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Companies must stop using Google Analytics

imy.se

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Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#431

Post by ryan_lane »

photonerd wrote: post #422
ryan_lane wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

Looking down on, yes. Suffering nonsense meetings silently? No. My entire point was that there is a major difference between the two & that while the instinct to look down on others for this organizational symptom is immature, it’s not unfounded or without basis to highlight the issue: they’re blaming the wrong thing however. And I often find that in those types of meeting communication & relationship building is the…

I'm guessing you're junior, or you'd have more control over these meetings, or have the ability to decline ones that you believed weren't going to be good use of your time.

Having good meeting culture requires everyone involved to improve it. If you want meetings to be better, set them up, add an agenda and objectives, and run the meeting so that it's effective. If you can't run the meeting, if it doesn't have an agenda or objectives, ask the person who created it for them. Ask for action items at the end of the meeting, if no one is calling for them. If it's mostly status meetings, propose a better process to track and communicate status.

If you're working through side channels, you're part of the problem.

Calling people assholes, rather than improving the situation, is an indicator of inexperience.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#432

Post by Falkon1313 »

andix wrote: post #215
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…

It is nothing new, that using Google Analytics is in violation of the European GDPR, I guess this was covered in the course. So why would she learn a technology, that is mostly illegal to use?

Maybe because most companies use it. Also, it is quite new for it to be considered illegal, GDPR only came into effect a few years ago. It would only seem "nothing new" if you're extraordinarily young and inexperienced.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#433

Post by andix »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #432
andix wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is nothing new, that using Google Analytics is in violation of the European GDPR, I guess this was covered in the course. So why would she learn a technology, that is mostly illegal to use?

Maybe because most companies use it. Also, it is quite new for it to be considered illegal, GDPR only came into effect a few years ago. It would only seem "nothing new" if you're extraordinarily young and inexperienced.

Or if you work in web development in Europe. Moving away from Google Analytics and Google Fonts was a huge deal in the last 3-5 years. Companies kept looking intensively if they still use it somewhere and it was a lot of work.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#434

Post by photonerd »

ryan_lane wrote: post #431
photonerd wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking down on, yes. Suffering nonsense meetings silently? No. My entire point was that there is a major difference between the two & that while the instinct to look down on others for this organizational symptom is immature, it’s not unfounded or without basis to highlight the issue: they’re blaming the wrong thing however. And I often find that in those types of meeting communication & relationship building is the…

I'm guessing you're junior, or you'd have more control over these meetings, or have the ability to decline ones that you believed weren't going to be good use of your time. Having good meeting culture requires everyone involved to improve it. If you want meetings to be better, set them up, add an agenda and objectives, and run the meeting so that it's effective. If you can't run the meeting, if it doesn't have an age…

This is the most wrong, yet condescending and naive, comment I’ve encountered on HN so far.

I’m actually impressed.

Call me in 20 years, maybe you’ll have learned something.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#435

Post by tuhriel »

DrScientist wrote: post #332
tuhriel wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point to a certain...eh point. During my studies we also had our ERP course accompanied with some specific tasks on one tool (don't ask me for the name now, its been some time). BUT it was accompanied only, we usually had the concepts presented beforehand. If you want to go a step further...show an alternative from time to time. But I don't agree with the python comparison. Python is only a language and ev…

It comes down to the course - a course that just teaches a cargo cult like set of steps is a bad course, one that involves a proper discussion of the fundamentals is a good one. All I'm saying, the fact that a course uses a particular tool chain isn't the determinant factor to whether a course is good or not.

>It comes down to the course - a course that just teaches a cargo cult like set of steps is a bad course, one that involves a proper discussion of the fundamentals is a good one.

totally agree here

>All I'm saying, the fact that a course uses a particular tool chain isn't the determinant factor to whether a course is good or not.

I totally agree! My comment was related to the commented mentioned that the whole 6 month training is worthless if GA get's blocked

I guess we aren't that far apart :)

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#436

Post by berkes »

qingcharles wrote: post #346
berkes wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using plausible Analytics. It logs and displays very little data. And no PII data. It's more then enough for me. And a few clients whom I enabled it for, told me they very much liked the simplicity. Less data as a feature!

