3,542 karma · joined May 8, 2012
meet.hn/city/us-Macomb-Township
Worth every penny -- it's very sturdy (pain to mount, must be perfectly level, but anything this big is challenging), and extremely adjustable (including stiffness at each of the positioning points which took a little while to get right -- you want to easily move the display but not so easily that gravity starts walking it around the room).
And it bled into everything else that I did. I tried to replicate the office experience in my home office and I really had no choice at the time -- that's how everyone I worked with worked.
But in some circumstances, you have enough control over your work/environment that all of those artificial boundaries prevent you from taking advantage of the unique productivity benefits that working remotely can allow. I don't stress over how much I work. I work around 45-55 hours a week. I spend no time in traffic so on an average week I have more free time than I had in the office. I'm allowed to complete my work during whatever time of the day works for me. So I do. I write boilerplate better in the early morning. I write complex abstractions better late at night. I complete more work in less time because I don't get hung up on keeping hours.
Sometimes I fight with a problem for an hour, head off to bed, wake up at 2:00 AM and have the answer in my head. Having my computer nearby means "I do it" -- ten minutes, fixed. The usual path that went was "I forgot all about that until something reminds me of it mid-day after I've spent half that day trying to fix it." And that happens to me enough to add up to a few days of time. I still work the same total number of hours in a week, but I am less stressed because things are being built better, fewer mistakes are being made and the "impact of my job on my life" feels like a lot less.
Reading through your list, though, it sounds like you are already a very disciplined person. Outside of "writing software", I am not (which is why your #1 is so important, I'd have a tough time working remotely if I hated my job). It probably works perfectly for people who share your personality. Most of the items on your list I have tried at one point or another and because of my personality/tendencies, mostly backfired. Most of the changes I made are centered around eliminating any friction related to "getting started". If my bladder isn't screaming, the first thing I do when I wake up on a week day is grab my monitor and turn it on/check work-related things. Within ten minutes, I'm awake, I get up and do the morning routine/breakfast/etc. But it keeps me from having to "do the drudgery stuff" when I'm ready to "start working" and it helps me to get into a "work mood" when I'm waking up -- both of which I hate doing, but doing them together feels like I only "take the hit once."
For example, I learned early on that I hated working in my office. I used to sit at the kitchen table with a laptop, sometimes while the kids were playing video games, but usually with a TV on some program I've seen a million times. I need the non-distracting noise and open space or I feel the need to get up so frequently that I can't focus long enough on the problems I'm solving. I carry my laptop between rooms when I'm feeling stuck and it often helps.
In almost every way the more I remove from "forcing an office way of working on my remote work life" -- essentially, giving myself as much freedom around where/when/how I work -- I am more productive and much happier.
And just to restate: I'm not taking issue or saying any of your advice is wrong. Most people do not work the way that I do. Maybe most would find working my way horrible or might lead to being a workaholic (my motivation for changing things was to work less and it worked ... for me). I get that there's probably a lot of folks who would have exactly the opposite experience doing exactly what works for me, or would find it to be distracting/problematic. I'm just putting this out there for the folks who are struggling following advice like this (everything I've said goes pretty contrary to the common wisdom about working from home including every bit of information every employer has ever sent me on the subject) ... So if my advice makes sense to you, maybe you're backward, too, and you need something different. ;)
Now, I am not married and live alone. I suspect I'll be ditching this setup if I choose to go down that road, again, but I ditched the whole "separate work from life" from a physical standpoint. It hasn't caused me to work "all kinds of extra hours", but it has allowed me to quickly sit up and write a few lines of code that are sitting in the corner of my mind keeping me from falling asleep. Before I'd just ruminate on them for hours b/c while I was awake enough to struggle falling asleep, I was tired enough to want to remain in bed.
When I dropped $300 on this thing I thought "this is a stupid waste of money" ... that week, my laptop battery failed resulting in it being impossible to use since any vibration causes the power cable to stutter resulting in its immediate hibernation. But plug it in and set it on a stable surface with an external keyboard/mouse and it'll run all day.
Since then, I've found I finish work feeling less sore (this position is extremely comfortable and my monitor stand adjusts/tilts so it's at exactly the right position). I'm no expert in ergonomics -- and I have a fantastic, highly adjustable (Herman Miller Aeron) chair in my office and an adjustable desk, but I've never finished my day without something aching until I started using my mega-bed-desk setup.
And the best part is it tucks away nicely so it's not the focus of the room unless I'm working.
Thinking about it more, the number kind of says nothing. Or at least you can't draw any conclusions without a lot more information.
For example, just taking into account a radius of about 2 miles from my home there are 4 churches. All are very old, one is a historic site, none have property (other than maybe a graveyard, but I suspect there'd be complaints) or buildings that would be great for solar (several of the older even have tree issues to contend with). Extend that out and you get two Mega Churches -- one took over a large movie theatre, one was purpose-built as an auditorium with a roof slanted in a manner that might work out well given the position of the sun in our latitude.
The picture they show is of a rural (likely protestant church) -- I suspect these present optimal circumstances, as well, in northern latitudes if they're placed appropriately[0]. It also looks like that's a shiny new roof on that part of the building (possibly an add-on designed to the aesthetic of the adjoining building which will likely get turned into a chapel/event space). Off-hand, I can picture at least two churches in the thumb that have wind turbines on their property[1]. Parts of the thumb are positively amazing from a wind perspective (water on both sides, frequently farms in-between)[2].
