My newly found issue with Dell and the XPS 13 9360 series is their insane costs.
Dell you see wont give you an indication of cost, instead you must send the laptop back at a cost of £40.
Stupidly I thought they'd be fair, but no they came back with a quote for £626. They had no interest in offering a discount - so I told them to send it back and get shoved.
£40 was the cost of my laziness. Now I'll just DIY for significantly less.
Worth baring in mind if you're not confident repairing the machine yourself.
Indeed. Take last years raid on the bank vault in London. Turns out they had full recordings on their calls. Whilst it did implicate them, how did they have them in the first place? And more interestingly, why to such quality.
From what I understand, they were bugged after the fact.
There is still a bit of a jump (how did they know who to wiretap? It wasn't really reported, afaik), but looking at the biographies of involved parties, they're the sort of people who would have been prime suspects anyway, so choosing to bug them was probably not an improbable decision to take.
Couldn't agree more. These brainwashing tactics are used throughout the industry, not just startups. It's a disgusting approach and be responded with firm regulation and, where appropriate, class action.
I think some companies can get it wrong. I think others do a phenomenal job. Companies like Stripe, Twilio and Airbnb have incredible missions that tons of people love to support - even people who don’t work there. I think that’s an incredible thing.
> Companies like [...] Airbnb have incredible missions
To destroy the idea of civil society and collaborative neighborhoods (even moreso than already done) and inflict the effects of negative externalities on people not involved in the transaction? If I were a cynic (and I am), I would say that belief in this "incredible mission" is a good way to undermine basic social responsibility.
We're all grownups. If you can't follow someone who leads through vision, why aren't you starting your own gig, with your own vision?
It's not brainwashing, it's selecting for shared values.
I became part of a company whose vision tactics I had to deal with, as the ultimate skeptic. At first I was like you, "No one's going to tell me..." Then I put myself in the shoes of the founder and decided that his vision was, in fact, acceptable. What you call brainwashing was simply reducing friction for those who would benefit from a little perspective.
Believe me, I was skeptical far into my employment. But I didn't obsess on the tactics, I focused on results of the company and myself.
If you're seriously calling for class action, you're beyond hope. And I'm about as far from a John Galt, pro-capitalist shill as you can get...
Isn't that just a pacing issue. If there's enough discrete work going through the pipe line then burn-downs (or if you're not traditionally agile, targets) should be pretty reflective of your output.
You have to be careful, but I wonder if giving a developer access to their own progress/burndown would be an encouragement for those who arn't quite so self motivated.
I love this idea and very much agree you end up with a much more modular, and proactive organisation with the right people. Owing to desk space issues, finance is moving more towards working-from-home. Honestly, in my next job I'd like to go 100% WFH - the amount of time saved from commuting is huge and, from an organisational perspective, if I get inspired over the weekend or the evening I'm much more likely just to get some bits and pieces done.
Unfortunately there's still a lot of legacy managers and people who make the transition tricky. If you can start from the ground up, or at least foster it within teams that's great.
Yea, those "legacy managers"... always trying to harsh our mellow. That's surely the only thing getting in the way of the ideal 100% remote-work-everywhere nirvana.
If remote working was really the slam-dunk productivity panacea that its supporters claim it is, then companies would be switching to it overnight to beat their "legacy" competitors. Shareholders would demand it! Soon, you'd have a hard time finding companies with physical offices. But that's not happening. Is it because of these old stodgy legacy managers, or could it be because there are major down sides to remote work that tend to get get glossed over by people singing its praises? What's more likely?
I don't think we can easily argue that "it this was good, people would have done it long time ago". Culture changes slowly, and people don't always make the best decisions.
The culture of "I want to make more money than my competitor" doesn't need to change. I can easily argue that if switching to remote work, in and of itself, were to produce clear, repeatable productivity gains that consistently outweighed the downsides, companies would switch to it very quickly.
In that case, the easy money would be in selling remote-work consulting to businesses that want help implementing it. The results would largely depend on the quality of the people jumping onto that particular bandwagon.
Can you argue that a company that wants to try remote, but doesn't know where to start, can consistently achieve measurable gains by employing such consultants?
That element seems to be what killed the positive momentum behind Agile. If the same people end up doing the same things, remote work will likely become just as dysfunctional as local in-office work, if not more so. Companies will buy just enough rope to hang themselves from people who will even gleefully tie the slip knot for them.
Much as science advances one funeral at a time, I sometimes think working practices advance one bankruptcy at a time.
We are terrible at measuring productivity. I'm not sure any of the places I've worked could've distinguished a factor of 2 in productivity one way or another. There're too many other factors affecting a company's performance.
I don't know about "slam-dunk" in the sense of 'silver bullet'. But I don't find your argument convincing at all.
Why would you think that large companies, entrenched in their ways, would be capable of switching overnight to any paradigm?
Remote-work happens as most new things tend to: mostly in small companies. But it's becoming more and more common, for good reasons. There's no reason for that not to continue. And the lack of massive, immediate adoption isn't an argument for or against anything.
To cite pg's awesome OSCON talk: "I'm saying that companies will learn these lessons the way that a gene pool learns about new conditions."
My problem with VM is their constant bumping of prices. Until recently I was paying MORE than a new customer (by quite a margin).
You have to keep an eye on your bills