Well since I’ve been mostly in customer service jobs I’d like for people to know that the reps don’t make the rules or decisions. When there is something about a store or service that’s undesirable such as prices then it’s something to bring up to upper management or just let them lose you as a customer. But you can be as nice to the reps as they are to you.
I’m an engineer. When you see something really badly designed and think “wow, those engineers are so stupid! I could have done a better job myself!”
Please know that we did think about it. It’s just that some guy with an MBA decides the schedule, and another guy with an MBA decides the budget, and terrible designs get released no matter how much we protest. I’m sorry we couldn’t figure it out fast enough and cheap enough, though.
And yes, we do mistakes all the time too. It’s just that we usually know about the obvious ones.
As a software engineer, this applies to my entire industry as well.
I’m forced to write subpar software, sometimes with atrocious security simply because some idiot set an unrealistic budget.
The worst part is, my current projects are all government funded. The German government implemented processes to prevent corruption, which force unhealthy competition and backhand corruption onto the bidders, which then churn out bad software, which causes gigantic costs down the line, because nothing works. Great job.
Excellent point about government sponsored anti corruption measures, too. Here in the US our government contracts award “points” to businesses which are minority or woman- owned.
In practice, the same construction companies simply institute shell companies, and make their wives/daughters/sisters the owners of these shell companies, charge a premium, and have the “owner” subcontract the work back to the same old company, effectively making themselves an extra 20 percent…
Small businesses (which may be minority or woman owned, but they don’t play golf with the government buyers) are still totally forgotten.
Every system will get gamed by bad actors.
At least in my case, I can’t come up with a system that doesn’t suffer from these problems, but still keeps corruption in check.
For example, I was in a bidding process for my own software. Our contract has a legal time limit, afterwards it has to be renewed using the same bidding process as the first time. It makes perfect sense for us not to rewrite our software - it’s working just fine after all. But legally, we’re bidding on rebuilding the entire thing, have to compete with laughably low offers from all over Europe, and when we won the contract we decide, almost by accident, to keep using the old software, but on a very tight budget.
The pragmatic thing would have been, to just extend our contract, but that could mean endless contracts to extremely high prices for software that just happens to be embedded deep enough to be irreplaceable.
No good solution, really.
This is a completely fair point. If I were given the proverbial golden keys to rewrite bidding practices, I imagine whatever I wrote would be subject to perverse incentives of some kind.
Or the engineers have been given bad requirements and made the wrong product.
Yes, another tragedy is when sales guy from company A talks to sales guy from company B.
You want a submarine to also fly into space? Oh yeah, we can do that! Our engineers are really smart, shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll have that design over to you in 2 weeks!
Later, when talking to the engineering team…
Well, I don’t see what’s so hard about it. We’ve had submarines and planes in WW2, you’re telling me we can’t innovative and combine those ideas? Well, this is an opportunity for you guys to really show off the engineering ability of the company… And I can’t move the promise date now, I already talked to him on the phone and I’m about to go on my cruise. Call me if you need anything!
Another guy with an MBA:It needs to have AI too!!! You know, like ChaTGPT. So it can reason about the world!!
Engineer: You know ChatGPT can’t “reason” right?
MBA Guy: But I can tell it to autogenerate code!
Engineer: It’s just finding code snippets like you could find with a search engine.
MBA: But they said it was sentient! AI!! LLMS!! SYNERGY!!
Engineer:…Nevermind. Yes, we’ll build a submarine that can fly and add a chat box so you can ask it what it is thinking.
Engineer quits next day
I’m half joking, but it pains me as an engineer to admit how close to reality this can be.
GET. THIS. GUY. HIS. VOTES.
Edit: The budget slayers, almost wanna punch them in the face and walk out of the office for good.
The things I ask you to do while troubleshooting aren’t guesses. They’re based on years of experience.
Sometimes I’m guessing, but my guesses are more informed than yours and I’m only suggesting giving it a try because it will be faster than this argument we’re now having about it.
If you can frame every guess so that it can only ever have a binary A/B answer, troubleshooting and guessing are pretty much identical.
Electrical engineer. You can’t develop and ship an iPhone in a year. Apple has multiple generations under development at the same time.
Woa. OK
This is makes sense, and is also how iOS can be so optimized for the hardware.
They lock down the hardware of the phone way early, giving them a lot of time to port/update the software and polish it like crazy.
I mean, they also have to figure out how to manufacture like 240 MILLION phones or roughly 1 every 130milliseconds.
The design is likely locked in around a year in advance, and the remainder of the year is spinning up production and actually manufacturing the phones.
If you work around forklifts, never trust the driver. Ideally they’re being safe and watching out for you, but don’t gamble on it. They’re heavier than a car and can very easily kill you or at the least break your foot and it will be an arduous healing process.
Ideally they’re being safe and watching out for you, but don’t gamble on it
Also, accidents just happen - people have heart attacks, strokes, seizures, machines malfunction, all sorts of shit can suddenly happen that is out of anyone’s control, so even if someone is being safe and watching out for you, it isn’t worth the gamble…
Never walk behind a forklift
Never get near one unless you’re getting in it to use it.
At least try rebooting your computer before you contact I.T. It really does fix a lot of things. And don’t lie to us and say you already tried it once we get to your office.
$ uptime 326 days, 14 hours, 8 minutes, 12 secondsYep, buddy. You sure did reboot like I asked.
Who would want to lose an uptime streak like that?!
That’s a pretty weak uptime counter. I have had some kit go half a decade with no reboot.
Damn son, what are they running?
Datacenter routers and switches.
When you buy a research paper, the author doesn’t get any cut from it. The journals are scams, and should be destroyed. Until that happens, try searching on arxiv.org first, usually there are preprints available there. If not, contact the authors. Most of us are happy to share our results. Your local library can also help you get access to those.
