Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Companies must stop using Google Analytics

imy.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 672 posts

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#411

Post by rodgerd »

dijit wrote: post #34

My sister-in-law (girlfriends brothers girlfriend, not that it matters) recently studied for a data analytics certification. Actually several. The entire course (located on here: https://medieinstitutet.se ) is based on Google Analytics. Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant, nobody would want to retrain for 6…

> Now her entire value is tied to the use of Google Analytics, she will almost certainly fight very hard to ensure that these skills remain relevant

On one level it's an important observation, on another it's mundane: DBAs will fight one another over Oracle vs DB2 vs SQL Server. Traditional bare-metal DBAs will fight RDS. C programmers are upset by Rust. People who invested a lot of effort in shell scripting for SysV init dislike systemd or s6.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#412

Post by mr_toad »

jhartwig wrote: post #270
ori_prior wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This level of dependence on certain tools is neither rare nor unprecedented. Your run-of-the-mill business drone will be trained on Word/Excel/Outlook and be hard to impossible to retrain on anything else (either because of actual stupidity or resistance to change). This already starts at school where "Informatik" is often just learning where to click in Microsoft products. Similarly, tradespeople often specialize in…

'actual stupidity'... gotta love the general disdain of the 'run of the mill business drone'... It's funny my wife is a run of the mill business drone. She thinks IT is a bunch of assholes. I would say she is probably right. Way to keep things going.

Don’t worry, the people in IT don’t like the other people in IT. Devs think that security are a bunch of a-holes, DBAs hate the devs, etc etc.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#413

Post by mr_toad »

delecti wrote: post #272
moduspol wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, being a "cloud" engineer essentially means that you're good at understanding and adapting to new services / value propositions, since they become available quite regularly. It doesn't mean, "really good at EC2, and incapable of learning more."

If I were reviewing resumes and saw someone list themselves as a "cloud engineer", I would make very sure their skills listed the cloud provider used where I was hiring. That title would make me assume they were a specialist in a cloud until I saw otherwise.

You know that the big clouds (and to a lesser extent the smaller ones) have more in common than they are different?

They use different jargon, they love to market themselves on their differences (because why compete on price?), but the fundamentals are really very similar and the skills transfer.

Anyone who’s telling you that Cloud X is vastly different from Cloud Y is either trying to sell you something, or has gotten their knowledge from someone who was selling them something.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#414

Post by electroly »

EGreg wrote: post #321
electroly wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reproduction steps: 1. Install Chrome for Windows from the Google website. As of today, that version is 114.0.5735.199 (Official Build) (64-bit). I am testing on Windows 11 and I used a fresh install of Chrome on a machine that has never had Chrome before. This machine has a standard 60Hz display which may matter for my theory at the end. 2. Go to qbix.com. 3. Hover the mouse over "Communities". Now hover over its su…

Tried it with Chrome and Edge on Windows. Still can't reproduce those bugs. Strange. The worst thing is when some users see a heisenbug that you can't seem to reproduce on a similar environment.

https://youtu.be/NTujUB8t4tE

Here is the screen capture. This video shows the creation of a fresh Windows instance in AWS EC2 and then the reproduction of all of the above issues in that fresh instance. Follow my exact clicks and you will see it, too.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#415

Post by mr_toad »

dijit wrote: post #286
itsoktocry wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consider transitioning from Excel to LibreOffice or Google Sheets. On the surface it's the same, but doing advanced things requires considerable time investment and is very uncomfortable. Silly hypothetical. I can't imagine a scenario where a company heavily utilizes advanced Excel, and then decides they want to use Google Sheets instead. Besides, we're programmers, and learning new tools all the time . Things are…

> I can't imagine a scenario where a company heavily utilizes advanced Excel, and then decides they want to use Google Sheets instead. I can't imagine a company that has built it's foundations on AWS migrating off of AWS. Such an endeavour would be more painful than transitioning spreadsheet tool by at least multiple orders of magnitude on basically every metric you can come up with. That's also a broad definition of…

> If you swapped out Linux for VAX I would be terribly displeased.

Having used both I’d say that the differences between Unix and VMS are much greater than the differences between Excel and Google Sheets.

A better comparison might be between Linux and BSD.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#416

Post by ramranch »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #369
jhartwig wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'actual stupidity'... gotta love the general disdain of the 'run of the mill business drone'... It's funny my wife is a run of the mill business drone. She thinks IT is a bunch of assholes. I would say she is probably right. Way to keep things going.

I someone can't be retrained, and it's not because they're being stubborn, what other reason do you have? Is it better or worse to assume they're being a problem on purpose? I won't say 'average' but I will say 'common enough to make changing software a huge issue'.

Many devs are the same, hence loyalty to a language

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#419

Post by shermozle »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #242
ra wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As is snowplow https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow-javascript-tracker

Deploying the Snowplow backend is non-trivial (to put it mildly) and extremely expensive if you don't want to host it yourself.

€0.02/day and easy enough for anyone with basic cloud skills: https://www.dumky.net/posts/own-your-web-analytics-pipeline-...

(With caveats: This is a toy pipeline. More work required to make it robust and probably not a great option for any site with reasonable traffic. But easy to get started and play.)

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#420

Post by ryan_lane »

photonerd wrote: post #402
jmye wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but IT workers can understand what the basic run of the mill business drones do...and their work tends to be a bunch of pointless meetings. What an ironic comment. Sorry, any early-career worker looking down their nose at anyone else (or pretending to have any idea what their job entails, especially because they “looked at a calendar”) might as well go back to middle school. They definitely need to grow up.

While true, it’s very fair to say that many (possibly most) meetings in a corporate environment contain a lot of absolutely pointless time wasting. I say this with the perspective of someone who has slowly had to have many more of these meetings added to his calendar over the years. Some are very important, some are reasonable but often bloated, but so many are a waste of time. At the very least: they’re 5-10 mins of…

I find that a lot of engineers don't understand good communication, and definitely don't understand the value of relationships.

When I was really junior, I'd go to meetings and think that the vast majority of the time was wasted. As I became more senior, I realized that a lot of that wasted time is for providing context, relationship building, and alignment. You may not need those things for your current task, but your leadership and partner teams may need these things.

Yes, a lot of meetings could be emails, and a lot of meetings could be better run (agendas and objectives in the invite, action items assigned at the end), but unless you're working somewhere awful, most meetings probably have a reasonable purpose and aren't all filler. Lots of jobs require way more meetings, and probably aren't filled with context relevant to you.

Looking down on non-engineering positions is a personality trait I associate with inexperience. It's absolutely something I'd consider when denying a promo.

Post reply on HN