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What I don’t understand: There are two ways to get empties out of a port: On a truck or on a ship. And it seems that root cause is ships bring more containers than they take with them. So maybe, part of the solution could be a mandate of ships to take an amount of empties?
What I don’t understand: There are two ways to get empties out of a port: On a truck or on a ship. And it seems that root cause is ships bring more containers than they take with them. So maybe, part of the solution could be a mandate of ships to take an amount of empties?
It does seem that they people who have control over this situation don't have much on an incentive to improve it.
In particular fixing any piece of this loop would fix the others... eventually they just ran the port cranes longer and opened up the hours that trucks could go in/out. Is it "solved"? No, but the local pre-Xmas crisis is averted, which is basically peak for the year.
What I don’t understand: There are two ways to get empties out of a port: On a truck or on a ship. And it seems that root cause is ships bring more containers than they take with them. So maybe, part of the solution could be a mandate of ships to take an amount of empties?
>And it seems that root cause is ships bring more containers than they take with them. No, that's not the root cause. The root cause seems to be a combination of cascading events that causes a deathspiral: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p... "ships bring more containers than they take with them" is a symptom, not a cause. Mandating "ships to take an amount of empties" doesn't really fix th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spewing BS doesn't in this context seem to imply either lying or shilling for somebody else. It's a devaluing the opinion of no taxing the rich, and being disappointed at the expression of that opinion.
Parent said Petersen was "spewing BS... to protect his money", I suppose that may not quite be shilling, it's more being deceptive and greedy/crass? I am happy to accept clearer wording if you've got any ideas.
That original interview experience was... interesting. I went through the usual HR type introductory interviews, and then I went through several rounds of coding interviews. Finally, I had a chat with the older gentleman who was in charge of all of their IT. From the very first moment, he seemed utterly disinterested in the call. He would not look into the camera - never made eye contact... asked questions as if reading from index cards, but registered no recognition of any responses. To me it was obvious that he either did not like me (from before we said hello) or was already determined not to hire me. That's fine, but I could have done without the awkard call. Then, two weeks later, they told me "No thanks" with no information as to why.
They were solving several problems related to shipping, one of which was managing customs. These must be complex problems. But the demos that I saw, at least 2 years ago, were very limited. And when I spoke to the recruiter a year ago, she told me that much of their activities were performed by humans instead of automated systems.
Since I'm an outsider, my perspective could be inaccurate or imagined. But to me it seems like another scenario of gathering funding but not actually having a solution. Perhaps it's a mere exposure scenario, but it seems they advertise jobs on the front page of HN more than other companies. Why do that on HN if they aren't looking for devs or if they are operating with 95% non technical staff? (this was the number provided to me by the internal recruiter)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>And it seems that root cause is ships bring more containers than they take with them. No, that's not the root cause. The root cause seems to be a combination of cascading events that causes a deathspiral: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p... "ships bring more containers than they take with them" is a symptom, not a cause. Mandating "ships to take an amount of empties" doesn't really fix th…
The last (upward) arrow in the chart does not make sense. Why would people buy more goods: as prices go up, they can buy less and less goods.
> "You can’t return empties, so you can't free up the chassis required to move full containers out of the port. And because you're not pulling the containers out of the port, you're not able to return empties to the port. I did not know that this was the case before I went down there. We only discovered it during that three-hour boat ride." It's interesting that he got this data by asking the owners of the many diffe…
Interesting podcasts for more background:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-25/the-white...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gene-seroka-on-the-log...
I used to work for UPS and tried to understand Flexport business model, but could not find any value that Flexport bringing to the table. Can someone explain to me what value Flexport is bringing ?
Basically, if you want to buy goods from China, usually you do it by container load. You rent the container, get a 3pl ( a broker) to arrange the shipments and port
If you want to ship less than a 20 foot container load, e.g. a pallet, your goods are shared between multiple parties who also are shipping that container.
Flexport can handle those clients and also clients who want to ship full containers of goods overseas
Basically, modern online freight forwarding and logistics. That industry is still very manually driven with old tech (edi and xml) that aren't consistent across shipping ports
I would say it's kind of like the Uber eats for shipping containers... where takeout meals are pallets and Uber drivers are 40 foot containers, the hungry customer is the business buying the goods from the restaurant
Flexport posts a lot of "Flexport is hiring" ads on HN. Here are my anecdotal experiences. I was contacted by a very sharp recruiter from within the company a year ago. She said they weren't actually looking for backend developers (senior or not). Why she contacted me given my senior backend developer resume is beyond me. I told her I had a previous lengthy, and ultimately confusing and unpleasant experience with Fle…
Is the hiring process bad? Is the turn over that high? The constant advertising gives a bad impression. If they are just expanding at a good clip, it seems there are better ways.
Flexport posts a lot of "Flexport is hiring" ads on HN. Here are my anecdotal experiences. I was contacted by a very sharp recruiter from within the company a year ago. She said they weren't actually looking for backend developers (senior or not). Why she contacted me given my senior backend developer resume is beyond me. I told her I had a previous lengthy, and ultimately confusing and unpleasant experience with Fle…
In 2015 I was laid off from a startup that unfortunately shut down.
During my search I was intro'ed by their VC to the CTO. The CTO told me they were hiring for my exact, kind of niche role. I was pretty pumped as I hadn't really lost a job before and wanted to get something new quickly.
I met the CTO at a coffee shop, he kept asking me a bunch of questions that were clearly more being asked with the intention of picking my brain about a project versus interview questions. I asked him what was up and he said they hired someone for the role the week before, but that he wanted to pick my brain so he kept our time on calendar.
I had taken BART into the city, pushed back a different interview and taken time out of my day so a CTO with a ton of funding could exploit my labor for zero compensation.
I said something along the lines of, "um, okay I need to focus on my job search, good luck." and got up to leave. He then kind of did this act as if I was being kind of a dick for not helping him.
Luckily a Director of Engineering I'd worked with at a past company was sitting two tables away and I said hi and he said he had overheard what happened and I ended up interviewing at his company.
Still, to this day, seeing all of those "Flexport is hiring!" posts has always made me wonder how much of their interview process is just wasting the time of potential employees. They seem like they have a fairly noble mission, which is why I interviewed in the first place. But man, that whole situation still feels really gross to me.