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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Please do keep voting with your wallet - its one of the few remaining ways to express our discontent!) That being said, I feel like both of those examples are where the service provided by adobe and then Netflix are terrible.

    Adobe is making you buy a whole year and Netflix is hassling you for “letting your pensioner mum watch your account”… To me, both of those are examples of bad service (coupled with cost).

    For me, a counter example for me is amazon.com: I hate what they’re doing to the retail landscape but find it hard to resist, as I find them SOOO convenient, and their customer service (for now) is absolutely stunning!!! Now if their prices were too high, I’d personally probably pay for that convenience a bit. (Where there model breaks for me completely is warranty major purchases: I’ve had warranty denied by manufacturers for items purchased through non approved amazon resellers. So now, for me, anything over $100 and I’m looking for direct purchase from the manufacturer as a preference. )



  • I’ve used the 3x multiplier for staff planning at services companies since the early 2000s.

    Perhaps there are regional differences, but they’ve rung true for planning billable rates of return at every services company I’ve worked at in the last 20 years here in AU.

    I realise that the services aspect isn’t relevant, but having the sum of indirect staff costs equivalent to staff salary cost when office space is involved isn’t a massive stretch in my experience. (Indirect costs would include office rent, utilities, infrastructure and a share of shared functions such as IT, HR, facilities etc…)


  • When running a business, you need to budget 3x salary for actual TCO of a staff member:

    1x covers their direct salary 2x covers retirement fund, electricity, office space, and infrastructure items unlike server and laptops for corporate use etc.

    The 3x multiplier is for when you’re a services company, and that represents a possibly profit margin.

    So for signal, your $380k becomes $190k which in my experience is average for a US tech sw dev at a mid to early senior level.

    I donate to signal monthly and I have no problems with the costs they’re posting. I work in SV tech and I’ve seen 20x worse numbers.




  • If you are data roaming with your home phone plan, then it is normal. The local carrier tunnels the traffic back to your service provider in your home country and then it routes to the internet from there.

    I get it all the time when I’m OS travelling.

    You’d need a VPN in the country you’re in to make the traffic appear local…

    If it’s happening on WiFi, it will be your language setting. If you’re on android, try setting up a different user profile with different language and locations settings as a quick test.