AlteredStateBlob

I once had a sales-bro tell the client we'd "monitor the internet for X". That has remained one of the most important hammers for me to wield when discussions even start coming up. How the fuck does one "monitor the internet" to a degree that fits the clients interpretation of this phrase. Sales guy is still with us and a good lad, he owns that mistake. But fuck was it ever crazy.

We've decoupled timelines from estimates almost entirely and to the ire of all our sales and C-Level only give out Quarter based estimates anymore. "End of Q3 or early Q4". When we deliver mid Q3, everyone is happy. The funny bit is that since we've made these changes, we've not noticed any drop in client interest at all. What we do notice is that we actually ship what we promise (sometimes even more). We also don't have clients who think we'll do 10 hours of work for free anymore, because we've anchored the value of every little bit we do properly. We also filter the stingy clients who are completely pointless and are just wasting our time, while engaged with our competitors.

There's a lot, a looooot of FOMO in sales on the side of our own sales people. So they lowball their shit to make sure we close. Then we can't keep what's promised and nobody is happy and contracts that would only be profitable after like 3 years don't get renewed and we lose a client. Great stuff. Then try and get them back after a shitty experience like that.

The mind boggles.

Thank you, I'm sure trying. I got a good 30-35 years left in this, I'd rather not be miserable or make people miserable for the duration.

Hate this. I work as a PO. Praise my devs every chance I get both internally and towards our clients. Always pass on positive feedback and use negative feedback only translated into priority weights.

I see my job as keeping stakeholders at bay and let them do their job. I bundle requests into feature requests that cover as many current and future needs as possible, but never without internal meetings first.

Just getting sales to stop making deals on feature requirements with clients was a very long uphill battle that we have mostly won. Now it all goes through my team first and we always do estimates with our development teams. Takes a bit of time, takes a bit longer, but never have I seen a client get back to us with the same urgency as they request a quote anyway. If they can not wait a week, they won't be a good fit for what we are doing and how we do things.

Posts like these make me feel accomplished :D

Ugh, god damn.

I am om the product side of things and have created some basic proof of concept tools with AI that my bosses wanted to sell off. No way no how will I be able to sevrice or maintain them. It's incredibly impressive that I could even get this output.

I am not saying it won't become possible, but I lack the fundamental knowledge and understanding to make anything beyond the most minor adjustments and AI is still wuite bad at only addressing specific issues or, good forbid, expanding code, without fully rewriting the whole thing and breaking everything else.

For our devs I see it as a much improved and less snide stackoverflow and Google. The direct conversational nature really speeds things up with boilerplate code and since they actually know what they are doing, it's amazing. Not only that but we had devs copy paste from online searches withoout fully understanding the snippets. Now the AI can explain it in context.

I don't think they need excuses, no. But there is a limit to how much you can realistically get out of a stone.

The world economy has absorbed fuck all, because a lot of, if not all, bad debt is still floating around the markets, hidden in swaps overnight repo, and similar mechanics. I don't care if you believe me, it's crazy talk for sure. It doesn't even matter a single bit if I am right, because there's fuck all to do about it for most day to day people. I'm also not being alarmist in: OH BUY GOLD NOW, PREP YOUR BUNKERS!!!!

I would much rather be wrong here. Would be fan-fucking-tastic, and if I am, good. That'd be literally the best for everyone.

All I'm saying is, the underlying issues that keep leading to these market upsets aren't resolved and CS, et al are just minor break outs of a major issue that keeps bubbling and boiling. Fucked if I knew when it'll blow, but the next time it does, will be bigger than anything we've seen. Just these three banks failing in 2022 was already much larger in value than the entirety of 2008-2009 collapses.

Again, it doesn't matter what I think or say. I don't know if I'm right either, how could I? No one does. I just believe that it's much more likely that the same fucks that caused 2008, who never saw any consequences whatsoever and are still running the show, never changed their greedy underhanded and horrible ways and 2008 was never resolved either, than all of them having a change of heart and never doing anything shifty or illegal ever again, cross their hearts and hope to die.

There's still a full on America+China+EU sized market crash boiling under that "booming" surface. I don't know quite how they staved it off with just Credit Suisse and two other banks imploding so far. But it's not done, it's not finished, it hasn't even started.

No idea what backroom deals were done in the financial sector to stop it all for now, but it's still coming. Otherwise corporations wouldn't still be bleeding the plebs dry with cost of living and trying to offset their shitty investments on the CBMS as well as fighting tooth and nail to keep students indebted forever, so the party can keep on rolling.

It's an utter clusterfuck. We'll see what happens in the next few years.

"Listen, we thought you dirty hippies might actually be winning and figured we'd be early betting on that horse. But then money was still in the planet killing juice, so we'd rather make all the money."

They did not struggle to come up with it. They struggled to get a puppet of Putin to allow this funding to be passed where it needs to go. Victor orban blocked the shit out of it.

I managed to get this instead of a pay raise. One of the very best decisions I ever made. Sure more money is always nice but it wouldn't be the difference between buying a house and not anyway. Might as well reclaim life time and enjoy what I got, while I got it.

I mean, bro doesn't give a shit about fair working conditions or good pay for his underlings. Why should his own contract terms be treated any better.

Fuck him.