So many people are overengineering this... I have a wireless Jabra headset. Works great. At home I use one of those usb speakerphone pucks, works great. Not these super special desktop mics that streamers or radio broadcasters use.
The people who try to use their webcam mic or the built in mic are the ones causing most of the problem (yes I'm also looking at you Macbook users).
I always thought it'd be a great idea if in your internal Teams or Zoom instance you had a "send this person a new headset" button to fix the problem.
Is nobody using a DJI Mic2?? I hoped you guys would recommend something better than the DJI Mic2, not because it's expensive, but there surely should be better mobile/wireless mics, no?
I hope someone knows, hey I am even down buying those talkshow moderator style mics, like the DPA 6066, that was recommended here. But don't they require a bulk of stuff wearing in your back attached to your pants/belt? For sound I would wear regular noise-cancelling in-ears, here the difference isn't that big, unless you're audiophile like me and many others in this thread. Especially so, if you have above average hearing, the world is optimised for lower-quality sounds :(
Why the focus on just the Laptop/PC? Mobile Phones also feature crappy mics, especially when on loudspeaker. Yeah I noticed it depends very much on the software being used too, but WhatsApp sounds tinny, Instagram sounds crystal sharp, Zoom/Meets sounds tinny.
What if you have to use the screen and still need to listen on your mobile phone?
Bummer, the microphone switches to crap-quality on loudspeaker.
Test yourself and record a message with loudspeaker on and off. Especially with background noise it's getting worse, whatever that algorithm is doing, it's tinning your voice to filter the stuff out.
I do have a (not cheap) BT headset and still use the builtin microphone of my mac. Why? Because when i use the mic of my headset it changes the type of BT connection and the sound i hear is basically unbearable.
How do you have the macBook pro microphone in a proper position? If I only use the macBook the camera is in a bad spot. Usually my macBook is plugged in which means my decent, external camera on my monitor is in a good location and so is my lighting. However, it means my macBook is off to the side.
Whenever you see one of these "it's product" or "it's engineers" all I can think of is "someone has more business context or knowledge than the others"
The best teams I've ever worked on as a product manager/owner is where we have shared context. These problems described here are minimal. In those teams I could provide technical input to engineers, and engineers gave me "consumer facing" suggestions on features.
I've believed for a long time that lack of business/use context drives a lot of these issues.
Take for instance I currently work at an IoT company, and if I'm working with engineers who have no idea what a thermostat does/how it works other than "makes it hotter or colder" then we have much more difficulty building shared understanding of a feature request.
I also know this because 10 years ago that was my simple understanding of a thermostat... so it was much harder for me to understand why we were doing certain things.
>> The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics.
This is a very important distinction.
At some age, you're going to have the money and whatever else you want and suddenly ask yourself why you're working so hard when you already have everything you need to be happy. This hit me a few years after I turned 35 and started asking myself was it worth it to have a really nice mountain bike, live in a state that has some of the best trails and the best I can do is get out six times a year because why? Because I'm putting in 50-60 hours at an office for a company that will cut me loose whenever they feel like it.
I realized if I didn't start focusing on my own happiness and stopped using all my energy to prove what an awesome developer I was, it was going to end up very lonely and very unhappy. I was also leery of burning out again like I did a few years earlier and had covered it up from my bosses and co-workers.
I feel like its a crossroads everybody arrives at in different times in their lives. For me, at 35, I felt like I had wasted so many years burning the candle at both ends and for what? Nothing that was going to make my life better. Even a few years after making several changes, I still look back with regret it took so long to see what I was doing to myself.
It's crazy to me that more people don't realize this. You're working crazy hours, have no meaningful hobbies or life outside of work... and for what? No one's going to remember that you built some nice feature in some bit of software in 100 years, or even 20. Enjoy your life, enjoy people and community and activities. You can still get paid incredibly well as an engineer, more than enough to live comfortably, and work a normal 40 hour week (or less).
It depends on how many years you do it, and how early. It's quite the trade in your 20s: Think of the freedom and peace of mine an extra couple of million in the stock market can give you. Then you slow down, celebrate, and know that you can let that money make more money on interest than you do from work. Reach the mid 40s? The pile has grown than enough to retire very comfortably.
The trick is that you have to know when to stop. I have a friend who ended up traveling with an oxygen machine, because she worked 80+ hour weeks for one too many months, and ignored a pneumonia.
I've been reading books about the history of computing, stuff like "The Soul of a New Machine", "Showstopper!" and "Revolution in the Valley" -- all these people working massive unpaid overtime. I guess some of them got stock options. Part of me wishes that I could care as much.
If you're married/kids it usually happens by 35. If you reach 'enlightenment' after that you can't cut back easily (wife and kids accustomed,even maybe feel entitled to expensive private school etc etc), and if you do your family will often simply divorce you then the judge will impute your income for CS and alimony at the high amount you made before. If you scale back, they put you in a jail cell, take away your licenses, your property, and revoke your passport.
Not to judge too much, but that sounds more like the outcome of a crappy relationship rather than a universal experience.
Not exactly related, but ... I will admit, I'm occasionally mind-boggled by family court. Male rape victims have been made to pay child support because its not the child's fault that his mother was a criminal.[1][2]
Child support is nearly universally enforced at least on paper. The incentive is to divorce quickly after a high earner scales back to lock in the high imputed income. You see sky high divorces in recently unemployed persons as spouses scramble to lock in CS and alimony against their recent earnings.
These are the acts of calculated actors getting in on the take as incomes reduce, to lock in the income stream.
I think it might be a bit of a post-scarcity thing. A bit like how we don't cope well with the easy availability of lots of macronutrient-dense foods that exists in many developing nations, and our physical health may be suffering for it.
