Scaling a customer support organisation is difficult. You need to find people to do a low-status job with unpredictable hours, in a tight labour market.
Also, you probably don't just want to speak to any human. You probably want to speak to an intelligent, skilled human who can fix your problems. That pushes cost up further.
If great support is a priority to you, I recommend being an early adopter of startup products. These companies get their edge from being customer-focused and will be happy to speak to you for whatever reason.
Of course, there are tradeoffs to that approach too. As customers, we want it all: we want cheap products that add tons of value to our lives and never break. In reality it's necessary to make some tradeoffs
Has anyone used both Hack and the modern React workflow of Typescript and a mixture of client and server-side rendering? Interested to know how they compare
That said, I'm not sure how you'd go about server-side rendering React from Hacklang, as it seems that the open-source solution to do so is no longer supported (https://github.com/hhvm/xhp-js).
To clarify, xhp-js was not server-side rendering - it's a framework for generating javascript code, and getting an DOM element ID for a react element that the hack code can refer to and use elsewhere, e.g. by passing to some other generated JS.
One of the resolutions that I frequently make competitive high school debaters debate about is a proposal for the EU to federalize and form the united states of Europe. Honestly, the EU really should try this. African leaders are also trying to form a United States of Africa, and I wouldn't be surprised if something like it happens by the 2030s or 2040s...
I'm guessing you're not European from this comment. This is not meant as an attack; it just seems like your comment lacks the perspective of actually living in the EU.
EU law makes news. It doesn't make many obvious appearances in day to day life when you're living there, however.
From my perspective, EU law does not play the most dominant role in everyday life. Apart from the big (or super silly) changes, it’s often more of a news maker. Take that plus big cultural differences (most notably: not being able to understand each other’s language), and you get a feeling of own nationalities.
There are still so many cultural and legislative differences between countries that people don't feel Europeans, they identify with the individual country.
The UK was definitely the country which stood out the most in EU, so after Brexit, the EU lost one furthest away country in its block, in terms of diversity.
EU law cover stuff you hardly run into. Sure, you have euros everywhere but they don't regulate how much taxes you pay or how your national health care is managed.
All is fine until they start regulating on things that matter. Immigration is definitely one of the first sector where people started noticing they're in the EU, because they're unhappy with the results.
US bureaucracy is not any better than EU. Have you dealt with the FDA, FAA or SEC?
The difference is that the EU tries to protect people in different aspects like social rights or privacy. The US does not offer similar protection, so in some sectors you don't hit the bureaucracy.
The US started as a fresh new country with minimal state and unbridled capitalism and became the largest state in the world.
There are still a few remnants of the old days (like all that capital $$$) but it basically become an Europe with expensive healthcare, expensive universities and tons of social issues.
might be a joke, but the thought of being the Wise Old Men setting rules for the rest of the world plays perfectly well to our historical strengths, so to speak. Euro man burden, anyone?
But does ASML build anything? or is their business just owning the "IP" (though, granted knowing this things is not trivial, and it's even more difficult given their closedness)
I always liked this quote by Jamie Zawinski, from Coders at Work
"I know it’s kind of a cliché but it comes back to worse is better. If you spend the time to build the perfect framework…release 1.0 is going to take you three years to ship and your competitor is going to ship their 1.0 in six months and now you’re out of the game. You never shipped your 1.0 because someone else ate your lunch. Your competitor’s six-month 1.0 has crap code and they’re going to have to rewrite it in two years but, guess what: they can rewrite it because you don’t have a job anymore."
Shouldn't that worry you, rather than excite you? He's just saying "worse is faster", not "worse is better". Especially that last sentence is kind of terrifying: "they can rewrite it because you don’t have a job anymore." Basically, everyone who takes the time to write good code will be outcompeted by bad code written quickly, until eventually everything is bad.
I think 'annoy' is usually a more appropriate word than 'worry' (but not always). Markets and users are stochastic with no one really knowing what users are going to ask for, nor what competitors release and cause users to demand, well designed or not.
What a lot of these conversations boil down to is finding the sweet spot between over/under engineering which is subjective. Are we wasting time solving problems that dont matter or are we shipping with a 'just enough' type of mentality and risk exposing our users to buggy software?
No one likes to work with bad code but if its siloing itself into inconsequential CRUD apps or frivilous games/social media it's just annoying to experience/work with. Its when it creeps into systems or applications where consequences for failure are dire, think Lion Air crash in 2018, that Im worried.
