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I remember the Print Shop as a kid! Yah I guess specialization won out. We don't even have to see our holiday cards now. Upload a photoshopped picture and mail merge and start getting compliments from friends and family a week later.


wait do you have one of the 12 Cellini Principias?


You don't start there, but you can get there as you level up. A lot of that would be because the stock on your RSU grants goes up while you work there though. I don't think many SWE have 7 figure targeted comp (highest levels, yes). But plenty get there with refreshers and stock appreciation.


Explain the math on leveling up. Each year, Meta hires more Jrs than there exist L7+'s at the entire company.


Many people top out at a lower level because they don't play corporate politics games or because the L7s aren't moving on, so there's no real room for promotion among the L5s and 6s.

Microsoft in the Ballmer years (early/mid 2000s) had this problem. Promising L65/L66/L67 (probably equiv to L5/6 at AMZN) would leave because the next step was full. All the "partners" were hanging around and not making room for the next gen of leaders.


Much of A/B testing is far deeper than the color of buttons.

How much faster can we process payments through provider A versus B in different countries around the world?

If we offer insurance after checkout, do we convert more than offering it before?

What ranking algorithm of skus leads to the highest conversion?


And what does any of that have to do with finding the right services or products for the right customers?

Does a customer care if you shave off 2% of the final cost or do they care about having world-class customer support?

Does a customer care if a product has a higher conversion rates or if it is the product they were looking for in the first place?

Does a customer care more about how long payment processing takes or do they care that it takes their local mobile payment app?

The only way to know is to talk to customers. Without doing so you’re just coloring a different variety of button.


> Does a customer care if you shave off 2% of the final cost or do they care about having world-class customer support?

Times and times again, they'll tell you the latter and actually choose the former.

The same bargain as paying more to have no ads: people vocally push for no ads, some will ponny up the money, and the vast majority will make do with the ad supported model, while ad blocking or giving up on the service when they're fed up with it.

> Does a customer care more about how long payment processing takes or do they care that it takes their local mobile payment app?

I'm curious how you find the people to ask that ? If your current service doesn't provide support for the payment app, who would you ask if it was a deal breaker for them and refused to become your customer, not giving you anybof their information ?


> Times and times again, they'll tell you the latter and actually choose the former.

I don't think this is as true anymore.

There was some time between 1990 and 2015(ish?) where physical widget prices was falling faster then the quality decrease, software and computing hardware got better, where the quoted strategy made sense.

Nowadays you will get dropshipped crap (or any service sector equivalent) if you go for the lowest price.


I'm curious how you find the people to ask that?

Market research, talking to people in line at the post office, sending a nice personal email to an existing customer?


We need a new "appeal to customer" logical fallacy. Talking to the customer is not a panacea for running a business, and the failed company graveyard is full of products that "delighted customers" but still couldn't cut it in the long wrong.

Part of running a business is having to explain to your boss how you spent millions of dollars, and building confidence that you're making sound decisions and not just shooting from the hip. Many times that will mean making decisions in the best interest of the company over the customer, and there's nothing wrong with that.

There's nothing perfect about A/B testing, and like any tool it can do both good and harm. But when I have to explain to my boss about how I'm spending their money, there's a limit to how much lip service I can play up about the customer journey before I have to put my money where my mouth is and demonstrate that I'm putting their cash to good use. A story that includes A/B testing along with qualitative customer research is better than a story that just includes one or the other.


This is like seeing the first packets ever sent on the internet and noting that latency is high, lol.


I can respect that.


I was cooking tacos for my family knowing I had COVID (we all had it at the time). I remember not smelling the seasoning, and threw a small handful of chopped raw onions in my mouth to confirm the bad news...

Luckily it came back in about a week. Beer and wine tasted awful for a few weeks, and I am a fan of both. Luckily a year on, and all seems well for now.


Years later, I'm still registering new scents that I haven't smelled since before my first COVID infection. For a hearing analogy, it's not like the volume is turned down, it's like some frequencies are missing entirely. And then one day, suddenly, it's back. Freshly ground coffee is an especially rich source of new odors. It turns out coffee isn't just one smell, it must be dozens.


