21–30 of 104 posts
Electronic Displays Industry: LED TVs are also LCD TVs. When I explain this to people, some even retaliate! The picture is formed in both by LCD only, just that the backlight is built out of LEDs in what is called an LED TV.
Specifications given for power output in music systems, contrast ratio in TVs, frequency response for earbuds, etc. are mostly fake.
In tech most managers and recruiters think there is a skills shortage. This is untrue. The truth is that companies do not want to pay market rates for people with the right skills
Of course some companies get really far by throwing armies of developers at the proof-of-concept software to keep it running and patched together. But that only works as long as the product is profitable enough to pay for all those developers plus some.
Anyway, point being, companies that "do not want to pay market rates" may have little grasp on the cost side of their profit equation. It's possible that because of that, they do not have a profitable business model, at least for a given product, and should really be rethinking their strategy.
This is one of the problems with keeping your "technology people" out of business planning. It's hard to impossible to avoid chasing organization-wide sunk costs if you don't have someone at the strategic level with a good concept of "technical" things: skill level of the engineering organization, technical debt levels, red flags in system quality, etc.
Spreadsheets are widely used in financial institutions, and not just for little things but also for critical tasks too. I've seen spreadsheets sophisticated enough to make database calls to book-of-record systems. These spreadsheets are often put together by an intern or associate who "knows a little VBA" and automates or tracks a task that the business was doing manually. Nobody on the desk really knows how the spre…
if something goes really wrong, they can fire the intern and caim they went rogue.
it is much harder to shift blame to a department where everything is full tracked, approved, etc.
i think this a symptom of a much bigger hidden secret. corporations are not organized to accomplish tasks. they are organized to avoid responsibility.
China subsidizes up to 70% of postage fee, so Aliexpress sellers can sell cheap stuff for $2 with "free shipping" worldwide.
There is no such thing as "free shipping" in e-commerce, it's just included in the price. An astonishing amount of people actually thinks it's free for the seller.
When you apply for a website license in China, you have to give root access to the Ministry of Information. Most of the time it's handled by your hoster "transparently" in the form of "license application tokens". (Yes, you can trick them if you colocate your own bare metal.)
25% is an average ingredient cost for restaurant meals.
Spreadsheets are widely used in financial institutions, and not just for little things but also for critical tasks too. I've seen spreadsheets sophisticated enough to make database calls to book-of-record systems. These spreadsheets are often put together by an intern or associate who "knows a little VBA" and automates or tracks a task that the business was doing manually. Nobody on the desk really knows how the spre…
Education is an expensive burden on the society that have not proven to worth its value in terms of Return Over Investment. Funnily, the only persons asserting the value of diploma ... are PhD in ivy league business schools... selling expensive diplomas... Education is probably a large scale scam in its actual form: too long, too expensive, counter-productive and overrated. Cf Henri Mintzberg essay on why MBA for ins…
From that point, it depends on the subject you decide to study. It seems to me that medicine students get a lot of real life practice during their training, which makes the school almost irreplaceable.
In other areas, like programming, you're better of staying at home and watching online lectures and making your own pet projects to learn, as long as you have enough self discipline to keep yourself on track. There are tons of resources you can learn from and you can practice as much as you want. I did it and it has been working well so far.
Overall, I wouldn't say we should ditch education at all, but we should seriously rethink the way it works. We can do much better than this.