I suspect 99% of the reasoning is economical. Churches are complicated beasts. The economics include all of the same lopsided reasons that businesses choose these things along with the weird things churches operating as charities face, like large grants for specific purposes (affecting smaller churches differently than larger[3]). It wouldn't surprise me much if part or whole solar installations aren't being donated in some cases.
If the business provider attends that church, they probably already have a small informal (or sometimes formal) list of businesses they use "because they're honest Christian places." Before the protesting begins about "Honest Christians", it's really more about "This person attends my church implying his personal and professional reputation would be affected if he ripped me off." And if your donation wasn't intentionally anonymous, it'll come with plenty of gratitude from the pulpit and a bronze plaque "or whatever non-tacky thing you want to donate, and maintain, too" indicating that the solar installation was donated by "SunCo" or whatever.
It's an interesting captive audience[4] who is hyper-loyal if you treat them well (for mechanics in my area, it's a ripe market). You tend to get forgiving customers, too. Sometimes repairs go wrong -- I'd jump to "crook", before, and never return. "Seriously, I'm two miles down the road and it's doing it again" ... yes, it's happened with my new mechanic, too. Sometimes a new part causes a failing part to fail and it's not always within the few miles of QA they do after a repair.
But now I just take my car back and "it gets fixed right" (and usually lasts longer than the previous installation).
Back to the hypothetical solar installation. In any market where solar is reasonably hot, if I'm "seriously thinking about solar" but haven't picked a company yet, they shot to the top of my list if they are somewhere near competitive on price. And in the imagined voice of my Mom a decade ago: "They put these solar panels up on our church, but they're not those stupid pink-gold ones, they look really nice!"
... my grand-mother would have complained that they didn't put a Jesus in the middle of the solar cross, or something "Blasphemy!" about it, but every generation evolves.
And some Houses of Worship outright advocate environmental causes. My understanding (from people I used to associate with who were members) of the LDS church is that they encourage various forms of environmentally sound behavior (conservation to the point of canning ... the only 20-year-old bachelor I knew who 'canned'), planting gardens in a sustainable manner. The closest friend of mine who was LDS was the first person I knew with solar panels (really, he had a house with solar panels before many of my peers purchased their first home and he owned it outright in ten years) in our latitude because his goal was to be able to live off the grid and that had something to do with his LDS beliefs (according to him...). I'd imagine you'd have an unusually motivated set of customers.
[0] I don't know anything about solar -- the sun feels like it's directly overhead in the summer, but it at like 70 degrees and 20 degrees in the winter if I'm thinking of the right number and remembering it correctly. I'm not sure what that means for solar positioning, though.
[1] Since this wasn't something I had put much thought to prior to reading this, I am not positive the turbine isn't on the bordering farmland.
[2] There was a map of renewables that had some of the turbines up north -- I know of at least two that aren't on the map as well as a solar installation (both over a decade old but I think the map is pulled from crowd-sourced data/satellite analysis, so I'm not knocking them) but my gut feeling is that there are twice as many as the map indicates. I don't know the economics of it but there must be some money involved to the farmers (and some who feel ripped off) b/c there were some angry road signs.
[3] An accountant at a large church nearby explained to me that there is no point in writing something or another on your check to direct your giving to a particular ministry unless it's a massive amount of money -- they have a set budget per year and if someone gives extra to "Mission Trips", they don't just make the Mission Trip budget bigger -- they balance it against the general fund, so unless you plan to fund the entire category and sprinkle some on top, they'll have the same budget they had last year. And for a large church, they better -- everything is dependent on people; over-funding doesn't make them appear.
[4] My mechanic is well known for handling the cars for everyone who attends (now a handful of local) mega-churches. One year he chose to donate $500 of services to single moms on Mother's Day (fifteen were pre-selected before each service, not a small donation) and if you know the shop, that $500 is $1,000 anywhere else. The first year he did this it took a day to get into his shop. It's been years of him doing that on-and-off, his shop moved to a location four times the size and he still can't keep under a week wait (and I wait, happily -- he's a very honest mechanic that I would not have found outside of that church service).
The best I can tell is that the company was laid out specifically focused on industrial/product/digital design. It built excellent, polished products[1] and the clients that were attracted to the company wanted that polished product. We positioned ourselves as a partner in executing on that vision but the reality is that we were taking a few sentences of an idea and creating it (with a bunch of hostility from the partner along the way). If the client wanted the polished product, we gave them an RFP that included everything required to get there and many of the things on that RFP came from bruises we received from previous work, so we were ready with "Here's a perfect example of why that's a must-have." And some of these bruises were incredible: I know of at least one project that was over a year past-due owing to a customer's constant design adjustments.
