And that risk is close to zero, since consumers can't block reporting of their data to Equifax and there are only 2 competitors Equifax has to worry about and the majority of them already use all 3 bureaus.
As a general point of interest, that situation might change next year for consumers within the EU, when new and very heavy-handed data protection regulations come into force. Those regulations have been very transparently aimed at big data hoarders like Google and Facebook, but I can't immediately see why they wouldn't hit the likes of Equifax and the other credit reference agencies just as hard. Since there were reportedly a large (though not as large) number of EU citizens affected by the leaks here as well, under the incoming regime it looks like Equifax could have been on the hook for a significant percentage of its total annual revenues in penalties for something like this. I believe the credit system works somewhat differently in the US from over here as well, so having no or a limited credit history with the agencies isn't likely to be as crippling for your personal financial situation as it seems to be for our friends across the pond.
The government's problem is that the "IR35-proof contract" mostly did work.
IR35 initially caused a great deal of aggravation in the industry, not least because it was like a Sword of Damocles over the head of every legitimate contractor or freelancer who really was conducting their affairs as an independent business would and not just claiming to be a contractor as a tax loophole while still acting as an employee for all other practical purposes.
After an initial period of confusion, a few test cases settled various criteria as clearly distinguishing people who would not be caught by IR35, and almost everyone started structuring their contracts in this way. From that point on, HMRC has won almost no cases, not that it's even bothered to bring that many in recent years, and most accountants working with small businesses are IME not particularly concerned about the risks of IR35 today.
That poor track record of successful enforcement actions continued even after various attempts to introduce new official guidance on what should or shouldn't be covered. Some of the guidance was hilariously ill-judged; for example, IIRC one set of questions would have put one of my companies under IR35 even though it has nothing to do with contract or freelance work of any kind and no-one who could possibly be in the "employer" role.
The trouble, of course, is that all of the above also applied to the cheats who really are disguised employees and really should be caught by IR35. And so the irony of the whole government contractor mess coming up now is that the government already basically gave up on IR35 and just directly shafted all the legitimate contractor-based businesses as well by slapping a huge tax rise on dividends a couple of years ago, and then tightening the noose even further last year. At this point, you'd be mad to operate as a limited company and pay out through dividends just to try to save a small percentage on your taxes anyway; the overheads in admin and professional fees to run a limited company would surely cost you more that any small tax saving would be worth.
And yet since the government don't want to hit main income tax, National Insurance or VAT rates, the small businesses and independent professionals keep getting hit anyway. (Just imagine the reaction if, out of the blue, they increased the basic rate of income tax by 7.5% at the next budget, in addition to pushing up a variety of other tax rates here and there so the overall increase in what you were paying was more like 10%.) Sooner or later, they were bound to find that smart, well-advised professionals of the kind who could actually run successful small businesses in the first place were going to walk away from the kind of bad deal the government apparently thinks everyone should take, and in this case, it appears that the government itself is the one losing out as a result. As someone who's always run businesses according to both the letter and the spirit of the rules and yet been repeatedly screwed over by the government anyway, I don't have an iota of sympathy for them.
FWIW, I found going independent was much more agreeable than lowering my price.:-)
It's a strange effect. Once you go freelance or even start growing your own development company, you're dealing with clients on a business-to-business basis rather than dealing with an employer as an employee. For some reason, in that situation businesses don't seem to have any trouble figuring out what it's worth to them to get a job done and paying someone to do it accordingly. If you're in a position to price based on value rather than time, you're also the direct beneficiary if your greater skill/experience gets the job done more efficiently than a team of junior developers.
Remarkably, there is life outside the US tech hubs. GP didn't specify their location or currency, so you have no idea how much that 100k is in their local market.
Horridly low pay for programmers is probably a big part of the reason Europe and the UK don't produce high quality, widely used software.
Yes, that's right, the US is the only place in the world that can produce high quality, widely used software. I don't know how I didn't realise it before! I mean, none of the popular programming languages were created by Dutch or Danes or Danish-Canadians or Japanese, no research into any major functional programming languages has been done in Europe, and certainly no popular operating systems were first created by a Finn.