Similarly, once upon a time people needed to work whenever work was available so that they could secure the resources they'd need for times when it wasn't. That may still be the case in some industries. But in tech it's not like that. If anything it's the opposite. Extra work tends to just create even more extra work, which won't necessarily be compensated because you're salaried. Sure, you might get a raise or promotion, but that's not guaranteed. The reward mechanism uses gachapon mechanics. Which works out great for the company's owners in exactly the same way that loot crates are more profitable than more honest forms of game design. Whenever I see people sharing anecdotes of that one acquaintance of theirs who was a tech workaholic and was handsomely rewarded for all that extra work, it puts me in mind of a billboard for my state's lottery that says, "Only players win." Or the motivational dreck that MLM companies like Herbalife feed to their members. People seem to have trouble recognizing a scam when there are some token people for whom it actually worked out well.
And no, it's not healthy. The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser is about 20, 25 years old now, but summarizes a lot of the research on this sort of thing as of that time. Long story short, you get caught up in chasing the dragon.
Exactly. I want a wife and kids and a family, and for them not to hate me. Work has always got to be secondary to that.
I think the time spent being a workaholic (I did it a little myself early on) is sometimes helpful to really increase your skills quickly. But eventually you hit a sort of skill ceiling and it's increasingly not worth it, especially considering the things you are giving up.
Nobody at your funeral is going to be giving a heartfelt and tearful speech about how great a developer you were. Ordinary people honestly don't give a shit and neither should we besides just being generally competent and able to perform our roles.
That's why you barista FIRE. Build up that nest egg of $3m then quit to take a part time job at REI or the Amazon warehouse, working 20 hrs/week, and spend the rest of your time mountain biking, skiing.
I think it's encouraged due to milestones always being set with unrealistic ECDs, so every project is always behind and there's always urgent security fixes to 'catch up' on (I work on an AWS microservice as an L4 SDE, and joined 2y ago, for context). So you work in the off-hours thinking you're 'catching up' to the work you've 'missed', when in reality that is just the expected velocity to keep pace, and being 'caught up' is an unreachable goalpost.
I personally just learned to hide lack of progress on one task behind the urgency of another new issue, or keep tasks as vague as possible so that I can slow down on some days and speed up on other days. As a result I don't think I work crazy hours, but there's just a constant, fatiguing pressure of the feeling of 'I should be catching up on work right now'.
And I only recently realized that it's degrading my ability to enjoy any time at all, whether its PTO or just after work hanging out with my girlfriend.
This is my first eng. job though and I can't tell whether its better or worse in other places, and I tell myself it's probably better than the hours required at a startup. And I feel bad complaining to my friends when they're almost all unemployed or working gig jobs. /rant
This is actually why I’m skeptical about the complaints about Amazon
I’ve never worked there but I feel like I could? The complaints sound like a baseline level of toxicity seen in many places, I have the discipline for and others dont
Amazon would still be the last of the big tech’s I would choose for those reasons, the worst vesting schedule, and RTO, but it definitely sounds relatable
> One frivolous lawsuit destroys the revenue from multiple happy customers.
And there's little or no downside for freelancing plaintiffs' lawyers to file questionable lawsuits in the hope of extracting a nuisance-value settlement. So the mentality tends to be, what the hell, let's give it a shot. (A.k.a. "moral hazard.")
The State of MN stopped accepting certain credit cards for many DMV type activities, and now only accept ones that allow an explicit surcharge (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex).
A coworker of mine was punched on NYCT. Went to the cop in the station, who did nothing, and was sore for a week. This is a case where it was ‘reported’, but the cop said they couldn’t do anything if he wasn’t seriously hurt. My other NY coworkers have similar stories of other people they know.
Maybe random minor violence is up, but major violence is down… but the number of people I’ve heard of getting assaulted has definitely increased since COVID.
The number of ‘we can’t do anything’ stories I’ve heard have skyrocketed. If anything pre-Covid cops were to quick to go after people. I got jumped after high school by kids I didn’t know and just got a black eye; the cops went and roughed up the gang of guys based purely on me saying ‘that’s them’ as we drove past.
Are your various friends/family all tech-y people?
My "normal" friends and family are majority iPhone users. I'm Android.
I "literally ruin" their group texts. I've seen people actually reject relationships because they don't date people with "green bubbles".
Don't even get me started about work group texts.
I know restaurants where some of the servers have group iMessage chats with customers for early notification about nightly specials, Android users literally can't be added.
Likely not maliciously, but this has created almost a "second/lower class" of phone users that encompasses ~50% of the country.
> Are your various friends/family all tech-y people?
Not at all. A few of my friends are techies and they use Android/iPhone about 50/50. Family is mixed as well. No one in family uses iMessage.
> I've seen people actually reject relationships because they don't date people with "green bubbles".
This seems like a feature, not a bug. I don't think you want to date someone who makes important life choices based on Apple marketing.
Edit: Is this a "Bay Area" problem or something? Or maybe a "young people" problem? I just can't imagine caring about whether someone messages me with "blue" or "green" text bubbles.
> I've seen people actually reject relationships because they don't date people with "green bubbles".
No, that's stupid. Sorry, not trying to be a jerk, but there's no other way to put it: that's just stupid and not worth any consideration in this argument.
Even putting aside the unlikelihood of what kind of idiot would someone have to be to reject a relationship with an Android user, the basic premise of caring about blue vs green is too shallow to form as any basis of a massive suit like this.
"Apple must be broken up because people think my Android phone isn't cool" ??
Specific example: When on dating apps you see "green bubbles" as a red flag/un-dateable trait, it has done considerable harm.