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Companies must stop using Google Analytics

imy.se

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Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#271

Post by browningstreet »

dijit wrote: post #34

My sister-in-law (girlfriends brothers girlfriend, not that it matters) recently studied for a data analytics certification. Actually several. The entire course (located on here: https://medieinstitutet.se ) is based on Google Analytics. Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant, nobody would want to retrain for 6…

When I got my AWS certification it didn't promise any applicability to Azure or GCP. But I brought skills, and took knowledge away, that would apply. Some of this is just on the practitioner.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#272

Post by delecti »

moduspol wrote: post #199
pbmonster wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Comparing something as vast and broadly reaching as "Cloud" is a disengenous comparison to something as specific as a tool like Google Analytics Is it? Tons of cloud people I know are very narrowly specialized and certified on AWS or Azure. They certainly don't ever apply for jobs using the other... I'm sure they could retrain. But I'm also sure they don't want to.

At this point, being a "cloud" engineer essentially means that you're good at understanding and adapting to new services / value propositions, since they become available quite regularly. It doesn't mean, "really good at EC2, and incapable of learning more."

If I were reviewing resumes and saw someone list themselves as a "cloud engineer", I would make very sure their skills listed the cloud provider used where I was hiring. That title would make me assume they were a specialist in a cloud until I saw otherwise.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#273

Post by moneywoes »

EGreg wrote: post #28
Pannoniae wrote: post #3

Analytics right now is basically "you won't get any useful information for your website because we value users' privacy, don't worry we see all of the data anyway" Remember, you aren't the customer if you embed Google Analytics, Google is. edit: if you want analytics, honestly just roll your own... you can't trust advertising companies with your users' data

This is true not just for analytics but pretty much all features. Imagine you are a great speaker and instructor and have an audience. Right now you GIFT it to YouTube, Twitter, etc. and they monetize it for you, give you a tiny percentage, and even constantly direct your audience to competitors and other distractions. In fact YouTube even sells an option to advertise your videos on your competitor’s videos! I say —…

How do you plan to monetize?

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#274

Post by tensor »

hamasho wrote: post #50

I've finally come to the conclusion that user tracking is generally a poor practices and should be regulated. As a web developer, I didn't see it as a big problem. We always do it to maximize ad revenue, find out where users leave to increase conversion rate, and simply to improve UX. But even when the intent is to improve UX, tracking is inappripriate. Imagine if a robot vacuum recorded videos of your home and uploa…

Except you are not in your home. You are in an app, a commercial property. Imagine trying to say that grocery stores are not allowed to have security cameras, or track what isles are most busy, or count the the number of each item sold.

All these things are under attack. I agree that cross-site tracking for ad purposes is bad, but this obsession with privacy goes too far. If you run around outside naked sorry you don't get to demand no one look. There are private spaces and non-private spaces, and I don't believe in eliminating non-private spaces.

edit: and to clarify, an app on your home computer controlling your lights or appliances, that should be a private space with opt-in usage tracking for UX improvement, a server on the internet that you are interacting with, that is not a private space. While you shouldn't be allowed to track across servers, yes I believe the server owner should has every right to anonymously track the views and areas of the website that people spend time on, and certainly they have every right to track purchases and do analytics on them.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#275

Post by itsoktocry »

dijit wrote: post #214
dfadsadsf wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are stretching credibility when you talk about 6 months to retrain from GA to some other analytics tool. 1-2 weeks is much more realistic timeline considering standard industry terms and similarity between tools.

if it was a 1year bootcamp, then I think saying 6mo is.. "fine". Consider transitioning from Excel to LibreOffice or Google Sheets. On the surface it's the same, but doing advanced things requires considerable time investment and is very uncomfortable.

>Consider transitioning from Excel to LibreOffice or Google Sheets. On the surface it's the same, but doing advanced things requires considerable time investment and is very uncomfortable.

