Yeah the deal has also changed. Right as I was leaving the messaging started changing a lot and there was a clear top down “you all need to work harder”. They hired an ex Amazon guy to run my org which really drove the message home.
To be fair though I think Microsoft has decided they are fine with rank and file being mediocre. I don’t know how interested they are in competing for top talent except for at the top.
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I went down a Reddit rabbit hole, a sub called /r/noctor. Basically people, mostly doctors, complaining about the prevalence of nurse practitioners, PAs practicing independently/outside of their scope, etc. The general consensus I see there is that the only people benefiting from this are private equity firms trying to squeeze more profit since they bill the same based on whether you see a doctor or an NP. This in turn has an affect where it doesn’t make sense financially to go through so much school and take on so much debt.
The primary utility of most medical professionals is to act as a gatekeeper to distinguish me from a drug-seeker. They are glorified security guards around medication. Fortunately, I always get what I want.
As an internist (not in the US), I would like to put in my two cents to say this is just wrong.
The primary utility of most medical professionals is to diagnose and treat a condition correctly. In the ER and elsewhere, the correct diagnosis is indeed often "drug seeking behaviour". And this is also a major aspect of medicine that many relatively healthy people interface with and remember. They are in pain for whatever reason, they desire to be relieved of said pain, and that desire puts them into contact with the skepticism and hesitancy around opiods that physicians have built up out of unfortunate necessity. It's often a hurtful and protracted experience, and so they remember it and form opinions like yours.
But this area of contact with medicine is a tiny, very visible tip of a much larger iceberg. Your description of "security guard around medication" is not strictly wrong for my field, seeing as internal medicine is largely about administering the right drug at the right time, but the 99% of the drugs we guard are not desirable at all for any drug-seeker. They are potent, full of side effects, are sometimes potentially deadly. But they do work. And you do not see any of this until you get properly sick, which to most people does not happen very often often (at least until they approach 70). And when it does happen, most people tend to focus on the one little side of the ice berg they come into contact with. But it is there, and it is about much more than distinguishing you from a drug seeker.
No professional has ever taken kindly to being told their primary function. The notion of greater grandeur infects everyone from janitor to president. I'm not foolish enough to tell doctors these things. If I did, I doubt I'd get what I want.
There are limits, naturally. I don't really expect to fit the percutaneous pins into my hand myself, even if I had third hand capable of equal dexterity. But if I have to sing a song you can be sure the song is sung. It's no different from selling B2B SaaS. You just need to make the sale.
I'm sure that's at least somewhat correct, but if I'd offer a similar reply, I could say that amateurs rarely takes kindly to being told that they do not understand what they are talking about. Dunning Kruger is endemic, and especially prevalent in populations making reductive comments about a group of professionals they maintain an adverserial relationship with.
My point was not about the emotional experience of being presented with a certain viewpoint of the function of physicians. My point was simply that if you look at the details of what physicians actually do, the stated viewpoint is wrong.
Of course, "primary function" is a somewhat subjective concept that you could define however you'd like, so it is more or less unfalsifiable as a standpoint.
Haha that is just as true. I suppose I should say “the primary function to me of doctors who are not family members is”. They are a vending machine with a code and fortunately I know the code.
Others need to be told to “advocate for themselves”. I simply get what I want and it always works.
What exactly is the problem with giving drugs to someone who might be a drug seeker? Is it worth letting someone sit in pain on the chance you might allow an addict to get high?
Harm reduction by just giving drugs to addicts in an organized fashion is honestly a strategy that might work fine on a societal level, and I'm not against it (although I am unsure about the details of implementations). However when your society does not practice it, and the ER/family med practioner becomes the one point of contact for potentially cheap drugs, you run into some practical problems over time. Essentially you can't have an open "drug seekers in line B" policy due to legal issues, so drug seekers will have to lie about being in pain and figure out a convincing lie.
Let us say they try to simulate an acute ruptured appendicitis. If they do this convincingly, they will get an acute CT with contrast. In my hospital system these machines and interpretation of resulting images is expensive and resource constrained, especially during evening and night time, meaning that the prioritisation of one patient will generally mean that another, let us say a patient in the process of having a very real stroke, might get delayed if traffic is high.
