kdelok

> The tools of marketers (data mining, consumer behavior analysis, surveys, market testing, etc) aren't just a veneer to be applied at the completion of a development project.

I strongly agree with this! If you're working towards a product (and not just a hobby project) then these are crucial requirements. If they can be found out before writing any code, then they should be, since it will save time in the long run.

For me it's also the kind of thing that can lead to costly changes after the fact, which is prone to rub developers up the wrong way. It seems like the principle of phase containment might apply - if you found it early in the development cycle, then it would have been easier to fix.

There are lots of startup founders who do feel a bit sleazy, or like they're just faking it until they make it. You don't give that impression at all!

As others have said below, I think you should push your product a bit. It might not be perfect, but if you can talk it up a bit whilst accepting valid feedback, then you're more likely to come off as dedicated and earnest. People can then trust that the product is likely to head in the right direction under your care.

Best of luck.

Strongly agreed! It doesn't just seem unfair, it is unfair.

I also think that there's much more celebration of "overcoming" disability or illness, rather than the much more sustainable (and difficult!) practice of changing your work patterns and lifestyle to live within your daily allotment of spoons.

Even if it does boil down to that, there might still be value in ranking the savings per service you buy in. Except for a core product, it is almost always going to be the case that buying in is cheaper than building it. However, having limited resources, it's valuable to work out what tools could give you the best value for money, and which others are a more marginal call (given the uncertainty about support work etc.)

I feel like it's just missing the fairly fundamental thing that any flow of energy will result in an increase in entropy of the universe as a whole.

It doesn't mean that localised systems can't tend towards lower entropy.

It does seem obviously to be a spectrum. I only realised that I have some degree of aphantasia when I read an article on it.

I think there's also an element of things being "faint" in your mind's eye. For example, there's a McDonald's and horse racetrack that I drive by every day on my way to work. I can sort of visualise some constituent parts, but there are no details and there's no overall picture.

I also don't know how much of the visualisation is just me recalling (in abstract) what is there, since I am very familiar with it.

One of ours loves golden syrup - isn't that basically just sugar?

This just sounds like a bad/inappropriate use of a tool. I wouldn't think that a team of people working on unconnected items should have any meetings at all, let alone a daily stand-up.

As others have said, when you're working on a team where there is significant interplay or varied, related experience, they're really useful. We work on an OS and have members of the team who happen to have experience using infra and tooling. There's no way you would necessarily know this without saying "Oh, I was struggling with this bit of stats collection infra" and somebody else says "Yeah, I worked on that on x project, y years ago. Let's chat after stand-up."

There are obviously other ways to seed this kind of thing, but brief stand-ups seem a good way of doing it.

The other thing that we tend to do is just say "Oh, I did x that doesn't really relate to the project yesterday, but that's not very interesting" and leave it at that.

I'm not sure there's an inherent value in compromise.

I certainly see value in a greater understanding of the alternative perspective, but not in accepting it if you disagree.

That's great to hear to be honest. It sounds like you're one of the self-made grafter types. :) My parents' background is similar - they both put themselves through university as adult learners having a pretty poor time of it at the end of high school (for various reasons).

My dad is potentially a good, albeit anecdotal, example of this. He's one of those people who's had every semi-skilled job under the sun, mainly to make sure that he could provide for his family. Eventually, he paid his way through university and chartership and now he does what he enjoys and he's a very well-regarded psychologist. But the thing is that he could have had all that for his whole life, instead of having to struggle his way up there, if he'd lucked into the right background to begin with.

The other thing that we on HN have to consider is that we're generally able to work very well in analytical and numerate disciplines compared to the average of the population. As another anecdotal example, my sister has a (mild) learning difficulty, but it really does just mean that her prospects are much more limited compared to mine. She has a great life, but it's very unlikely that she'll ever be a high-earner. It's most certainly not for lack of will or graft though, just the lottery of life.

For my lot, I'm just glad I happen to have the skills that people want to pay money for. I recognise that I worked hard to get here, but I also acknowledge that luck played a substantial part in everything and I'm grateful for that.

Oh, I certainly don't mean that a good university place guarantees you a top job. My company targets top universities, so it naturally has to reject a bunch of people who just aren't the right fit. However, it is certainly the case that you can usually infer the other way around (i.e. that people with top jobs tend to have good degrees from well-respected universities).

For many graduate software roles over here, recruiting targets people studying "any numerate discipline". These people don't have any professional software dev experience or a CS background, so wouldn't be able to demonstrate those skills from the start. However, the decent degree from a good university is a proxy for the appropriate skillsets required.

The problem remains that there are people with all the skills who just can't get their foot in the door because their background just didn't give them a reasonable opportunity to do so.

In the UK at least, the people who've managed to bootstrap themselves to success through hard work and good decision making are the overwhelming minority.

The causal chain seems to roughly be: Top jobs tend to belong to those who attended top universities. => Top universities are attended by those who went to private schools. => Those who went to private school are either from wealthy families or attending on scholarship due largely to the fortune of genetics and/or an educated family. I certainly benefited from that (school scholarship => Oxbridge => good tech job), but I don't know that I could have if fortune hadn't smiled on me.

I agree that even with all those benefits, you can still fail if you make poor choices. However, I don't think the vast majority of people with worse circumstances can just choose their way out of it. It's not to say that it's impossible - my grandma has a rags to riches story that's only slightly marred by her similarly ethically dubious sales techniques...

Even using the carpentry analogy, I suspect the point is to avoid ruining something on which a lot of time was spent. The material cost of most raw materials isn't very high, but ruining something you've already spent hours crafting is extremely costly.

The other thing to bear in mind is that there is always more work to be done than time to do it. You have to factor in opportunity cost. As many other commenters have said, ultimately it's a balance which depends on your company's particular situation.