It's easy to get bitter about these things.
"Experience" seems to be code for: "we've spent fifteen years painting ourself into a corner and now we need a guy who will get us out of it in three months or less".
You are however not allowed to give any feedback whatsoever about their processes, priorities, organization, promotion strategies, retention policies, etc.
Having experience usually means that you've acquired a holistic view of software development. Usually the hard way.
But they want solutions, not advice or opinions.
I've met a few devs that makes a living like that. Get in, solve problems. Keep quiet. Get out. Wait for them to call back in a couple of years.
> You are however not allowed to give any feedback whatsoever about their processes, priorities, organization, promotion strategies, retention policies, etc.
Ironically, the only people who have social permission to do that are extremely expensive Big Name outside consultants. Who will then do one of two things: either speak to the staff, collate what they have to say, and launder it back to the boss; or produce a thinly veiled adaptation of whatever business book the CEO last read in an airport.
> speak to the staff, collate what they have to say, and launder it back to the boss
My wife is a management consultant and this is _exactly_ what she does in half of her projects. But it is a bit more sinister than that, the management consultant feed the info back to the _top_ bosses bypassing the middle-management hellscape.
For example, she did a project for a big bank where she interviewed 70 or so people her main output was a streamlined virtual machine requisition flow (which included merging a couple of teams together and configuring the ticketing system they already had). It used to take devs 6 months to get a VM. I bet the devs where yelling at their middle managers to sort it out, but their managers didn't have or want to actually bring it up with upper management with a plan on how to do it.
I joke that companies could just do that internally, have some people interviewing the leaf nodes in the org to find out top-down initiatives to help work get done, but companies simply don't do this.
This is a reason why when life pushed me away from product development into consulting/agency work, I hated it at first and eventually I learnt to appreciate the positive side of it.
Usually those kind of companies won't hire old employees, while at the same time will gladly pay for consulting knowledge to solve their problems.
Also while product companies tend to hire folks that the very last thing they worked on checks all bullet points on the HR job ad, agencies will gladly throw people at a problem regardless of the skills list, as long as the team learns to swimm fast enough.
> agencies will gladly throw people at a problem regardless of the skills list, as long as the team learns to swim fast enough.
I did a few years at a company which was "product development consultancy", and this aspect of it was really enjoyable. We got a set of diverse challenges through the door, often "virtual startups" (CEO hiring consultants rather than staff in order to do v1 of a product). The company was basically a single room, and we had two senior guys (the founders) to review work and support us. Plus one "smartest guy in the room" who served as mathematician fire-support for things like signal processing or the rare actual DS&A problem.
Most consumer electronics companies are like this.
It's not only a yearly release cycle but a Christmas release cycle.
New Shiny Thing has to be in the stores by late November so all development has to be done in August so the factories can start producing the first trial batches.
I never buy products when they are first released.
I prefer to wait at least 3-4 months so that production has had time to tweak all the settings and weed out the funky first component deliveries.
Also the software devs will have fixed the worst bugs by then.
That's extremely serious because the call you're trying to make could be an emergency call. A bug like that would have top priority in the org I used to work in.
If I'd had to guess it cancels the call because there's a crash in a process somewhere. Possibly because of audio handover between apps.
I did a MS in Telecoms Engineering. Our Telephony teacher Claude Rigault drummed it into us that when people can't make emergency calls, pople die, thus the importance of reliability.
> state puts refugees in the same areas (Rinkeby, Vivalla, Tensta, etc ...).
No it doesn't. Refugees are placed in municipalities all over Sweden but most choose to move to the big cities as soon as they can and end up in these districts because they are the cheapest.
> slightly elevated crime rate.
Citation needed. Compared to what? Casual crime is very high compared to traditional Swedish society. Also a lot of crime goes unreported because the locals don't trust the police to be able to do anything.
> That's where the integration effort stops.
Simply not true. There are oodles of integration efforts all over Sweden at many levels; public projects, local initiatives and on top of that immigration heavy areas gets more public funding than average for schools, after-school activities, park/street cleanings, etc.
> Even professionals who move to Sweden for work have a hard time integrating in Swedish society.
That's because Swedish is a small language and most professionals don't plan on staying.
Most Swedish professionals speak English on a native speaker level and most large Swedish companies has English as the official corporate language.
In my experience most non-English speakers that comes to Sweden spend their efforts on becoming fully proficient in English while the English speakers are delighted to find that they can use English everywhere in society.
Learning Swedish has a very low priority and after a couple of years most expats grows tired of the cold, darkness, taxes, low salaries, etc.
In my opinion, refugees should be spread out and placed among neighbors who are willing to interact positively with them and invite them to stuff so they can integrate, and NOT allowed to relocate their residence for 5-10 years. That will be better for the country. Beggars can’t be choosers, they’re happy to get asylum.
How to enforce that: fine whoever sells/rents to them outside where they are supposed to live. And threaten to deport them if they move without the years passing or showing they’ve integrated / learned the language / culture etc.
Obviously, exceptions can be made for reasons of safety or being closer to a job they got, but then the same procedure should be followed (spread out and surrounded by neighbors willing to help integrate them).
They should also have access to resource to accelerate the cultural integration, like meetups and schools etc.
I like the idea of setting an immigration quota based on how many meighborhoods overwhelmingly vote to welcome immigrants, and then requiring the immigrants to live in those neighborhoods as a condition if their immigration status.
If the immigrants enrich the community, those who welcomed them get the enrichment.
If the immigrants bring crime and disease, those who welcomes them get the crime, disease, and decreased property values.
I love solutions that work whether my views are right or wrong.