These are the more legitimate ways, and then there’s sci-hub. I’ve actually seen internationally renowned researchers open a paper using sci-hub on their laptop lol.
Icing a cake takes time, especially when it’s one meant to feed between 90 and 100 people. We’re not trying to ruin your kids birthday when we need 24 hours notice for something that size, it’s that someone needs to take at least 2 hours to get it done, and we can’t magically make that happen on short notice and full days.
Ha, it’s your cake day today…
I work on a farm. Where I live (in Canada), farm workers don’t have the same rights as other workers. We don’t even have to be paid minimum wage.
You are not entitled to:
- minimum wage
- daily and weekly limits on hours of work
- daily rest periods
- time off between shifts
- weekly/bi-weekly rest periods
- eating periods
- three-hour rule
- overtime pay
- public holidays or public holiday pay
- vacation with pay
WTF? That is insane what you are not entitled to. If you don’t mind my asking, can you not find another job than being a farmer?
I chose to do it. I like it. I have a good boss who pays well and gives me a lot of freedom and flexibility. The vast majority of farm workers aren’t as lucky.
It’s usually family business, and they have a lot of write offs and incentives usually, so it prevents abuse of the system, but it also applies to non-arms length employees since farms trade work all the time as well, so bobs mid works for me and my kid works for him.
Oof! Hello, fellow Ontarian here. I had no idea this was the case for Ontario farm workers! Is it common for people to be paid less than minimum wage and not get breaks? Is it just for specific times of year (ie harvesting) or for the entire growing season?
This may sound weird, but: thanks for the work you do in agriculture and feeding us! 😛 I’m in / from Toronto, and try to buy local when I can.
I work on a small farm and am treated well but my understanding is that the big farms that supply the grocery stores employ almost exclusively underpaid temporary foreign workers (TFW). A lot of the farms that sell at farmers markers also employ underpaid TFWs or idealistic young people who will work for food, a room to sleep in, and a $50 a week allowance.
Ah, TFWs. If you go by the news, neither big farms nor Tim Horton’s can survive without them. I’m glad you’re treated well. It pains me to think about how much exploitation is in the industry.
It’s a dream of mine (and a handful of friends) to start a commune / cooperative farming thing (closer to the hobby side of things) east of Toronto once we pool enough money, so insights into the industry are fascinating to me. And yeah, we know it’s going to be more work and recurring failures than we can possibly imagine (especially to start) but we’re determined and going to be diligent in research and preparation before we jump into it.
I don’t really know how to feed everyone without TFWs either, to be honest. They really are so much better at this work than any local Canadians I’ve met, myself included. And people are only willing/able to spend so much on their food. I’m paid better than most farm workers because my boss is idealistic and willing to pay himself very little in order to pay us more and sell at a price regular people can afford, not just wealthy people. He can only get away with paying himself so little because he lives in an off-grid cabin and I’m pretty sure his parents are rich. It’s a nice job for me and we do feed quality produce to people who normally couldn’t afford it, but it’s only about 200 people. Places like this aren’t going to feed all of Canada.
I hope you get your farm one day, though. It feels good feeding people.
Editing just to clarify that I don’t think it’s okay to treat TFWs like we do. People need to be paid and treated properly regardless of where they come from.
This may sound weird
We should absolutely normalise thanking those who work to produce our food.
I work in food and the amount of customers that act like every mistake is a personal attack is wild.
If you actually think someone is deliberately messing up your food you need to just stop going there entirely.
Retail employee.
Technically speaking there’s not that much stopping me from slapping the shit out of you.
I’m a mechanic.
At any given point in time, I can clock out for my lunch break and walk out of the parking lot and I am no longer an employee of my company at that time. The big-ass prybar in my toolbox also isn’t company property.
I haven’t had a situation yet where I’ve had to make use of that ability, but I have had to bring up its possibility once or twice.
And that’s only because I actually value my job. If I didn’t like my job there’s really nothing stopping me from throwing some hands at a shitty customer other than police action, and to be honest, the cops don’t really like to come around the area where I work very often.
More people need to be just a little bit more afraid of service workers. Treat us nice and we’ll treat you nice. But treat us like shit and we don’t really have all that far to fall if we decide you’re the hill worth dying on. I’ve been really damn tempted to just beat the fuck out of an asshole customer before and while I’ve never done it, I know a lot of folks in my industry with a lot less restraint than me.
As a welder, quality doesn’t come cheap or fast. A lot of work goes into my work. Even if all I’m doing is welding Part A to Part B, a lot of research, prep, and planning goes into it.
I need to know what the base material is, the base metal thickness, I need to clean the HAZ, I need to protect everything near the HAZ. I need to actually weld it and clean it for repaint.
A good welder plans to have their welds last the lifespan of the thing being welded on. If I’m welding a car frame together, I’m going to make damn sure they’re good long-lasting welds that resist corrosion. Those welds will outlive the car itself.
As a funeral director, I’m not trying to upsell you into a nicer casket or talk you into something you don’t want. I’m just trying to help you get through it and be happy with the decisions you made.
Ha! Nice try adverts
Seriously, tho, I appreciate your job.
Username checks out.
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YES WE DID TEACH YOU THAT
YOU WERE DOING WHIPITS BEHIND THE GYM
You can bring your phone into the X-ray room. Unless you’re getting a hip X-ray you can even keep it in your pocket. Keys and wallet too!
All my patients are convinced that a phone can’t be in the pocket and I cannot even convince them otherwise. They don’t believe me!
I feel like that comes down to misconceptions over X-ray vs. MRI. Because you absolutely CANNOT have any metal on you for an MRI.
Well, technically you can, but it’s not going to be fun…
Second this.
