As a theater major who spent the last 8 years doing web development and web design I decided to start building augmented reality games using Unity, Vuforia and C#.
My best decision of 2018. I have never been happier with my day-to-day work.
The theatrics of it all take me back to college. The amount of creative freedom you have to build narratives, characters and effects is just so much fun.
Highly recommend for any one who was involved in theater.
6 questions that should be answered above the fold of the page. These questions should be answered again in different ways throughout the page using pictures, text and video.
1. What is it?
2. What does it look like?
3. How big or small is it?
4. Can it be delivered?
5. Can I return it?
6. Can I trust it?
People consume content in very different ways. And showing, telling and demonstrating the product/service helps achieve #6.
Elsewhere someone bemoans that landing pages don't answer "what is it?".
Some (most!) sellers couldn't care less if it's right for you, just if you buy it. Spelling out what a product is can lose customers.
Example: Back in the day I bought a minidisc player-recorder as you could easily put/remove tracks digitally. Turned out you couldn't do that properly, only from computer, not to computer, making it terrible for live recording (my need). If they'd told me properly "what is it" then I would instead have bought an mp3 player.
Yup, still bitter - cost me many hours that mistake.
A corollary to this though, they made the sale, but I've never bought from the company (Sony) again.
I do the grocery shopping in our house 90% in-store shopper (I like to pick out my produce and discover new stuff) 10% online delivery - San Francisco, Franklin Location. Here are the the things that they have gotten really wrong for me...
1. Quality Eggs. This is expensive. It requires sourcing locally and refrigeration at every step. I use to have options to buy from 3+ fantastic pasture raised egg options (almost farmers market quality). This has deteriorated to 1 option. I happily pay $9 a dozen.
2. Don't put the tofu with the dairy. They moved a lot of vegan/vegetarian favorites next to the milk and butter. Customers were complaining while I was in the store. They did not fix it. This might save on energy in the long run but is a tone def move.
3. Staying Local. I will stop shopping at WF if they don't carry local produce. This is expensive and managing each supply chain goes against lowering pricing.
I don't think Amazon wants to keep the demographic. I think they will be a Ralphs or Safeway in 5 years. The next conversation will be quality and keeping the historical whole foods demographic, in these early days I am not sure that is their vision.
Thanks! Can't edit my post, but didn't expect such a positive response, really cool to see others offering an ear as well.
OP's got a _lot_ going on here: fear of being stuck at a prestigious company; team/interpersonal struggles; the feeling of vulnerability from bombing an interview (which was also "the one" opportunity); possibly burnout; and the potentially very serious signs of depression. Thought I'd try to take a chance at demystifying some of the demons I know better, I'd probably learn a bit too.
Whether or not he or she reaches out, there are a lot of other great responses here, and I hope OP can at least feel less alone.
I would checkout http://www.ivysoftworks.com/. The CEO of this company was the CTO of a company I worked for. Extremely developer friendly, great visionary etc.
Worked at a startup that served only fortune 1000 companies. Always late, late, late, late.....
Good side:
Repeat customers. Getting in the door is hard but once you're in it is easy to stay in if you're doing a decent job.
Bad side:
After 6 months of doing business with them you would finally get your first check. For a startup even with millions of dollars in the bank this sets your burn rate on FIRE.
"But it's scary to me to think that women feel the need to make these types of sacrifices, and not take care of their family."
Hmmmm ... the United States does not offer paid maternity leave. So if you needed the money, and weren't a CEO, you would have to go back to work anyway. She is making a choice, but for many other women the choice has been made for them. The US is the only developed country without laws providing paid maternity leave.
And to me, that's barbaric. We're punishing women for following every animal's instinct to procreate. Men don't get equivalently "punished" when they have a child, women have to shoulder that burden. As a society, we need women to bear children. Why do we force her to choose between work and family?
In Canada, we provide 17-52 weeks of maternity leave for new mothers, depending on a few factors. Moreover, we allow for 15 weeks of paid leave for pregnant employees or new mothers, with another 35 weeks of 55% paid parental leave. [1]
In the US, up to 12 weeks of leave is allowed, but there are conditions and exemptions, one of which is that if you're a company of less than 50 employees, you don't have to allow leave.
From [1]: "If a mother has to rush back to work after giving birth because she cannot afford the lack of a paycheck, she may not be as effective at her job compared to if she was rested and had her family life settled."
I would rather have a kickass employee, male or female, be happy to come back to work after their home and family has settled.
If we hire in the US, I'd like to provide equivalent benefits to them as if they were in Canada. Hopefully I can make that happen, but that's an issue for future me to deal with since it's a long ways out.
> As a society, we need women to bear children. Why do we force her to choose between work and family?
That's not strictly true. We need some women to bear children, but we don't need nearly as many as currently do it. We have a shortage of many things on this earth, but human beings aren't one of them. Why should society be encouraging women to have children when it's objectively better for society if most of them don't?
Strict population controls, like China's one-child policy, are probably a step too far, but not encouraging parenthood seems like a reasonable middle ground.
Eh... while I agree that overpopulation (on a global scale) is a real problem, it is also true that most highly educated/industrial societies have problems with too few children being born. I seem to recall that the average needs to be around 2.4 children/family for population to not decrease.
The US overall might not exhibit the typical traits of an educated society (family planning) -- I've not looked up the numbers. But with poor social mobility, there would still be a problem.
As for looking at the issues from a global perspective: do we really think importing children from third world countries is a viable, moral and/or sensible approach? If not, the sane plan for the future, is to encourage sustainable family planning everywhere: more children in the rich/highly educated part of the world, better access to contraceptives etc in the poor/less educated parts.
I suspect the argument there is that not offering maternity leave discourages working women from procreating while there is no such disincentive for those not working. And so those often without the means of supporting a child will be the ones having the children.
> Men don't get equivalently "punished" when they have a child
How long is the average paternity leave for new fathers? Or are you suggesting that fathers don't have a right to paternity leave and thus raise their children?
The United States doesn't _require_ companies offer paid maternity leave (at least at a federal level, some states do). That's not the same thing at all as not having maternity leave. Personally I think this is something which can be dealt with most effectively in employment negotiations, with perhaps some regulation at the state level.
Paypal is the worst way to process payments, no one should use them (use any of the alternatives). Paypal will never support anything like Bitcoin unless they absolutely have to because it involves "risk". I wish consumers weren't so use to the easy checkout process, because they're terrible to develop with and will stifle virtual currency adoption.
My best decision of 2018. I have never been happier with my day-to-day work.
The theatrics of it all take me back to college. The amount of creative freedom you have to build narratives, characters and effects is just so much fun.
Highly recommend for any one who was involved in theater.
You can see what I have been building here: https://codetocanvas.com/