You seem to view of the industry from the perspective of US tech hubs, but sadly most of the world doesn't pay anything like $70-120K for rank-and-file jobs in technical fields. For example, the lower end of your rank-and-file range is about the salary ceiling for senior software developers in most contexts even in the UK, which still pays relatively well compared to most places. Web work pays less as a rule. Hardware-related fields aren't much better.
To go much past that, you probably need to be either a specialist in a valuable field and based somewhere like London, or more likely to go independent, where once you're working on your own or running your own team you can charge clients what your work is really worth.
As for
You can train anybody to do those in about 4 years. Which coincidentally is the length of a college education.
I find that highly unlikely, unless by "college education" you mean some McUniversity course on writing CRUD app front-ends using some recent JS framework or something similarly dull.
I'm sure there are a lot of youngsters who just graduated who'd like to think they could kick my generation to kerb. As the saying goes, I'm not young enough to know everything any more. But you don't need to be a math genius to be 2-3x faster than that youngster at producing working software and to make 2-3x fewer mistakes; a decade or two of experience will probably have the same effect. It's the same with non-trivial web projects, and while I'm not much of a hardware guy, somehow I suspect the story there is similar too.
I'm hoping that a big car company does get hit by exactly those kinds of laws sooner rather than later. There is a very unhealthy trend in building extra functionality into modern vehicles that is actively in the interests of the manufacturer/dealer and actively contrary to the interests of the customer. We need someone to force full, up-front disclosure of these shady practices so customers can vote with their wallets, and we need manufacturers/dealers who pull shenanigans like this to be on the hook for meaningful penalties, or we're going to be in a customer-hostile market with no real competition and it's just a race to the bottom. For something as essential to many people as a car, that would be a very dangerous path to follow.
Good enough to use. That was the disappointing thing. Almost all of the transmission standards that matter are digital these days, so even if you've managed to block 90% of the signal strength, as long as that last 10% is enough to be detectable a message is potentially going to get through.
FWIW, I don't so much mind the organisations with a single, short phone menu for the reason you mentioned. It's the ones where you spend several minutes going through several levels of menus, and then at the end they just cut you off (or to add insult to injury, refer you to their web site and then cut you off, when you were calling precisely because their web site was broken, incomplete or incorrect).
HOWEVER, I *also* am painfully aware of how incredibly stupid and annoying people are. Allowing them to send replies to all sorts of automated e-mails would be a nightmare.
People say this a lot, but somehow I struggle to believe it.
At least for my own businesses, where I have been able to see every communication we ever had with customers, the longer or more unusual messages we get are far more often positive/useful things than negative/unhelpful ones.
For the rest, yes, most of them are routine things where someone just hasn't figured out how to do something for themselves. However, almost all of those are dispatched quickly with standard replies to FAQs. A significant proportion of those people then send a nice message to say thanks and confirm they're OK now, so if nothing else, bothering to send a quick and helpful reply built us a bit of positive reputation.
We do also see the odd person who just doesn't get it and causes far more trouble than they are worth, but they're a tiny fraction of our overall communication. I can't help wondering where everyone else keeps finding all these terrible customers that are such a nightmare to deal with. Is the real problem the customers, or the way the customers have been treated up to the point when they want to get in touch?
It's quite hard to think of a business scenario when this is likely to be true, unless either you really do offer a product or service that is only useful once or your product or service is so bad that you don't expect most people you've duped into paying for it once to ever come back.
In most other contexts, it's one of the almost immutable laws of business that attracting new customers costs more than looking after your existing ones. Whether your business's processes and metrics and incentive schemes recognise that is a different question entirely, of course.
First of all, no-reply emails are a means to notify a customer of something. They are one-way. They are not meant to be responded to like text message notifications of upcoming appointments or Amazon shipping notifications.
If something is important enough to trouble someone with a message, surely it's also important enough to follow up if the recipient needs clarification of something or to make some sort of change. If it's not that important, why are you wasting their time with sending an email in the first place?
