its insane that there wasnt any consequence for the metaverse at all. Oh yeah, we built a second life clone based totally around the idea that people want to spend rent money on fake digital real estate. Of course it tanked, no one was brave enough to point out ahead of time how bad an idea it was? And this doesnt hurt their standing, stock price, or marketability at all?
What makes you say it hasn't affected their stock price? Seems likely the Meta stock would be much higher if they had an additional $15B profit on their books each year.
my managers are indian, and honestly Im struggling. Do you have any advice? I feel like im not allowed to ask questions, a lot of our processes dont make sense to me.
Not the advice Im proud to give (or anyone should give), but the one that will work: Create dependency on yourself, company-wide, and make sure the boss knows about it. Avoid direct confrontation with your manager.
I feel like ive been stuck in that cycle, and I know its partially just me being in my head about my career, but I really have been basically doing CRUD apps for a decade. Ive made a lot of front end forms, Ive kept up on the latest frameworks and trends, but at the core it really hasnt been dramatically different.
If you really distill it, I've been doing API Glue for about a quarter century.
I connect to a 3rd party API with shitty specs and inconsistent output that doesn't follow even their spec, swear a bit and adjust my estimates[0]. Do some business stuff with it and shove it to another API.
But I've done that now in ... six maybe seven different languages and a few different frameworks on top of that. And because both sides of the API tend to be a bit shit, there's a lot of experience in defensive coding and verification - as well as writing really polite but pointed Corporate Emails that boil down to "it's your shit that's broken, not ours, you fix it".
At this point I really don't care what language I have to use, as long as it isn't Java (which I've heard has come far in the last decade, but old traumas and all that =).
[0] best one yet is the Swedish "standard" for electricity consumption reports, pretty much every field is optional because they couldn't decide and wanted to please every company in on the project. Now write a parser for that please.
another 'anyone but Java' developer! For me its not even the language or syntax, its the way people code it. Not every line of python ive ever read is gold, but every time i delve into Java code its like the developer was mad, at me specifically.
I would say they dont contribute. I don't think Jeff Bezos has contributed anything positive, at all. He's managed to become insanely rich in a system that rewards bad behavior, so what? All that value isnt doing anything.
Are you saying Amazon isn't a positive? Or that Bezos didn't contribute to making Amazon what it is?
I think it's pretty clear Amazon is quite a positive given by how many people like using it so much for it's convenient 1-stop shop, quick shipping, and hassle-free return process.
Are you saying it would be better to have to shop at 1000 different little websites with probably crappy or at least inconsistent return processes?
OK but how realistic is that? Not everyone lives in a city nearby local stores.
There is such a wide variety of products that people go to Amazon for. I know I do. So many things are niche I can't see how any local stores could exist to stock things like that in even a 1 hour range from a majority of the population.
How many people are going to drive hours to go to a special boutique that has this random thing they want or need?
Maybe people use Amazon to buy routine things that could easily be stocked locally. But I guess I use Amazon to get things that I can't really get or even usually find anywhere else for that matter. Most come from small operations using Amazon as their sales platform. Amazon is providing a lot of discoverability and logistics to them and I am not sure I would even stumble across the seller if I had to find some tiny website that they operated themselves.
I am not sure most people would prefer to shop locally, most people don't seem to even go to the store anymore and instead use delivery services for everything. This saves so much time to allow us to do other things that we enjoy in our lives. I don't think small shops would be able to offer this level of convenience.
And you don’t have another big online marketplace that’s basically similar?
And if not, you are saying you have a similar availability of such a vast network of goods, almost anything you might want and the convenience of fast delivery and simple returns via local shops or something?
I guess I’m not sure what you are suggesting. I personally find that shopping and finding and acquiring the products I want is vastly more convenient and easier with Amazon than before we had Amazon and yes I was around back then too. I’d never want to go back personally. Most family and friend I know seem to feel the same.
Absolutely. Creating value in the stock market is not the same thing as creating value for society. Are we really better off as a society now that amazon has closed down all the mom & pop stores?
Are we really better off as a society now that the entire internet is centralized around AWS? It made a lot of people rich, but the internet sucks more than ever