Silly hypothetical. I can't imagine a scenario where a company heavily utilizes advanced Excel, and then decides they want to use Google Sheets instead.

Besides, we're programmers, and learning new tools all the time. Things are deemed obsolete regularly.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#276

Post by dijit »

primax wrote: post #268
dijit wrote: post #34

My sister-in-law (girlfriends brothers girlfriend, not that it matters) recently studied for a data analytics certification. Actually several. The entire course (located on here: https://medieinstitutet.se ) is based on Google Analytics. Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant, nobody would want to retrain for 6…

As someone whose total compensation went up 600% over 5 years as a 'cloud engineer' from a sysadmin background, I think your comment is kinda silly. Those skills are very transferable to new products and very little of the worth I bring is from my certs

Sysadmin background is akin to first principles when it comes to Cloud.

I also have a sysadmin background and my journey to the cloud has been "I can learn new things that make things easier or just use some pretty standard Linux VMs at any time".

Most new entrants to cloud learn the following:

* an object storage system (GCS, S3)

* A functions as a Service system (Cloud functions, Lambda) -- if you are lucky, Cloud Run; since that also gives you Docker.

* Message systems (Pub/Sub, SQS)

* Maybe an orchestrator (GKE, ECS), but only surface level.

* Some very minor information on how to create and access VMs; but it's clumsy, since you have to also learn Linux, this is unused.

For me, I can always fall back to my foundational knowledge of DNS, Networking, Linux and the systems I used to run, like databases, app services, mail systems, queue systems etc;

For people who are trained only on FaaS and SQS they do not have foundational knowledge to fall back on. That's not to say they can't get it, but it's not helping them make money and it's usually not taught, and worse: it's not something you ever reach for- and people typically learn through failure or by doing.

For me: Cloud just makes my life easier.

But I can also use an iPad as a consumption device; if I was only ever given iPads I would not be able to write C++ or Perl. That's just the nature of exclusively using simplified tools and abstractions.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#277

Post by romanovcode »

acatton wrote: post #45

Who needs analytics? I'm confused. When I worked at companies using google analytics, 99.9% of the time they could have gotten this data from server logs with something like awstats or goaccess. To this day, I still don't get what's the point of embedding some javascript to do extra-requests or a tracking pixel, when the data was already given once.

> Who needs analytics? I'm confused.

SEO and Marketing Dept. of any company.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#278

Post by EGreg »

electroly wrote: post #257
EGreg wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it make it bad or offputting?

I don't know about the 2008 stuff but I found the site to be pretty broken, as in things clearly not working and the code blowing up. The design is very busy on desktop; I suspect your "clean design" is what you see on mobile. The desktop site is packed to the gills and every page has multiple things animating and bouncing at me. Let me make it clear--this site is busier than most, not cleaner. On desktop, it's prett…

I want to fix what you're talking about, but I was not able to reproduce the bug. Can you please tell me how you got the menu to not close, for instance? Also, clicking on the menu items clearly opens the page they're linked to. I couldn't get it to not do that.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#279

Post by dbg31415 »

It used to be that Google needed GA to see how users used a site.

But I think they just track at the Chrome-level now.

So using GA is really just a way for you to see what Google sees about your site.

Blocking GA use... I don't think it really hurts Google any more. I think they get all they need -- more than they ever got through GA -- through trackers in Chrome.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#280

Post by mettamage »

dijit wrote: post #34

My sister-in-law (girlfriends brothers girlfriend, not that it matters) recently studied for a data analytics certification. Actually several. The entire course (located on here: https://medieinstitutet.se ) is based on Google Analytics. Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant, nobody would want to retrain for 6…

> Personally I find this astonishingly foolish of the people who train exclusively on these tools instead of first principles and primitives.

Even if we would train them on first principle primitives, recruiters don't view it that way. That's even true in the software dev world. If you don't have 3 years of experience in Java, then it doesn't matter that you're a 5 years experienced software engineer in all kinds of languages.

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