being easy was the nature of the market at the time, rather than it being a personal achievement worth proving.
I also was lucky that I didn't discover a compulsive/addictive weakness for the activity, which could've turned a $1K experiment into personal ruin.
Taleb writes about this kind of thing in Fooled by Randomness. Poker player Annie Duke's book "thinking in bets" also goes into it.
I reckon to some extent public market conditions in recent years since GFC have approximately been "stock market only goes up" with a few small fluctuations from covid, negative oil price weirdness, etc. Lots of investors trying desperately to invest cash in recent years pouring money into variety of highly speculative areas -- SPACs, crypto, fraudulent EV companies (Nikola rolling their "truck" down the hill to make it look like it was self propelled, lol).
At some point the music will stop.
Anything else is likely BS.
I'll never forget the great crash of 2000. Among the signs I should have seen-- I knew a guy from my bowling league who quit his job to day trade. I don't know what your qualifications are for this line of work, but this guy had no discernible skills. He was doing fine 'till the big crash, then he was wiped out.
Please be safe.
Just dont be this guy
https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/comments/ti1jg8/i_owe_nearl...
Those who actually consistently make money daytrading (averaged out over a long enough time period) don't have a need to write those books (and potentially put themselves at a disadvantage by doing so) to make money.
While those who write "daytrading secrets" books typically make heavy majority of their money from those books, because they cannot make money from actual daytrading.
Last month, when war started I told my team, Aerovironment stock, is gonna double (war drones) but I'm not gonna be part and I want you all to feel how calmed I'm about that and undertand (I don't need those 100k). I now undertand the difference between being Socrates or a 'sofist' (greek philosophs both, one for pleasure, the second as a job). Investing shouldn't be a need, is what's best for humanity. I think Elon musk already refered this way