chevman

Does nobody in Silicon Valley understand how to negotiate a contract anymore?

I work in a large corporate/enterprise company doing marketing/tech work.

Started dabbling in freelance consulting/paid interviews and found I can easily get in the $500-$1,000/hr range.

So, been doing a few sessions a month and earning a couple thousand in extra cash. Not bad and met some interesting folks/companies in the process!

This is AI getting smarter, testing the edges.

Makes your public metrics look better (ie "we have over 500+ customers!!!!") and also demonstrates (in theory) a more durable product.

When people see small number of large customers, the implication is you are basically just running an outsourced dev/consultant/staff aug shop. Less product vision and ability to "scale".

The way I’ve seen this work well is for the prospective employee to state their intent (in writing, can even have HR include in the offer letter) before they accept the offer, as in “I will plan to use on average 12 weeks of PTO per year, consistent with your unlimited PTO policy. Everyone is good with that? Great!”

This is the type of corporate thinking characteristic of people who've been in their roles too long - over invested, myopic, and out of touch.

The real question is, what is the end game for Zuckerberg and who takes over FB next? This may be the inflection point on the curve.

Not refreshing for me either.

Every company is screwed up.

Every company is in the middle of some kind of evolution.

You'll walk into situations you had no hand in creating.

A big part of leadership is getting comfortable with this reality and understanding your role in helping move the ball forward.

“The Last Surprise” by Richard Brautigan

The last surprise is when you come

gradually to realize that nothing

surprises you any more.

At application/interview time, you're too late.

Trick is to talk to all the existing product managers, and their managers, ahead of application/interview time and figure out what they need, when, and why.

Do that, and the application/interview will be a formality.

All the big consultancies are pushing RPA, bots, automation etc HARd the last year in bigCo land. I think part of it is due to the wfh pandemic situation.

I’d wait 6 months or so, the bottom could fall out of this category fairly quick.

Sharepoint forms.

Was interesting watching this happen today at a large Fortune xx that is a year or so in to wide scale Azure rollout.

Took out Outlook, Teams and all meetings over the course of 5 minutes, then moved on to internal service alarms going off across multiple (10+) major customer facing digital products that got vaporized due (presumably) to various dependencies on AD. I think some of this was service accounts on backend that lost connection to various dbs, file systems, etc.

What a total shit show.

Company basically down from 2pm CST and barely coming back up 5 hours later.

IT Buddy who is 2 people away from CIO pinged me and said “DNS issue, data center power outage or Azure just crapped its pants.”

If you want to have fun, ask your insurance company and/or PBM (ie Rx insurance company) how they handle this scenario :)

Easy come, easy go!

Yeah, first thing I thought as well when I read this.

Dude has $150MM annual ad budget and has never audited his vendors?

Either total incompetence, or something shady was going on.

Are folks not aware of the idea of a 'control' group or 'hold-out' group? It's easy to mathematically prove the effectiveness of some types of direct response digital advertising, such as what corporations are running on Facebook.

Started sometime earlier today - we got alerted by Salesforce deliverability team around 11am CST.

I picked up one of these fanless cases, with aluminum heat sink built in, seems to work pretty well - https://flirc.tv/more/raspberry-pi-4-case

Yeah, seems like the key point here is be careful architecting your infrastructure around a somewhat arbitrary construct like 'customer'. The relevant entity to scale around for Slack is likely 'active users' or even 'messages'. Which may map loosely to 'customers', but that's almost incidental.

Lot of consolidation opportunity in the marketing/email/CRM space.

Could fairly easily collapse all of the following into your SFDC stack if you add their Marketing Cloud (fka ExactTarget) module:

MailChimp

MailGun

Mandrill

Marketo - basically a CRM like SFDC

Outreach.io

Sigstr - believe SFDC is building (or already has) similar functionality in their CRM

SurveyMonkey & Qualtrics - both survey tools that you could consolidate or potentially migrate to built in SFDC/MC survey tools

T-Mobile has also not been approving new short codes on their network since earlier this year. Frustrating for folks trying to execute legit SMS comms.

Yes, this is often times how business operates.

Guess what, we meet with potential competitors in our market and sometimes even contract with them to provide services on our behalf, and use that to gauge the market and current solutions!

Doreen - have always loved reading your comments on hacker news over the years. Very insightful and unique voice. Good luck on the new blog, will definitely subscribe.

Only other person I regularly follow here, in addition to you, is graycat:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=graycat

Another vote for Cisco Webex here.

Work at a large Fortune 10 company and have tried all the major players (I think) - Google, Teams, Skype, Zoom, GotoMeeting, Webex, Join.me, etc.

Webex seems to be the least worst and is fairly reliable and generally works everywhere under all kinds of load (we have meetings that range from a few folks to multiple hundreds with no issues).

Definitely not the prettiest software but it gets the job done.

Replying to myself here - evidently Israel is doing kind of what I was thinking about now:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/world/middleeast/israel-c...

Why is Google (and for that matter Apple) not helping to track the prior movement of every coronavirus patient where possible to identify additional potentially exposed individuals?

Seems fairly straightforward given their massive surveillance infrastructure.

Anyone at Apple or Google actually going to pitch in here and offer meaningful help?

So far, crickets.

My prediction is that the first, really huge, AI breakout company will be the company that can figure out how to deploy AI to automate and scale data normalization/processing/integration pipelines and the resultant downstream features that drive value.

Yeah, I've heard similar at the Fortune 10 where I work. We could barely get our legal/compliance/privacy team to meet with us on it. They said our approach is wait and see, that based on the verbiage they see basically no risk of any real litigation resulting from it in the current form and from a business standpoint not to waste time with it.