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Small Projects, Big Companies

pioneer.app

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Re: Small Projects, Big Companies

#61

Post by scarejunba »

phkahler wrote: post #42
scarejunba wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scal…

But once you automate the backchannnel, it becomes impersonal. If someone is vindictive they can ruin careers through such a system. If you dont actually know a person, how can you trust their recommendation?

Well, we couldn’t figure out how to make things work and decided not to pursue. Maybe the next guy will have better luck.

Re: Small Projects, Big Companies

#63

Post by jmanzy01 »

chime wrote: post #7

> 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.

The Org is already doing this (https://theorg.com/)

Re: Small Projects, Big Companies

#64

Post by thundergolfer »

anchpop wrote: post #33
thundergolfer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> What is getting built for specifically the 1%

Should clarify that by "specifically for" I'd mean that the 1% have all the money and thus practically all the decision making power. An example of the distinction would be that though everybody engages with AdTech software the software is built for the 1% to make them money.

The 1% isn't a demographic that's targeted by some SaaS in this case, it's a way of naming the rich who create the demand for a lot of software (they use the software to make money) and control the (high-level) implementation of most software in the world.

What's Magic?

Re: Small Projects, Big Companies

#65

Post by TeMPOraL »

zomglings wrote: post #56
chime wrote: post #7

> 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.

Why such a strong reaction against the idea? For someone who has to sell stuff, this would be incredibly valuable if executed well. It's possible to build something like this using only publicly available data about people and organizations. Genuinely curious - where is the ethical problem?

> Genuinely curious - where is the ethical problem?

Why not sell stuff based on the quality of that stuff? If the stuff is crap, or is a bad fit for the purchaser, but you've managed to sell it anyway thanks to various sales tricks (playing off a company's org chart would be one of such), then you've done an unethical thing. Since buyer's org chart has little to do with quality of your wares and their utility to the buyer, such an org chart spying tool seems to serve only to enable unethical sales behavior.

Re: Small Projects, Big Companies

#66

Post by buzzkillington »

> 3. Backchannel.app

Having a hard time seeing this turn into anything but linkedin wankery. The people who could give you honest responses either don't care enough to or will start a 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours'.

> 5. Org Chart As a Service

Prepared to get sued out of existence. I was at a finance firm where all external emails were sent to both legal and security. I had to redo security training because I didn't report a phone call I got from an external source that shouldn't have had my details.

And god help you if you do any of those ideas to EU citizens.

Re: Small Projects, Big Companies

#67

Post by zomglings »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #65
zomglings wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why such a strong reaction against the idea? For someone who has to sell stuff, this would be incredibly valuable if executed well. It's possible to build something like this using only publicly available data about people and organizations. Genuinely curious - where is the ethical problem?

> Genuinely curious - where is the ethical problem? Why not sell stuff based on the quality of that stuff? If the stuff is crap, or is a bad fit for the purchaser, but you've managed to sell it anyway thanks to various sales tricks (playing off a company's org chart would be one of such), then you've done an unethical thing. Since buyer's org chart has little to do with quality of your wares and their utility to the…

It's not about trying to pawn off inferior wares onto your customers.

I make a living selling software that I write. My customers have no way of judging quickly how good my software is or even whether it solves their problems. When I'm selling to someone, it is my responsibility to figure out whether or not what I'm selling actually solves their problem.

Being able to navigate their organization helps me extract this information more quickly than I would otherwise be able to. It allows me to convince people for whom I'm really solving a problem to try out my solution. It allows me to leave people alone for whom my solution would only add noise.

Re: Small Projects, Big Companies

#68

Post by lowercased »

bastawhiz wrote: post #47
adnzzzzZ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe yourself to be an ethical person then you want to build companies like those yourself rather than stop, since you can be sure that you'll do your best to handle data properly while providing the world with that service. In the case of the Big 5 there are not many companies I know of that are providing the service as proposed in the article so you would have a chance to set standards and expectations ar…

While the data might be handled responsibly, what you're suggesting assumes that inferring personality traits as a business model can be used for ethical purposes. I think there's a fair number of people on here that would say that trying to guess a person's personality based on their media consumption or otherwise is implicitly unethical no matter how you do it, since it's in support of the monetization of another p…

> since it's in support of the monetization of another person's emotions

that seems to describe close to 100% of commerce.

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