DoubleGlazing

I know a few people who make stuff to do with hobbies. For example I know one person who makes fishing lures and another who makes ham radio antennas. Oh, and another friend who make rubber melee weapons for LARPing.

What they do is fairly simple and doesn't need CAD experience or the use of CNC machines/3D printers. The key thing is to make a good quality product, offer good customer service and work to get word of mouth advertising.

People with hobbies and disposable income are a good market to target.

Every review I have posted on Glassdoor has been with a disposable email address, using my own device and using a public WiFi hotspot. I once had an employer try to get legal on me because I went to work for a rival after they laid me off - so I know some employers can be petty like that.

I trust Glassdoor to keep their promise of not releasing my ID voluntarily, but when courts get involved all bets are off.

It depends on the subject matter I think. For more popular subjects I definitely think that an obsession with monetization is having a negative effect. For more niche subjects, it's still very much like early YouTube - lots of organic well made content.

I watch a lot of videos related to two of my hobbies fly fishing/tying and ham radio. There is very little in the way of sponsorship or paid reviews and nearly all videos on these subjects feel rewarding to watch.

Technical content on the other hand is a whole different ball game. If I have to learn a new framework or library I used to head to YouTube first to view a few tutorials before diving in to the docs. The quality of these has declined because a lot of channels are just churning out tutorials without really understanding the subject matter. In some cases they are just video versions of the getting started tutorials on the libraries website. There are loads of channels where they churn out new low quality tutorials every day on a wide range of subjects - jack of all trades, master of none - but they are doing something right because YouTube places them high in the search results.

And as for the bigger channels on popular subjects such a gadgets, computers, food and gaming - yes I do feel like they are often feel like the content support the advertising as oppose the adverts supporting the content.

I think to get value from YouTube you just need to be a bit more choosy. There is still good organic content being made, but it sits behind all the stuff that is primarily designed to get high up in the search results and make money. Remember, the way YouTube ranks search results and places suggestions is designed to benefit them more than you.

I know Firefox has a small market share, but this is the sort of feature other browsers may adopt. Maybe not the big boys like Chrome or Edge, but I could see all the niche privacy focused browsers implementing it and maybe even Safari given Apples claims to support user privacy. If a certain percentage of browsers started to use similar functionality I could tracking companies starting to develop countermeasures.

In fact I've already encountered one site that gave me a popup telling me to enable third party cookies. It was one of those dodgy sites that scrapes and copies Stack Overflow content and the JavaScript that enabled it was very clunky - but it worked. I'm surprised there aren't more websites already doing something similar.

Validating the identity of each reviewer. If they post something slanderous then the business owner should then be able to get a warrant/court order etc to force the site to reveal the reviewers identity. So long as anonymous posting is allowed there is no way to have a truly reliable platform for reviewing anything.

IDing users wouldn't be too hard to implement. There are plenty of businesses that provide instant ID verification services, many of the new online banks and money transfer apps use these services. The two issues would be cost and the fact that the number of people using review sites that do this would be pretty low.

I stopped buying Samsung stuff years ago. I have never encountered a brand who products have consistently given me problems like theirs do.

It's not just phones. I've had their TVs (old CRT and flat panels) fail within a year of purchase. A camera with a zoom lens that didn't work out of the box. A microwave which only displayed 99:99 on the display and wouldn't turn on. A washing machine where the hoses to the outflow pump came loose and flooded our kitchen. Luckily I didn't have to deal with Samsung directly and sent all that stuff back to the retailer to sort out, but I did learn a lesson.

As for their phones, they just seem to be a little bit more delicate than other brands. Things like the glass seemingly being easier to break, charging ports getting loose and not allowing for a good connection and physical buttons that just fail.

I know other peoples experiences will be different, but for me I have decided to never again buy Samsung.

There is a high likelihood that that those scatter-gun recruiters aren't placing people into appropriate jobs.

Most recruiters have one goal, get candidates into a job - any job. Then they get their fee. They do not have an obligation to get a candidate in to the most suitable job. In my experience they will happily lie, flatter and cajole you in to doing their bidding and taking a job that is not right for you.

I don't want to deal with recruiters like that and that's why I try to filter them out.

Pretty much. I have always found that it is better to send out fewer customised job applications, rather than send out loads that are all the same.

I wish recruiters would do the same. If I engage with recruiters that use the scatter gun approach then it is inevtable that they will be wasting my time as they just aren't interested in detail and effort.

A really common one I get is emails about Java jobs where the recruiter praises me for all my Java skills and experience and talks about how I would be the perfect candidate for the job they have. The thing is nowhere in my profile does it say I have Java experience (I'm all C#/.Net), however it does mention JavaScript in a few places. They couldn't be any more obvious with their laziness.

