Kind of reminds me of an interview question that a friend of mine suggested for when I conduct interviews: Pick your favorite/strongest language. How would you rate yourself, where 0 is "complete newbie" and 10 is "I invented the language"?
My friend, an EXTREMELY competent C++ programmer, rates himself 4/10 because he knows what he doesn't know.
I've interviewed people who rated themselves 9 or 10/10 but couldn't remember how their chosen language did iteration.
I poked around with Mattermost like ~8 years ago, but never anything serious. I don't know how good it is now, especially w/r/t administration, but I have to imagine that if you're concerned about $1000s -- let alone $100ks -- in annual costs, you can scale up your storage and still come out _way_ ahead. Maybe that's a naïve take?
> Teams only gained penetration through bundling with the rest of MS products on large enterprise contracts.
Hard disagree on the "only" modifier. Surely integration helped, but I've used Zoom, and I hate it every time I have to use it. Teams is comparatively a godsend.
I like that you have the ability to exclude on some dimension (eg, I don't use Amazon.com). Do you have or are you considering adding more retailers beyond the four you mentioned? For example, I buy a lot of unroasted coffee from sweetmarias.com, and excluding Amazon from Popgot results eliminates all but one listing (from Walmart).
Ah, hell yeah! My buddy on this project has been itching to add sweetmarias.com ... he just needed this as an excuse.
So yeah, we'll add it. If you shoot me an email (or post it here?) to chris @ <our site>.com I'll send you a link when it's done. Should take a day or two.
> For instance, people often tell me Costco is much cheaper than alternatives, and for me to compare I have to compile my shopping cart in multiple stores to compare.
A few years ago, I was very diligently tracking _all_ my family's grocery purchases. I kept every receipt, entered it into a spreadsheet, added categories (eg, dairy, meat), and calculated a normalized cost per unit (eg, $/gallon for milk, $/dozen eggs).
I learned a lot from that, and I think I saved our family a decent amount of money, but man it was a lot of work.
Glad you guys mentioned Costco -- I happen to have written a blog post on exactly that: https://popgot.com/blog/retailer-comparison Surprisingly, Costco does not win most of the time, and especially if you are not brand loyal. Costco has famously low-margins, but it turns out that when you sort by price-per-unit they're ok, but not great.
@mynameisash I'm curious what you learned... maybe I can help more people learn that using Popgot data.
One thing to call out is that costco.com and in-person have different offerings (& prices) -- but you probably know that already.
I just dusted off my spreadsheet, and it's not as complete as I'd like it to be. I didn't normalize everything but did have many of the staples like milk and eggs normalized; some products had multiple units (eg, "bananas - each" vs "bananas - pound"); and a lot of my comparisons were done based on the store (eg, I was often comparing "Potatoes - 20#" at Costco but "Potatoes - 5#" at Target over time).
Anyway, Costco didn't always win, but in my experience, they frequently did -- $5 peanut butter @ Costco vs $7.74 @ Target based on whatever size and brand I got, which is interesting because Costco doesn't have "generic" PB, whereas Target has much cheaper Market Pantry, and I tried to opt for that.
My family’s favorite experience has been that Costco usually doesn’t have the cheapest option but it has a good value option.
Our main example is something like pasta. Our local grocery stores all carry their own brand of dirt cheap pasta but it’s not as good as the more expensive pasta at Costco. Comparable pasta at the local grocer would be more expensive.
For items that are carried at both stores, Costco is usually no cheaper than the regular retail price and rarely much more expensive.
What is better than Teams? I don't love Teams, but it's light years beyond what Zoom provides, and the services that Amazon and Google offer were pretty garbage last time I checked.
I worked at a company that used teams a few years ago, after an acquisition. I'd routinely not get notifications for DMs and other important messages. The devops guy was trying to figure out how to port our slack prod errors channel to teams. I felt bad for him. Can't remember if he ever succeeded.
I also really like Slacks huddles and Discord VC's (we treated them like conference rooms).
I don't think you're wrong, but I know people who grew up poor and blow money on stupid shit -- or at least unnecessary purchases (eg, upgrading to every single new iPhone).
OTOH, I grew up upper-middle class, my dad being quite frugal and a big DIYer. Similarly, I make good money and am also very frugal. I have no reason to flaunt money around my peers.
Current Microsoft employee here. Every tech company I've worked at has some bullshit aspects to it. I was just telling someone yesterday about the first company I worked at where we were required to track our time on various projects in 15-minute increments, but it just led to everyone punching in some semi-plausible numbers. I guess Microsoft's bullshit - from the author's perspective - is that it uses Connects and it focuses on growth mindset?
A lot of anecdata in the article, so I guess I'll add mine here: I don't think the Connect process is too onerous, and I don't think any of my managers have ever really brought up the subject of growth mindset except for as it relates to our twice-yearly or sometimes quarterly Connects. YMMV depending on the group and team you're in, but growth mindset is very much in the background for me. And while I do have my copy of Hit Refresh on my bookshelf that I was given, no one has ever used it to push any talking points or corporate agenda. It was really just kind of a PR push.
This article feels like it's making a mountain out of a molehill to push an agenda. Maybe all the people this author interviewed have a particular angle, but the overall "culty" message here does not ring true to me at all.
Also, to be picky:
> Over the coming decades, [Carol Dweck] further refined and defined her ideas, coining the terms “growth mindset” and “fixed mindset” in 2012, a mere five years before Nadella took over at Microsoft.
Nadella became CEO in 2014. At least get the objective facts right, please.
+1 to this post. Ex-Microsoft employee here (left last year after 7 years) and I agree completely with the parent.
The article makes mountains out of molehills. Every large company has its own culture and its own BS. Having worked at many over my career, Microsoft’s was better than most (actually, I’d say it was better than all of them).
Ford has also done a decent job of over-promising. I put a deposit on the Lightning the morning after their announcement. They originally priced it at $40k[0], and now their base model starts at $63k[1]. When the opportunity finally came up for me to buy one, the two lower trim levels were unavailable, and the best I could get was something like $75k, which was a hard pass for me.
The destructive EEE strategy is replaced by a constructive poisoning the well strategy. That's arguably moral progress while there is no legal or financial incentive to do so.
That's praise for Nadella, not Ballmer.
My friend, an EXTREMELY competent C++ programmer, rates himself 4/10 because he knows what he doesn't know.
I've interviewed people who rated themselves 9 or 10/10 but couldn't remember how their chosen language did iteration.