Number 4 is ethical quicksand. Please don’t build a machine that guesses personality traits based on personal data. It won’t end well.
Small Projects, Big Companies
31–40 of 77 posts
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#32Can someone elaborate on "Backchannel.app" thing ?
It's the common use-case: you don't know whether to trust someone. If you ever know anyone who is in danger of being hired by a friend, your friend will ask you how it was working with that person. This is usually a high-signal source because you're not going to lie to your friend, your recommendation or anti-recommendations are things you want to be meaningful, and because you have direct evidence.
They want to scale this. I've discussed this same thing with friends before but we couldn't find a way to keep it clean.
This is also a powerful advantage of a good network. You hear someone's leaving some job through the grapevine and if it's accompanied with positive feedback you hire this person. Or you're looking for a person and you ask your network for the guy who can do it.
That's how I got my current job.
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
could you elaborate
Things are getting built for the 1% because they have the economic power, but I'd imagine OP thinks this is undemocratic (which it is) and results in many people becoming underserved by software companies (very likely).
What is getting built for specifically the 1% (or .1%, etc.)? The only service I can think of is Magic.
Additionally, what markets are underserved? This is an area I'm interested in but don't know much about (except from my own anecdotal experience like the fact that comparing costs of healthcare from different practitioners being prohibitively difficult)
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#34> The golden dataset everyone wants is the org chart. Who reports to whom. Who is new. Who has been at the company for a while. Find a way to get this data and sell it to companies. I suspect you’ll have many takers. Please don’t. Please. Really. Please don’t. Training my users to fend off social engineering attacks is hard enough as is. Please don’t use your talents in this way.
I think this is the exact point of the article. Executives don’t think like you, so if you want to make it big with your software, you have to change how you think. Even if it means annoying middle management and their direct reports.
That might be the point of the article, but the point of the grandparent is that the only method to get this data is to be seedy as hell. And that we should aspire to use our talents for better things.
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#35Can someone elaborate on "Backchannel.app" thing ?
Something that is at best bordering on unethical at worst a material breach of candidate confidentiality.
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#36> The golden dataset everyone wants is the org chart. Who reports to whom. Who is new. Who has been at the company for a while. Find a way to get this data and sell it to companies. I suspect you’ll have many takers. Please don’t. Please. Really. Please don’t. Training my users to fend off social engineering attacks is hard enough as is. Please don’t use your talents in this way.
I think this is the exact point of the article. Executives don’t think like you, so if you want to make it big with your software, you have to change how you think. Even if it means annoying middle management and their direct reports.
I guess the mental calculus depends on how much you value positively impacting society vs just wanting money
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#37Re: Zendesk
It's not just that ticketing products won't build next-gen reporting with thematic monitoring and analysis, it's that big companies have more than one source of customer conversations.
Actually answering the questions that matter when it comes to customer contact -- "what's driving specific outcomes, and what about them has changed over time" -- needs to be done across all sources.
The company I work at (frame.ai) is an add-on with built-in connectors for all the help desks like Zendesk, Intercom, Service Cloud, Help Scout, etc. for this reason.
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is the exact point of the article. Executives don’t think like you, so if you want to make it big with your software, you have to change how you think. Even if it means annoying middle management and their direct reports.
That might be the point of the article, but the point of the grandparent is that the only method to get this data is to be seedy as hell. And that we should aspire to use our talents for better things.
Better things don't pay, at all. The most betterest things you can do as a developer - make infrastructure that makes other developers more efficient, or invent protocols or fundamentals to build ecosystems and industries on - often you get nothing for it. Because you made it open source, because you wanted it to be useful. But to try to make it proprietary would have been to make it useless.
Theres a reason probably 95% of software developers are employed to write redundant repetitive corporate business software over and over and over again. Everything else is being done philanthropically because anyone outside the perview of a budget department at a big co recognizes the value in reaching a consensus solution everyone uses because its a lot of work to make and is good enough. Even corporate-adjacent software like databases, game engines, etc are trending this way - Unreal, Unity, and Godot are all varying degrees of open now in ways engines weren't even a half decade ago. The world is coalescing around Postgres in a way unexpectable a decade ago under the tyranny of SQL Server and Oracle SQL alongside a half dozen "competing" open source databases.
Do you think those who contribute the most to Postgres get anything close to "reasonable" compensation for having architected the database engine that is now running likely trillions in business infrastructure and data management?
Their software is maximally useful - "the betterest things" - but you can't survive being maximally useful. You have to sacrifice how useful what you make is to not be homeless in 99.99% of cases. You have to make worse, often redundant things, wasting your time and the time of others in the process, because thats the only (feasible and/or reliable) way corporations will pay you to write software.
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#39Number 4 is ethical quicksand. Please don’t build a machine that guesses personality traits based on personal data. It won’t end well.
I'm considering submitting a project that would fit well under this category. Have any ideas around what could be done to mitigate the involved risks?
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#40Number 4 is ethical quicksand. Please don’t build a machine that guesses personality traits based on personal data. It won’t end well.
I'm considering submitting a project that would fit well under this category. Have any ideas around what could be done to mitigate the involved risks?
stop?