Some jobs just rely on attracting and retaining people with no boundaries and no ability to set them. Startups are great at this. They foster a sense of community between the workers and then understaff/overbook the team. When the invariable crisis rolls in no one even has to tell people to work until 5 am. They just do it because no one wants to "let down the team".
My last job I was at least the fourth or fifth person to break down and cry at work. Plenty of those happened in meetings where the boss man was present. They just quietly get replaced and that's that. Burn em and churn em. Never shows up on the ledger and everyone writes it off as a crazy one-off situation.
Then oh gosh a big deadline hits and we're down a person, better show off what a team player we are and make sure we hit the deadline.
it's a deeply wired need, and it would be interesting to discuss that. I found it easier to wake up in the morning when I felt part of team rather than going to a company be a nameless cog. Surely being a cog may avoid being overworked by never ending night shifts .. hence the debate.
> They just quietly get replaced and that's that. Burn em and churn em. Never shows up on the ledger and everyone writes it off as a crazy one-off situation.
Man, it’s killing me how true this is. It’s never “we treated them so poorly they needed to quit to preserve their sanity”, it’s always “they just weren’t a great fit. Oh well.”
Businesses have gotten larger and more powerful than the governments that are supposed to regulate them. Moreover, infested the relevant regulatory agencies.
The point of any service, free or otherwise, should be to deliver some kind of benefit to its users. If it doesn't do that, it has little reason to exist.
"Data harvesting," marketing and advertising are far from the only business reasons why a company might want to offer a free service.
From a business perspective, a free service might
- build goodwill for the company
- satisfy legal or government requirements
- save money on billing while increasing the value of other goods and services from the company
- enable the company to qualify for certain grants or subsidies
- support the creation and improvement of goods or services
(such as software) which the company uses
- enable the company to influence industry standards
- help to acquire future paying customers (e.g. by offering a free student or limited version which can be upgraded with additional paid features)
- help to compete against other companies that charge for the same service
- act as a loss leader to encourage sales of compatible companion products or accessories
In this case, Twitter was lying (or more generously, not being entirely truthful) with what they were using the data for. Some users may have chosen not to give up their phone number or email if they had known it would be used for advertising in addition to account security.
When signing up for a "free" service, I basically assume all data entered will be used for advertising / marketing purposes. This is a safe assumption to make.
I don't disagree, but I think we should still be able to get upset when a free service uses the data for something other than what they said it would be used for.
It's why I love GDPR. Since it requires explicit, opt-in consent, I can just register or visit a site and don't worry much - abuse of my data is a bigger risk to the service than it is to me.
In fact, prompting every time is also a red flag. They wouldn't be so desperate if providing the number was for your benefit as they claim (for "security", etc). The real reason they're so desperate is because it's for their benefit.
> Harvesting data and using it for marketing purposes?
Twitter's actions make everyone less secure. The next time an online service asks me to enable 2FA to protect my account, I'll have to consider whether the potential for abuse of my 2nd factor information is worth the additional risk to my account.
FIDO tokens (for U2F or WebAuthn) don't give the relying party anything valuable. If they literally publish everyone's parameters it makes essentially no difference to anything. It doesn't even mean they stop being useful for authentication.
Not allowing opting out of data collection is actually in breach of the GDPR, so actually in the EU you can not run a business for the sole purpose of stealing data.
>We have incurred net losses in all periods since we began operations and we expect we will continue to incur net losses for the foreseeable future.
The admission that "we've never made money and there's a good chance we never will" being boilerplate S-1 copy is monstrously troubling.
When no one needs to see that a company can made a dollar before investing because profit is for suckers and this company's probably going to be a unicorn, maybe that's the stock tip from the shoeshine boy.
Fair enough, but there may be a small middle ground between "guaranteeing a return" and "never made a dime in profit and in fact is burning through millions or billions of dollars annually with no expectation to stop any time soon"
I grew up with absentee parents. This is an unwelcome spin on that situation. I can't even give an opinion on this that doesn't immediately fly into rage. I just hope I don't try to pair off with someone who ends up getting hoodwinked by articles like this. This is disgusting.
There is a difference between parents who are absent because they don’t care, and parents who are absent because they have a lot of work to do. My dad worked overseas and was gone for 30-40% of the year when I was a kid. Grew up to have a great relationship with him, because when he was here he was always attentive. (Not in the sense of spending a lot of time with us—he worked 60 hour weeks stateside. But in the sense of always calling when we got home from school and generally being loving and supportive.)
> Sometimes my choices make me sad. My daughter’s seventh birthday was the worst. She cried, and I did everything I could not to. I felt sick to my stomach. But I had a trial starting the next day, six hours away.
> I had picked the date, not the judge, because I knew that the other side wasn’t ready. Delaying even a few days would have meant losing a crucial advantage. I wasn’t going to risk it knowing what was on the line for my client.
I don’t think this one counts as “absent because they had a lot to do.” This one is just prioritizing the kids second.
Same here. My dad was military when I was young and during my teenage years had another job that took him away from home for about half of the month.
I wouldn't ever disparage him for it. He provided well for his family, and most of my favorite childhood memories are the times we spent together. To this day, I try to spend as much time with him as possible while I still can.
I can only hope that I give my kids as much of myself as he did.
>because when he was here he was always attentive.
That doesn't sounds like the author. Kids will understand if a parent is away because they are working to make their (i.e. the kid's) life better. My father worked long hours, sometimes multiple jobs, all his life for little money, as did my mother. Even though they weren't around for some of my recitals or Christmas pageants, I respect them both that much more because I knew why they were doing it ... even as a kid. Kids aren't stupid though. If the parent is absent for selfish reasons, in order to fulfil their life and their goals, it will lead to bitterness and resentment. It will.
Some people are bitter and resentful and would have had the exact same childhood you did and think their parents weren’t there for them. People in extremely similar circumstances feel very differently about them all the time, often enough within the same family.
You're correct, and we're all speculating because we don't know their situation. It could all be fine and the kids have other support systems ... but it doesn't sound good as written.
> They were lovingly cared for by their father, their grandmother, my son’s preschool teacher and my daughter’s babysitter.
For me that’s the critical part. Her kids could still feel they don’t get enough of her time, but they’re not just abandonned.
As a kid I spent a lot of time with my grand mother and other outer family members, without my parents. It was fine, actually fun, and everyone seemed to feel responsible for my well being while I was with them.
I also feel this mother chose to prioritize her job because she actualy could, and wouldn’t be doing so if her kids were miserable.
My last job I was at least the fourth or fifth person to break down and cry at work. Plenty of those happened in meetings where the boss man was present. They just quietly get replaced and that's that. Burn em and churn em. Never shows up on the ledger and everyone writes it off as a crazy one-off situation.
Then oh gosh a big deadline hits and we're down a person, better show off what a team player we are and make sure we hit the deadline.