It's interesting what happens when certain recruiters send a follow up message when I don't answer first time. When that happens I tell them to read my profile carefully. Some then get it and send me a colour and a few have got a bit shirty saying I am being unprofessional or that I am being unreasonable expecting them to read my profile given the pressures they are under.

I have never got a job through LinkedIn, even though I get loads of contacts from recruiters - as many as 10 per week. The problem is that those contacts are poor quality. They are spammy as heck, basically mass emailing anyone who has a specific search phrase anywhere in their profile.

For the last year my profile bio has opened with the statement "Recruiters: Please tell me what your favourite colour is if you want me to respond to your message." Not one recruiter has actually done that. They literally do not even look at your profile.

That was an abomination of a ruling.

I find it amazing that the Data Protection Commissioner basically went against the constitution which clearly states that Irish is the first language of Ireland.

We have a friend who owns a single bungalow in a row of five in the Liberties area of Dublin. That's where Guinness is and a load of new distilleries, it's becoming a "cool" area.

The other four bungalows are owned by a single owner who rents them out as AirBnB's. This had made our friends life a nightmare. Stag and hen parties, teenagers booking them for parties, people returning home from an evening out drunk and trying to get in to her house by mistake. Also, the local parking has been messed up as well.

The worst thing is that when they are empty the street is really eerie. Also, the landlord keeps the keys to the houses in combination lock boxes bolted to the walls just outside the front door of each property. He'll give renters the code so they can retrieve the keys when they arrive. Local teenagers have been known to spend the time needed to crack the code and then let themselves in to the property and raise havoc.

She has reported the problems to the local council many times, but they just don't seem to care. Reports to AirBnB, unsurprisingly, go nowhere. When she has approached the owner to complain his response was to offer to buy her out, which is a bit cheeky as that has been her family home for three generations.

Being surrounded by so many AirBnBs can really have a negative effect on your life.

I was part of a team that the developed a workflow management system for managing telecom's infrastructure. We were really quite proud of it, it pushed our boundaries during development and we learned a lot of new skills. It was implemented exactly as per the clients spec.

It was also quite expensive, my employer billed them €300,000 for the work.

They accepted it.... and then didn't use it.

There was some use in the first few weeks, but then it petered off - despite this they kept paying us to manage the hosting and suuport of the system.

After a few months our manager approached them to ask if everything was Okay. Their response was to say the thought it was an amazing system, but now they realised it was way over-specced and using it was more of a burden than they expected it to be.

I suppose it was the software development equivalent of ordering the biggest thing on the menu and then regretting it.

I've had issues in the past with employers wanting me to add work email and work apps to my own phone.

I always refused. My attitude was, like you said, if you want me to carry around a device connected to my work, then you need to pay for it.

But my main reason why though was knowing that managers preferred staff to put work email etc on personal phones, not due to the cost of buying devices for employees, but because it blurred the lines between personal and work domains. You can switch a work phone off at 6:00pm and turn it on again at 9:00am. With a personal phone you have to set up do not disturb profiles and stuff like that to achieve the same separation because you aren't likely to turn it off in the evenings. Admittedly, it's not the hardest thing in the world to setup - but still a bit more effort that just being able to hit the power button.

I still had to deal with the extreme annoyance of having my personal number passed around the company without my permission.

Donald Where's Your Trousers?

Probably not a lot.

It could be argued that the taxi driver needs a customer's phone number if there is a problem, so therefore it wouldn't be an issue under the GDPR. The app developers probably only mask numbers as a courtesy, and not necessarily as a legal requirement.

I'd say because Amazon doesn't care.

If a seller pushes the boundaries a bit too much and Amazon is forced the ban them, they really don't care if they sign up again using a different name.

If the seller has a strategy worked out on how to get good reviews quickly then they can keep repeating this process safe in the knowledge that they're making money and Amazon are making money as well.

So Amazon is basically a type of eBay in India?

You're right about the whole phone number masking thing. It's pretty simple to implement these days, so any platform that doesn't do it is probably not all that concerned about looking after their customers. There's a taxi ordering startup here in Dublin where I live that has only 10 employees and they use phone number masking, if they can do it then there's no reason why Amazon can't.

They were chucked off the platform only to return and start from scratch again. I feel they may have been one of the few settlers who pushed Amazon a bit too far with their behaviour.

If Amazon was on the ball they would use all that fancy AWS AI stuff to spot when banned sellers reappear.

I've stopped buying 3rd party seller items because of this. Now, I'll only buy items sold directly by amazon.