They did a lot right. The design pricing and QA was double what I recall seeing at previous employers. Development cost (equating to time) was a bit more, on average, than previous employers[2]. The development budget didn't necessarily suffer due to design being too large, but we weren't consistent enough with change-orders to handle the fickle customers we often ended up with. Hiring was impossible -- to get the people necessary to build these products they had open positions in nearly everything and hired anyone who was exceptional whether or not they had work for them (we were paid salary). This sort of worked, but after losing a huge contract for a product in a language we wrote almost nothing else in, we took a 25% hit to staffing affecting everyone who specialized in that language exclusively. It was a very demanding job but I met some amazing people there -- I remember a certified genius hardware guy who when I asked about his experience learning "C++" he said "I learned from Bjarn Straustrup" -- delivered factually, deadpan, no hint/intention to brag -- so much so that I took it as "read the books/code/self-taught as he was an autodidact" but he clarified "my employer paid to have my team trained by him (I think in the 90s)." WTF?!
[0] You have to be careful, here -- we used a couple of providers and I can only remember Shiffrin Heyworth and I can't find them any longer. Shame, too, it's even harder to find these kinds of companies if you want to participate as a panelist (most are scams) -- they had real secret shopper programs, expert studies (flying panel participants with specific, narrow, subject matter expertise), 3-5 hour paid catered studies (with a 20% chance of being handed food/a cheque and sent on your way) -- all design/product/marketing focus -- it was a lot of fun.
[1] "Products" was a range, but mostly digital, however we did a few interiors of the early Microsoft stores. They spun off a few companies from products they partnered with third parties to design/develop, as well.
[2] Adjusting for "specialization tax" -- I worked for a company that wrote software add-ons for Skype for Business/Lync/etc ... there were very few of us ... my hourly billing rate made me wonder where my corner office on the top floor was hiding at. Though my dataset is small, it's still about twice what my time has been valued at to a third-party.
An hour or so from where I live there have been complaints about an infrequent low rumbling sound for years[0]. I'd wondered -- at the time -- why you couldn't just do something like they do with the gunshot detectors to find the source of the sound[1]. I suspect there must be a technical/physics reason that I am not familiar with. This article re-enforced that thinking for me -- I think I've heard one of these air cannons, before (I have not heard the Windsor Hum), and its characteristics seem more like a gunshot kind of sound than what's described here but ... if you can record the time it starts from three different points (and all you're looking for is "an area roughly the size of a large factory" because it had always been suspected to be one of the plants along the river), wouldn't this approach have been simple/cheap enough to do to figure it out[2]?
[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/08/04/898853311/it-took-a-pandemic-... -- it was solved because a steel plant shut down and the problem went away.
[1] Part of the problem was that a subset of the population could hear it and a subset of that population noticed it enough to be bothered about it so it kind of led to a large number of people dismissing complaints as "people who complain about WiFi signals harming their health"
[2] And if I answer my own question: I suspect it probably was and I suspect the reason it wasn't done is that nobody cared enough to do it, really. :)
But you bring up an interesting point about WFH:
> I will never admit to any abuse on my part or anyone else's ever.
I'd gut-feeling a guess that all of the companies trying to bring employees back into the office are working that way or very close to that way -- some variant of "Be in front of your computer during your old office working hours". Well, except for coffee, several co-worker chats about Netflix/Sports/Nonsense. At the only job where I had this kind of schedule (for a period of time), our corporate policies allowed for checking personal e-mail, doing online banking and other personal activities on work time provided they weren't excessive (while signing off on them being monitored, of course). Is running a load of laundry between toilet breaks excessive? At what point does "doing non-work things during those working hours" count as abuse? How do organizations operating this way plan to catch the time thieves? These are all things that managers are panicking about, right now, because some of their employees basically stopped working[0], or they perceive the work being done would be done better if they could go back in time and put asses in chairs.
For roles where this is possible -- and obviously some aren't (and those have bigger trade-offs with remote work, as well) -- performance should be based on the simple question "Is the work getting done in a suitable time-frame?" Isn't that what they paid for? And if performance of all remote employees across the board is unsatisfactory then you have at least two things going on -- you've hired wrong, or you're failing to onboard well. And some people are slacking off, or literally doing no work, remotely. Why are they still employed? Are these people super-productive in the office? I suspect remote work shakes out a lot of people who'd rather have a different job. Those are the people that do shoddy work "in the office" and no work "at home[1]." I've had coworkers do this -- on a couple of occasions we didn't notice because the mistakes stopped which resulted in the team completing more work!
Where I'm currently employed, we have a few meetings, rarely before 10:00 AM, rarely after 3:00 PM. We're designing/building/adding new features to our product, together, and we all work radically different hours (despite most of us being down the street from one another). We're in a crunch time, now, so we're working radically long hours and spending more time on calls, but that will subside. I work from wherever in the heck I happen to be. I have an abundance of hardware/network setup so that I am never connecting to remote resources while developing. Outside of "I delivered what I said I would when I said I would" there's not a whole lot of oversight and I work between 40-50 hours a week like I did when I was in the office at my previous job. I start work between 5:00 and 8:00 -- sometimes I take a mid-day break and finish between 6 and "whenever." We have meetings every work-day so I work M-F, but it's common when someone didn't want to put something down and worked into the late evening to just leave a note and sleep through most of the following work-day. It's about "getting the thing done" and only about "how much time it's taking you to get it done" if you're burning out on 16 hour days when you shouldn't be. The intensity is no less -- probably more -- than it was when I was "in the office at my last job." But the impact of that intensity is a lot less when I have an abundance of control over when and where I work.
