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watermelon59

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Ask HN: Is the quality of American customer service degrading sharply?

4 points·by watermelon59·3 jaar geleden·5 comments

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watermelon59
·5 maanden geleden·discuss
> As someone who taught kids in person and fell into a deep depression with how Kafkaesque that job was

Would you mind elaborating on why that was the case? I’m super curious because I’ve considered switching careers to become a teacher.
watermelon59
·5 maanden geleden·discuss
As a father of a still very young boy who might be getting into sports later in school (who knows), reading that terrifies me. I’ve heard the same, in person, from friends who have kids on their school’s soccer team and whatnot.

Why don’t school provide transportation to games on the weekends? Seems like a massive waste of collective resources to have every family drive for hours to get to wherever games are played.

Is it an American phenomenon due to the car-centric culture?
watermelon59
·5 maanden geleden·discuss
Were you able to get into that role without the expectation that you’d still be functioning as an IC i.e. holding two jobs at the same time?

I had an awful experience as a lead because the massive mental context switches between leading and doing IC work were unsustainable.
watermelon59
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
Goodness, I totally misread the post lol. I somehow read it as “Mazda has a process to help their engineers deal with that.”
watermelon59
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
Can you elaborate on that? Sounds interesting.

I’m exactly 35 and in the same situation as the OP.
watermelon59
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
They essentially eliminated the SDET role across the company. There may be a few left here and there, but it used to be a whole thing of its own.

The book How We Test Software At Microsoft describes in detail what the SDET role was about and how Microsoft used to approach quality.

I think it’s a tragedy that they eliminated the discipline entirely.
watermelon59
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
Am Brazilian, can personally confirm. I used to do that too. I actually left the country with the explicit goal of shedding my Brazilian identity and becoming someone else entirely.

I think Brazil suffers from being a country where some segments of the population can’t find a relatable national identity. I feel very strongly about my state identity (I’m a gaucho from Rio Grande do Sul) to the point I’d probably support secession if that was a serious possibility, but I’ve never felt anything positive about being Brazilian.

Funny enough, 10 years later and now a US citizen, I don’t speak so negatively about Brazil anymore. Turns that that over time I found out I’m a bit more Brazilian than I thought, despite former efforts to not be one. Also, there are things I miss about living there, at least compared to living in the US. If it wasn’t for the still insane crime rates, I’d consider moving back for a season.
watermelon59
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
The ecosystem is nowhere near as mature though. I don’t work with either anymore but back in 2017 I made the switch from C# to Java and it felt like a breath of fresh air when it came to the maturity and capability of JVM tooling compared to what’s available for .NET.
watermelon59
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
> Working on something with unrealistic confidence, even if that project itself is completely doomed to failure, is probably better for you than watching Netflix.

As someone who’s heavily biased towards just sitting on the couch (but reading a book, not watching Netflix :)), but married to an unrealistically confident wife, I have to agree.

I tend to panic whenever my wife comes up with her way-too-frequent ideas and goes ahead with them with minimal risk analysis, but at the end of the day she’s a much more accomplished and satisfied person than I am. I tend to look at every project from the most pessimistic angle possible and the end result is that I almost never actually do anything. I have a lot of book knowledge about a number of things but little to no experience, whereas she’s the exact opposite, and that tends to be more beneficial in real life.
watermelon59
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
I don’t have an answer to your specific question, but I just want you to know you’re not alone. I’m also quite excitable and love talking not just about technical stuff, but all sorts of things. I’m quick to smile and laugh, and I probably overshare at times (that last one I had to learn to control).

I’ve had the same worry as you at times, but so far I’ve been 15 years into my career as a software engineer and it hasn’t been a problem as far as I know.
watermelon59
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
I’ve been learning it for over a year because I want to be able to speak to my wife in her native language. So far I’m loving to learn it for the exact reason you said, the way sentences are pieces together is outright fun to me. I’m also amazed by how much information can be packed in a small combination of characters.
watermelon59
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
Seattle has so many intersections that are completely bonkers. They’re not only poorly walkable, they also make driving extremely stressful.
watermelon59
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
> My experience in this world of embedded chips, is that many of the tutorials you read do not deal with power consumption really. They assume that you're playing with a dev board. Or that your application has copious amounts of power. But if you live in a battery powered world, your entire game lies around navigating between sleep and wake states on the chip.

This has been my experience so far trying to build my own devices at home. They all assume I’ll connect things to a USB port or have a power adapter. Material on how to deal with battery voltage dropping over time, determining battery level, etc. is really scattered. Makes me wish I was an EE major instead of CS.