Yeah I had a dram or so of cask strength (60% iirc?) whisky per day when I had no taste just because I wanted to have some kind of taste-adjacent feeling even if that was just a bit of burning. I was so happy when I realised it was coming back slowly every day. Nose is still not 100% but I am fine with that, I can enjoy food and drink so I'm lucky and thankful


Why don't you just tell me when you want it done? (said in Kramer MoviePhone voice)


every NTP story needs a link to the Netgear/UW-Madison fiasco: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/



The global pandemic may be affecting their behavior.


My street was full of older folks that we got to know over the years. Some moved to assisted living, some are getting there, and some passed away from unexpected diagnoses.

We have new Gen Z neighbours for the last two years who seem to exist in their bubble, shutting out the immediate world and interacting only with their social circle. Barely an acknowledgement even if we’re out in the yard, shovelling snow or cutting grass.

I don’t expect much, but maybe small talk once every couple of months to get a sense they’re alright, and not gone off the deep end and bottling their urine in mason jars.

At some point, you start to fill in the blanks by noticing little things like what’s on TV through the window (hockey 24/7) when you drive by, who does the yard work (she does) or the decorations they put up on the outside.

I am wondering if this is some generational divide at play where some slice of the population had been conditioned that the only valid interactions are those that happen online.

It’s also possible that we seem intimidating or unsocial — but our interactions with other neighbours don’t seem to give this vibe.


> I am wondering if this is some generational divide at play where some slice of the population had been conditioned that the only valid interactions are those that happen online.

I think it's likely some of that is at play, yeah. A less confrontational way to phrase this could be: perhaps people who were raised with the Internet feel they find sufficient socialization through talking with their friends online, and don't go looking for it elsewhere.

In any case, I wouldn't read too much into it, or take it personally. I'm 35 and have lived in my house for 10 years and have only really met three of my neighbors beyond "hi". If we were neighbors, maybe you would think I think you're intimidating or unsocial, but that's not the case, I'm just shy and have a hard time being around new people. Talking with strangers is a major event for me, and I'm usually not up to the task without a lot of mental prep work. I wish I was more social, but well, I've tried, and I'm just not comfortable with it. It is what it is.


I agree.

I'm not quite so shy, but on that same side of the spectrum for sure. The deal with me these days is that I've got a couple kids; one thing that comes along with that is quite a bit of social interaction with people you're not 100 percent at ease with. So, that energy - the same type id use to do some small talking with the neighbors - is almost always on E for me.


I definitely see a pattern regarding younger folks.

I got some Gen-Z co-workers, and most of them immigrated here alone. A lot of them don't interact much with other co-workers, don't join parties, activities or happy hours, don't speak the language of the country, and report spending all weekend alone at their single-room apartments.

I also ask them to not work overtime but they just mute Slack and continue working after 6pm and lie on their monthly timesheets (yep we got those now because of this). They haven't learned how to change git timestamps yet, though.

Most will go back to their country sometime after claiming they couldn't adapt to the "cold culture" here. At least that's what happened for the last few years.


I wonder about this, and not in the sense that this person is being extra cautious still. In my case, I moved into my house a few months before the pandemic struck. When I moved in, the couple across the street came by to introduce themselves when I was moving in. We had a short friendly chat and exchanged numbers.

Once the pandemic hit, everyone sort of disappeared, and I hadn't even talked to the neighbors on one side of the house. During that period, I got more introverted and sort of started avoiding social interactions with people, and not because of a fear of catching COVID. I just became more withdrawn since I wasn't socializing in general.

Anyway, after it got safer and more people were getting out, I now felt awkward seeing the people who introduced themselves on that first day since so much time has elapsed without conversation. (That's on me and my social anxiety, though.) I think it'll require me getting over my introversion to chat with them now.

On the other hand, I have been over to a neighbor on one side of my house a couple of times, but that was them going out of their way to include me.

I think what I'm saying is the pandemic created this weird empty period where people who had just moved in to neighborhoods didn't necessarily build connections with their neighbors and now it'll take some effort to bridge those gaps. On top of that, I think there was some social practice that many of us were out of, which made it even more difficult to just chat up strangers, but I feel like for me this is finally starting to go away.


[flagged]


Why put pandemic in quotes?


Because it's over


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