For example, I bought a little portable projector last Christmas. In the box was a big bar of Swiss chocolate and leaflet offering me a tripod in return for a five star review. The projector wasn't as good as the description made out. It wasn't terrible, just not as good as they claimed. So I left a three star review. I started getting texts from the seller asking, and then demanding I remove the review - they weren't offering me anything in return. And the texts came from the sellers name which changed slightly every time, so I couldn't easily block them or reply to them. It took two months for them to give up and leave me alone. I've had similar less extreme experiences with other sellers.

I did complain to amazon, who said they would take action. A few weeks later the seller disappeared from amazon, so I assume they received enough complaints to take action.

But..... the seller reappearance with a different name. They had the same product range and descriptions.

Amazon doesn't care and is totally complicit in all this.

The problem as I see it is that so much commerce is concentrated on to a small number of platforms (amazon, ebay, wish etc), which leads to sellers getting desperate to get to the top in searches. I mean, I can understand sellers doing this when their livelihoods depend on it. It's still not right though and amazon should fix it.

The author is right the, most current home automation products suck.

The stuff from big brand names is poorly supported, pricey and designed to suck your money away from you.

The cheaper Chinese stuff requires the use of a cloud server located somewhere I don't know and it comes with god knows how many security holes. Plus, the build quality is ropey at best, I clearly remember that time a desk lamp controller in my children's room literally melted.

There are a few devices on the market that don't rely on cloud servers. I have a few plug controllers that you can control via WebSockets or a REST API. I've been dabbling with them for a while and they seem pretty decent. It's just a pity there isn't any off the shelf home automation software that I could use to control them.

That's why I said sensible.

I have an unusual, hard to spell surname. One time when I lived in the UK I found it hard to open a new bank account.

After a bit of investigating I found out that I had been placed on the Credit Industry Fraud Avoidance System because different spelling of my name had been used in previous applications. This was seen as an attempt to get past credit checking, in reality the people entering my name in to their systems mis-spelled/mis-typed my name. As a result of someones carelessness I was flagged as being risky.

In a sensible world there would be a law that allows you to pick and choose which non-essential apps and services can run on the hardware you own.

I know a few people involved in drone delivery projects. Their employers are always just about to launch commercial services, and it has been that way for several years. There was to be a big trial of food deliveries within a university campus, but the local aviation regulator stopped it from happening due to a load of unresolved safety issues.

The problem is that drone delivery in urban areas is difficult. Accurate landing issues, noise, kids throwing stones at them, overhead wiring, managing safe landing when there's a fault etc. Oh and the big one, air traffic control. The authorities want drone operators to co-ordinate their flights so that they don't crash in to each other. The clients of the drone operators are obsessed with commercial confidentiality and don't want that to happen.

I'm in Ireland the only type of drone delivery that seems to be successful so far is delivering medicines and the like to small islands off the west coast where most of the above issues don't apply. It seems to me that drone delivery will end up being a niche thing. Ground based robot delivery systems will probably succeed where drones fail.

I've been told by at least one manager that he disliked older devs because they are much more likely to push back against against poor management and refuse to put in overtime.

I refuse to engage in long interview processes or technical/programming tests.

My CV goes back 20 years and it is quite clear about what my technical skills are. For me the most I will do is one phone interview, one HR interview and one technical interview. If the recruiter has any questions about my skills they can ask them in the technical interview and I can also put them in touch with people who can vouch for me as well.

I've experienced a few recruitment processes where there were multiple round and also take home tests that took up way to much of my time. To me the time investment required to go though these is too high as the risk of coming away with nothing is too great.

If a potential employer can't figure me out from my CV and a few interviews then I don't think that is a place I would want to work.

"Remember, good marketing usually doesn’t feel like marketing at all!"

Yeah, that's my problem. Marketing is essentially all about manipulating my thoughts to benefit someone else. If you are deliberately trying to manipulate people without them realising, that can never be ethical.

> I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things.

This drives me up the walls. At my last job (food ordering startup the CEO had the attitude that releasing code that was 95% functional was Okay, remaining issues could be fixed as we went along.

As a result, one developer overlooked a bug that cost the company €300,000, loyalty discounts weren't being deducted from payments to take-aways. They then had the cheek to demand take-aways pay them back.

Then they launched a major upgrade to the system at 5pm on a Friday - two hours before their busiest time of the week. It collapsed a few hours later and it was impossible to roll back because they didn't include a roll-back SQL script for the DB. It took till the following Tuesday to fix it.

The DB schema was all over the place and as a result it was slow. Entity Framework couldn't handle it and the SQL it was generating was terrible. Me being the only one with decent SQL knowledge had to replace all the bad EF queries with raw inline SQL.

Despite this, they still carried on deploying without a care in the world. I was told to stop moaning about QA. We didn't have QA or testing staff, the CEOs attitude being why pay for QA staff when our clients will do it for free?