Great story! I remember sharing my screen at work recently and the URL bar suggested https://thisisnotporn.com/ because I had been playing it a bit on my phone and my browser history synced to my work. I dont know if anyone caught it but I started using a different browser after that. Because it indeed is not porn but hard to explain that!
> Yoti is an independently audited age verification provider for SOC2 compliance.
I worked for a consulting firm and I needed a client to get SOC2 compliant.
The way we did it was scarily easy. It was like a self questionnaire that was like "we dont log PII" and other stuff like that. I could have lied and said yes to everything and still got compliant. I thought I was gonna have a meeting with someone to audit my answers and codebase but instead I got a shiny badge after about an hour of answering questions.
Anyway, there are many SOC2 compliant companies that get pwnd so this isnt really reassuring in itself.
Kinda orthogonal to this, but the other day I was looking for a friend's cheer routine on Instagram so I put her school name and cheerleader routine and I got a lot of images and videos of very young girls (like aged 6-16) in very revealing cheer outfits doing provocative dances which made me very uncomfortable for many reasons. Like first, why are you making your 6 year old do this, and second, why is Instagram floating these to the top instead of adults? I dont think I want to know the answers to either of those questions.
Just the other day I burned through my 5h quota twice in a row because I had opus spawn a review session on a medium sized PR and I don't know what happened but I told it to summarize to me and it said it spent 100M tokens throughout 50 subagent sessions.
And more recently its been recommending that i install this new browser called Aside. I did, and it almost felt like I was installing malware so I Uninstalled it fairly quickly (it also was not a great browser)
Well yeah, that's the name of the game of most software companies. Anthropic has been fairly good up until the last week or so when it started needing more hand holding to not do things it didn't normally do.
What's an "actual software product" and why don't you think web products count as them?
I'm a full stack web developer. I've worked for startups and F500 companies. There is always a push for release targets. The less technical the leadership, the stricter the release targets (its hard to sell a critical refactoring to management when they cant sell a shiny new feature or kpi to their own boss). We've kept our teams pretty lean too.
We still aim for high quality, and performance and security.
I do agree that many people dont really know what theyre doing and are kinda just winging it, especially with AI at the helm, and many companies are likely overstaffed, but I dont think theres a correlation between headcount and slow/bloated software. Any team of any size can make slow and bloated software.
I worked at Expedia for a bit. Ask yourself if they are a tech company, software company, or travel company. It’s not a trick question. They have a shit ton of software developers that work there. Same with Bank of America where I also worked. In fact BoA has more software developers as employees than almost any other company.
Compare those to a company whose only product is software or is primarily a software service.
The difference is directness to the goal. If you are a big bank you need software and web services just like everyone else, but if you get it wrong it’s not going to bankrupt you. You can always hire an outside consultancy to fix it knowing your employees suck at what they do. If all your business does is sell a retail software product and it turns out to be slow broken shit then you have nothing. That’s the difference and layoffs aren’t a bandaid.
At places like Expedia and BoA you can absolutely suck at what you do. Sucking is actually the expectation because 20% of the people solve 80% of the problems, nobody provides substantive training, and everyone is easily replaceable. If you are the guy building innovative solutions on an original software product for a company that only sells software as a retail product you are still ultimately replaceable, but not immediately so.
One key identifier if the business intends to hire sucky people for a sucky job is degree of abstraction. Is the given job about solving a real problem directly, for example using JavaScript to create a new transmission system that achieves higher availability and lowers costs. Or, is it a tech stack nightmare pretending to not write JavaScript to do the same boring shit everyone is doing in a half ass way?
I dont see the correlation between company type (tech/software/X company) and sucking at your job though. Ive never worked for a, as you define it, "software" company because the software ive built has always been in service of selling other things, but people who sucked at their jobs got let go quickly.
And there are absolutely software companies that hire sucky people. I don't know for certain if the people who work there are sucky, but the software they build and sell certainly are.
Maybe for big corporation non-tech companies the calculus is different? But both Shopify and Spotify certainly cant exist without their software.
> I dont see the correlation between company type (tech/software/X company) and sucking at your job though.
The difference is in culture and expectations. People can suck when they are allowed or expected to suck. They can’t suck when the employer sets high expectations. If a company wants to ease hiring and employment flexibility they have to set the bar low to increase the prospective candidate pool. Otherwise they have to be extremely selective and/or train people.
Perhaps the distinction is outside your imagination because it’s outside your experience.
> People can suck when they are allowed or expected to suck.
This is not a unique concept to software or any company type though. You don't have to look far on the antiwork subreddit to find people who work in all types of different industries, technical and not, big and small, where some people just suck and everyone knows it and no one does anything about it.
That is true, but it’s also why most industries require licensing and/or certifications. These things are not 100% effective, but are still excellent at removing disqualified candidates.
If you are selling the code as the product, it could be said to be an “actual” software product, rather than a mechanism for selling other products, or software as a substrate for some other business.
Those other businesses aren’t any less valid, of course. They just aren’t software businesses. They are businesses that (quite sensibly) use software.
Is Facebook, a company that build software to sell ads, a software company or an ad company? I think its a bit bikesheddy, if not pointless, to try to confine companies to labels like this.
Shopify works well for me but it used to push nonsense like podcasts or audio books that I had no interest in, with no way for me to hide them. I just want to listen to music.
Upon looking just now, seems like they have been relegated to their own tabs now, which is great.
When I did some consulting for an e-commerce company that used Shopify, I had a Colombian coworker who kept confusing Shopify and Spotify which was contagious across our company but we always knew what we were referencing because we dont use Spotify to start an e-commerce page.
Similarly, we've had confusion with AWS Amplify and Amplitude (metrics service).
Or I just made a typo. I dont think anyone actually has the understanding that Shopify is a music streaming service and Spotify is a shopping plug-in. I was addressing the latter half of gp's comment which was saying that Spotify has had no problems and I wrote (or perhaps got autocorrected, as I had to correct my phone several times writing this comment).
I have a Samsung Z Fold 7. The stock keyboard is split so it's a bit more comfortable to type on with my thumbs. Granted, this phone is the square form factor and not the wide version but I think the concept stays.
My iPad from 2018 still has a full width keyboard so I have to hunt and peck which is annoying. I would hope that apple designs this better for the iPhone duo.
Yeah pretty much this. I tend to use Astro but I think your point still stands.
I wanted to make a basic online agenda in a few different formats for a Toastmasters club and though I could have used raw html and css to build it, but each agenda had slightly different layout that would have been a lot of copy pasting in html and lots of room for error.
With astro and react islands it was fairly simple to implement.
I think the "intent" ( pun not intended) for "intent" to be a moral stance was to not discourage people from trying to do good things for fear they may do something bad and get in trouble or whatever.
In an ideal world this would be good but then of course it's ripe for manipulation because it's hard to prove one's intent
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