I worked at a large fully remote company and it had dedicated topic channels you could join. I thought that was an excellent solution since people could discuss their interests with other employees without it seeming like a corporately mandated chat break.
I now work for a much smaller company and I miss the chat channels.
I agree. Group channels on relevant topics is very helpful. Especially on technical details relevant to getting work done.
Yet here goes my rant. Nothing can replace a good in-person interaction. Perhaps I'm the old guy in the room. When teams are trying to build something there is nothing like water-cooler talk and banter about the work that helps relate shared challenges. Granted this is going to very specific to organizational needs.
I don't work in software development so perhaps my needs are different than most on Hackernews. I've managed teams in person and remotely. I've found that managing in person is a much more productive way to work.
I’m also an old guy at 51. I have been in cloud consulting for the last five+ years and I’m perfectly capable of leading large projects remotely.
I can do it in person. But I find diagramming with collaborative tools, shared Google docs, etc to be much better than in person drawing on a whiteboard. There are remote collaborative tools for everything.
With the tools available now, you can record all of the meetings and don’t have to take notes, have transcripts automatically generated and summarized with AI. I can then take all of the transcripts and other artifacts, throw them in Google’s NotebookLM and ask questions and get answers about the project (with citations).
I do the same for transcripts of meetings I am not in - mostly pre-sales.
The channels I'm talking about weren't about work, they were about hobbies - biking, cars, cats. I found that interaction quite fun and actually much better than in-person chats because I could choose to interact at my pace and comfort level.
I was a founding member of a dating app startup and worked there for 10 years until it filed for bankruptcy. I have some insight.
The number one reason dating apps suck is money, or the ability to make money is antithetical to the purpose of getting people together. A dating app is successful when people don't use it anymore, so that user churn is a serious impediment to earning a profit. Thus, the apps are designed to keep you paying that monthly subscription.
In that same vein, apps have to work way harder than websites to turn a profit because of app store fees. Our app would have been profitable if we didn't have to give Apple 30% of our fees, so we had to do way sketchier shit to increase profits to compensate.
Second problem is the wildly unbalanced male/female ratios in users. We had one of the better ratios in the market but it was still 70/30 male to female. Straight men and women simply do not have the same motivations around dating and trying to balance those is a hard problem. There are many videos out there about this problem, no need for me to go into detail.
Third is reach. We spent a lot of time trying to find ways to advertise or optimize for store placement and the restrictions placed on us were almost puritanical. For instance, Facebook wouldn't let us advertise because our relationship settings had "married" in the list, so we were forced to remove that option in order to place ads on Facebook. There were other compromises we had to introduce in order to qualify for other stores or advertisers.
Lastly, the Match Group is the 800lb gorilla of the industry and they buy all the good ones (OKCupid, Plenty of Fish) and grind them into maximum profitability like a hedge fund, thus removing any distinctiveness they had in favour of the Match methods.
What it comes down to is the ecosystem is gamed to make good datings apps impossible.
Thus, the apps are designed to keep you paying that monthly subscription.
I've heard this assertion before, but I don't understand it. Relationships are hard; most relationships fail. There's no need to do any special work to set people up for failure.
If dating app providers had some algorithm that could match people to make lifelong partners, surely somebody would have publicized it by now. Maybe it would be self-defeating as a commercial app, but somebody would do it anyway.
The apps do need ways to keep you coming back, but I don't think they can achieve that by locating and then hiding your perfect match. The best way to keep people coming back is to set them up with the best possible dates, and wait for those to fail entirely of their own accord.
Or at least, that's what I'd expect. If you have more insight as an insider I'd love to hear more.
For our app we front-loaded the list of accounts with the most "popular" users (number of likes, messages) within their criteria when people signed up. So the sort order was always "hottest" first then everything else.
This was to get people to sign up so they could chat.
People would get the most "success" with those closest to their own level but that did not result in subscriptions at the same rate as putting the hottest up front.
Just one of the many ways the apps don't work the way you expect.
Sorry, when you're applying to a dozen jobs a day, it's hard to put that personal spin into it.
I know you think you're a special snowflake that's different from every other company out there, but looking for a job is a grind. A tough one. Why make people dance and sing even more?
> Sorry, when you're applying to a dozen jobs a day, it's hard to put that personal spin into it.
True, it's a lot of work. But plenty of people (myself included) manage it.
I'm not going to say that anyone is wrong for not writing cover letters, of course. But there are lots of people making hiring decisions that put a lot of stock in good ones, so it makes logical sense to provide one.
> True, it's a lot of work. But plenty of people (myself included) manage it.
Generally what the person recruiting ate for lunch and the state of their bowel has ten times the influence on the success of your application than any amount of time you spend writing a cover letter. It's all random, and you can't know beforehand if your application will arrive at a serious recruiter or not.
The mischaracterizes what I'm saying. I'm not saying everyone has to do it. Nobody has to do it -- it's your choice. What I'm saying is that doing it can give you an advantage.
You know, I'm more on the side of the worker than capital a lot of the time and I despise much of modern hiring processes, but a cover letter doesn't seem like a big deal to me. I would think you could template it significantly and still avoid making it too boilerplate.
Like start with some bio - as a young child, I took everything apart to see how it worked (much to my parents' chagrin). From that I learned to see the beauty of a mechanical watch ticking away, and I see a similar beauty in a RabbitMQ server ticking away messages, directing them where to go and seeing the inside of the system at work - it's been a lifelong interest of mine.
That part can pretty much stay the same. Then write a paragraph or two about the job. You might not know much but try and find a connection. Like if it's a bank, talk about how you'd like to know more about how money moves over the modern global infrastructure, or if it's some service you've used, talk about how it was helpful. If it's hard to find a connection, then you can say I've got some relevant skills, but I don't know much about your industry and I'd like to learn more.
Someone applying to jobs dozens of times per day for months (so over a thousand applications), without bothering to research where the job is, much less write a cover letter, strikes me as working harder, not smarter.
If they were to apply to fewer jobs, less frequently, and more personally, putting more effort into each, they might not need to be searching for months, or making so many applications where it's clear to the company that they don't care whether they get that job or 1 of hundreds of others.
Maybe think of it like phishing vs. spearphishing. Or sending "hi" as an opening line on a dating app, vs. tailoring it to the person. The latter gets a better response rate per interaction.
Ah, yes; I'm sure you're much smarter than all the people who have struggled to find jobs over the last few years. Surely, their problem is their own incompetence, and not the incredibly hostile labor environment that decades of Gordon Gekko-style management have wrought, treating human beings as cost centers to be minimized, rather than as the reason we do any of the work in the first place.
It's simply a different strategy. If you're getting better results working harder on a scattershot, impersonal approach that broadcasts to the recipient that you aren't particularly interested in them, much less suited for each other, more power to you. That goes for jobs, dating apps, phishing, etc.
In all those cases (okay, not phishing), I got better results the other way myself. I also didn't reach out to recipients that struck me as having the type of culture/personality you described when I read up on them. So there's a selection bias there, too, but one that works for me.
That was never really true - I used to make plenty of cash refurbishing machines, playing for a bit, and selling them off. It can get pricey if you're trying to source unique parts for low-volume games but the vast majority of wear parts are generic and not that expensive. Mostly games are just dirty.
If you buy them brand new, you will never put enough plays on them to get them to the point they'll break. They are well made.
But that said you do need a certain level of handiness unless you plan to call the distributor to come out and fix it if it does break, because even new games will break occasionally.
If you'd ever talked to a pinball designer you'd know that their primary goal, without question, is making a fun game. No designer ever designed a game with coin drop in mind, except for things like appealing to a broad audience.