And before you get on your high horse about how hard good customer service is, I have worked for a variety of businesses from tiny little startups to literally one of the biggest in the world, and to date I have never worked in one of any size that couldn't manage to deal with customer communications better than that. If you have so many people sending so many unnecessary/unhelpful messages that it's causing you trouble, changing an email address to no-reply@ isn't going to fix whatever serious problem you've really got, it's just going to hide it.
And thus was born the automated phone menu, and the anguished cries of a billion souls who did know exactly what they needed to say and could have said it at least three times before they even got to speak to a real person.
Mind you, I bought something from Dell over the phone the other day, and I felt like I spent most of the call debugging the scripts their people were clearly reading from, so maybe it's not the automated aspect that is really the problem here...
For the web form thing, I'd settle for at least knowing whether or not I'm going to be sent a copy of what I'm writing by email afterwards. If I am, I don't need to save it manually myself, but I also shouldn't include any sensitive information. If I'm not, maybe including sensitive details is OK but I also need to keep a copy.
You jest, but the idea that modern devices will start connecting to some sort of mesh network or using their own independent access to mobile/cell networks in order to phone home when you don't want them to and haven't given them access to your own network is disturbingly plausible.
I saw a TV programme a while back about someone building their own home who was concerned about some of this, and so tried to build in what was basically a Faraday cage to prevent unwanted signals getting in or out. It did cut the signal by quite a bit, but not enough to stop the message getting through...
We are heading for a disaster and nobody even realizes it.
Plenty of us in the tech community realize it. Unfortunately, most people outside the tech community don't understand the implications, and there are a lot more of them than us.
I am open to learning new skills, and often start using new tech before the younglings, but I love it when a 20-something learns about an elegant tool from a more civilized age.
Interesting. I'd say the biggest difference between 20-year-old me and 30-year-old me was probably was that 20-year-old me wanted to learn All The Things, while 30-year-old me was a lot more choosey about where limited time was spent.
I find bleeding edge technologies interesting, but I only rarely spend much time on something that is still in its early adopter phase any more. Consequently, I often am a little behind the enthusiastic youngsters in adopting new tech.
However, if you look at how effectively I use the new skills and technologies that I do adopt, or the proportion of the new skills and technologies I adopt that remains useful in the long term rather than quickly becoming obsolete, older me does much, much better than younger me.
"you're too young to understand" is possibly the lamest, laziest response. It requires no effort from you and gives you an unwarranted feeling of superiority.
There's only so much you can write down and reuse - having actual people on hand who know better to help make decisions is far more efficient, in my view.
This is the thing: If you could just distill all the value of a decade or three of good experience into a few pages on a Wiki then every new graduate in a tech field would already have that knowledge and wisdom, but that's not how it works. Training and guidance can help to accelerate someone's progress up the learning curve, but there comes a point where there is simply no substitute for having experienced, skilled, knowledgeable people doing the work.
More often than not in this context, we're not talking about management issues but technical ones. The way you (successfully) institutionalize those lessons is by having people on your staff who have worked with technology for more than five minutes and seen the problems before, so that when they come up again, you can avoid the mistake and educate the less experienced staff about what you're doing and why.
So many times in the past few years, I've looked at failures, sometimes serious ones, in software projects and thought that the only way you could possibly wind up in that position is if your most experienced technical employee was a 26-year-old CTO who thought that moving fast and breaking stuff was a good idea...
Older workers should adapt with the times, not vice versa.
Older workers are experienced enough to know that not all change is for the better.
Also, it's tough to make progress if you keep throwing out all the people who learned lessons already, and then spend the next generation of staff learning all the same lessons again.
Sending location data on an emergency call without asking is strictly a policy decision, rather than a technical issue.
Right, and one policy will almost certainly save lives with negligible loss to anyone of any kind, while the other will not. Anyone flaming a tech firm for turning a feature like this on is literally a danger to society.
Slashdot Mirror
And that risk is close to zero, since consumers can't block reporting of their data to Equifax and there are only 2 competitors Equifax has to worry about and the majority of them already use all 3 bureaus.
