The problem with some of (all of?) these is that it's becoming increasingly moot to bother posting. I posted back in the early days of social media to share with my friends. In response, my friends and acquaintances kept me up to date with their lives. Now the apps only bother to show me friend/following posts if they deem it matches my interests.
I understand that this sort of algorithmic feed likely matches the metrics to keep people scrolling. This would also track with every app moving away from "friend" verbiage to something like followers, subscribers, or members. Users are encouraged to post _to_ their audience rather than sharing _with_ their friends.
Yes, I mostly stopped sharing because I don't want it to be used for creepy reasons. When Facebook was just a community of sorts, it was fine to share. People who cared would see it. Facebook wasn't doing too much content mining. But in the current world, people who care often don't see it, and if I told them to go looking there, they'd be bombarded by so much ragebait that I couldn't in good conscience recommend it.
In addition, it feels like the past 5 years have brought on more marketing spam. I've been slowly reappearing onto marketing lists that I either never signed up for or unsubscribed from. They're coming from legitimate companies that I've done business with.
The people that's a problem for don't understand this fact. Of the ones that do, there's upper management and/or shareholder pressure for profits now. It's a can that infinitely gets kicked down the road until they reach a dead end.
I see this take all the time, but hiring a junior/intern has never been great ROI, so I hear. Why did we ever do it in the past? Its not like it was ever likely that hiring a junior means getting an employee for life. Could it be that the economic and shareholder pressures are requiring this rather than it being a logical thing?
Anecdotal counterpoint, the best teams I've been on have always had a good mix of a couple of really senior/decent intermediate people and a few either totally fresh grads or juniors (at the beginning of the project). Those fresh people have a good chance of becoming pretty formidable pretty quickly with the right mentoring, and without them seniors have a tendency to just remain experts on whatever tech stack they're familiar with but not think out of the box.
Hiring a mediocre senior is much worse than hiring a grad because they will never get any better, and it's very hard to know at hiring time that they're mediocre.
I'd also add that top-heavy engineering organizations are sometimes incapable of delivering anything useful because everyone wants to work on the hard problems, establish the frameworks, define the processes, and so on, and no one wants to operate the damn business. It's good to have a mix of perspectives in a team.
Fully agree actually. Not sure its a counterpoint at all really, but its a great point. My comment wasn't intended to be "juniors were never worth it", but instead "juniors WERE worth it before but not because they produced amazing ROI themselves, why does the introduction of an LLM change that?" I'm solidly against the narrative that now all of a sudden juniors aren't worth hiring anymore because a senior with an LLM = 100x engineer.
I think a lot of people are missing that eBay bought TCG Player back in 2022. This would fold the TCG Player brand into GameStop. Many (most?) local game stores list their inventory on TCG Player. In addition to the physical stores themselves, GameStop would have their hand in nearly every digital trading card transaction. GameStop would own the TGC Player warehouses and inventory.
You also have to be "all in", so to speak, in order to participate. I can window or minimize a screen on a PC. I can pause a game on a console. I'm immediately aware of my surroundings in both cases. With a VR headset, I have to physically remove the headset before I see where I am within physical space.
It feels so silly expressing this, but the act of putting on a headset that completely engulfs my vision with screens, even if my space is already clear with a boundary, feels like a much bigger commitment than opening Steam. It doesn't matter if I'm standing for room scale or if I'm already seated with the headset next to me. Both cases feel like extra effort for a lesser experience.
> What I'm suggesting is a low risk way to see if an engineer has an aptitude for aligning the roadmap with what the users want. If they aren't great at it, they can go back to engineering. We also know for sure that they are technically competent since they are currently working as an engineer, no risk there.
It doesn't have to be the most socially competent engineer to gather feedback. Having the engineering team sit with the target users gives so much insight into how the product is being used.
I once worked on an administrative tool at a financial institution. There were lots of pain points, as it started as a dev tool that turned into a monstrosity for the support staff. We asked to have a meeting with some reps who were literally 2 floors below us. Having the reps talk as they worked with the tool in real time over 1 hour was worth more than a year's worth of feedback that trickled in. It's one thing to solicit feedback. It's another to see how idiosyncrasies shape how products get used.
I once got dinged for not reporting. I saw an email that was clearly an internal security campaign. I deleted it. I received an email a day or two later stating that I failed to take action on a phishing attempt. Damned if you do; damned if you don't.
You can setup a Google app automation to do this for you.
I did for e.g. knowbe4 since all their test emails have the same header information. It made it quite easy to never see any of their attempts, though I did have to check every once in a while to see if I'd been signed up for any random learning and it removed those emails as well..
I don't live in the city. Aside from not being able to walk to school, mine would have to wake up roughly 45 minutes earlier (60 minutes if we want to be safe) to catch the bus. We are about 8 minutes from the school via car. Between the lack of housing density and ugly school zoning, taking the bus cuts significantly into their sleep.
I had the same setup growing up. Lived about 3 miles from school but was one of the first stops on a 45 minute bus route through largely rural areas. I got a lot of reading done.
Your kid won't be harmed by sitting on a bus every day.
As a kid who had go get up at 5am to catch a bus to school, maybe they might. The issue is not riding the bus, but impeding on sleep. As a teen, I would have preferred to wake up st 6:30 to be to school at 7AM rather than wake up at 5AM to be there at the same time because I'm the first stop. My mom wasn't kind. I did survive, but I also had less sleep which isn't great for a growing mind. I'd drive my kid in the same situation. Hell, I drive my kid now because I don't want a kid who can't write letters yet walking around any real distance without me. Especially in a semi-rural area where we've encountered wildlife and feral pets that weren't dangerous to me, but were dangerous to her.
Many schools are starting later for this reason. Just because the bus may take long doesn’t mean there aren’t other issues that should be solved to make buses a more viable option.
I understand that this sort of algorithmic feed likely matches the metrics to keep people scrolling. This would also track with every app moving away from "friend" verbiage to something like followers, subscribers, or members. Users are encouraged to post _to_ their audience rather than sharing _with_ their friends.