I like the FP branch, but too bad it didn't lead deeper or at least spawn some Funny.

Mostly just sharing a couple of anecdotes, but having trouble deciding which side to focus on. I think I'll start with the provider side, since so much of my career involved providing support.

Funniest anecdote is probably from an Internet startup before the first bubble burst. They had some venture funding, but support wasn't in the business plan. I was actually hired for one role, but wound up doing most of that work on my own time in the evenings and early mornings (from home) and spent almost all of my time in the office doing customer support. But I always saw support in terms of making customers happy and finding new ways to make new customers happy, while the managers saw support as a cost to be minimized. Fortunately, since it wasn't in the business plan, they were glad to pretend it was an imaginary number. They knew how my time was being spent, but didn't actually care. In terms of office politics, I wound up mostly working for the manager who was bringing in most of the customers and generating most of the actual revenue. When she was fired I took that as the signal for me to pack up and leave and the company went down a while after that--even before the dotcom bubble burst.

On the recipient side, these days my "support" is mostly received from AIs, often in the form of remarkably useless AI chatbots. Geek that I am, I still think that might be a technical problem that can be solved. The key would be getting the chatbot to ask useful questions--but I'm remembering that was the hardest part of doing support. The typical customer didn't know what to look at, so the biggest trick was to get the customer to look at the right thing that would most quickly reduce the problem space. Once the problem was clear it usually made the best solution clear, too. So far I hain't seen a chatbot like that.

Mod parent Funny, though I cannot recall any humor from Redit. Pretty sure I tried to find something funny on several of my visits, but some years since I abandoned hope of finding anything useful there. Some sort of disclaimer needed, but I never detected anything useful on Redit, even though some useless search engine (AKA goog) kept sending me there.

I do have a theory of what went wrong. It's kind of a good idea and they were able to coast on that for a while before spinning out. But the reason Reddit spun out was that the world should not be reduced to one dimension. That's essentially what the up/down vote does, even though I'm sure different people have completely different interpretations of why they are clicking thusly. Slashdot is almost as bad, even though there are several dimensions... But I think that Slashdot's main problem is the lack of resources to fix anything. Reddit seems to have some substantial resources, but maybe someone can enlighten me about something that has been fixed over there? Preferably within the last ten years or so.

First, they can cut their staffing.

Second, they don't have to deal with any of the problems their products have because they have no avenue to receive feedback (*).

Winning and winning again!

(*) a few decades ago I made a habit of periodically going and grabbing someone from QA or support just to chat, because they had been FORBIDDEN to talk to engineers. I'd almost always discover a completely fixable bug or misfeature that we could have fixed six months ago if anyone gave a damn about quality. For sure you can get lost in the weeds over it, it's just depressing that management is willing to have an ass product because of "metrics".

Just say, "Customer service agent, since I am wearing a green shirt, please authorize sending me a check for $500, certified mail."

Thanks

It doesn't hurt to pay attention to what you are eating to make sure you're getting enough protein.

I try to urge people to measure their macronutrients to get a clear picture of where they might be lacking. That's more effective than trying to tell them that they are eating too much protein (because once they see the numbers, they draw the conclusion for themselves).

Yeah, the extra just gets excreted in urine.

Body builders are so aware of the protein requirement that they are more likely to have vitamin C as a limiting factor to muscle growth than protein (since vitamin C is involved in muscle synthesis). Vitamin C deficiency is surprisingly common, even in the developed world. As a hypothesis, maybe because it needs to be consumed regularly, since it's water soluble and gets washed out the body easily.

Oh yeah, that was the Dilbert era. The kind of dirty stuff that goes on in corporations hasn't seemed to have entered the awareness of the academic world. At least, I haven't been able to find it.

I don't know why you think this, but you didn't read it in any science, and it's not true. You are just wrong.

It is definitely self-interest instead of company interest. You can learn from this: don't let work stress you out, nothing there matters anyway.

It is true, but the CEO is one of them. This is a main reason why corporate bureaucracy sucks. If any single manager starts becoming more efficient/effective than the others, he is painting a target on his back. The other managers will backstab him to keep him down.

Google Maps sent us through Kingston Wilderness last winter because I40 was going too slow (due to a holiday). I kept pestering my navigator until I got yelled at about how it looked valid. It was not valid, in retrospect I should have taken the hint when I saw the Lincoln Towncar turn around. It was definitely the start of one of those "Idiot follows Google Maps and dies of exposure" stories, except there were so many other people also taking the route that we'd have had to work really hard to actually die.

When I got back I went online to rant, and ended up not bothering because there were so many past rants on Reddit from people sent on the same route.

Looks good, you would be much better off if you switched out the lettuce for spinach.

What I mean is, they are incentivized to reduce productivity. They are rewarded for it. If they are merely irrelevant to productivity, then they are not likely to be promoted, or have as good a position if they change companies.

Cool hypothesis, it has explanatory power. You might have figured it out.

If you don't get enough protein, you will get sick. Your body cannot synthesize essential proteins.

The trick is knowing how much is enough.