As a general point of interest, that situation might change next year for consumers within the EU, when new and very heavy-handed data protection regulations come into force. Those regulations have been very transparently aimed at big data hoarders like Google and Facebook, but I can't immediately see why they wouldn't hit the likes of Equifax and the other credit reference agencies just as hard. Since there were reportedly a large (though not as large) number of EU citizens affected by the leaks here as well, under the incoming regime it looks like Equifax could have been on the hook for a significant percentage of its total annual revenues in penalties for something like this. I believe the credit system works somewhat differently in the US from over here as well, so having no or a limited credit history with the agencies isn't likely to be as crippling for your personal financial situation as it seems to be for our friends across the pond.
And when you give that info up to your bank, you give your consent to them sharing it with the equifaxes of the world.
This is a very weak argument. Consent without a viable alternative isn't really consent at all.
"IR35-proof contract" bullshit that doesn't work
The government's problem is that the "IR35-proof contract" mostly did work.
IR35 initially caused a great deal of aggravation in the industry, not least because it was like a Sword of Damocles over the head of every legitimate contractor or freelancer who really was conducting their affairs as an independent business would and not just claiming to be a contractor as a tax loophole while still acting as an employee for all other practical purposes.
After an initial period of confusion, a few test cases settled various criteria as clearly distinguishing people who would not be caught by IR35, and almost everyone started structuring their contracts in this way. From that point on, HMRC has won almost no cases, not that it's even bothered to bring that many in recent years, and most accountants working with small businesses are IME not particularly concerned about the risks of IR35 today.
That poor track record of successful enforcement actions continued even after various attempts to introduce new official guidance on what should or shouldn't be covered. Some of the guidance was hilariously ill-judged; for example, IIRC one set of questions would have put one of my companies under IR35 even though it has nothing to do with contract or freelance work of any kind and no-one who could possibly be in the "employer" role.
The trouble, of course, is that all of the above also applied to the cheats who really are disguised employees and really should be caught by IR35. And so the irony of the whole government contractor mess coming up now is that the government already basically gave up on IR35 and just directly shafted all the legitimate contractor-based businesses as well by slapping a huge tax rise on dividends a couple of years ago, and then tightening the noose even further last year. At this point, you'd be mad to operate as a limited company and pay out through dividends just to try to save a small percentage on your taxes anyway; the overheads in admin and professional fees to run a limited company would surely cost you more that any small tax saving would be worth.
And yet since the government don't want to hit main income tax, National Insurance or VAT rates, the small businesses and independent professionals keep getting hit anyway. (Just imagine the reaction if, out of the blue, they increased the basic rate of income tax by 7.5% at the next budget, in addition to pushing up a variety of other tax rates here and there so the overall increase in what you were paying was more like 10%.) Sooner or later, they were bound to find that smart, well-advised professionals of the kind who could actually run successful small businesses in the first place were going to walk away from the kind of bad deal the government apparently thinks everyone should take, and in this case, it appears that the government itself is the one losing out as a result. As someone who's always run businesses according to both the letter and the spirit of the rules and yet been repeatedly screwed over by the government anyway, I don't have an iota of sympathy for them.
FWIW, I found going independent was much more agreeable than lowering my price. :-)
It's a strange effect. Once you go freelance or even start growing your own development company, you're dealing with clients on a business-to-business basis rather than dealing with an employer as an employee. For some reason, in that situation businesses don't seem to have any trouble figuring out what it's worth to them to get a job done and paying someone to do it accordingly. If you're in a position to price based on value rather than time, you're also the direct beneficiary if your greater skill/experience gets the job done more efficiently than a team of junior developers.
Remarkably, there is life outside the US tech hubs. GP didn't specify their location or currency, so you have no idea how much that 100k is in their local market.
Horridly low pay for programmers is probably a big part of the reason Europe and the UK don't produce high quality, widely used software.
Yes, that's right, the US is the only place in the world that can produce high quality, widely used software. I don't know how I didn't realise it before! I mean, none of the popular programming languages were created by Dutch or Danes or Danish-Canadians or Japanese, no research into any major functional programming languages has been done in Europe, and certainly no popular operating systems were first created by a Finn.
