731–740 of 794 posts
Facebook leaderboard for AT&T back when they were dropping calls like crazy. So really early in social media days. The more you commented or liked posts the higher on leader board. Top comments would be automatically highlight. I kept trying to get word to people in charge that the project would fail. No one would listen. Went live for 1 day. Every top comment, was on how horrible AT&T was. Shut down next day. 3 mont…
This is old, but my most pointless project: The CEO wanted a screen in every hall that showed the company "EnGUAGEment meter". Users would have to go to the app, choose from 10 or so canned messages like "Feeling productive", "Ready to conquer the day", and other such HR speak the CEO (or rather the HR committee he put on the important business of picking the list) felt was motivational. This would update a page that…
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…
I understand if the data is not used or is used to falsely claim high employee satisfaction, but nothing you've said suggested these systems didn't start out as good faith efforts on the part of the company to track and improve employee job satisfaction.
I don't see how your behavior isn't just childish insubordination.
A few years back, I was assigned to a new team and had to run some analysis on a selection of hardware that kept failing quality checks. Was told this was of the utmost importance to the product and that a future production push hinged on solving this problem. I was given a week. The scope of work would entail at least one really late night into the project. On Day 5 of 7 (sleepless night happened on Day 2 and 3), a…
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/…
Well, this sounds like the opposite of overengineered, but definitely terrible
I once worked for a VP who needed to sunset an old internal tool that people were unwilling to part with, so he asked me to make it suck intentionally. 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.
I worked on a six-month contract project for a large US retailer; the fact that everybody else I worked with was laid off the second week probably should have told me something was wrong, but they kept paying me so I kept showing up. Anyway, the only task they ever gave me was to build Cisco router ACLs to match existing traffic in the stores; they needed to implement access control but wanted to make sure they weren…
> ...he never responded. Eventually I tracked down his desk in the vast corporate complex and paid him a visit. He was pleasant but told me that he wasn't even on the access control project and he thought it had probably been canceled at some point... I love it. A co-worker of mine told a similar story. For at least six months, his only regular responsibility was to compile a report every week and email it to a distr…
BP: 'We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem solved from your end.'
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slightly off topic but I never logged in on my kindle so I don't get ads. I just load ebooks on it with my computer.
Yeah, the ease of avoiding the ads (not logging in, jailbreaking it, or just getting a cover) were all big parts of why I felt like kindle ads were so much less offensive than most online advertising.
As I understand it, Kindle is locked to Amazon. I don't know why anyone would pay for that, especially if it also shows ads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Different but similar. I once wrote a trivial lotto number selector app, at the request of some colleagues. It just emitted a few unique random numbers. Silly but why not. They hated it. I added moderate, random delays before emitting each number. They loved it, and used it every week for quite some time :)
This is the same psychology in play when the lotto balls pop from the hopper or loot boxes open or slot machine wheels turn. A few seconds of suspense and fanfare for the reward is more satisfying.
A lot of these "certain delay for 'correct' response" rat feeder types of mechanics. Even when you know "the hit" is pointless or a waste, still heavily compelling anyways.
Cigarettes have a similar experience if you smoke too long. Days of "I don't 'actually' enjoy this anymore", yet my body still demands something that makes me vaguely nauseated now. Except, per the original comment, it is still the "suspense for a reward" that no longer exists.
Digg v4. I started at Digg as employee 30 or something close to that. When v4 was being designed I was (among others) very much not supportive of the concept. I did the work they asked of me and about ~4 months before launch I was fired. Some Digg colleagues reached out asking why I decided to leave… since that is what digg internally announced. This is when I understand a number of others before me were also fired a…
It would be nice who pushed for this, why, didnt they understand that it will be a disaster? Didnt they understand power users? Even moderation issues, but (as far as I remember) digg was less brigaded politically than what happens nowadays that internet matured (state actor level).
Was digg even a startup at that point? It was a full mature website? Or at least gave such impression.
Maybe the money was "low" - as far as I remember Google wanted to buy it for 90M, but come on, those billion websties were mostly written off, since they are impossible to monetize.