[0] It's because they're lazy, right? Have you asked them? Do they know their performance is not adequate? I know of one person who nearly quit a job because he was working 15 hours a day coding boilerplate. He was hired because the team was overwhelmed, but he wasn't working out because he couldn't complete simple things on time. When someone shadowed him for the day, they discovered he wasn't using a handful of scripts and was spending hours writing ... boilerplate.
[1] This happened "in the office" -- in my late teens I did desktop support for an organization with three offices/one main office. Two people usually handled "the non-main offices" working between them in various places. Over a month-long period, one employee stopped coming to work, completely. We discovered only when we rotated in new people to the "offsite offices" and the guy he was paired with said "that guy told him he was working at the main office." I guess he figured out we all kind of worked as an island and he only needed to tell one lie to collect free money.
The last decade of my Telecom days I reported variously to our department director, our department VP and ultimately our CIO and I had no direct reports[1]. My favorite was when I reported to a particular director. She was famous for sending sentence fragments as requests that, if you didn't look at the subject line, you'd picture a warden ordering prisoners around. It was most noticeable because she was such a pleasant, easy going individual ... if you'd only ever met her through e-mail, you'd think she was angry all the time. Like, literally one liners shot off from a Blackberry "need patch reports pronto" (it was either all lower or ALL UPPER depending on what she was doing when she sent the message, which added a little extra flair sometimes).
I don't know that we talk to each other all that politely via e-mail and written correspondence, already, especially in the above context. Other people are just "some opinion I don't like on a page" or "someone is wrong on the internet!", why would we converse with a chatbot any differently? And I don't treat Alexa any differently, TBH. I yell at it all the time. I've gotten used to just yelling "Alexa! Stop!" instead of more complex commands because the pre-GPT engine is extremely limited and it in no way feels like a real thing, either. And as long as I know the thing on the other end is a computer, whether it speaks to me or types to me, I'm going to similarly not care for the feelings it (presently?) does not have. This, however, does not affect the way I interact with others[2].
[0] Although, most reasonable CEOs would be very careful wording e-mails to employees they don't regularly encounter (understanding the "holy crap the CEO e-mailed me" shock).
[1] I'm sure I explain this in a past comment, but it happened b/c all of the managers above me gradually were let go and I didn't have a natural fit.
[2] Cue sarcastic comment. :)
They were a typical "we make products/digital experiences for brands/companies" kind of shop with some very big brands. Most companies their size that I worked for -- including one with extremely similar kinds of customers -- had about 100 employees, of them 70 developer/design/ui/ux, of those 70, 60 were developers, 10 were split amongst UX/UI/Design in different ratios depending on need.
At the company that did it right, half of the 70 were UX/UI/Design. Developers didn't get involved in the product until after project managers and UX had completed most of their work, Design/UI/Development would follow with development laying down the first line of code after everyone else is about 1/3 of the way through. Though we had fewer developers than any place I've ever worked at (even more stark considering the output was much more than we produced at other shops), we had the highest number of Senior/Dark Wizard developers than any place I've ever been, too. The polish of the products we produced was magnificent and we were well known for extremely well designed products. You saw many of them if you followed the second Obama election (those Surface large arcade-like tables were really popular that year -- my company did the app for at least one -- I think two -- of the 24-hour news channels) or bought a few major consumer brands.
This was also the only place I've ever worked with that regularly assembled test panels of customers for direct UX testing (we had someone on staff "that's all they did" was user studies of this nature) -- all paid for by the customer and the results were pretty incredible most of the time.
> Every team I’ve worked on that maintains a backlog, got most of their backlog from customers.
Or maybe you aren't the one who calls Bob, but someone from Sales, or Customer Support is the one who calls Bob, so now you don't just have a back-log, you've got two panicked people who are sure Bob is going to take his business elsewhere.
First, Bob's easy. Bob cares about all of those little things but most of the time, Bob's not stupid. He's fully aware what's important and what's not, the reason he brings you the whole list is because he thinks that will get your attention better than it did when he brought up his "critical feature" that got sidelined. If you don't sell to thousands and thousands of customers, but hundreds with a tens of really important ones, and Bob's one of them, the problem is failing to apply empathy to the Bob problem. Personally, I love these guys because they're usually very easy to placate. Usually Bob's list has 100 things on it, 99 of which are solved with the same four lines of code, one of which is a horrible pain in the ass. Usually at the beginning of the conversation, all 100 are important, but after you finish 99 of them, sometimes Bob doesn't even notice the one that's missing, he's too shocked that not only did one thing get fixed, but his list is gone! Call Bob in a week to follow up; if you haven't been neglecting him too long, ... he's got one or two bullets or nothing at all.
But for all the others, yeah, the backlog will grow ... initially. If you keep following up, and keep reaching out, though -- you'll find your customers are on your back less because they know you know what you need to do and they know you're working on it. Over time, it becomes easier to temper expectations, you have fewer emergencies, things get scheduled more consistently and the backlog ... eventually starts to shrink again. Your customers not only have limits on the things they want/need out of your application, they also complain less and less feverishly about the things that do irritate them because it's "just the one button that's wonky" and not a thousand little paper-cuts of things that just don't seem to work like they should.
