I once had a sales-bro tell the client we’d “monitor the internet for X”. That has remained one of the most important hammers for me to wield when discussions even start coming up. How the fuck does one “monitor the internet” to a degree that fits the clients interpretation of this phrase. Sales guy is still with us and a good lad, he owns that mistake. But fuck was it ever crazy.
We’ve decoupled timelines from estimates almost entirely and to the ire of all our sales and C-Level only give out Quarter based estimates anymore. “End of Q3 or early Q4”. When we deliver mid Q3, everyone is happy. The funny bit is that since we’ve made these changes, we’ve not noticed any drop in client interest at all. What we do notice is that we actually ship what we promise (sometimes even more). We also don’t have clients who think we’ll do 10 hours of work for free anymore, because we’ve anchored the value of every little bit we do properly. We also filter the stingy clients who are completely pointless and are just wasting our time, while engaged with our competitors.
There’s a lot, a looooot of FOMO in sales on the side of our own sales people. So they lowball their shit to make sure we close. Then we can’t keep what’s promised and nobody is happy and contracts that would only be profitable after like 3 years don’t get renewed and we lose a client. Great stuff. Then try and get them back after a shitty experience like that.
The mind boggles.
Thank you, I’m sure trying. I got a good 30-35 years left in this, I’d rather not be miserable or make people miserable for the duration.
Hate this. I work as a PO. Praise my devs every chance I get both internally and towards our clients. Always pass on positive feedback and use negative feedback only translated into priority weights.
I see my job as keeping stakeholders at bay and let them do their job. I bundle requests into feature requests that cover as many current and future needs as possible, but never without internal meetings first.
Just getting sales to stop making deals on feature requirements with clients was a very long uphill battle that we have mostly won. Now it all goes through my team first and we always do estimates with our development teams. Takes a bit of time, takes a bit longer, but never have I seen a client get back to us with the same urgency as they request a quote anyway. If they can not wait a week, they won’t be a good fit for what we are doing and how we do things.
Posts like these make me feel accomplished :D
Yes, it is about control. Companies like meta with near infinite resources made their money by exploiting the ever living fuck out of data the vast majority of people to this day do not understand to have any value at all despite the evidence of not just one but multiple trillion dollar companies existing soley due to the exploitation of this kind of data.
I am done with being sold to, having my data harvested, being gaslit, being spied on, seeing these companies avoid the shit out of any consequences for their actions, etc.
Ooh, but it is open, if they wanted to scrape the data they just could! Yes, and it would be fucking illegal under frameworks like the Gdpr. If they join the system though? Wells then they have a legal basis again yo just keep tracking you. Not only that, they avoid further sanctioning by being able up show that they work on interoperability, without investing anything at all, simply by exploiting Foss software.
Ooh, but individuals can block instances, no need to defederate on an instance level! Sure and most people won’t know about it or how to do it or just not care enough and get to enjoy being abused by these companies yet again in a space specifically chosen for not being that.
Oh, I don’t see a way they could possibly exploit this or extinguish it! Cool. I bet their lawyers, psychologists, experts in every field imagineable that has anything to do with using data and driving engagement are exactly as stumped about it as a random user out here. Bet they couldn’t possibly have a plan because we don’t see one.
Anyone who has even an ounce of trust that meta and all these other exploiters will not find a way to ruin activitypub, has not paid attention in the last 20 years of internet service development.
Activitypub as a technology will survive this. The fediverse as an alternative to these utter monsters of companies might very well not.
If Google is successful with their garbage webDRM, I feel we might actually get a sort of reset back to the early 2000s internet for those that care to get out of that corporate hell hole the “internet” has become.
And thanks to the Fediverse we might not even need something like Google ever again. But then they’ll start attacking the infrastructure itself. Make it prohibitively expensive to run such instances, etc. Attack them with content that gets instances banned, etc.
No matter where one looks, it feels it’s an all out war on any minor comfort or freedom left to the non-ultra-rich-ultra-connected.
So. As for Firefox. What’s a good alternative? I’m very fond of the container thing they got going, but everything else can be replaced, I believe.
I am not a fan of high compensation overall on the C-Level. What I’m worried about most with these types of companies is being destroyed from within. That’s generally heralded by bringing in high cost outside consultancy firms.
I don’t see that yet on their balance sheet. No idea what Mozilla Corp. does, but the Mozilla Foundation is still doing things I am aligned with.
But as with all things, constant vigilence is key. More and more it feels like there’s barely anywhere left to invest time or money in. Fediverse is truly a ray of sunshine at the moment. But I wonder how long that’ll last until it’s been subverted by commercial interests.
All good. I have no idea about these taxforms, but since the compensation didn’t show up on the pro-republica form analysis but is visible in the 990 form from mozilla itself, I went and tried to find out what’s going on. No idea if I am right though. Don’t know US taxlaws at all.
The CEO didn’t get that money from the Mozilla Foundation though, but rather Reportable compensation from related organizations (W-2/1099-MISC/1099-NEC) which can be anything like parent companies or subsidiaries, etc. https://www.mlrpc.com/articles/decipher-form-990-sections-compensation-reporting/
Not sure if that makes it better, but the other compensation looks fairly alright to me.
Possibly. It’s entirely opaque where I work. I have no clue how they’re compensated whatsoever. We managed to fix it for the most part. I like the customer satisfaction approach via renewals as a target. Especially since you can basically give that to everyone involved on the project. Then again, some customers are dissatisfied as a policy. Worked with some miserable folk who always communicated in a horrible, horrible way but kept renewing and never balked at the cost. It was simply a “you’re a service provider, you’re beneath us” thing. Some people truly suck.