Conserve thier god given right to exploit everyone and everything for thier short term benefit.

Doh, I thought it was Liechtenstein. I rember three small things from my kids geography quizes… Monaco, Vatican city, and Liechtenstein. So in my mind it had to be one of them. Lol.

Yeah I never understood why ads make so much money. Seems like some kind of gift is going on.

Selling personal data at all should just be banned. It says personal right in the name… Giving away free services with forced adds is exploitation in my opinion. The first step to solving the issue is to require everything have a paid option that gets rid of adds and doesn’t sell personal data for additional profit. The hard part with that is preventing them from just setting the price unreasonably high.

Or… do both. Buy premium because you are actually getting something for your money… a platform. And support ad blockers to stop the ads where the product is just a webpage.

Well, I suppose by the time we no longer have to work for a living, we will easily have extremely good sex robots. So it will probably be an irrelevant question.

Oh I agree with you on sex work in the present day. I just go a step further for the future. People should work because they want to, not have to. The value of a person’s work should not determine the value of the person. One thing I do wonder though. If we didn’t have to work, many people still would because they enjoy the work. Would people do sex work in that situation? If they want to, I support thier right to do so. But it was a thought that came to me reading this post, that I haven’t fully explored in my head yet.

When I see that I think both should be illegal.

Kids

Predatory advertising… commonly is the form of fear mongering, but any form should be illegal.

Remember solarwinds… that was supposed to destroy them to. Still here though.
You seemed surprised companies would risk a catastrophic bug because it would destroy them. But this will be the evidence that it won’t. And yes, the most likely cause was that the copy process failed somewhere along the line. But testing hashes of the update against what you actually tested is part of qa. And clearly testing didn’t happen somewhere critical.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-19/technology-shutdown-abc-media-banks-institutions/104119960. They didn’t even test the update before pushing it. And the company will still exist in a month. They will take a stock hit, might lose some customers, but in the end it will just be a blip.

Simple. Been a QA, worked with QAs, been to conferences with QAs. We tell the boss we can’t cover the whole thing, they say just cover the most important stuff. The general advice from veteran QAs is to not even say that to the boss. They know, and they can’t get more resources. So veteran QAs advise others to get a feel for how much time you can spend on a thing before they start complaining that you are holding it up. Then work within that timeframe. As long as nothing major gets through it’s all good. Your view is one of survivor bias. Nothing big got through, but that doesn’t mean it was completely tested. Its good enough, untill it isn’t. Side note, I’ve seen product managers close bugs, not because they weren’t bugs, but because they were bad enough, compared to features they thought would sell more software. This was an outlier, usually they just wait a few years and mass close everything that is X years old. That, I have personally seen everywhere I have worked.

I guess now I know that you just have a super narrow view. Cause no, call centers are not the majority. Not even close. The average tech worker interacts with far more SaaS software products in a day than a call center worker. That however explains your views. Call center software is an outlier. The workers are usually hourly, not salary. And so thier time does matter to the purchaser of the software, and usually it matters a lot. That just isn’t the way it is for the rest of the SaaS market.

I am starting to doubt your credentials. When a salaried employee works 44 hours, it costs the same as when they work 40. And the tougher the economy, the more work you can squeeze out of each person. And no, even in this economy people will leave, not everyone will hang onto thier jobs. And it will be the ones who refuse free overtime that go. This is even amazons well known work model. Only they enforce required firings to take it a step further.

The shift was around 2018 or so. It was talked about on qa forums and conferences. It likely was talked about at conferences that management go to, but I can’t confirm that. It seems like you must work in a specialized industry. 1 QA to 4 devs is about the standard. And they keep up by cutting corners. The effort required to creat test automation to test a feature is on par with the effort to create the feature. And then you have to add in old tests that need to be maintained. No way one person can cover 4 and not cut corners.

The company that takes the risks gets the product out before those that don’t. And the ones who get lucky not to have a major thing tank them win in the end. That is just how the system works.

So I know layoffs don’t make revenue go up. But in your previous comment you said revenue drives the stock price.

You are so sure of yourself, anyone who disagrees must be an idiot. And you then miread what they are saying because they must be idiots.

But at this point you have just validated what I am saying. You said there is no metric for covid. Correct it was people perceived evaluation that drove the price. Which is what I have said all along. Everyone can see the numbers, so the numbers no longer matter. When you buy a stock, you are betting others will too, but for a higher price. And if you both have the same numbers, then it isn’t numbers that would make the difference, it is perception.

In one thread someone questioned if I even work in tech. So I started mentioning my experience to back up my claims. My current CTO fully admits that we have to cut corners and deliver features to win customers. That why I work for him. He is honest about it. And he is not new at it either.

As for time is money… take a person working 40 hours a week, and replace thier tool with a cheaper lower quality tool, then tell them to make it work. They start working 44 hours a week. You saved money and got the same result. Awards for you. And a lot of people will do the extra work, because they care about the work. As a bonus, the people who won’t work extra leave. Now you have a self selecting group of people who will work longer for the same price. And those tend to be the people who won’t leave for various reasons. So now you can even not backfill some of the ones who left, and tell the ones who stayed to cover the slack. Wow, even more money saved. I’ve seen that happen at a company with billions in revenue and great profits. But the shareholders demand growth, so if they can’t sell more, they must cut expenses to grow profits.

What goal post have I moved. My initial comment could have said work well for the user. But the second sentence implied that pretty clearly. And I am still saying it now. And great for you. You probably drank the kool-aid to get that position, so you feel the need to claim carry water for the illusion that upper management always try to project. I mean, you might be the exception, and truely believe in the things you say. Maybe you even work for one of the rare companies where it is true. But the vast majority of people working in the field that I have talked to have said that just isn’t how it is most places. Many said it used to be, when their company was small… but that it changed.

And yes I wrote regression tests. And I worked hard to maintain them while writing tests on features. But with a 5 to 1 ratio of devs to QA, it wasn’t possible to not cut corners. A year after I changed jobs I found out they had lowered the bar for releasing to 55% passing of the regression tests. I never had the tools to make them able to resist change as they had no one owning the automation tools. The next guy just didn’t care as much. The job I moved to was qa automation so the qa’s were my customers. I did my best there to give them automation that would reduce maintenance costs. But we weren’t allowed to buy anything, we had to write it all. And back then open-source wasn’t what it is today. So the story was the same, cut corners on testing. And of course the age old quote… “why is QA slowing down our release process”. Not why are the devs writing poor code. The devs weren’t bad either, but they were pressed to get features out fast.

As for why do they invest in it at all. Optics is a big part of it. But also to help maintain that low bar you spoke of. The moment industry trends started touting the Swiss army knife developer who could do it all including testing, they dropped qa teams like a bad habit. Presentations were given on how too much testing was bad, and less tests were better… that pendulum swings back and forth every decade or so. Because quality drops below the low bar, and the same exec who got a promotion for getting rid of the qa team at his last job 7 years ago, gets accolades for bringing it back in his new job.

Stock price is all speculation. Revenue yesterday doesn’t mean revenue today. And you don’t buy stock in a company that stays the same, you buy stock in a company that you speculate will go up in value. Revenue can be going up, and the stock price down because people think the price will go down. How do layoffs make revenue go up? Yet they often make the stock price go up. If the stock prices was super dependent on metrics, algorithms would be making soo much money we wouldn’t have anything else picking stocks. But the algorithm traders can’t predict human speculation. So they tend to work much better on smaller companies where there is less attention and less speculation.
And not all companies by any means just the big ones. And I am sure there are some exceptions, there always are.