And yes, always listen to the customers/never build what they ask for ... except ... that's only good advice in very specific circumstances. If you know your customer's needs better than your customer does than that's the best advice you can take. For everyone else, "always listen to your customers until you understand it precisely on their terms" then start asking them questions to understand why it is they're asking for the thing they're asking for. The problem with the "the customer doesn't know what they need" premise is that if you dismiss what they're asking for and the thing you produce doesn't fit "the thing they were trying to accomplish by asking for that" everybody loses. Sometimes, hell often, you're better off giving the customer exactly what they asked for than missing the mark by even a small amount even if you provide something substantially better. What you end up with is "a cool feature that nobody wants because your customer really did just want the 'print to PDF' button because of some archaic fax workflow you were unaware of" (or insert some other weird example).
I'm not poking fun/chiding here -- I give the same advice to others all the time, but it's easy to forget that "you can't tell the customer what they want if you don't talk to your customers" :)
You know, this is an observation I've made sub-consciously a thousand times and I really appreciate you putting that into words. In my experience, frequent check-backs with the customer -- and planning those "detours of development to make something visible" or "prioritizing this with a fake back-end to make something visible" (which we may do anyway if we have front-end/back-end working simultaneously) -- I find the most useful parts of working this way have nothing to do with the usual Agile Suspects[1].
My observations come from the lens of being employed by a few companies where I was a Senior developer with one or two Mid/Junior levels designing all or a major part of a product for a third-party (usually IoT or fully digital product someone paid us to design/develop). This may not apply to "I make a SaaS product I sell to customers" because of the closeness of working with them, but some of them likely do:
(1) Willingness of the customer to engage in regular communication is (anecdotally -- my observed) biggest factor to success. Ya know what, sometimes it doesn't even matter, either. I did three jobs for an oil company everybody's heard of, paid for via consulting dollars given to them by Microsoft. They met with us about five times for three products with the vision being to roll out one of them to "every employee except for the clerks" and the rest back-end to the complete appropriate environment. All three were met with praise and brought us future work. Not one of the three was deployed beyond test capacity (of the something-ungodly-like "150,000 user licenses" they paid for, we logged all of ten, it was sad).
(2) If they are unwilling, or you suspect they are dis-engaged, meet with "your contact over at the company" and have an off-the-record (but you know it's not) careful conversation to discover the reason for the dis-engagement. We were straight-up told "Oh, no, they do this all the time. They have to spend the consulting dollars." Emphasis provided verbally but never explained. It was said as though it could have been finished off with "or they will be fired" -- despite that being absurd; that was the level of intensity. Sometimes, though, you find out that you're not listening (or in a larger forum, they're not willing to tell you what the elephant in the room is) and it might be the only opportunity you have to fix it. A past product I botched pretty well had this issue. I had a customer become disengaged on a product I was working -- up to the point of actually shopping the product to another company half-way through. There's a lot lost in the detail, but it came down to them paying us to develop a product with the assumption that they'd have total control over the layout of the data in the database (despite not mentioning it, nor it being specified in any useful way in our contract). Unfortunately, the product had about one way it could be laid out in the database -- and it wasn't a way this unsophisticated customer would be able to just run a few simple SELECT queries on. Or, that's what I thought the problem was. Once I rang up their "one terribly abused IT guy", and exchanged a few war stories from my work history, I said "What's up with Tom trying to force this ridiculous schema down our throat?" He laughed and said "The money they budgeted for the project covers everything except the admin tool and Tom knows he'll never grasp your Schema well enough to write it himself[2]." They'd been telling us they'd pay a second invoice for the Administration tool and this was confirmation that was out, which I'd already scoffed at but this was absolute confirmation. I wish I could say we did the right thing with the information and it all worked out but, unfortunately (and this was out of my control), nothing was done with it.
(3) Frequent communication leads to higher engagement which leads to the feeling of partial ownership. I saw this at two shops -- one where we had almost no competitors developing against the APIs we were experts at -- we were expensive, so customers became invested in the success of the final product. They were engaged because "if it failed, they might not have jobs." But the other shop was unique. We provided a service that, on the surface, looks a lot like a whole lot of other things, including things sold by Microsoft. But the product was designed targeting three, specific, narrow verticals. These verticals, for at least two huge brands, had nothing that really met their needs so our pitch was "we'll make a version of our product designed for your company with you." And we did. We responded to every little detail asked down to ensuring the buttons/other things looked like every other internal web app they used, branded in a manner that completely hid that it was a SaaS product we sold with another name or that there was another company involved. But we knew every single big brand had a department that does this even if they hire a whole other company to manage the majority of it. So we ensured the contracts allowed for us to re-brand and re-sell it to every one of their competitors (and because of the product, it ends up benefiting them if the other company is as successful as they are). Fast forward a few years, and those two companies have been purchased three times over, almost ended up becoming one, and each time the question of "Should we get rid of Super-App?" wasn't just "No", but met with stories from the department head of "How it was a short meeting after they heard from me and (the three other folks we built it with)." They continue to pay the yearly renewals and work with us to develop out more things every few months. We've re-done this with the other verticals to the point of "we've captured all of the low hanging fruit in that vertical" to "we are a very competitive product in that vertical" but where we're deployed, our customers love the product. Those early customers feel actual loss when people talk about replacing it because they feel like they had a part in its creation.