You seem to view of the industry from the perspective of US tech hubs, but sadly most of the world doesn't pay anything like $70-120K for rank-and-file jobs in technical fields. For example, the lower end of your rank-and-file range is about the salary ceiling for senior software developers in most contexts even in the UK, which still pays relatively well compared to most places. Web work pays less as a rule. Hardware-related fields aren't much better.
To go much past that, you probably need to be either a specialist in a valuable field and based somewhere like London, or more likely to go independent, where once you're working on your own or running your own team you can charge clients what your work is really worth.
As for
You can train anybody to do those in about 4 years. Which coincidentally is the length of a college education.
I find that highly unlikely, unless by "college education" you mean some McUniversity course on writing CRUD app front-ends using some recent JS framework or something similarly dull.
I'm sure there are a lot of youngsters who just graduated who'd like to think they could kick my generation to kerb. As the saying goes, I'm not young enough to know everything any more. But you don't need to be a math genius to be 2-3x faster than that youngster at producing working software and to make 2-3x fewer mistakes; a decade or two of experience will probably have the same effect. It's the same with non-trivial web projects, and while I'm not much of a hardware guy, somehow I suspect the story there is similar too.
Younger is cheaper.
But not necessarily better value for money.
The trap is managers who don't understand the difference.
I'm hoping that a big car company does get hit by exactly those kinds of laws sooner rather than later. There is a very unhealthy trend in building extra functionality into modern vehicles that is actively in the interests of the manufacturer/dealer and actively contrary to the interests of the customer. We need someone to force full, up-front disclosure of these shady practices so customers can vote with their wallets, and we need manufacturers/dealers who pull shenanigans like this to be on the hook for meaningful penalties, or we're going to be in a customer-hostile market with no real competition and it's just a race to the bottom. For something as essential to many people as a car, that would be a very dangerous path to follow.
Star Citizen has a large older gamer population.
Is that only because anyone who has followed its progress from the start is in at least their 70s by now, though?
Good enough to use. That was the disappointing thing. Almost all of the transmission standards that matter are digital these days, so even if you've managed to block 90% of the signal strength, as long as that last 10% is enough to be detectable a message is potentially going to get through.
FWIW, I don't so much mind the organisations with a single, short phone menu for the reason you mentioned. It's the ones where you spend several minutes going through several levels of menus, and then at the end they just cut you off (or to add insult to injury, refer you to their web site and then cut you off, when you were calling precisely because their web site was broken, incomplete or incorrect).
HOWEVER, I *also* am painfully aware of how incredibly stupid and annoying people are. Allowing them to send replies to all sorts of automated e-mails would be a nightmare.
People say this a lot, but somehow I struggle to believe it.
At least for my own businesses, where I have been able to see every communication we ever had with customers, the longer or more unusual messages we get are far more often positive/useful things than negative/unhelpful ones.
For the rest, yes, most of them are routine things where someone just hasn't figured out how to do something for themselves. However, almost all of those are dispatched quickly with standard replies to FAQs. A significant proportion of those people then send a nice message to say thanks and confirm they're OK now, so if nothing else, bothering to send a quick and helpful reply built us a bit of positive reputation.
We do also see the odd person who just doesn't get it and causes far more trouble than they are worth, but they're a tiny fraction of our overall communication. I can't help wondering where everyone else keeps finding all these terrible customers that are such a nightmare to deal with. Is the real problem the customers, or the way the customers have been treated up to the point when they want to get in touch?
getting new ones is cheaper than retention
It's quite hard to think of a business scenario when this is likely to be true, unless either you really do offer a product or service that is only useful once or your product or service is so bad that you don't expect most people you've duped into paying for it once to ever come back.
In most other contexts, it's one of the almost immutable laws of business that attracting new customers costs more than looking after your existing ones. Whether your business's processes and metrics and incentive schemes recognise that is a different question entirely, of course.
First of all, no-reply emails are a means to notify a customer of something. They are one-way. They are not meant to be responded to like text message notifications of upcoming appointments or Amazon shipping notifications.
