I only ever want stuff I can limp along standalone with until we find something to replace it with. I got seriously burned by a small SaaS help desk app about 15 years ago. Turns out they had three customers, no investors and were burning $20k a month on operational expenditure
That's one problem with a fixed on call rate that some organisations offer. It's a hefty chunk of cash and sounds generous to the engineers. But the cost is already known and sunk up front and not proportional to the amount of call outs so the business sees it as a fixed operational expenditure rather than an appraisal of how fucked things are.
The performance metric quickly becomes how many people you still have on cover who haven't quit to work somewhere else because they are burned out.
The best (FSVO "best") on-call compensation I had was a fixed sum per standby week, for simply carrying the pager. Then, on top of that, overtime at the going rate (150%, 200%, or 300% of hourly rate) depending on when teh call-out happened, with a minimum 3h compensation for any calendar day in which a callout happened (it used to be 3h per incident, until someone had 12 call-outs that each took about 5 minutes to fix).
For partial on-call weeks, the standby comp was adjusted. For good or bad, it was a literal pager, so we could easily adjust things within the team and file paperwork afterwards, as the NOC just called the pager. The downside of that was that it required being in physical presence to hand the pager over.
If you want people to be engaged, delivering content that respects them is the only step. Engagement measurement and mechanics that interfere with that only serve to reduce that respect.
I’d rather actually we used postfix notation as that not ambiguous at all. I would like a modern “dc” written in Go if I’m honest. With engineering units, BCD decimal arithmetic, blackjack and hookers.
Actually if there was a postfix notation spreadsheet with that capability it would be an interesting tool.
My ex wife is an ex wife because she zoned out into Facebook constantly and stopped doing anything with the family. Then she went bananas and ran away with someone who ironically she split up with because he was always on Facebook. It can go pretty bad.
I’m super happy though as the kids stayed with me :)
I'm struggling with this currently. My partner spends 3+ hours a day scrolling Instagram (I know, I checked it in her Apple phone metrics).
When we watch movies, it's me watching it and her scrolling. When we're in the car listening to music, it's just me listening to music and her scrolling. I'm starting to struggle initiating conversations because she's simply not paying attention. Whenever we're out, half her time is spent through the lense of her phone so she can take photos for her story.
She refuses to admit its a problem, disregards any argument I put forward about how it's disrupting her life, and when I really sit down with her and tell her how it makes me feels, she attacks me about the time I spend at my laptop (which I track meticulously and know its at most an hour outside of work, so she is simply using it as a defense).
I've dated girls with drug addictions before, and it was easier than this because they at least admitted it was a problem. I feel like I can't even initiate the first step with her. It's crushing, because besides this issue, she's pretty much perfect.
I'm sorry to read this, I also have a similar same situation with my father.
He's in his late 70's and a year ago bought himself an iPhone. He now spends ~4 hours a day reading a tabloid newspaper app, which has endless content. His attention span has fallen noticeably and he can't keep up with conversations that happen in the same room while he's "scrolling".
When I visit he's on his phone, and we go out for a walk (in the beautiful countryside around us) he stops and disengages when his app sends him the latest notification about what's happened on "love island", or some other nonsense. When I leave he's on his phone.
I tried to talk to him about it, and about how it's particularly effecting my mother, who I can see is lonely and lost a person she could talk to, important at their time of life. He just gets defensive and angry, which leads no-where.
Will he spend the most of the rest of his life looking at a screen?
Similar with my father but he's got a dumb phone and browses on his laptop. When we have conversations with family he seems to always tune out after a few minutes and goes on the computer. His whole world view has been flipped upside down by conspiracy and hoax content. We've talked to him about not mentioning that stuff while we're over but it seems to be affecting his happiness nonetheless.
Mine too. It seems like every old father has fallen into the right wing conspiracy cesspool that has warped their mind. An entire generation lost. I really wonder what makes them so susceptible to that content. Internet illiteracy? Old age? It's just who they are? In other words, they want the conspiracies to be true, they want a reason to hate Fauci, Greta Thunberg etc.?
And even more, I wonder if it can be cured. I think it ties into how socially isolated men are, especially old men. Once you retire and your work social network is gone, their only social ties are online. They need to identify with a community, and I guess there is something appealing to being in a conspiracy in-group. It's just impossible to pull them out, because you have to replace that group with something else. And there's just nothing there for them.
Maybe a life of manual labor, always feeling like you can't get ahead in life. Then a group of people tell you it's because of some simple reason that you need to get angry about. Obviously it's something that you can't actually do anything about. So it makes you feel worse and makes you feel like you're at least doing something when you consume the content and spread it to others.
But the extreme ends do have similar features (hatred of certain ethic/racial groups, black and white thinking, desire to destroy the existing political order instead of reform it, conspiratorial thinking, etc.). The fact that you don’t think they’re equal is just because you have more sympathy towards one end of the spectrum over the other.