(4) Frequent communication means you actually understand what your customers are saying. The biggest problem with talking to customers is they ask for things that have nothing to do with what they want to accomplish. "Can I save that to a PDF file?" "Why?" "I want to print it in a consistent format?" "I can put a print button on the page that will do that?" Customers get hung up on specifics of what they want driven by limits of what they believe things can do. If I had a dollar for every time a customer was surprised it was easy to do something "that, I'm fairly certain I could make work in IE 6 with a little effort." That's not a "har har, the customer iz stupiDZ", it's "that's not their job", "that's mine." But they're trying to translate a little of what they're asking into "Software Development Shop" because to explain it to you in their language, you better know a whole lot about manufacturing headlight bulbs (or whatever), and you're trying to translate everything into headlight bulbs. Over time you understand each other's languages and know when to say "... wait a minute, are you trying to ...?" with results that work out a little better than Clippy.
[0] Let's pick the topics: "Anything in the category of project management, scrum, agile", and the "Customer's Don't Know What They Want" (aka Listening to the Customer Results in Features They Don't Use(tm)), the "Startup Advice Doesn't Apply Outside of Startups" ... but that has nothing to do with what I wanted to say.
[1] Building the product this way ensures that the customer and you are on the same page with what the end result should actually be. Nothing explains how it's going to work than a UI that kind of does some of the things the working thing will do.
[2] I did inquire why "internal IT Dynamo", who I knew was a programmer from outside circles, wasn't being forced to write it. He said "I told them I'd quit." It sucked because I was so proud of this design -- it performed brilliantly despite being 6th normal form for 3 tables and it actually had to be 6th normal form to do what I was trying to do. Even better, because it's such a bitch working with that data, I put instead of update/insert/delete triggers on a set of views so "if you wanted to screw with it in SQL Management Studio", go ahead, all enforced by simple constraints, 1/4 the code that was ultimately required by the customer's insisted-upon design but -- importantly -- didn't grow table data exponentially for every configuration added resulting in the whole system falling down after setting up about ten configurable products.
I had two families who led me to the decision, myself. If people really knew what a typical "I don't have an axe to grind, I just want to direct my child's education" home-schooled parenting life was like, everyone would choose it if their life situation allowed. I understand that I was blessed to have circumstances that allowed us to do this for our children[1].
[0] Many in the homeschooling community find themselves having to explain their choices, often, to outsiders so they tend to over-compensate with their kids out of a desire to not have others' think of their children as "weird". I tell my kids to be as weird as they want.
[1] Well ... my circumstances were anything but ideal despite how it sounds. We just made it work.
We were a pretty laid-back home schooling family. My kids didn't spend all day nose-in-books, watching documentaries in the afternoon between violin, piano and Spanish lessons. Up until this year it was a closely guarded secret how much time my kids spent "in home school." Had I let my family or non-homeschooling friends know how much actual formal class time there was, I would have probably been derided as a terrible parent. Now that they're sailing through school -- not just doing well, but generally underwhelmed by the difficulty of the material -- I'm not so shy.
They had, on a really good day about 2 hours of actual, formal, class-time with homework. The vast majority of the time, it was under an hour of mom-led learning followed by under an hour of homework, done in one room, alternating kids between homework/study but often times with both kids participating in each other's lessons (why not?). Aside from having to be single-income, and except for the "they're your kids so they aren't as easy to teach" problems[0], it wasn't difficult at all. Hell, the vast majority of the time -- especially since I work remotely -- it was downright awesome.
The above paragraphs might make it sound like I'm saying "Screw Teachers, their job is easy, any idiot could do it!" Obviously, it's much easier to teach two children than it is twenty-ish. Obviously, being that they're your own children, you have lack the complexity of dealing with parents, administration and politics. The reason "it worked for us so easily" is almost entirely due to these factors. I think about how, one year, we decided to ditch the math curriculum we were using for my son -- he was struggling, we found something better for him and within a week he was enjoying learning it. Having just the two kids meant we could make sure they were enjoying learning. When kids want to learn something, all you really have to do is point them toward "how." You're not going to get 25 kids -- some who come from tough home situations -- to all enjoy learning.
That said, I've never understood why (at least in the past) substitute teachers[1] never required degrees and were plenty effective, homeschooling is allowed without restriction, registration, or any requirement to prove you are actually home schooling to teach from a book basic things that every adult -- at one point -- learned. That sounds dismissive -- I'd imagine the vast majority of the job isn't that, and I have no interest in becoming a teacher because of those factors (difficult children, parents, administration, government) but I'd be willing to bet there are a lot of very qualified adults who would, but can't, because of degree requirements.
[0] My daughter was famous for breakdowns during math lessons. She can be emotional, but trust me, she's not breaking down in front of her Math teacher at school, today. Incidentally, despite her claiming to hate math all throughout home-schooling days, now that she's past Arithmetic, it's her favorite subject.
[1] Yes, most of the time, that's a single-day activity. We had one for three months, once.
I remember the palette choices in CGA were downright bizarre; they'd be 4 colors that you couldn't possibly use to make anything look right. At the price of the card and the display, you're like "wait ... that's it?"