We're already giving all jobs to low cost centers and low cost employees and look where this is taking us: take home automation products as an example.
He's definitely saying "worse is faster" but he's also saying "worse is better," if what you're measuring is how good you're at shipping a product. And I think if you change "bad" to "good enough" (to be better than existing products) then you're right.
I know we are not hired "to write code" but "to ship products", and that everything is done in "sprints" and we must be very agile in doing them because they're always non-stop, and quality comes second (unless, of course, you are really skilled and can ship high quality code in half the time it usually takes), and customers first and "we'll polish it in version 2" and...
I guess I feel "guilty" of writing good code just for the sake of writing good code (and taking time for doing so). At work code comes second, product comes first. I accept it and I try my best, but at the end of the day the code I write at my own pace at home for side projects, now that's the code I like to write.
It's easy to do things slowly, by the book, taking all the time in the world, while the world is waiting. It's part of the skill and mastery to know which corners to cut and which things are essential and which can be fixed later, and judge the effort to result ratio accurately.
It's not so binary though. If "perfect" takes 3 years, and "mad-max" takes 6 months, how good and maintainable a product can you muster in 9-12 months?
There is non-linearity here where you beat the "6 month" competitor the following year, because their product is buggy as hell and unmaintainable, but you keep cranking out solid features on your maintainable codebase/infra.
I'm a current student at Lambda School. It's a pretty stressful time at the moment - I don't have any loyalty to Lambda, but the recent string of damaging stories about the quality of teaching and average graduates is concerning.
It's true that Lambda is incredibly disorganised and the build weeks etc are chaotic. Equally true that they don't do a good enough job of ensuring we have something to show for ourselves on our portfolio.
It's also true that their admission standards are seemingly incredibly lax. About 40% of my cohort struggle to code at a fundamental level - I don't mean that harshly, it's Lambda's fault
With that said, I've really enjoyed my time at Lambda overall and it saddens me to see it fail like this. The atmosphere and internal culture that they cultivated is second to none and I have enjoyed my time there a lot.
As with many people at Lambda, I joined them at a difficult time of my life, when I was suffering from pretty severe depression. I knew I loved coding but barely spent any time doing it and struggled with impostor syndrome, etc.
While at Lambda I benefitted hugely from the daily structure and discipline, and from having a community of people in the same position as me. I've made some great friends, and met some very smart and talented people.
What pains me is the embarrassment of appearing like some clueless fool who got caught up in some get-rich-quick scheme. I love programming, and I just wanted a structured curriculum to train as a professional.
> What pains me is the embarrassment of appearing like some clueless fool who got caught up in some get-rich-quick scheme. I love programming, and I just wanted a structured curriculum to train as a professional.
Don't let this stop you. The world needs more good engineers, and if you practice your craft you will always find a home. There are plenty of industry professionals who now look a bit silly for their choice of company (Uber, WeWork) but ultimately it's all just a job and if you have the raw skills you can find a new gig.
> What pains me is the embarrassment of appearing like some clueless fool who got caught up in some get-rich-quick scheme. I love programming, and I just wanted a structured curriculum to train as a professional.
Been there. I think this feeling comes mostly from the fact that this initiative has had a lot of attention, and of course, a lot of public criticism from people that weren't really able to give qualified opinion.
If you are having a good time there, if you are perceiving value, learning new things that makes sense and seem useful, just ignore those bad opinions and try not to think how others are looking at you.
I myself had a course on investing given by a moderately famous youtuber, and the environment around it was full of sarcasm and debauchery. I somehow managed to ignore it, took the course to the bone and now, less than 12 months after finishing, had a more than 3-fold return on the money I spent on it.
> What pains me is the embarrassment of appearing like some clueless fool who got caught up in some get-rich-quick scheme. I love programming, and I just wanted a structured curriculum to train as a professional.
If you are learning more than you would have otherwise, or if you get a decent job at the end of this joining does not make you a clueless fool. Other people who don't know you or what you have done might think so but they don't matter. What matters is what you've learned, and that you'll get a job out of this in the end. Haters gonna hate.
Also learn generic problem solving VS just pattern matching on how to do a specific thing. Frameworks, languages and patterns themselves will keep changing. Core problem solving skills and understanding will stay relevant always.
