Everybody working at Dropbox?
How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
61–70 of 428 posts
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#62I am currently employed to develop an entire data analytics system because a government department can't get their firewall rules right. None of the members of this government department want a bespoke system, they want to use tools they are familiar with but due to the firewall rules this isn't possible.
What stack are you using? I did the same thing not long ago with Flask and Plotly.
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#63Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…
> we all know the project will fail unless someone develops well-perfoming, human-level AGI before Q4/2020 This is hilarious, and makes me wonder how many similar corporate AI initiatives are under way in the world right now.
I have had a couple conversations where a business guy starts off with a decent idea then he says something like "the cognitive AI module will fill out your expense report after watching you do it for a couple weeks".
What the fuck? If I had the ability to code a cognitive AI module which could do that I would not be building it for you, I would solve self driving and license the software for billions.
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#64Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…
> but at least we can now tell investors we are a keen company with an AI play up our sleeve Obviously I don't know the details of your company situation, but I've experienced myself over the years, that sometimes it can be less overall cost and trouble to give this kind of lip service , rather than fighting an overwhelming fashionable trend until that trend runs its natural course to extinction. > Team motivation is…
Well, it sounds so weird but intriguing. Do you mind telling the rest of the story?
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we all know the project will fail unless someone develops well-perfoming, human-level AGI before Q4/2020 This is hilarious, and makes me wonder how many similar corporate AI initiatives are under way in the world right now.
I have had a couple conversations where a business guy starts off with a decent idea then he says something like "the cognitive AI module will fill out your expense report after watching you do it for a couple weeks". What the fuck? If I had the ability to code a cognitive AI module which could do that I would not be building it for you, I would solve self driving and license the software for billions.
Business guys usually comes together and brag about their works. Quite often, they start to talk about things they heard but don’t understand much.
And the other one hear about it, get excited, but also don’t understand much. Then on the meeting, he brought the idea up and convince everyone to do it.
The next you know, you’re pulling your hair out trying to understand what is going on
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#66Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…
Think about open-sourcing some of the stuff you're doing. Otherwise it's likely to stay buried in the corporate IP portfolio
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
That advice is OKish if you only ever want to be a mediocre employee clocking in to get your wages. I think you need to be far more proactive in training your mind if you want to become a founder [edit: of a successful business], or move into more responsible roles, or even just to get satisfaction from shipping great software.
>if you want to become a founder Why do you need to work up to being a founder? Any bozo can start something new especially given that the vast majority of start ups either never go anywhere or flame out somewhere in the first year or two. Even I've "become a founder" a couple of times.
Right, my goal is not to become a founder, my goal is to live a long time and retire.
I used to be pretty close with the founder of my company and his life doesn't look like any fun.
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
And of course you're being facetious, because if everyone is 33% better, the company can fire 25% of its staff (right?).
That's hilarious - I can't help but think of this dilbert cartoon on making change: https://dilbert.com/strip/1993-03-20 (I am not putting you down)
Years ago I worked at a store with registers that didn't calculate change; myself and the other cashiers would need to calculate the change mentally. Once in a while I would get people like this who threw out convoluted amounts of change. Normally it was fine, but sometimes towards the end of a long day when my brain was tired I wanted to strangle them.
The store actually had really great employees overall and I suspect this little factor played a big part in that. Part of the application process was a basic math test and it was funny to see how quickly some applicants recoiled when they found that out. It seemed to be a great filter.
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#69I am currently employed to develop an entire data analytics system because a government department can't get their firewall rules right. None of the members of this government department want a bespoke system, they want to use tools they are familiar with but due to the firewall rules this isn't possible.
What stack are you using? I did the same thing not long ago with Flask and Plotly.
We are required to use some internal assets, so I am using a combination of Flask, our "workflow execution platform", and some Amazon EC2, S3 and Glacier on the backend. Angular and a few data viz libraries for frontend.
It's very rigid and slow :(
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#70[deleted]