[0] Ignoring all of the interesting things coming out of the 8088 demo scene, nothing that I'm aware of from the 80s was capable of anything close to that.
That company produced a number of excellent DOS survival tools. QEMM memory manager was an absolute must to get games working.
It was for an 80286 clone that had a 10MB HDD. His rational for buying this card was "I can make a big RAM drive out of it and run everything from memory"
I can't recall the price of the thing, but I want to say it ran in the thousands. Couldn't run most games on it because of copy protection so we never got to take advantage of it. In fact, I don't think the extra memory was usable at all in most software -- I recall we couldn't run a game on his machine due to having 512MB of onboard memory, but it had no issue in my ancient 8088 with 640K installed (in bizarre CGA colors).
When I worked at a large, multi-national telecom, I started in desktop support (waaaaay back in the day!). I remember being surprised about the layout of the 10,000 person organization, in general. You had staff, supervisors, managers, directors and vice presidents with some of those roles missing/swapped. Usually its "one or the other, supervisor vs manager" depending on if it was a higher-paid salary (or hourly) position or "the folks who answered the line when you dialed 411".
For nearly every organization in the company, turnover was nothing that would raise an eyebrow. The structure was pretty boring, too -- A single VP, maybe two directors, the rest managers/staff.
And then there was sales ...
In Desktop Support, we spent a lot of time in the various local sales offices. We were either picking up or dropping off a computer over there about 5 times as much despite the office holding 100 employees. Almost everyone had an office. All office locations had the same dress policy, but everyone in the Sales department was 1980s IBM dress policy[0]. And almost everyone in the building was a Vice President.
Being a frequent fixture in the office, I got to know a few of the managers and it was explained: the job has high performance quotas which, if met, will make a 6-figure salary very easily (in 2001) but which, if not, you'll be gone -- quickly[1]. There was something of a 400% turn-over (I can't remember if that was per quarter or per year, but I think it was the former). Much like the response from "Matthew Prince", though, the manager I talked to and the two sales-people that were hanging out all agreed "that's just how it works -- you don't have a consistent paycheck month-to-month, anyway, but the money is very good and the turnover means jobs are abundant." It's not a life I would choose, personally, nor am I in agreement with that way of doing things, but that was my take-away.
[0] Which wasn't all that surprising; the office had customers come through.
[1] The devil's in the details; certain sales jobs had long-tenured people and a long-term high-performer isn't let go after a bad month ... usually, anyway.
Of course, normal users use the terminal as much now as they do, then, but mostly because "they don't ever have to"[0], but yet they're able to accomplish things that might have been relegated to the category of "computer programming" just a decade ago.
Programming software is just another way of using a computer in a more advanced manner than mere mortals. Programming gets simpler, more enter the field, junior developers become more powerful and the difference between the expert and the novice increases or decreases depending on which direction you look at it from.
In 1986, my Dad, a non-programmer, and a "power user" but not expert in PCs, used Lotus 1-2-3 to design an invoicing and accounting tool that had a UI, forms, printed formatted output and tracked everything in a database-like manner in a file. I called him a non-programmer, but was he?
[0] When your PC boots into a `C>`, you better know what to type to get it to do something other than that.
(1) Their store brands are consistently on-par or better than the name brands. It's no "Kirkland Signature" but I've found short of about three things, I like the Aldi product better[0].
(2) Their prices are good enough that I don't have to plan with coupons/nonsense. I analyzed this a few years ago (so long ago that newspaper coupons were still the only "real" coupons offered by food vendors) and found it was worth the time savings to skip the chore and just go to Aldi.
(3) Their "Aisle of Shame" (close-out random goods) is fun. I frequently find excellent products at ridiculous prices ($30 off-brand blender worked longer than the $200 I replaced it with).
(4) Their near-frustration free check-out.
Honestly #4 is the reason. Their check-out staff will rip through a cart faster than you can unload the groceries. They can do this because Aldi ensures their store branded products have barcode labels that extend the length of the box and appear on nearly every surface[1] (and they minimize the movements required of their staff to perform that job). You can have 4 people with full carts in front of you and they're cleared out before a typical Walmart scanner handles one half-full cart.
When I saw they introduced self-checkout, my heart sunk, but I used it. I think it's the only automated check-out system I've used that works. You get that product anywhere near the laser and it scans. It's amazing how much of that process comes down to the barcode scanner working properly.
[0] In one case -- their Mocha iced coffee -- I can't drink other brands any longer
[1] In some cases they slap a barcode on non-store branded products.
(1) How "high-end" something is does not equate to how long it will last or how reliable it will be. Sometimes it's entirely the opposite (early generation Plasma did not outlive CRT equivalents but cost substantially more).
(2) Targeting a specific brand "known historically (to you) as reliable" is pointless most of the time. All brands have levels, and the low end is same old crap.
(3) Consumer reports turned out to be a sometimes useless great resource. Often the model being recommended is no longer available. Buying the next model burned me -- badly -- because the following model year dishwasher was required to use less water (EPA), it was the first generation of this new design and it meant not really having a dishwasher.