Plausible rubbed me the wrong way because of the attitude of their staff, but maybe I was the asshole? I found a bad bug in their JS which means that on some pages it just silently fails and doesn't log anything, which means your analytics are even more inaccurate than ever (given the browser restrictions). I was totally broke and I wanted to use their paid service for a few months, so I offered them the fix in excha…

I obviously don't know this exact situation.

But I've been in one, where a customer offered "patches", despite our software not being open for contributions. Not only were they inconsistent with our standards, they were hard to read and had some subtle security issues on careful review. I'm still suspecting it was an attempt to plant a backdoor.

In any case, even if legit, it was a lot of work on our side to just review and clean it. Far more than if we just did it ourselves.

This is different for OSS, which should have external contributions as main workflow. Ours wasn't prepared for external contributions.

Maybe the same is with Plausible?

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#437

Post by ori_prior »

mschuster91 wrote: post #377
yesco wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a Sr. SE at a large medical device company and can confirm that our IT dept is filled with assholes. We do everything we can to keep systems out of their hands because they are so difficult to work with compared to every other part of the company. I get they have to deal with a bunch of technical inepts constantly falling for phishing attacks and occasionally teams will make outrageous requests to them that simpl…

> and it bothers me how much they seem to clearly exaggerate the difficulty of things. Scotty Engineering principle at work. I'm no stranger to that, it's often enough the only strategy keeping higher management from completely swamping you with work.

It's not that it usually is the Scotty Engineering principle. It is more often a hedge against unforeseen complications, because if you give a realistic estimate that would be true for 90% of the tickets, the 10% will come to bite you. So to not get chewed up for providing realistic 90%-true estimates, you give 99.9%-true estimates that are far higher, but with just a .1% chance of being screwed instead of a 10% chance. Which is, at 10 tickets per day, getting chewed up daily vs. once every two weeks or so.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#438

Post by ori_prior »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #404
kenjackson wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s actually a far better reason they don’t retrain. There aren’t better tools. Or the tools are basically carbon copies (Google Docs and Sheets). Show me a product that provides so much more value for my team than Excel that it would be worth a retrain.

My first office software was WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 on DOS. Then Lotus Smartsuite, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, now LibreOffice, with occasional bits of Google Docs. I never had to be retrained. Here's the thing, for 90% of use cases, those are all effectively equivalent. You really shouldn't need any retraining whatsoever. A spreadsheet's a spreadsheet, and a word processor is a word processor. You type the te…

You are both right and wrong. It depends on the intelligence of the person you are dealing with.

There is a thing called "intelligence". There are several definitions of it, the one I'd like to use here is "the ability to infer general principles and common workings from small isolated samples and apply those principles and workings".

So if you are sufficiently intelligent, you can infer, from observing a few (or even one) doorhandle being pushed, that his is the general way to open doors. You can then apply this principle maybe even to different doors, windows, rotating knobs, etc. The fewer samples you need to learn and the broader your application range after learning, the more intelligent you are. In the stupidest case, one only learns to open one specific kind of door in one specific way, like a cat might.

You are writing from the point of view of someone sufficiently intelligent to derive the working principles of software and apply it to other software packages that generally serve the same purpose. However, there are people who are not intelligent enough to do that. Those people do get by by just following instructions, learning by rote which buttons to click for which purpose. Those people are the "door opening cats" of the office application world.

Less intelligent people like those do exist (50% do have an IQWhich is why I'm also a fan of intelligence-test-type job application processes. The ability to learn, for higher-level jobs, is far more important than preexisting knowledge. And intelligence is the best known predictor for the ability to learn.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#439

Post by tourmalinetaco »

ramranch wrote: post #416
Dylan16807 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Unless its Webdev, because from the outside looking in it seems there’s some new fad moving through every few months.

Re: Companies must stop using Google Analytics

#440

Post by gkbrk »

moduspol wrote: post #221
appleflaxen wrote: post #5

I am so grateful for the progressive policies in Europe that help the entire globe.

Yes. Every time I see a cookie consent dialog, I do a quick "thumbs up" to our pals in Europe.

And you don't consider that the website puts up a consent dialog because they want to (ab)use your personal data?

No need to put a consent dialog if you are not stalking people.

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