631–640 of 794 posts
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this one's crazy lol. frankly it sounds kind of fun, but i'm sure it was not in reality.
It was actually pretty entertaining. This was almost 20 years ago.
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I also don't totally understand, what's a TIN for example (Taxpayer Identification Number?) and why is it making money? (Don't taxes go to the state?)
Yeah, it’s the identifier the government uses to attribute income for, and hence calculate the resulting taxes. In this case it sounds like a midsize business is using some random guy’s number, so the tax authorities are under the impression there’s a guy pulling in millions personally, and a company with no income. Given that individuals and companies get taxed differently in many different jurisdictions concurrentl…
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I always marvel at how bizarre it is that there's a permanent ad on the Kindle even when it's "off". The books they recommend are never pertinent to me in the slightest.
I feel like this exists so that people who use their kindle will pay trn bucks to turn it off.
Though fun fact, some execs did the math before making the smart cover, and figured they'd make more money from that, than they lost from people not being able to see and interact with ads.
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…
Damned. I'd be tempted to write down in my resume "Company would've saved N million dollars and 5 years of their time had they listened to me" were it not such a double edged sword.
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Oh my god, it isn't the same product but I was the user of a similar thing at an old job I had for 2 years only it was a slider from 1-10. I always chose 1 no matter how productive, happy or driven I felt. I remember that HR called me in because of this and in a round-about way said I can't just keep doing that as it was bringing the whole purpose of the system down. If I didn't want to interact with the system then…
Probably unpopular opinion: Silly excercises like this are a good way to see who bends the knee and who is a maverick, and projects only work when most people are docile enough to go with the flow and follow orders. Identifying people that make waves and evaluating if they're worth the hassle is an important part of running a successful business. This is often sad and depressing, but sometimes it's just about doing y…
If management is unable to deal with people that rock the boat (as in firing should there be actual problems) then they seriously lack backbone and leadership qualities since spouting corporate propaganda and playing silly conformance games with employees is probably all they can do.
> So once again, if you're feeling useless, remember that I exist.
You are far from alone.
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I tried to place out of an intro-to-programming course in a back-to-school bout of scholastic achievement. I wasn't allowed to test out of it despite the coursewor being rote and that anyone with 2 seconds looking at my CV could see I did not need it. Anyway - they released the assignments on day 1. I turned them in on day 2. I still had to go to class. Stupid. My "filesystems and database design" class was basically…
I took a database design class in college. I had been using MySQL for years at this point (by no means an expert, but databases weren’t foreign to me). In my first exam I got a 90/100. I got all the queries right (don’t get me started on programming/writing queries on paper and how stupid that is), but I lost 1 point on each of the 10 questions. Why? Because I didn’t put a semicolon at the end of my query. Something…
Still a dumb reason to deduct points though
I've worked with someone like that. He didn't last long a the company.
Roughly 15 years ago I worked for a large media company that was thinking about moving into the smart energy meter business. I was late to join the team, but when I did, they'd already bought and branded thousands of meters that were boxed and ready to go in a nearby warehouse. The team had already built a number of APIs exposing controls for these meters as well as various monitoring and reporting interfaces. A UI a…
Once I came to peace with realizing my job is to enable higher ups to do their job a lot of this came into perspective. Still a complete waste, but something somewhere was enabled.
It was at Amazon and I don't remember exactly what the service was called, I think it was AdSomething. It was while I worked on the Kindle Special Offers (taking advantage of the "off" screen of an e-ink Kindle to show ads) project. I find that to be one of the less offensive forms of advertising, so I was generally pretty happy on that team for a time. But there was a service, AdWhatever, which let users go onto a s…
This is so painful. Kindle still after all these years cannot select a single word without a comma. So, dictionary does not work. Such simple thing could be fixed, but you did all this bullshit work instead.
Also, I try my best not to buy anything Amazon anymore because Bezos is a gigantic prick.