(4) Dishwashers these days positively suck. I went through four of them in two years, returned two, resold one, suffering with the last (a Bosch that is -- at least -- quiet). The manual instructs not to pre-rinse the dishes, just "shake them off in the sink". Do they actually test these things with real food? Heaven forbid a kernel of Cocoa Krispies ends up on a bowl ... when mixed with milk and sent through a hot cleaning cycle, it turns into chocolate stone epoxied onto whatever in the hell it attached itself to. Oh, and that one kernel will turn into 40 little versions and attach themselves to everything.
My buddy has dishwasher-something-he-got-from-Sears from the 90s with a garbage disposal built in. You can put a Crock Pot with the leftover roast in the thing, put in your hearing protection, turn it on, and everything is shiny in about 60-90 minutes.
(5) There's a real market opportunity for a microwave without a weird UI. That's it: "without a weird UI". Mine has 25 buttons and a dial. Figuring out how to microwave something on anything other than "high" is sort of like figuring out an Escape Room. The microwave's "30 second" button sets the time for 30 seconds and starts it immediately. Hitting it again adds another 30 seconds. So that button's almost got a hole in the center where the text once was and the entire family either rounds up or stares at it until it's almost done, popping the door open with 15 seconds or so left. Of course, as a result of this behavior, the door safety switch is malfunctioning so you have to very slowly/carefully close the door while applying pressure in a very specific way or the microwave will refuse to start.
(6) Sometimes you'll buy a cheap-o gas mower with every intention of upgrading it "when it kicks the bucket". And sometimes that mower will run, faithfully, every week, 3 months a year for 25 years. Some will continue to start on the first or second pull despite still having the original spark plug, wires, air filter, having never been tuned up, maintained, or cleaned and despite it having only had oil added (never changed) ... twice? ... in 25 years, when it was blowing black smoke out the exhaust. Sometimes the thing you want to fail will outlive you.
Really ... do you need more than one button for "make it soggy and unevenly warm?"
This was 1993. There was no broadband. We almost went 10-BASE2 due to cost. I remember we had a Netware server and two computers. It was kind of overkill but it was fun!
You're either someone who prioritizes the car they buy based on how others will perceive you (and how you will perceive yourself when driving it) or you're someone who sees a car as a means to an end.
I realized I was the latter when I bought my first car. After telling the salesperson the model I wanted, his first question was "What color do you want?" I went into a car dealership knowing the exact model/options "level" I wanted (V6, Leather, Convertible, Keyless, etc), I knew what I wanted the dealer to add (Remote Start, mostly) ... and I knew exactly what I was willing to pay given the two purchase options available to me (cash with a large incentive or 0% financing). At no point had I thought about the color. After shaking off the momentary embarrassment, I sarcastically quipped: "The cheapest color".
I've since sent him some suggestions :)
Had it not been for the experience of "tinkering" with that PC and its predecessor (a ten year old 8088), I would likely have never become a software developer.
I had the honor of building a gaming PC for a neighbor kid and watched over four years as he (unbeknownst to him) became a very competent geek. A few years of tweaking settings in games to eek out a higher frame-rate, fighting with firmware updates, video card drivers, software updates and every other bit of mayhem that the words "I want to game on my PC" evoke, and you pick up a wealth of knowledge "by accident".
I hadn't talked to the kid in four years; met up with him, again, recently and I was blown away. First thing he does is pull a "Flipper Zero" out of his pocket and tells me about all of the crazy things he's done with it.
He is as capable as any systems guy I've ever talked to. He has no clue that he has this skill, either.
It was such a good experience that I opted to buy my son a decent gaming laptop to graduate him from consoles. Over the last year, the same thing has happened to him. This year, my daughter (she's two years younger) begged me to build her a desktop, so she's getting a really nice Christmas followed by a year of learning/frustration. :)
Oh, and the fam got a Flipper Zero this year, too. Can't have the neighbor kid have all the fun.
[0] I saved up the money to afford it by building computers for other people.
That sounds like a pretty unique approach to Usenet content delivery. I wonder if anything else/similar has existed/exists (unlikely in Usenet and I can't think of something quite as useful).
I'm not surprised this catches people off guard. I'm usually among the gadget folks and was intellectually aware of the A2DP/HFP situation, but hadn't put it all together until I tried to use my new headphones (which support AptiX, etc), went to play a video game, and my (Windows[0]) computer flipped me to HFP, destroying the game audio to my headphones. It was at that point that I understood why the console makers shied away from "just using bluetooth" for their headset channels[1].
It was a new laptop that has some rather slick features you can apply to the mic array which causes it to only pick up the voice of the person directly in front of the laptop, or limit it to the people in the room (but not, say, televisions/stereos/PC audio). If I want the higher quality audio from my headphones, I just use my laptop's mic; it sounds as good to everyone else.
It's a shame for my phone, though. Many conferencing apps support High Definition audio and there's a not-always-small difference between the Bluetooth and USB versions of some conferencing devices.
[0] Which, AFAIK, doesn't support AptiX; but my phone does.
[1] I haven't looked into this in three years or so -- I recall something about PS4/PS5 supporting certain Sony headphones and there are plenty of wireless headphones that work with a USB stick (along with at least one on the Xbox platform [Turtle Beach] that required no USB stick, licensing/utilizing whatever the wireless controllers use -- since most/all have a 3.5mm jack -- for communication).