I wish I could understand the managers that insist on these patterns.
Are they completely out of touch and don't know that people hate them? Are they aware that people hate them but don't care? Or perhaps they've drank their own Kool-Aid so much that they truly believe nobody would actually want to say "No" and think they just need more opportunities to say Yes?
Thieves are typically not technical people. If they were, they'd be using their technical skills at a legitimate job, not relying on burglarizing to make a quick buck.
They also are interested in getting in and out as quickly as possible. They're not going to take the time to disassemble a computer to remove just the hard drive, they're gonna steal the entire computer.
> Maybe I should read about these actual crimes
You should, especially on the kidnapping front. The extreme majority of kidnappings are from a relative or someone the child knows who will run off with them during the day, not break in at night.
...
Not sure that actually will make you feel better, tbh.
If I can answer a question with a 30-second response to a Slack message, I will, and I won't mind it as long as it's not frequent. I won't join a call, and I'm only logged into Slack and Outlook on my phone, so if answering requires checking something on Confluence or Jira, I can't help.
Maybe I feel this way because actually being asked something is exceptionally rare. I'll be gone for a week and MAYBE I'll get one message.
In my experience, the reseller agents don't even offer better prices these days.
So I'll typically use a service like Google Flights to find a flight, pick an itinerary, but then go to the airline's web page to book the flight directly.
Same for hotels. Find a hotel on Expedia, then book with the hotel directly.
I've seen too many horror stories of people booking through a reseller, and if something goes wrong, the reseller tells you to talk to the hotel/airline while the hotel/airline tells you to talk to the reseller.
Someone else said it on HN a couple years ago...Something about how there's no such thing as a 10x engineer, but there are a LOT of 0.1x engineers and a few 2x.
The absolute worst is someone that tries to brand themselves as a 10x engineer by constantly using programming terms like "dynamic programming", "polymorphism", "recursion" and the like, but they're really a 0.1x engineer because they don't truly understand what any of those are and when they should actually be using them, and so try to shoehorn them in when they don't need them while also not understanding them, and end up writing low-quality crap.
Took too long for management to get rid of that guy.
> after enough instances of "I'm trying to do X. It's not working. Help." type messages.
Related to this, I will never for the life of me understand why people think it's okay to say "I get an error" without saying what the error is.
I don't expect a non-technical person to understand the error, but I do expect a non-technical person to know that what the error message is is useful to the person trying to help you and to proactively provide the contents of the error message, even if it's a shitty cell phone picture of the error.
The thing is, they've still taken the time to actually write "I get an error". So by principle of reciprocity, you can just take 2 seconds to say, "What's the error?" Usually that won't lead anywhere; but as long as you don't spend more time than they are, you aren't really wasting much time; and they can't exactly complain that you weren't helpful. And occasionally it will lead somewhere, in which case it's a win.
Because modern tech and modern tech support has a terrible UX in general built by engineers around their engineering heuristics.
By the time a non-tech user reaches the point of seeing an error they are cognitively overloaded and since the errors are pretty much incomprehensible to the users, the user doesn’t get the feeling of it being anything that’s tied to their actions. It’s just anxiety-inducing noise, it never registers as something that has a meaning, so even copying and pasting an error feels like a meaningless step that their overloaded and already anxious brains skip.
If errors are meant to be shared with tech support, the UX should reflect that (and some interfaces do that where you just have a button to send the crash report or smth). If errors are meant to give users agency to solve the problem on their own, the UX should reflect that too.
I found that in general, Firefox works fast enough that I can't tell the difference in performance between it and Chromium-based browsers. I have 128 GB of RAM on my desktop, so even if it's a memory hog, I'd never notice.
However, occasionally I'd run into sites with terrible performance issues. Facebook [0] was often insanely slow on Firefox and would sometimes freeze up entirely.
I wanted a Chromium-based browser but didn't want Chrome, Edge, or Brave. I ended up landing on Vivaldi and have been happy with it so far.
[0] Yeah, yeah, ridicule me all you want for still using Facebook, but I enjoy it because I don't have shitty friends.
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