levi-turner

2 mesi fadiscuss

As a sorta informed outsider, conceptually this makes intuitive sense. But in practice, how does this work? It seems a lot of the intuition breaks down if we don't assume it's network (aka 1 vendor). Fundamentally it's a bunch of external actors where we cannot verify trust and in order to solve for the needs of the individual, suboptimal choices must be made. To put it another way, even if computers can drive cars, what _else_ needs to be in place for this vision?

levi-turner

5 mesi fadiscuss

The main under appreciated influence in all this is how much talent can reinforce work. There are outliers on either side (pure talent, pure work) if you squint, but ultimately the best of the best are the ones who are extraordinarily talented but put in an incredible amount of work (and are intelligent enough / discerning enough to find the right coaches to work on the right things). From the outside we look at the work as superhuman, but for many "common" people, we all spend ridiculous amounts of time on things we enjoy. The academic finding that I always found the most illustrative of this was that the correlation of IQ to outcome increases after age 18. The environmental influence of your parents goes away, both the overeager parents who push their kids when the kids don't care and the dreadful parents who drag down their kids success.

levi-turner

9 mesi fadiscuss

> Was it agreed by some salespeople without the knowledge of legal / management?

Never worked for either company, but there's a zero percent chance. Legal agrees to bespoke terms and conditions on contracts (or negotiates them) for contracts. How flexible they are to agreeing to exotic terms depends on the dollar value of the contract, but there is no chance that these terms (a) weren't outlined in the contract and (b) weren't heavily scrutinized by legal (and ops, doing paybacks in such a manner likely require work-arounds for their ops and finance teams).

levi-turner

anno scorsodiscuss

> Support is typically low paid because it's a lot of effort for little reward, no matter how much you pay someone in support, there's only so much impact they can have on the bottom line.

As someone who was in Support and moved to the sales (engineering) side, I'll put it this way, if we had 3-4 of me in Support, my job would be 2-3-4x as easy.

levi-turner

anno scorsodiscuss

For background, RFPs are not value neutral. It is not uncommon for customers who have a preferred vendor to shape the RFP to fit in a more natural way to the preferred vendor. To use a simplified example: you want a web server vendor and only IIS and Apache exist. If you have a RFP requirement that the service runs on Linux, then you have a RFP but your requirements have pre-selected the vendor which can achieve the objectives. This is hard to catch from the outside, but focus on ultra specific requirements which seem relatively arbitrary (Linux vs. Windows isn't arbitrary, but the example is super simplified for illustrative purposes).

I am also curious about examples, but as someone from the vendor side, I'll be the first to admit that if the purchasing group has any semblance of intelligence, you can easily hide these biases. The bias only is obvious if you are in the industry and grok the subtle nuances of the capabilities.

levi-turner

2 anni fadiscuss

Beyond salary, there is a whole industry of data brokers who get transactional data from individual participants in an industry vertical (CPG, Health Insurance, Salary, etc), aggregate it with their competitors and present it back to those participants as benchmarks. Management Consulting likewise is a way to launder getting strategic insight into your competitors from a third-party.

levi-turner

2 anni fadiscuss

This isn't a Github project with a MIT license. When you do B2B software, there aren't software licenses, there are contractual terms and conditions. The T&Cs outline any number of elements but including SLAs, financial penalties for contractual breaches, etc. Larger customers negotiate these T&Cs line by line. Smaller customers often accept the standard T&Cs.

levi-turner

2 anni fadiscuss

> There was a stark contrast between those of us who had designed our projects completely ourselves, and those who had significant mentors/lab affiliations.

Love to see someone confirming my cynicism. In high school, a science teacher asked me if I were interested in doing something for the (then) Intel Talend Search. I looked up the previous finalists / winners and noticed that an overwhelming majority of the kids were in cities with top tier research universities (or did math stuff, those kids' locations varied a bit more). At that point, my spider sense told me that it wasn't worth the effort to try to compete without the backing / mentoring of a credentialed adult.

levi-turner

2 anni fadiscuss

Same at my local Home Depot. Shut down regular registers, self check-out being run as a normal register. Outside of time sensitive shops, I'll go 10 minutes out my way to avoid this.

levi-turner

2 anni fadiscuss

Let's not use the term "trophy hunting". It's analogous to calling an OBGYN an "abortionist". People hunt for all sorts of reasons. The question is often not whether X number of a particular animal will be killed, the question is who will do the killing. State game quotas are set by biologists who are fine tuning populations. If the animals aren't killed by hunters, they will be killed by State wildlife employees. This process is a core tenant of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Model_of_Wildli... ) which is the reason why there has been a flourishing of game animals in North America in the last century.

But to your point, they are referencing two main funding streams for state fish and game / wildlife / natural resources departments:

1. Pittman-Robertson funds ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittman%E2%80%93Robertson_Fede... ). The gist is that there's an excise tax on firearms and ammunition. One fun consequence of this is that hunters aren't making up the bulk of funds here, it's recreational shooters. A hunter may shoot 10 shots on a hunting trip. It's gun nuts at firing ranges who disproportionately pay this tax.

2. Sale of hunting and fishing licenses. This varies by state since states' wildlife vary in quantity and quality. Western states with prized large game animals (elk, mountain goats, etc) earn more from this funding stream than Eastern states.

To take an example of Vermont ( https://anr.vermont.gov/sites/anr/files/FY%202023%20ANR%20Bu... ), 36% of funding comes from hunting and fishing licenses and 33% from matching Federal funds. $7.1M of the $9.67M in Federal funding is from Pittman-Robertson ( https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/WR%20Final... ).

comments