Since yours is software its much easier to give away freebies. Discount codes, special features, early access features, etc are much easier to do than a physical product. Also its a great way to get feedback and generate buzz on the project.
Echoing the other comment, I would agree to avoid giving out equity. The customer is far less vested in your company's success than you are.
A bit confused regarding your formatting requirements there... but basically fitment and quality are most important to me and I'm not sure it's in your list. No, I don't know what Digital Clothing is. This is an engineer centric crowd so your responses would probably differ from other channels..
I might be the same as you, except like 3 years ahead. I too felt the exact same way, so I left my cushy job (which paid pretty well) to start my own thing.
3 years later, and still bootstrapped, I'm starting to see why things are the way they are. Not trying to sound too depressing, but at the end of the day, money is what matters, and the status quo is the most optimized form of money-making there is. Profit-seeking trumps everything; even if you create the next PageRank algorithm, in order to have value it still needs to be monetized.
I also realize the whole "everyone else is a conman" thinking is quite wrong. PMs do provide value (of course, some more than others); it's just harder to see as an engineer, since it feels like we're doing all the hard work.
This might go against the grain here, but my advice: change the attitude, unless you want to remain depressed.
I hadn't seen this discussed yet, but how did Google know that Podcast Addict was indexing corona-related content? What was the mechanism that triggered the ban? The developer's twitter said that he didn't include any corona keywords in the play store metadata, nor in the source code. The consensus seems to be that some automated system was too aggressive in banning.
My best guess is that the source for the info used to ban PA would be the reviews, i.e. someone posted a review mentioning "great podcasts about corona" or something. But I can't imagine it's that simple, because then I can just put "corona" in any review and get somebody's app banned.
Unless Google has some other way of tracking PA's content?
The 'not knowing' part happens when the outrage is then transferred to any app which does integrate the FB SDK (like zoom). We as developers have sortof taken for granted that the FB/Google/etc SDKs can do no evil. Maybe that attitude should change, because public opinion certainly has.
From them: "The Facebook SDK automatically initializes when the app is opened. When the SDK is initializing, it fetches app settings from Facebook. If you want to block all network requests to Facebook, you can disable automatic initialization." If you want to turn it off, you're supposed to set in your app's plist <key>FacebookAutoInitEnabled</key><false/>.
If people are claiming that the SDK is still fetching despite adding that key, that could be breaking some compliance and consent laws...
For the average user out there, the fact is, most people only care about privacy when there's a breach/outage/scandal of some kind. Otherwise, the average person is not going to have "zomg fb is spyware" on their mind.
If apps start charging money, there would be a significant drop in the # of average user installs. Then the app would only make money off of privacy focused users, which is comparatively small.
I went thru the 10 questions and it didn't really come across as a "test of toughness" - the questions were variations of "how well do you cope with stress". Also why would I want mental skills like Michael Jackson?
It sort of depends on the candidate. For a new grad, I'd be asking interview questions that are a little more textbook. Write something to traverse a tree, sorting, etc, i.e. theoretical stuff.
For someone with experience, the expectation is less about data structures, and more about architecture and practical problems we'd have to solve day-to-day. Of course there was a coding question, but it weighed a little less.
This was the standard process at a medium-sized company in SF, and I thought the process was far from perfect. I'm sure the sentiment is shared by many, but focusing on one's ability to write an algorithm within 45 mins did not necessarily mean they'd be a great developer to work with.
But I digress. To answer your question, we used coderpad for phone screen coding interviews.
If the government entity really is throttling that site, assuming they are competent, you're unlikely to find conclusive proof that they're actually throttling. Compare this with a full on blackout (i.e. Great Firewall of China, where that's obvious proof of government intervention); the fact that they're allowing some requests to go thru means that the meddling is likely engineered to not be detectable. Best you can find is maybe the speeds are slower when accessed from within the country, but they can always plausibly deny it.