I kept tabs on a company where I used to work and when I got an email from Glassdoor about a review of that company with the title "stalled", I naturally wanted to click through, but by that point the review was gone.
I then started to screenshot any new reviews, ad saw that some of the negative ones also got removed after time.
You could say that Glassdoor is more like a rose-tinted window.
I used to open them from the hard stem bit which was not always successful, but it turns out that if you pinch them at the other end, they open up much easier:
You can also grab it with both hands and just break the whole banana in half with a quick pop. The line will be clean. Hand one half to your date as if nothing happened.
When in Poland, I learned of one urban legend there which was that your head to remove the end of the banana because there are some small livings (?) there (I think they called them "lamblia").
Public companies trying to keep investors happy and share prices good during a downturn.
Let them treat employees like cannon fodder. Some of those employees might end up creating something new and innovative, rather than building another product that gets eventually dead-pooled by Google, or copy-pasted by Meta.
If you had to identify the top three things (in terms of impact) that could be changed (albeit with difficulty) to reduce the chances of employees being stuffed into cannons, what would they be?
My three would be:
1. Relatively weak labor protections in the USA.
2. The fiduciary requirement to maximize shareholder value. Why not allow a company to define its own metric, such as a blend of profit along with employee treatment (or others, within some notion of reasonableness*), make this metric public, provide some sort of accounting and accountability for it, and let shareholders adjust accordingly.
3. The quarterly reporting of public companies. This makes long-term planning and investment much harder.
* I haven't studied this very broadly. I'm familiar with the Triple Bottom Line and B-Corporations.
As far as I know, you can satisfy your fiduciary requirements by treating employees well simply by claiming that it attracts better employees and avoids costs associated with searching for new ones.
Keeping unproductive employees on in a punch-clock make-work position benefits no-one. If we're going to broadly restructure society to make this kind of thing better, we'd be better off strengthening the social safety net and getting rid of all the stuff that says you have to have a single full-time job or your life will suck. Nationalise healthcare, remove all the weird tax/benefit cliffs that happen when a job goes over/under x hours/week, legalise building more homes in places people want to live...
Haha, I have watched that documentary multiple times, it is great and deserves to be turned into a film.
Someone's earlier point about hiring as a growth indicator to VC's reminds me of the point made by the CEO in the documentary about how VCs told him he needed to have 100 employees in order to boost the value of the company, so they ended up hiring people off the street, spouses and family members.
I work in a large organisation where some of the issues mentioned are very relevant, especially the 'flow state" issue.
We have a mix of on-site and remote workers (myself being a remote worker), and because Slack/Teams is our primary method of communication with colleagues, and I operate in a tech lead role, it becomes difficult to achieve flow state on some tasks.
This is potentially a bad idea, and I can explain an actual use case that happened a few weeks ago.
My neighbour had dropped her phone in some water, it was a Samsung S21, and the screen was messed up. The moment you tried to activate the screen, lines would appear across it. It was unusable.
Thankfully she had a spare phone available to use, but she needed to get a bunch of things setup on there (Google Mail, NHS for the Covid pass as she was travelling abroad).
She ran into an issue authenticating her Google Mail account - the password. She didn't remember it, so we tried the "Forgot Password" user flow.
For reasons unknown, the user flow insisted on sending a notification to her Samsung S21, even though we had swapped the SIM card from that phone into the new phone, and we had no way to swipe the notification on the S21 due to the screen being broke.
Somehow, we managed to trigger sending a text message with a code, and thankfully she got access to her Gmail account and other items.
But it was not a simple process, and there's no way your everyday person would have a clue how to deal with such cases (it confounded me and I'm a developer!), so I hope that someone with UX and QA chops is able to cater for scenarios like someone's phone screen being busted and knows how to provide alternative options that your everyday folk can get to grips with.
Just turn the phone off. That’s what Apple has you do when you need to turn off Find My iPhone but your phone is on and unable to be used. Even without the sim the device is still trusted, and as long as it’s connected to the internet it will try to authenticate with it. Also trusted contacts are also now a thing. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212515
Gotta love HN. OP talks about phone useflows that in "no way your everyday person would have a clue how to deal with such cases" on a Samsung phone. They get a reply about a hack about apple phones when unusable.
While it isn't helpful for this person, I'm happy that I read it so at least I know the "correct" solution to this problem now should I ever encounter it.
It's worth a shot though, and it kind of makes some sort of logical sense. Samsung and Apple have copied each other since the beginning, so it stands to reason this might work.
It’s not a hack, it’s expected behavior. Go to an Apple store with a broken screen, and this what they will have you do. If I remembered the title of the support article I would have given it to you.
I understand what he's getting at, but if you are trying to have an exact copy of code in order to guarantee an exact behaviour, then you would want to extend that to the operating system used to run the software.
One example was having code where the test suite ran fine on my local MacBook, but would fail on CI (Linux). It turned out that on Linux finding files by name is case sensitive, whereas on Mac OS it isn't, and a require statement in Node.js was referencing a file path with casing that was different to the file name's spelling.
This entire comment thread is just torture for anyone who uses real dep management tools like Nix and Guix. Sorry, but it's just exhausting watching the same asinine conversations play out over and over. I guarantee there are multiple people who have spent more time pontificating over pointless ways to microscopically improve the node tooling situation who could've picked up Nix in 1/10th the amount of time.
But then again, I know there's a bunch of Nixers that pick their head up slightly, shake it, and then just go back to work on actually interesting problems instead of a millionth discussion about dealing with npm. Christ, the stuff people put up with.
EDIT: Ironic, this being here along with the CISA/log4j post where everyone is yammering about SBOM (software bill of matearials). Again, I just glance over at Nix and go, "sure, what do you want to know, I can tell you instantly if log4j is anywhere and if it's a vulnerable version (excluding non-source-built packages in nixpkgs)".
100% Agree. Only issue is that I'm trying to buy a licence but the payment options seem to be US-only (ZIP code validation). I'm trying to buy from the UK.
I studied it as a module at Cass Business School back in 03-06. To see it mentioned here in a completely different environment to the one I studied in has been a pleasant surprise.
I loved how it explained the counter-intuitively of rising crime whilst drug busts put dope on the table, or the risks of an aggressive or non-compliant fishing policy being the EU, or the tale of a group selling their model to a hedge fund for a small fortune.
So many potential ways to use this, and unfortunately I never encountered it at workplaces in my career. I think that’s when you realise that sometimes the ideas have to be presented by yourself.
I then started to screenshot any new reviews, ad saw that some of the negative ones also got removed after time.
You could say that Glassdoor is more like a rose-tinted window.