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How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

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Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#351

Post by beckingz »

the_af wrote: post #110
sukilot wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that you seem to be insulting your CEO, who managed to solve a customer problem with reasonable tech requirements for you and a grandiose upsold sales pitch. Seems like a win-win-win

If it happened like the OP described, they just got lucky, but it could have gone differently. A good (but less than honest) CEO would have colluded with the developer before talking to the customer, both agreeing to upsell an easily implemented feature. However, the mark of a PHB is that he/she will ask for random features while completely misjudging their feasibility -- sometimes you'll get lucky, sometimes you'll…

My new hobby is using "collusion" instead of "collaboration"

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#352

Post by savrajsingh »

TedShiller wrote: post #264

I'll share a disturbing anecdote about one of the largest and most influential software companies in the world, based in the Bay Area, and I'll leave it to you to guess which one. I know of several people who work there who are ranked very highly and are paid extremely well, who have told me personally that the work they do there is terrible for the users (i.e. it's exploitative) and terrible for the internet (it int…

https://youtu.be/-DiBc1vkTig exact story covered by the onion

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#353

Post by perfmode »

runeks wrote: post #348
samvher wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are not bad people. Very few people are "bad" people but the way you're describing it makes it pretty clear that they're making unethical choices, and they're doing so consciously. Actions speak louder than words.

What’s the difference between a bad person and a person who consciously makes unethical choices?

difference... bad... unethical...

all of these are concepts in the mind.

in truth, it is all simple ignorance and a case of mistaken identity.

there is no bad... good... no ethics... no this or that.

this is how the world will be until we all wake up.

until then, we rest in compassion.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#354

Post by jagged-chisel »

Aeolun wrote: post #344
Havoc wrote: post #304

This all seems a little back to front - engineering in a vacuum. I mean sure it solves the problems the engineering team has but at the cost of making everyone else's job near impossible. "Date scrum" isn't an anti-pattern, it's a basic requirement. e.g. Sales staff: Please buy our product Customer: Cool. Can I see it? Sales staff: Not ready yet Customer: OK when will it be ready? Sales staff: No idea. Whenever the e…

Don’t try to sell a product that doesn’t exist yet?

This seems obvious to non-sales folks: why would you like to a potential customer about what you're selling? But for some reason, it's common enough that every software engineer I've ever known has experience with salespeople attempting to sell things that aren't ready or don't even exist. When customers push back, Sales comes to engineering with "we can't make this sale until we've built X. can you have that by Friday so I can get this deal signed?"

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#355

Post by cm2187 »

worriedformyjob wrote: post #13

Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…

Perhaps the most significant outcome is that you guys will be peppering your resume with AI buzzwords, which the board may be paying through expensive staff retention.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#357

Post by Balgair »

abbadadda wrote: post #312
samvher wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are not bad people. Very few people are "bad" people but the way you're describing it makes it pretty clear that they're making unethical choices, and they're doing so consciously. Actions speak louder than words.

The sad thing is, what are they going to do? Change it? Leave? Let's pretend each of these individuals are making $2M a year. They'll just be replaced with someone else that'll take the humongous paychecks. They could take a moral stand and leave, and I think continuing to work in that environment would be hard, but I don't fault the individual to the point I'd consider them a "bad person." Their complicity in these…

I don't know here.

The choices aren't like those in a DoD company (we assume from the poster this is a FAANG company). You aren't actually building weapons platforms. It's a bit more like slot machine engineers here; people's lives are 'worse', but not 'over'.

As such, I think it's very personal.

If they are OK with building digital casino-like places, so be it. If they are not, then they should make a plan to leave. If they feel that the money is the only thing keeping them there, they have to look into their own mirrors.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#358

Post by bigbluedots »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #259
bigbluedots wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard about this guy's forecasts but have been unable to find a list of predicted vs actual. Do you know of such a list?

He started with a list of 1024^w512 sure things, but 7 years of mostly good picks later now he just promotes 8 companies ... /s

Oh, it's this guy - nothing to see here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_A._Armstrong

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#359

Post by mpfundstein »

sbierwagen wrote: post #307
transcriptase wrote: post #300

Did anyone here work on implementing Bing web search into the Windows 10 start menu? I'm curious to know the decisions that led to an operating system file search prompt ignoring exact file, directory and app names in favor of trying (and generally still failing) to show irrelevant web results.

After years of low level annoyance, I looked up the regedit incantations needed to disable it. Now start menu search is amazingly snappy and only returns relevant results.

Mind sharing? PLEASE!!!!!

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#360

Post by majewsky »

dkersten wrote: post #316
bigiain wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, actual AI is kinda cut-n-paste accessible now too. I slapped together a POC javascript tinyYolo feature detector demo last weekend (using someone else's code and pre-trained model from their github project), and joked when I showed it around that "And we can tell investors we're running AI, deep learning, and convolutional neural networks in our realtime production workflow!"... (But as we all know…

If you have someone doing a task manually, you could technically argue that you’re using an incredibly advanced neural network. Just not an artificial one. I was recently joking that I was training a neural network with a water spray bottle (teaching the cat not to jump on the kitchen counter). And just while I type this, my little neural network came to walk over the keyboard...

> my little neural network

Free idea for a children's TV show right there.

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