Why would the extreme left have hatred of certain ethnic/racial groups? Which ones would that even be? I hope this isn’t some the left hates white people thing. Bigotry of superficial things doesn’t make sense for what the hard left is about.
Conspiratorial thinking for the hard left is nothing close to what it is like for the alt-right. They are basically not similar at all. The alt-right is about Q, saying Trump lost a rigged election, or thinking moderates are grooming children and molesting kids. What is the equivalence with the hard left?
The black and white thinking is also super simplistic. How do moderates not have black and white thinking in comparison to the extremes? IE a moderate would say don’t vote or spend time on any one but the two main party candidates in the US. In other countries, they’d say focus on who has a proper chance of being elected. Black and white thinking and self fulfilling.
> The fact that you don’t think they’re equal is just because you have more sympathy towards one end of the spectrum over the other.
Or maybe I know they aren’t equal because they aren’t. Perhaps it says more about you and only you, that you jump to such an assumption and conclusion without knowing me.
> Why would the extreme left have hatred of certain ethnic/racial groups? Which ones would that even be? I hope this isn’t some the left hates white people thing.
I think Asians are considered privileged (so almost as bad as whites), and there was something wrong with Israel, too.
> saying Trump lost a rigged election
Some people on the left said similar things when Trump won the 2016 election.
Something wrong with Israel isn’t racism or bigotry.
Why would the left be the ones that put Asians on a pedestal? Fox, and alt right places put Asians in America on a pedestal enough already. It’s a regular thing when shitting on black people or brown migrants need to be kicked down by the [hard] right. I’d be curious of even minimal widespread hard left caring of Asians in a specific way.
Also, “almost as bad as whites”? Are you saying the hard left finds white people to be [really] bad? That’s something I specifically called out as an incorrect thing. It is a random talking point that to stir things up. I wish people wouldn’t take bullshit peddled seriously. Knowledge of hard left principles and people would show this is wrong.
Finally, some people everywhere of any kind are always saying something. A small portion of hard left people saying X is rigged is not comparable to the significant chunk of the moderate and extreme right doing the same.
———
I hope I have been able to keep the record straight that the extreme left isn’t the same as the extreme right and most assumptions or accusations of what the hard left is, have not and are not correct.
Well, I'm 10 years younger than dewclin Senior and I recently switched to a Nokia dumb phone for the summer and I have been keeping a record of screen time and what I was actually doing on the laptop. Using a paper page a day diary.
I'm not in the tabloid market segment, and perhaps I had the insight to self-diagnose? Did dewclin Senior do much before the iPhone arrived?
Perspective: I remember that Uncle Dave spent most of his (long) retirement watching sport on the telly back in the 1970s/80s. Any chance of sparking an outside interest?
I have a similar issue with my wife. The reason you can’t initiate the first step is because they are in denial that it’s a problematic addiction. Everything is telling them that social media is “sort of okay” even though the studies abound proving it’s a nefarious addiction.
It’s easier with hard drugs cause society, government, and even business mostly agrees it’s likely bad for you (except alcohol, that one still gets a free pass).
For me, I still try to remind her to be in the moment. She’ll ask to watch a show or movie and within 5 minutes her brain has pulled up her phone to read Reddit. I pause the show and then I’ll ask, “do you want to stop watching?”
She’ll reluctantly put her phone away (sometimes I have to wait a whole minute for her to actually put it down) and then I’ll resume the show on the TV.
The addiction is very very real and their diminishing attention span shows in their behaviour in other ways as well.
Honestly looking back at my situation which paralleled yours, life’s not worth suffering through. Took 7 years to sort it out here which was a big chunk of my life. If you’re not happy, get out of the situation that makes you unhappy as soon as you can. The regrets hurt more than the relationship problems did.
If you don't have kids with her, move on. She's made clear what her priorities are, or she needs the wakeup call that a failed relationship will bring.
Sounds horrible. How did you even start dating a person like that? She must be really something special but I just can't wrap my head around it because in my experience only exceptionally dull and dumb people are like that.
That said, I am a happily married old fart so it's only natural to not get some aspects of modern life.
This can be especially difficult for people who work online and particularly in social media where responding quickly to comments can be part of the role/expectation/defensive response.
maybe she's not perfect. maybe you just don't know her well enough because she's not there most of the time and you don't have projects you both really care about
If it's public facing I would suggest that you keep it in context and PR friendly and say something like:
"I am declining this as it is not fitting with the direction of the project and other users' requirements. You are free to fork it and maintain your own version"
I only ever want stuff I can limp along standalone with until we find something to replace it with. I got seriously burned by a small SaaS help desk app about 15 years ago. Turns out they had three customers, no investors and were burning $20k a month on operational expenditure