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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • 3 Abrams is correct, 8 Bradleys sounds about right, but I didn’t hear anything about HIMARS. It is odd that they’re not bragging about the Ukraine confirmed loss of a Patriot system (albeit not the radar but two launchers). I mean, that’s what they’ve been claiming forever. Maybe because they said they destroyed all of them already and can’t now claim destroying any actually?

    Fucking weirdos. Still, compared to Russian losses in manpower and vehicles, this is nothing. For the numbers that Ukraine has, it’s not insignificant for sure. The main thing and difference between Russian losses and Ukraine losses is that the crews often survive the loss of the vehicles on the Ukrainian side, whereas Russia loses both vehicle and crew.



  • Possibly. It’s entirely opaque where I work. I have no clue how they’re compensated whatsoever. We managed to fix it for the most part. I like the customer satisfaction approach via renewals as a target. Especially since you can basically give that to everyone involved on the project. Then again, some customers are dissatisfied as a policy. Worked with some miserable folk who always communicated in a horrible, horrible way but kept renewing and never balked at the cost. It was simply a “you’re a service provider, you’re beneath us” thing. Some people truly suck.



  • We’ve decoupled timelines from estimates almost entirely and to the ire of all our sales and C-Level only give out Quarter based estimates anymore. “End of Q3 or early Q4”. When we deliver mid Q3, everyone is happy. The funny bit is that since we’ve made these changes, we’ve not noticed any drop in client interest at all. What we do notice is that we actually ship what we promise (sometimes even more). We also don’t have clients who think we’ll do 10 hours of work for free anymore, because we’ve anchored the value of every little bit we do properly. We also filter the stingy clients who are completely pointless and are just wasting our time, while engaged with our competitors.

    There’s a lot, a looooot of FOMO in sales on the side of our own sales people. So they lowball their shit to make sure we close. Then we can’t keep what’s promised and nobody is happy and contracts that would only be profitable after like 3 years don’t get renewed and we lose a client. Great stuff. Then try and get them back after a shitty experience like that.

    The mind boggles.



  • Hate this. I work as a PO. Praise my devs every chance I get both internally and towards our clients. Always pass on positive feedback and use negative feedback only translated into priority weights.

    I see my job as keeping stakeholders at bay and let them do their job. I bundle requests into feature requests that cover as many current and future needs as possible, but never without internal meetings first.

    Just getting sales to stop making deals on feature requirements with clients was a very long uphill battle that we have mostly won. Now it all goes through my team first and we always do estimates with our development teams. Takes a bit of time, takes a bit longer, but never have I seen a client get back to us with the same urgency as they request a quote anyway. If they can not wait a week, they won’t be a good fit for what we are doing and how we do things.

    Posts like these make me feel accomplished :D






  • If Google is successful with their garbage webDRM, I feel we might actually get a sort of reset back to the early 2000s internet for those that care to get out of that corporate hell hole the “internet” has become.

    And thanks to the Fediverse we might not even need something like Google ever again. But then they’ll start attacking the infrastructure itself. Make it prohibitively expensive to run such instances, etc. Attack them with content that gets instances banned, etc.

    No matter where one looks, it feels it’s an all out war on any minor comfort or freedom left to the non-ultra-rich-ultra-connected.

    So. As for Firefox. What’s a good alternative? I’m very fond of the container thing they got going, but everything else can be replaced, I believe.


  • I am not a fan of high compensation overall on the C-Level. What I’m worried about most with these types of companies is being destroyed from within. That’s generally heralded by bringing in high cost outside consultancy firms.

    I don’t see that yet on their balance sheet. No idea what Mozilla Corp. does, but the Mozilla Foundation is still doing things I am aligned with.

    But as with all things, constant vigilence is key. More and more it feels like there’s barely anywhere left to invest time or money in. Fediverse is truly a ray of sunshine at the moment. But I wonder how long that’ll last until it’s been subverted by commercial interests.