irotsoma

You’re seeing how changes in circumstances cause changes in estimates. If the first time the next truck going out was tomorrow because today’s was full, but now they have a promised overnight delivery for a bunch of stuff going in the same direction, they might put your package on that plane instead. If you have Amazon Prime then your membership pays for the extra fees for the faster delivery that is now available, but otherwise you’re probably going to pay more if you select that faster option.

Or maybe there was a return or cancelation for that same product and it happened to go to a warehouse local to you, so now there’s a closer option.

Lots of things change and Amazon tracks that stuff in near realtime.

Stark self sufficiency and individualism is their philosophy. Too bad they forgot what their parents gave them so they could reach that point. Including the political atmosphere of unions and good paying jobs.

Doubt that’s US Dollars.

A lot of times of it’s a very small, light item, there are contracts that allow for expedited shipping through government channels which might reduce cost which is why the faster option is less. Probably if it were a bigger item, the faster option would be either unavailable or way more expensive and the slower would be about the same price. Similar to how in the US the first class mail is very cheap.

Also, it’s probably so expensive because expediting the customs process is mostly there just for rich people to skip the line kind of thing like in many other areas of society. There’s almost always a backlog in customs combined with “antiterrorism” things like radiation detection, xray, pathogen detection, poison detection, etc., that is often done at random in large batches, but with expedited they often have to test every piece rather than rooms full of stuff. And routing is similar. They also can’t wait to add your package to a larger batch of things when moving between various points along the way, so a lot of things are moved in smaller batches or direct courier. All of that makes it very expensive to move something very fast, no matter how small.

Yeah, the crazy requirements, most of which are impossible, unreasonable, or are meant to be wish-list kinds of things mean the scores are all useless. It’s just the people who game the system and lie who get good scores anyway. Probably the least good candidates. And ,sure, by default it “shows all candidates”. Buy if you don’t have a score because you opt out, that likely puts you at the bottom when sorted or removes you when the HR person filters the results. But that’s not their fault, that’s the user, despite it being their design that allows for and encourages using the scores that way.

When the convenience store only has one employee, even often during peak times, that has to run the register, stock shelves, clean, and take out the trash, in that priority order, is it any wonder that the lower priority tasks just don’t get done at all?

Yeah, it would be nice if it was easier for devs to just turn over the project to an “official” fork. Unfortunately, I’m sure that would get abused by scammers taking over projects forcefully and adding in malware before anyone notices.

Depends on the language and platform as well as how asynchronous things are. For example, lots of platforms have little to no debugging for scripting languages. I write a lot of Groovy on a platform that has a debugger that is mostly too much trouble to connect my IDE to since the platform can’t run locally. But even then it doesn’t debug the Groovy code at all.

And with asynchronous stuff it’s often difficult to tell what something isn’t running in the right order without some kind of debug logging. Though in most cases I use the logger rather than printing directly to the console so that it can be left in and just configured to only print if the logging level is set to debug which can be configured based on the environment.

I see this a lot less with developers whose companies actually provide decent IDEs. Especially front end devs or older devs who still use text editors.

Yeah, and contracting is weird, too. I worked for a company that built a product to regression test that upgrades to major components that our systems integrated with didn’t change some functionality that would cause incorrect pricing or other issues. The testers at the companies that bought it loved it, but it was an annual fee and they couldn’t justify the cost without a specific upgrade planned in advance. Instead, they all went back to spending up to 100x as much hiring contractors to manually create test data and analyze the results. Worst part is the divisions of the companies that purchased the software could easily have convinced the other divisions to use the software and there would have been plenty of projects every year even if one division only had one project every two years or so.

But nope. Can’t collaborate and share expenses or they’ll lose their funding. Better to have big spikes in spending so that they could look like they were saving money all the rest of the time. Otherwise, they would lose all of their permanent staff to budget cuts.

Yeah. I get it if it was a market where things change quickly, so all you need is a quick and dirty product to get your foot in the door with customers. And sometimes it’s easier to build something that is more targeted rather than collaborating to make a more generic solution.

I don’t work in that kind of industry, really. And the kinds of things I’m talking about aren’t things that take years to develop. For example, just in the last two months I built a solution that will make literally hundreds of small upcoming projects spread across four teams take a single two week sprint to implement for one to two people depending on complexity. Previously each of these were taking 3 to 4 people 2-3 months to implement. Plus tying down people from working on maintaining the existing system, so they were going to need to ramp up on engineers pretty quickly.

Plus this solution doesn’t require code deployments to onboard new customers, only to implement the new functionality that each of these small projects are adding. The old solution would have meant possibly having to wait months for a window to deploy code just to onboard a new customer because so many things were hard coded. Our system is extremely high volume and downtime can mean not just losing money, but fines from not meeting timeliness regulations, so deployments are heavily controlled.

And of the two months I spent on this it only was about a week of research and development. The rest was winning the trust of the other tech leads, gathering their requirements, and getting them all to agree on things like naming conventions. Both because they’d been burned too many times and because I’ve only been there for 2 years and wasn’t even a tech lead of my team yet when I started this, though I was about to be because the lead was moving to a newly formed team. And sure, if you had joined one of those meetings in that first week or two, it might have seemed like a waste of time with the bickering and nitpicking. But that’s just because they didn’t believe it was possible to collaborate and get things done, too.

The company was happily going to hire a bunch of contractors to build these things in order to maintain the silos and “competition”. It’s only because of a new manager, that I built trust with over the last year, that no one interfered when I started pulling people together and “wasting time” to collaborate. It’s not even that the middle management is doing these things maliciously in most of the places I’ve worked. They’ve just been brainwashed to believe that making people compete makes them more productive than making them collaborate. But it’s only the worst engineers that need that threat of losing. And only the worst ones that will stick around to play the game since good engineers just want to build stuff.

And this is how you end up with five different parts of the company building pretty much the same thing, because if there was a central team creating shared components, they wouldn’t bring in any profit to justify their existence. But hey, at least there are no dependencies. And competition between teams drives innovation, right?

So tired of this line. The first thing I do in any team I’m on is start building bridges, sharing information, and collaborating on shared components that have the features that all the teams need, so we’re not all wasting everyone’s time building ten crappy, buggy versions of something we all need with slight variation. And instead build a single, well designed and well tested version that suits us all. But it’s always an uphill battle. Experienced engineers are always hesitant to trust, even if it’s exactly what they all want. They get burned or even punished by management policy for collaboration.

Yeah, just not as effective after VHS since you only have to buy it once, or just illegally copy someone else’s. I think that’s what Netflix mostly was used for in the DVD days. Rent the movie to be copied and shared.

I mean lots of media has always worked that way. Build up the nostalgia to increase what people are willing to pay. Before VHS, Disney would lock up their movies and bring them out to theaters every couple of decades making way more money than if they put it on TV. It drives demand. And they think it should be their decision whether to satisfy that demand or not.