I worked for one of these outfits for a summer job. I needed the money and they seemed alright on the outside.
There was a strange obsession regarding looking official and academically legitimate, to the point where they would attempt to recruit professors to do the peer-reviewing, then override what they said in the final "edit" stage of the review and approve the submission anyway. Since it was anonymous, there was no way to tell if "Reviewer 3" was actually bumped or just that someone else got to that submission first.
That said, their business model was a bit different. They weren't open-access: they made their money selling conferences (which were mandatory to attend if you wanted your paper to actually get published in the journal).
Often, they would resell gifts from the venue such as comped hotel rooms and airport shuttles at above market prices to the attendees as well as part of a "package." As well, the venues usually also matched where-ever the founder wanted to go on vacation.
Out of paranoia as much as cost-cutting, they ran the offices very lean and centralized authority in the founder and his family. They probably would have had a more successful operation had they gotten good lieutenants who were better capable of maintaining the facade. My local university used to warn people off of publishing with them by name, which I thought was a remarkable step considering the precarious state of Canadian libel law.
Other staff was mostly early-stage "green card"-esque workers who they would hold the threat of dismissal over their heads (forcing those workers to rush to get a new job before they timed out and had to leave the country) and students like myself.
The year before I got there, they had a major publicity crisis in which they took substantial heat in academic circles for basically auto-publishing plagiarized articles from anybody with an email address. Part of my work was integrating one those "turn it in" style plagiarism detectors into their submission funnel.
By the end of the summer they were in deep with the tax authorities from a backlog of unpaid taxes; the founder bragged to me that he considered paying corporate income tax a kind of "game" in which the penalties for losing were insubstantial. I'm sure by now the penalties have grown in seriousness, though the last time I looked them up they still seem to be publishing journals and hosting conferences.
It was a good lesson for me about what to look out for in the future when trying to select a small business/team to work for.
> which I thought was a remarkable step considering the precarious state of Canadian libel law.
Taking a University to court for calling you a fraud only gives the University a great opportunity to prove it in a public court room :)
Also you can probably interview current and former employees, like yourself. Not to talk about the presumably long list of sketchy things published, which should be sufficient on its own.
If you want to maintain some illusion of legitimacy, suing a University isn't going to get you far.
How do you prioritize which 'frustrations' to work on?
Processing existing customer feedback has always been a problem even at large, established places I've worked for - chasing the new customer and adding features is always sexier than a general feeling of unease that requires a lot of prying to get to the root of.
Often in my experience most customers don't seem to know what the exact problem is, or can't put it into words, so having strategies to tease that out would also be appreciated.
My experience is a little different (mgmt consulting) but the problem is largely the same. The one piece of advice I have for your last line is to ask the simple questions - "What do you mean by....", "Can you tell me more about...", "Can you walk me through..." are all very powerful.
If you have nothing to go off of but a rough sense of which part of their day is causing them frustration, you can ask "I heard that (process X) is hard or frustrating. Can you walk me through how that works? Where does it start?" followed by very simple questions to keep them talking - they'll get as detailed as they can for someone who appears to be in a position to help.
The built-in examples for method use are a really cool feature. I hate having to jump to MSDN, etc just to find an example snippet when the argument comments are unclear.
Yeah, I love the examples too. Where do they come from?
I think allowing users to submit code examples could dramatically increase the value. Maybe even microservices.
The ideal (and perhaps impossible) version would look at my code structure and suggest replacements for components from people who are better programmers than I am.
They don't tell builders "give me a house, I want turrets and a fence and 23 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms and I want it done to a really high finish by next week".
Instead they get a detailed, industry standard, multi-stage plan that has everything they need to start, as well as access to an architect that can check on their work and when things go wrong a process for change management is included. And no-one expects a house to be built well over a weekend.
I wonder if the Joy-Cons will be changed out on people's systems more than controllers usually are. They're almost a fashion accessory in the tablet/portable mode.
I would hate having to replace a rusty fuel filler neck that runs across the wrong side of the car and over the exhaust.
We should just go back to the 70s-era centre-mounted fillers behind the license plate holder. Those were great, until you got rear ended or it was frozen solid.
These were depopularized after the arrival of self-service gas stations due to modesty issues regarding drivers refueling themselves while wearing skirts or dresses.
