There are a lot of government/pseudo-government (like utility) websites that still require IE, I suppose because of ActiveX junk. There are people still using COBOL And I’m sure it’s not just government. Any institution that is around for a long time is bound to have legacy stuff that no one wants to change.
That causes issues like this though.
It’s not even a big win for the megacorp. They’ve trained their smartest people to start looking for their next job the day after they start their current job. Like American itself, the Fortune 500 companies are trending toward becoming value extraction tools for the most sociopathic users, who will leave behind zombie companies staggering along powered entirely by their brands.
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It really is completely insane how hollow most of the S&P 500 components are. They’ve been systematically strip mined of anything of tangible value for generations of managers now. There used to be tons of good targets for private equity vampires once upon a time… today they’re buying single family homes. Nobody would bother buying up single family homes to convert into rental property portfolios with pension funds to raid… but good luck finding an overfunded pension fund (private equity code for a actually funded pension fund) in 2021.
All that’s left is a logo and a brand name that people are still stupid enough to associate with quality usually.
There’s actually an even funnier story that’s about a brand new system that was just built. The system generates reports (think along the lines of a system that produces quarterly sales data for company X over a specified period). It’s a big improvement over the old system of having junior people just assemble the data by hand, but the user flow is as follows:
- User goes to a web portal and fills out a form to identify the kind of report they want.
- The server generates the corresponding form as an Excel doc.
- The user fills out the Excel form with the name of the company and the period, along with internal housekeeping information.
- The user then uploads the Excel form to their document management system.
- Over the course of several hours, the service detects that the form has been uploaded, processes the request, and puts a new Excel doc with the report on the DMS.
The only explanation I can think of is that the responsible developer got into a huge time crunch, so he stole a particularly mischievous genie’s lamp and wished for “a software system where the user sends a GET request to the server, which provides a form containing the required information, then the user sends a POST request containing the form data as GZIPped XML, and the service responds in the same fashion.”
Odd question. Is there any definitive or comprehensive book on Jeff Bezo’s management style / history? More written from a business perspective rather than a biographical one?
As a first pass, you could read his series of annual shareholder letters, starting with 1997:
https://ir.aboutamazon.com/annual-reports-proxies-and-shareholder-letters/default.aspx
It pisses me off how good these are. The guy wasn’t always like this.
We do sometimes forget that although capitalism is a natural landing place for sociopaths, it’s also a reinforcement / feedback loop that makes people worse over time. The most success you have being a sociopath, the more you start to normalize that behavior in your brain and you become more sociopathic and more successful and more sociopathic and on and on and on.
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Thanks I hate it.
We also unfortunately tend to empathize the most with the people we are connected to and regularly interacting with. When those people are shareholders, constantly whining to you for more profits, then those people increasingly become your priority.
Sociopathic behavior is both selected for and encouraged by capitalism.
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lmao I literally had one of the funniest moments of my life just now. Talking to a recruiter on the 3rd contact for this company.
“yeah so for all of our candidates we have them do a timed 90 minute code challenge where they build out this thing in react. Most of them get done in 75 minutes”
“then we have an on site react challenge where you pair program with one of our engineers to make xyz this takes 2 hours”
“then you have a similar thing to do CSS blah blah blah”
and I just shut him down, yeah dude I’ve been doing software engineering for 10 years, I have a board game website built from scratch that hundreds of people use every day that has 1000 stars on github, if you want to find if I can program you can look at that, I’m not jumping through hoops to do a ton of work for free. People like me aren’t going to do that and people like me are impossible to hire and I would know. But hey good luck! end of call. Fuck all that.
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Lololol these fucking people, that would enrage me
Let’s say you indulge them in this because it is Big Tech Co and salary + stocks are a big upgrade. You go through the process and then at the end, one of the devs writes feedback like: “The candidate was able to arrive at a working solution for the problem, but it wasn’t elegant. DoNotHire/10.” 
Tech interviewing is broken. I doubt other fields are much better, but the other fields steal less of your time with the take home project type stuff.
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Yeah if this was FAANG and not only a huge compensation bump but resume builder that would follow me the rest of my life then maybe I would consider it but for some random SAAS place? Fuck off. I and everyone else who’s not entry level are completely over this stuff.
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I swear to god if I ever have to do a sales interview again in my life if someone tries to do the ‘sell me this pen’ bullshit I’m just going to hand them my tax return from the previous year and say ‘fuck your pen’.
That shit felt degrading when I was young and unproven. It’s not me who is trying to keep my tiny sliver of remaining equity alive in that deal it’s the recruiter after they asked me to sell a fucking pen.
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I always regretted playing along with all the bullshit in interviews.
“Tell me about a time you overcame adversity.” RIGHT THIS SECOND MOTHERFUCKER I HATE INTERVIEWING BUT IM HERE ARENT I
“Why do you want this job?” BECAUSE I HAVE TO PAY RENT ASSHOLE
Fuck you fuck you fuck you
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But if 90% of work is bullshit, they have to ask you these questions to test your ability to bullshit. How else will they know you are qualified?
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This reminds me of my interview process for google. Non tech leadership position.
- They called me.
- 7 interviews over 3 months.
- They tell me ive passed the interviews. I celebrate
- But wait. theres this whole other selection process. We have to review your application in a bunch of committees.
- They ask a bunch of salary questions on take home pay. I tell them that im being massively overpaid by the shitty failing startup im trying to leave plus its tax free because of loopholes in the Philippines
- google policy insists they offer more than current take home so they put together a crazy salary package.
- im like. Thats crazy. Im happy to work for half that.
- hiring committee rejects me because the job grade required for that salary is way more than my experience justifies…
Note - im reading between the lines on the last one
Beyond infuriating.
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I’m sure interviewing a bunch of code monkeys and ultra checkmarking the handful that happen to produce a one-off eLeGanT sOlUtIon to a 75-minute task is super predictive of future performance.
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