221–230 of 794 posts
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Awesome story, and a good lesson in "always get it in writing"
The concept seems weird to me. I have never been given a mark by a teacher that matters. Exams were administered by independent bodies.
The project was doomed to failure because Datarama had all the same problems as Domo for our use case and, as the project dragged on, Datarama increased their pricing to match Domo's. Eventually the project died, but not after we paid for a year of Datarama and 8 months of contracting.
Corporate users of 3G dongles used to rack up enormous charges while roaming. They’d get hit with five-figure bills and complain to their carrier that they didn’t warn them, and often the carrier would end up swallowing the charge, even though they were rarely marking up the costs heavily. I worked on a project with a major carrier to enable companies to monitor and alert on cost overruns, and shut off devices in som…
I suppose the tool would still be useful for EU -> not EU roamers? Interestingly Liechtenstein, Iceland and Norway are not part of the EU but I know my German SIM card works there with its home tariff, but Switzerland is still the holdout. EDIT: Wikipedia says Monaco, Andorra and San Marino also don't have free roaming... Also, did this EU directive come as a surprise? AFAIK they move at glacial pace and carriers sho…
There's a global industry involving thousands of healthcare professionals, lawyers, judges, police officers, and child protection workers who have spent 50 years prosecuting tens of thousands of parents and caregivers for allegedly shaking their babies. This is based on a theory from the 1970s, which posits that virtually all infants with blood around the brain and at the back of the eyes have been violently shaken. These professionals have developed entire academic journals, conferences, curricula, and training courses to teach this "theory" to all involved professionals (hospital clinicians, police officers, prosecutors, etc.). There are likely hundreds of such courses annually in dozens of countries. These people have raised probably tens of millions of dollars for research and prevention programs against shaking which, while somewhat beneficial for the well-being of babies, have not succeeded in reducing the global incidence of shaken baby syndrome diagnoses.
It turns out this theory is largely incorrect, and only a minority of cases are likely to be actual cases of abuse: the other children suffer from rare diseases or household accidents that cause these types of bleeding, which are mistaken for signs of abuse. Every year, thousands of babies are removed from their homes and hundreds of parents and caregivers are convicted and incarcerated.
This has been known for over 20 years, with more and more professionals raising the alarm, yet the diagnoses continue to be made every day. I discovered this 8 years ago and swore to myself that I would do anything I can to end it. At the time, I met doctors who had been trying to do the same for over 15 years, and here I am, 8 years later, doing everything I can but still feeling quite lonely and helpless. I still hope to think I'm not entirely useless. But more importantly, think about all these professionals who have built an entire industry on false premises, leaving a trail of devastation around the world under the guise of "child protection", convinced they are making the world a better place. Does this fit your definition of "useless"?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/152483802311516...
I once worked on an in-house ERP system which had been developed over about 15 years by various developers. It was the engine of the entire company, everything passed through it. The CFO and some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for their shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat. When new management took charge, an initiative was started to replace the system with an industry standard solution. Both myself and the…
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You have worked on earning money to live in your world. Good job. Don't over think work.
This is the right attitude. Unless you own the business, you have no moral responsibility to ensure the projects you work on have a purpose. You can, of course, optionally choose to not work on projects you believe have a bad or evil purpose. I've quit jobs where I though the project was evil. You're writing the code, or producing the documentation, managing the project, performing QA, or whatever else your role is,…
I had a boss at one of my last gigs who would cook up the most impossibly over-engineered (and badly designed and rarely worked) projects ever. The worst one ever was he wanted to build a kubernetes observability platform from scratch. Specifically, we wanted to filter our application logs for errors and be able to find them. There's a million out of the box ways to do this with free and enterprise tooling, like EFK/…
Oh god dammit that's where you finally pissed me off. Lol.
Added random sleeps to slow down performance. Random alert messages about fake errors. It was weird.
EDIT: Since this is getting some votes I'll add some more details. He would also come by to tell me how happy he was about all the complaints he was getting about it.
Kiosk Banking. Back in the 1990's, just before the web became a thing, it was an idea to bring banking to consumers without the bank buildking, which they called "brickless banking". Kiosks would be placed in public locations like malls. Customers would enter the kiosk, close the curtain or door, then connect via video-call with one of the agent in the call centres. Depending what product the customer wanted (mortgag…
Wells Fargo has something they call a "digital branch" which, despite the name, is a brick and mortar location, just with fewer services. Like, you can't get change, and they don't have real tellers. They have a few ATMs and some people who must be there to walk you through some things, but overall it's pretty useless. It's one of the reasons we're moving our banking to Chase.
“Advisory” by appointment is where the profit is, not cash management.
If you need a lot of cash, the “teller” will give you temp permissions for X minutes to use the ATM for your big withdrawal.