May I steal that for part of my political platform?
Sure. It sounds very bottom-up and libertarian, the kind of libertarian I am is exactly this thing … making a new bottom-up system with software, giving people the tools to self-organize, get critical mass in various local areas, and then using the new tech to bring about change by working with the old top-down structures.
Facebook and Uber and AirBNB did it in social networking and transportation and housing, respectively, starting in colleges and cities.
I am doing it for all kinds of things, and sometimes selling it to political campaigns such as I did with https://qbix.com/yang2020.pdf but that is not really my goal, just to help some politicians was never my goal
I put out a few apps like Groups on iOS and so far we attracted a million small community leaders in 100 countries, who have our app on their phones. So the first phase (bottom-up) is under way
Years I go I met with Rohingya Project guys and working together to create the R Coin, Identity and Academy on decentralized platform for the Rohingya refugees:
https://rohingyaproject.com/platform/
Now this year for the first time, we got a VC (Balaji’s fund) leading our round for Network States. Balaji is a big proponent of these (kind of like Estonia’s e-residency), his fund also has Naval Ravikant, Fred Wilson and others on their investment commitee… basically a lot of people involved in Web3 (CoinBase, CoinList, etc.)
So if you’re serious about doing the first part of the solution (software) I recommend you can do it in software, and working on the ground with small towns and neighborhoods. I already have a platform doing just that, so if you want to do it locally, we can reach out about doing something together. We’re eventually looking to go to every part of the world, but currently we’re at a stage of just doing local pilots. Look at my profile and you can email me.
And/or come to the Singapore conference on September 22nd and let’s all meet and discuss there in person :)
But PS: our platform isn’t only about resettling refugees, although it is a big part. It’s about dating, job boards, local currencies, and much more. I think that if Donald Trump and Co get into office again, there will be a huge “crypto summer” but we need to use crypto for actual applications like the one I mentioned, with global donation crowdfunding and transparency and benefitting the stateless people on the ground, instead of crazy ponzi schemes round 4 LOL.
Do it! Start-up meet-ups and find a way to make the labor, especially the idle labor, more productive. This is entreprenuerism. It is also hard and then there are the costs--who pays?
> Citation needed. Compared to what? Casual crime is very high compared to traditional Swedish society. Also a lot of crime goes unreported because the locals don't trust the police to be able to do anything.
Citation needed? You haven't provided a single citation for any of the wild claims you've made.
Redefining words in order to win arguments. Nice.
Defunding means exactly that. I know this because that is what happened to the police forces that were defunded. Not entirely defunded, but they ended up with less money in their budget.
> the typical day-to-day work for a police officer doesn't require violence or the threat of violence
Says who? Are you a cop? Do you have cops in the family? Are you a law enforcement expert?
Do you have any source or statistic whatsoever to back that up?
> Redefining words in order to win arguments. Nice. Defunding means exactly
> that. I know this because that is what happened to the police forces that
> were defunded. Not entirely defunded, but they ended up with less money
> in their budget.
The poster is not redefining the term.
The "Defund The Police" movement has very specific and very well documented goals: Use police only for law-enforcement, and use specialized responders for non-law enforcement interactions. For example, you send mental health specialists when someone is threatening suicide. This will reduce funding for the police, but it also reduces the police's workload.
Is the movement poorly named? Yes. Is their goal to eliminate police?
Absolutely not.
The movement existed for five seconds, had a really bad idea as their name, and now you're saying it was all a misunderstanding and they are really moderates?
There's a person waving a knife or gun around in public threatening to commit suicide.
Now what?
There's a person threatening suicide in public and then pulling out a knife or gun when the authorities show up.
Now what?
It's easy to be an armchair law enforcement expert and dream up scenarios where the good guys always wins.
But reality doesn't conform to your utopian ideas.
The "defund the police" movement was not that well organized but I agree, they do have very specific and very well documented goals: the end of policing. They went hand-in-hand with the prison abolitionist movement.
I get that you may not want to eliminate police, but I assure you, a large number of the people at the center of these movements do want that.
UK police didn't have guns in the early 2000s either. The rise in recorded violent crime can't be explained by something that hasn't changed. You're just trolling now.
Did you even look at the link I included that disputes that violent crime is trending up at all? Your chart shows that digital cameras have gotten cheap. Not that violent crime has actually gone up.
> The ONS reported that victimisation rates shown by the CSEW have been decreasing in the long term. They peaked in the year ending December 1995, when 4.7% of adults were a victim of violent crime. Rates have remained below 2% since the year ending March 2014.
> In contrast to the downward trend shown by the CSEW, the ONS highlighted that police recorded violent crime increased between the years ending March 2013 and March 2022. The ONS explained that these increases are thought to be driven by improvements in police recording practices
Depends on the context, I think.
She took the limo ride because it's was available.
Alcohol is alcohol.
What if it was another person sitting in an ordinary cab drinking whiskey straight out of the bottle saying to his/her friends "Thank God we're getting out of THAT, right?"
The reporter could've left out that they were toasting Sour Apple Martinis in a $2,000 limo, but she didn't, so we know they weren't somberly drinking from whiskey bottles. That might be the craziest part to me. They could've not included the limo ride or passed it off as something else, but it's explicitly pumped up as something luxurious.
I read it as something deliberately escapist. It didn’t matter what it was, there was too much to process and focusing on a limo and drinks meant they didn’t have to focus on what had happened. She included details because that was her job to describe the scene.
People process grief/stress/trauma differently. I wouldn’t read too much into the details.
For some reason they always seem to be privately owned by one person rather than publicly traded or owned by a corporation. At least in my experience.