This is beyond the fact that roughly 30-120 minutes of the physicians time in the ER will be wasted in examining the patient, ordering blood work, the imagery, writing notes, and so on, which means that another patients time, who is often literally waiting in line for your time, is being wasted. Furthermore this kind of clientele have an unfortunate tendency to become unpleasant when you tell them that you can't find any reason for their pain or giving opioids, which is an extremely unpleasant and frankly often traumatic experience for green eyed doctors that enlisted in this career with the goal of aiding the sick. You can only get threatened, spat upon or assaulted so many times and maintain your professional enthusiasm. Many quit for this reason. And for the ones that don't, the experience of being forced to take on the role of distinguish between drug seekers and non drug seekers will generally turn you into a more unpleasant human being.
In summary, mostly due to unfortunate societal circumstances, you really, really, really do not want to encourage drug seekers to try their luck. It is an expensive waste of everyone's time, in circumstances where both money and time is tight.
Conversely, you really cannot predict in advance which ones of your opioid-naive patients will become addicts because the opioids that you gave them, which effectively means that you've fucked their life forever. Opioids are really, really dangerous. Sometimes people are obviously in pain and you open the tap quickly. But there's a name for the historical consequence of playing fast and loose with pain relief, it's called the opioid epidemic.
I think that’s a little naive to how these massive dinosaurs operate. Microsoft doesn’t build anything in an afternoon, not even Minesweeper. There are probably multiple careers at least partially dependent on the metrics from this. Everything becomes an ongoing process at MS scale, for better or worse.
Then Microsoft is operating incompetently and it's not my obligation as a player of Minesweeper to endure their shit version of it because their organization is incapable of taking on a simple problem simply.
If you can't as a company belt out a simple game in a short amount of time without roping in 4 project managers a senior project manager 2 senior developers 12 code monkeys and 4 graphic designers and all the overhead to manage them, your company sucks and should be buried.
> Microsoft doesn’t build anything in an afternoon, not even Minesweeper.
Heck, once you factor in alpha, beta, and user testing, I don't think anyone could build a releasable Minesweeper in an afternoon unless it's just a junk implementation.
Surely e.g. the version that was good enough to ship to hundreds of millions in Windows XP is not junk, and it seems like something on that level should be totally doable in an afternoon by someone familiar with GUI application programming? The actual game logic should take like 10 minutes.
Like what would be the scope of an "alpha" that isn't a working game? Opening an empty window? Writing a console version of the logic?
> The actual game logic should take like 10 minutes.
True, but there's a lot more to it than the game logic. Regardless, it's not a complex application by any standard -- but I don't think I know any dev who could implement it well and in its finished form in an afternoon.
> Like what would be the scope of an "alpha" that isn't a working game?
I don't understand this question. Any alpha is a working program. If the devs don't think it's done, then it's not yet an alpha.
As much as I do appreciate Elon's takes on a lot of things and some of his approaches. I don't think he would work out well for a corporation the size of Microsoft.
Microsoft is almost more of a conglomerate than a singular software (and hardware) company. It would take a solid leader who also appoints appropriate corporate heads in each division.
The marching orders for Windows seems to be "monetize home users." They don't "sell" the OS anymore on practical terms for home use... it's more about trying to sell adjacent services, shove Edge with built in consumerware plugins and nickel and diming every possible corner to each out a dollar or two a year per user.
Often times when this stuff comes up I think it’s Microsoft’s organizational structure that’s to blame. Namely that each team operates like their own little company in many ways. So the team and PM for minesweeper forget they’re just a small part of a broader ecosystem.
At some point I hope there's an interesting documentary or memoir on whatever happened to Microsoft's Carbonated Games, because in my mind as an Xbox fan from the early days of the 360 that's maybe where some of the interesting bodies were buried. At the time as an intern in an entirely different division, Carbonated Games seemed like it was built out of PopCap envy. (Today it might be called King envy, with the irony that Microsoft now owns King.) It seems like there was an idea to take casual games seriously, and they had some incredible talent. Hexic was designed by Alexey Pajitnov (of Tetris fame), who had been working for and was seemingly under-utilized by Microsoft for years at that point (other than Hexic his biggest known contribution to a Microsoft product was 1997's [fantastic] Microsoft Puzzle Collection aka Microsoft Entertainment Pack [5]: The Puzzle Collection).