If something is important enough to trouble someone with a message, surely it's also important enough to follow up if the recipient needs clarification of something or to make some sort of change. If it's not that important, why are you wasting their time with sending an email in the first place?
And before you get on your high horse about how hard good customer service is, I have worked for a variety of businesses from tiny little startups to literally one of the biggest in the world, and to date I have never worked in one of any size that couldn't manage to deal with customer communications better than that. If you have so many people sending so many unnecessary/unhelpful messages that it's causing you trouble, changing an email address to no-reply@ isn't going to fix whatever serious problem you've really got, it's just going to hide it.
And thus was born the automated phone menu, and the anguished cries of a billion souls who did know exactly what they needed to say and could have said it at least three times before they even got to speak to a real person.
Mind you, I bought something from Dell over the phone the other day, and I felt like I spent most of the call debugging the scripts their people were clearly reading from, so maybe it's not the automated aspect that is really the problem here...
For the web form thing, I'd settle for at least knowing whether or not I'm going to be sent a copy of what I'm writing by email afterwards. If I am, I don't need to save it manually myself, but I also shouldn't include any sensitive information. If I'm not, maybe including sensitive details is OK but I also need to keep a copy.
You jest, but the idea that modern devices will start connecting to some sort of mesh network or using their own independent access to mobile/cell networks in order to phone home when you don't want them to and haven't given them access to your own network is disturbingly plausible.
I saw a TV programme a while back about someone building their own home who was concerned about some of this, and so tried to build in what was basically a Faraday cage to prevent unwanted signals getting in or out. It did cut the signal by quite a bit, but not enough to stop the message getting through...
We are heading for a disaster and nobody even realizes it.
Plenty of us in the tech community realize it. Unfortunately, most people outside the tech community don't understand the implications, and there are a lot more of them than us.
I am open to learning new skills, and often start using new tech before the younglings, but I love it when a 20-something learns about an elegant tool from a more civilized age.
Interesting. I'd say the biggest difference between 20-year-old me and 30-year-old me was probably was that 20-year-old me wanted to learn All The Things, while 30-year-old me was a lot more choosey about where limited time was spent.
I find bleeding edge technologies interesting, but I only rarely spend much time on something that is still in its early adopter phase any more. Consequently, I often am a little behind the enthusiastic youngsters in adopting new tech.
However, if you look at how effectively I use the new skills and technologies that I do adopt, or the proportion of the new skills and technologies I adopt that remains useful in the long term rather than quickly becoming obsolete, older me does much, much better than younger me.
"you're too young to understand" is possibly the lamest, laziest response. It requires no effort from you and gives you an unwarranted feeling of superiority.
Perhaps you're just too young to understand. :-)
There's only so much you can write down and reuse - having actual people on hand who know better to help make decisions is far more efficient, in my view.
This is the thing: If you could just distill all the value of a decade or three of good experience into a few pages on a Wiki then every new graduate in a tech field would already have that knowledge and wisdom, but that's not how it works. Training and guidance can help to accelerate someone's progress up the learning curve, but there comes a point where there is simply no substitute for having experienced, skilled, knowledgeable people doing the work.
More often than not in this context, we're not talking about management issues but technical ones. The way you (successfully) institutionalize those lessons is by having people on your staff who have worked with technology for more than five minutes and seen the problems before, so that when they come up again, you can avoid the mistake and educate the less experienced staff about what you're doing and why.
So many times in the past few years, I've looked at failures, sometimes serious ones, in software projects and thought that the only way you could possibly wind up in that position is if your most experienced technical employee was a 26-year-old CTO who thought that moving fast and breaking stuff was a good idea...
Older workers should adapt with the times, not vice versa.
Older workers are experienced enough to know that not all change is for the better.
Also, it's tough to make progress if you keep throwing out all the people who learned lessons already, and then spend the next generation of staff learning all the same lessons again.
Sending location data on an emergency call without asking is strictly a policy decision, rather than a technical issue.
Right, and one policy will almost certainly save lives with negligible loss to anyone of any kind, while the other will not. Anyone flaming a tech firm for turning a feature like this on is literally a danger to society.