Back in college (2010), a friend started working at a bustling coffee shop, and pretty soon our friend circle included her "coffee crew" of friends from the shop. Every Monday, a paper with shifts for the next two weeks were posted and someone would take a photo so they could "fix it" without management involved.
The owner could never keep track of who had classes or specific commitments, so they would get together (originally in person) to independently swap shifts and make sure the people who needed more hours could get it. A few hours of communication, the schedule would be completely revised.
This was the peak of app-dreaming, and I always figured it was a matter of time before a ubiquitous shift scheduler took over the industry. The crucial piece would be giving workers a level of autonomy that would be challenging for management to accept. As far as I can tell, no app ever took off, but this flexible work option sounds like an evolution of that idea for a much larger operation.
I don't do a lot of interviewing at my company, but I encountered my first fraud candidate two weeks ago. He said he was having connectivity issues and asked about not joining video. I offered to work with HR to reschedule but he said he didn't want to inconvenience anyone. If it was purely my decision, I would say no video = no interview, but I guess fraudsters thrive when administrative coordination breaks down.
He gave a technically sound answer to every question, but I was extremely skeptical. For one thing, he wholeheartedly agreed to the design outlined in my "honeypot" question where the solution would be something prone to triggering immense technical debt. He also dismissed the "soft" question about a time he encountered a challenge.
His most recent work experience was at a competitor where a former colleague works (we're in a niche space). That friend told me he encountered the same thing, including a candidate who recently claimed to work at my company and was moving (I never heard of the name nor could find mention in Slack/AD).
Microsoft's xCloud only streams controller games for now, and I think that has provided an exceptional user experience early on. You can select the game in your browser, and pick up the different input device while the stream loads. Once you're done playing, put the controller down and Ctrl-W to close the tab and go back to the real-world.
In my experience, ratings are an inaccurate measurement. If you want to learn how to cook Pad Thai, are your going to trust the 5-star recipe with 30 responses, or the 3.9-star recipe with 3,100 responses??
An active comment section tends to be a step above reviews, because at least you can see if other people find the recipe too spicy, or boring, or an exciting base for other ingredients. And no, 2 comments that say "I loved this recipe!" and "Thanks!" isn't sufficient. This is usually how you can tell a recipe on an aggregate of authors like FoodNetwork, AllRecipes, or NYTimes is legit.
In my opinion, one step above an active comments section is following individual recipe writers that you jive with. An individual writer will usually have a measurement of success that you can agree with (health-conscious, budget-friendly, unique flavors, wide appeal), so you can understand their motivation better. Also, they have some credibility on the line. When you find writers that you agree with, you may even find their "filler" text to have some substance (another reason a "poseur" would feel obliged to include vapid copy before their recipe).
The Lasagna recipe is an independent cooking blogger (note the "Hi there, I'm Holly!" in the top-right corner). Food Network, Allrecipes, Tegel, and other sites mentioned are not promoting a specific person, but an entire brand. Babish is the exception to this rule, but he "changed the game" by going for YouTube instead of blogs.
Although the optimization is infuriating, in my search to become a decent cook, I have found more success following specific writers instead of a top result/highest rated meal. Many of these writers self-promote (and cross-promote) on sites with the same template as spendwithpennies.com
I wouldn't be surprised if that annoying SEO template was designed in collaboration with Cookbook publishers. The "anecdote before recipe" style was made famous in Irma S. Rombauer's Joy of Cooking, and took on a variety of forms throughout the 20th century.
I really like this analogy, especially while WSB-style "YOLO" has become a life philosophy over the last 5 years.
That said, I wonder if the "fantasy financial league" game can become a lesson by selectively choosing a handful of stocks over a 30 year period. Tell the kids about the economics of the period (let's say the 1960s - 1990s) and provide a few companies with the tickers, names, and descriptions replaced. Watch as the "blown up" stock subsides, but the conservative investor wins in the long-run.
EDIT: I cannot stop thinking about how ubiquitous YOLO as a philosophy has become in the last decade. Everything about life has become a binary of win or lose. Your stock market plays "won" if you are in the green, your tweet "lost" if you did not get effective engagement, your latest commit "won" if the established metrics succeeded after deployment. And then there are the implications in machine learning, where everything becomes a binary "correct or incorrect" assessment...
I am an IT Consulting (not with SAP) who has a Computer Science degree. I would not hesitate to hire a liberal arts major for a technical role in my company. Programming and analytical thinking is a tiny fraction of my job; most of it demands public speaking, organizational skills, and business relationship instincts.
If these people work at a firm like Accenture that just outsources the technical challenge, coding skills become completely unnecessary.
Also, a ton of the industry is built around the risk of something unexpected happening after you push the button (as mentioned below) and distributing blame if the end-result isn't precisely what customers anticipated (the old "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" adage)
It may seem backwards to people outside of giant organizations, but it is a necessary aspect of modern business (and there are tons of industries that make more money while generating less value for society).
ServiceNow is another disruptor with an interesting approach similar to SalesForce. SNow started as a Remedy alternative, but really saw IT groups as the infrastructure that every other Department relies on. While SAP hold influence in a company by controlling the purse strings, a good ServiceNow implementation holds the Microservice and Technology information every group is reliant on.
I'm not as familiar with SalesForce, but I think it has a similar stake by focusing on CRM. If you start at the customer data, you can influence the profit centers and influence a company that way.
I mostly mention these success stories to say that a Goliath like SAP won't be taken down by one David, but by a ton of ankle-biters eating their lunch. Maybe these ankle-biters will be easily replaceable, but I wonder what an organization where Enterprise Software is constantly hot-swapped will look like, given how inefficient Application Retirement projects can be.
Competitors cannot outsmart the leader in every facet of business. They creatively optimize some processes, but for the rest of the business their choices are wing it or purchase the Commercial Software solution.
Even a bleeding-edge company will hit an obstacle they cannot improvise through (like in QA or Compliance). That's when enterprise software creeps into an otherwise lean operation.
Simple game design really is a beautiful thing. You find a mechanic that is fun to noodle with (like the slippery control logic), throw in a hook to get people ("oh look! a green square!") and then you can refine and refactor into a billion different permutations.
My favorite part about this was how the red square would get faster in bursts. It was like the baddie was getting increasingly exasperated about his whole damn situation.
The owner could never keep track of who had classes or specific commitments, so they would get together (originally in person) to independently swap shifts and make sure the people who needed more hours could get it. A few hours of communication, the schedule would be completely revised.
This was the peak of app-dreaming, and I always figured it was a matter of time before a ubiquitous shift scheduler took over the industry. The crucial piece would be giving workers a level of autonomy that would be challenging for management to accept. As far as I can tell, no app ever took off, but this flexible work option sounds like an evolution of that idea for a much larger operation.