339 karma · joined November 16, 2019
Mobs will always remain dumb and quick to anger, so this will not be an isolated case.
It makes sense that their actual product would be near-total access to data from people ignorant of the value of this data and behavior on these apps.
Anyway, dating apps are garbage for the majority of men. You’re better off just going to a bar or social events and playing the numbers game in the meat market.
Sunk cost fallacy is what keeps these doctors stuck. They get addicted to the lifestyle, income, and prestige after years low on the totem pole. The workload seems manageable until the reality of boundaries being crossed involves having to choose. We only have 24 hours in a day.
This is not just a medical industry issue. The tech industry is inherently prone to burnout when potential rewards can exceed even that of a doctor. I know too many stories of drug-induced burnout while trying to keep up a certain lifestyle. We all have a choice, and we need to check in with ourselves to make sure we are not losing more than we gain.
whenever you see a term or concept you don’t understand, WRITE it down. The brain-body connection works well for your memory.
I’m gonna get flak for this, but going out drinking and to the smoking area will give you an inside track to how the company operates.
I’d be wary of any company listed here that made that decision and hasn’t changed leadership, as it has been proven time and time again that many companies simply don’t care enough about customers enough to protect them. History repeats itself.
It’s fun to go back to old projects and finish them with new skills you’ve acquired over the years.
protip: US companies with offshore groups are usually underfunded, understaffed, and underskilled. Time to see if that disaster recovery environment works!
Happy holidays to those who encounter system stress tests. Can’t spell salary without some elements of slavery…
Basically, it was a way to get a developer to do more testing during development before handing over a feature to QA. This sets up the imagined possibility of firing all QA staff and having developers write perfect code that never needs to be tested thoroughly. Looks great on paper...
At a previous company, they started firing all of the manual QA devs and replacing them with offshore QA people who could do automated testing development (Cypress tests). The only problem was that those fired QA team members had significant business domain knowledge that never was transferred or written down. The result was a dumpster fire every week, with the usual offshore nightmares and panicked responses.
Make no mistake about this, it's just a cost-cutting measure with an impact that is rarely felt immediately by management. I've worked with stellar manual QA people and our effort resulted in bulletproof software that handled edge cases, legacy customers, API versions, etc. Without these people, your software eventually becomes IT-IS-WHAT-IT-IS and your position is always threatened due to the lack of quality controls.
I gave it a shot for a year as a potential source of side income and released about 10 skills publicly (+20 more are half-done or abandoned).
I've learned quite a bit about this platform over the past few years. I'd say the only positives I got out of it are a monthly $50 credit on AWS and sporadic surveys that netted me anywhere from $5 - $50 each.
My notes:
- VUI is a terrible interface. There are too many variables (foreign accents, volume, word recognition, etc.) that just make it clunky and unusable. Testing and debugging in the Alexa Console does not work 100% like on a real device.
- The ISPs (In-Skill-Products) are confusing to developers and users. The documentation is often wrong.
- The Alexa forum posts are rarely addressed by anyone at Amazon. Instead, you start to see fellow developers venting their frustrations.
- The intent model and lack of state machine makes it incredibly difficult to make a skill worth someone paying for it. It wasn't uncommon for testing to work flawlessly and then the published skill would be so spotty as to be unusable. Imagine being in the middle of an Alexa game and then unceremoniously receiving a the default help response (required for Alexa skills) that restarts your progress.
- Alexa doesn't work like people expect it to. Again, the intent/slot paradigm is pretty terrible. There's a lot of grunt work to have it even recognize slight variations of slots, so you end up with a huge list of sample intents users could potentially use.
- Internationalization is a HUGE pain. There are different availabilities for ISPs, Alexa services, etc.
- The Alexa Console is very clunky. Today (just like every day), I loaded the Analytics for one of my skills and got a 500 error. Reloading two or three times usually solves this issue, but c'mon!