I don't have any clue how or why Carbonated Games blew up (other than jokes about maybe they were a bit over-carbonated), but the only official game they released was Hexic and a few later versions of Hexic.
There was a sense that Carbonated was going to be the first party developer in charge of things like modern Solitaire and Minesweeper. For whatever reason that Carbonated blew up, when it blew up Microsoft let a second-party relationship (Arkadium) sweet talk them into that catbird seat. It's an incredible revenue stream for a privately held company and seems to be an incredibly favorable contract that lets them keep using Microsoft's brand.
Should it ever finally come to light, I imagine that the full story of how Carbonated blew up and Arkadium was waiting in the wings for that seems likely to be some binary of either a completely dull story of bad budgeting and worse contracts or an incredible story of international intrigue, bribes, backstabs, and betrayals. (We already know Alexey Pajitnov is a player early in the story, and his Edgerton-led tale is in recent amusement media, but also more recently Arkadium got into a lot of hot water because the majority of their development staff were in an office in Crimea. There's a lot of interesting questions to be had there.)
Sounds like a fancy handwavey excuse for organizational blindness.
If I showed up for work in a top hat, gold watch and a lovely lavender evening gown under a piss soaked parka while wearing clown shoes, I would be asked politely but firmly to go home and come back in a presentable fashion for my job.
The MANGA companies do the organizational equivalent of this on the daily and rather than excusing them from the gala people line up to dance and hope that some of the leftover urine dribbles on them.
It's pure insanity that we as a society have no uniformly and completely recoiled in horror from them.
For me at least it’s not actually the price of the Uber but that I know what it will be up front. I wasn’t really taking cabs until uber was ubiquitous though so maybe that’s not the same for everyone.
Fortunately for us customers, it seems Uber catalyzed a transition among most other taxi companies as well to improve this. A bunch of local taxi companies here have apps that have the same features as Uber, where you can pay in the app and see where the cab is on its way to you etc. There are "OEM" taxi callcenter cloud services that small taxi companies can rent to get the uber experience for their fleet without any IT knowledge, each car gets an iPad with an ODB connection and you're ready to go.
In Oslo, Norway, one of the major taxi companies has an app called Taxifix. You reserve a maximum price in advance. If it ends up cheaper, you only pay the actual price. If it ends up more expensive, the taxi company covers it. You can also see where your taxi is on a map while you are waiting
I think other companies have similar apps, but I always use this company as they usually have more competent drivers and reasonable prices
Taxis are not great here in Denmark, I don't know why you'd think to state this. They are also not "used all the time", instead used sparingly because of how outrageously expensive they are. Taxis are run by cartels here who have carved up Denmark amongst themselves. Drivers wait in queues, idling, and are paid to idle, sometimes dozens of cabs at a time. As a result, taxis in Denmark are some of the most expensive in the world.
Uber was banned here in Denmark because the taxi companies saw a threat to their easy money. Drivers wanted to drive independently and for a brief period where Uber was allowed to operate, competition flourished and prices came way down.
I'm not saying Uber is a good thing but pretending or even suggesting that the taxi companies are somehow an ethical or good alternative is absurd.
hmm, ok so maybe things changed in the last 15 years as I do not go out on the weekends anymore but basically all I remember was everyone taking cabs everywhere.
My experience from other countries made me feel like hey, these Danes sure do use the cabs quite a bit.
As a general rule I find the cabs in Denmark more reliable and better maintained than UK, Italy, and any region in the U.S I've lived in.
>As a result, taxis in Denmark are some of the most expensive in the world.
Everything in Denmark is some of the most expensive of that thing in the world. Suggesting that taxis are somehow different than all the other expensive stuff in Denmark is absurd.
I guess you and your friends are rich. I can easily go out 3 nights instead of going out 1 night and taking a taxi home in sweden. I can imagine dk is worse :D
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