I am thinking about doing something similar. Out of curiosity, do you use a reverse proxy web server to protect from malicious attacks ? That`s probably the only part I would think of leaving in the cloud if I were to host my own servers at home.
Hype, pipe dreams, hokum... I am wondering at what point do these stories become fraud ? Telling stories about your technology that are not true to gain a financial advantage.
The tracers over prototypes advice is a precious one. Having worked for small and large companies, once you have a functional prototype that has been built quickly, managers tend to be very reluctant to let you rewrite the prototype architecture to make it clean. Using tracers you can demonstrate small but important features to the persons involved in the project and when the project will be given the go sign you can work peacefully on the product's architecture.
The initial questions to build your pitch that are enumerated in that article are also good questions to ask yourself if you should pursue or not with your company.
Some of these cases are not only dark patterns, they constitute was it legally known as fraud. If you deceive someone in order to gain a financial advantage, it is fraud. The problem is that going against those gigantic companies is very difficult.
The first thing that came to my mind was... what about advertising on the web ? This is an area where machine learning and algorithmic decision-making use discrimination to either show or not an ad to a particular user. There are millions decision made everyday. Under that regulation, could you ask for the reason an ad was shown to you ?
Actually, it might go up quickly once they start filling up their financial results every 3 months. If they have a steady growth the market will react positively and the employees owning shares will benefit from it.
I fully agree. When working on a team, you have to think about the future not only the current moment. If every time you have a disagreement it results in a win-lose situation I can guarantee you the mood among the your team will go down quite rapidly. I would suggest 'Getting to yes' by Bruce Patton, Roger Fisher, and William Ury on this matter of negotiation.
American approach is more 'trial and error' while French education system is more oriented toward demonstrating that something is good or not. Hence, when they see something new coming up they want to make sure that this won't interfere the current state of things. Both approaches are good, just different.
What I get from this article is that working collaboratively is a lot more efficient than working in a spirit of competition. Specially, if you have members with different backgrounds among your team. Working collaboratively requires a trust bond between each members and usually it takes time. As we build and dismantle team sometimes at a fast pace it may be difficult to attain this state in today'S work environment.
Strange in a the sense that the rational choice would be to promote your best asset while they are in the company. There are tough times in all companies but, in some, the best assets decide to leave when there are tough times because this is the last nail in the coffin of a toxic work environment.
Good to know I am not alone :) There are a few pinpoints also to detect if the company you are interviewing to is one of these. Usually, they are 'building' a new team for an existing product. As I grew up in my career I started to develop the reflex to ask why the previous folks left. You might not get an honest answer but at least it gives you more information either you should continue the hiring process or not.
Being the last man standing. Seems sad but when people leave bad company, usually the people who stay get promoted and some of them become senior developer. I have seen this strange pattern a few times.
I fully agree. There are even people who think the singularity will be coming within 10-15 years. The state of AI or machine learning if you want is far from what we see in the news.
Too often, the team fit is put aside and you end up with people who does not play well with others in your team. Technical interview can be ok but I would not put too much details into it. I have been in technical interviews where people were asking questions about obscure API calls and they were expecting applicants to come up with questions that were not relevant to the job.
What about developing a core codebase to build an app for different platforms (including the web)? There are framework out there that can help you do that. At least in C++ (this is the language I use the most).