- Good luck trying to market your skill. You could game the system by publishing updates or implementing new Alexa features, but getting your skill onto someone's account is basically a guessing game of what will work or not.
- Amazon Skills are not very profitable for individual developers. This puts the platform in jeopardy, as only the big players care enough to have their brand out there and sole developers don't make enough to make useful Alexa skills.
- Other skill developers could just copy your skill and publish it! The certification process is weird and oftentimes seems to be arbitrary.
There's more I could gripe about, but I've abandoned the platform. I suspect that Amazon's real product was the unfettered access to real-world speech data. By having a surveillance device in a user's home, they were able to collect data and train their own software.
As usual, American society superficially protects children while the most harmful perpetrators are given near-absolute access.
I really think the addictive qualities of video games should garner the amount of attention these social media companies generate. Actually, anything that takes your time and gives you nothing is suspect. As always, nothing will save you from a grift except knowledge.
There’s enough melody amongst the noise to keep it interesting, and the youthful finger-pointing aggression and characterization makes it unique.
I have a connection on LinkedIn (garnered from the spam connect campaigns I talked about previously) that talks about his MtF transition experiences as well as the struggle to land a job. No one cares enough to do more than post "You go, girl!" and move on with their day. Good advice would be to tell this person that LinkedIn is not the place to talk about your bottom surgery, vents about potential unsympathetic employers, or your struggles to find a partner. A good hiring manager would check social media for any red flags, and this public venting is a HUGE one.
You could replace "rainbow" with "Ukraine flag" or "Russian flag" or NY Yankees logo and it would still hold to be true. Someone will find an issue with anything about you, so why even post it?
Be a cog in the machine and be employed, or be an unemployed individual that whines on LinkedIn.
I put my LI profile to "open-to-work" on Monday and had three requests for interviews from various companies/entrepreneurs by Sunday.
The next week, I had at least 4 inquiries about my job status and interview availability. After the 1st two weeks, my email inbox was full of potential jobs/recruiter spam, which I sorted through and followed up on.
I'd agree about most being low-value leads, but getting your resume out there seems to attract all sorts of companies. Sure, I don't want to be a QA or SDET engineer, but my resume helped attract opportunities that I would have followed up on had I been more desperate.
You also have to assume that most recruiters are lazy and are doing the shotgun strategy as well.
My advice is how to get a job when you need one.
If you’re not playing the game willingly, you’re still playing the game.
We live in a world where you can either compete or wonder why no companies want anything to do with you.
“Fake it till you make it” is a good strategy when you have to pay bills.
If you’re actually desperate for a job, you’ll take what you get and rise to the challenge.
Chris Rock said something similar to my attitude: a person waiting on the side of the road with a broken car isn’t getting help. A person pushing their car on an exit ramp will get people to help.
Here are better job hunting strategies:
* Connect with anyone (just spam connect requests). You can easily have 5,000 connections. This looks good to people who take a cursory glance at your profile.
* remove anything on your profile that could be a potential liability for your future employer: no attitude, no rainbow emojis, no flags, no political statements
* embellish your resume and work history. If you’ve read a tutorial on a technology, you list it.
* start applying for anything you might qualify for. Interviewing is a skill and a process you have to get used to.
* Set your status to Open-to-work, open accounts on Monster/Dice/Blind/Indeed and start talking to headhunters/recruiters. Reach out to the big players (TekSystems, Robert Half, etc) as well as the smaller shops and see what they have.
* Personally ask or DM your friends for leads and references.
* search for “inurl:careers <your role or industry>” and find open positions to apply for anything
If you can’t get a job after following this advice, you’re doing something wrong.
We had city-burning protests for months for a career criminal high on illegal drugs committing crime. In a few days after, there were worldwide protests and political statements (GF portraits on the Berlin Wall?!?). Those that support this obvious push towards more chaos and police oversight have deep pockets and international reach.
Real change in the US comes from tragedy and money.