Always listening is somewhat preferable to ‘Has such an accurate profile on you from the data that is available that these instances happen by pure coincidence’. That’s way scarier and just as intrusive. At least with a listening device you can get rid of it.
Sad thing is, it’s likely both.
Tbh most employees at a company this size become risk mitigation more than anything else. Once you’ve reached a certain level of success, you’re looking at what doesn’t move the needle as much as what makes it move positively. There could be a feature that is a major QoL improvement, but because in a test segment it performed 1% worse than base then it won’t be implemented.
Spotify, I believe, still works in the tribe and guild model that they created.
Chapter = people with the same skill set, squad = a group of people from different chapters focused on a single project, tribe = a group of squads focused on a large business goal, guild = a collective of folks who have a shared interest like Data Privacy.
Suffice to say, Agile is an imperfect tool and as you try to scale it, you need an increasing number of people to support it and make it run. Coders and Designers are likely just a fraction of their head count.
I’ve worked places that don’t have that support structure in place and they’ve stagnated for years struggling to get the most basic of decisions made. Decisions is what it is about too. Rarely do you get actual leadership from the c-level and especially from a CEO. So you end up with a lot of cooks trying to work out why the broth doesn’t taste quite right and lacking confidence to just add a bit of salt.
That’s most tech corporate jobs tbf. Lots of middle managers with nothing much better to do than play musical chairs once a quarter. It’s like that XKCD meme about there being the standard that will clean up the mess of there being so many standards. Surely my way of working will solve all our problems of underinvestment and losing key talent…
The largest owners are Advance Publications and Tencent. Advance also own Condé Nasty (Reddit even used to be under the Condé Nast banner). Weirdly they also own everyone’s favorite plagiarism detection service Turnitin.
In my experience, even the consumer facing portion suffers from lack of innovation. Look at the big rounds of lay offs this year, fairly uniformly one of the hardest hit teams has been UX Research. If you’ve worked with a good researcher, you really know their value. But translating value that into hard metrics is tough. A lot of the time CEOs in the private sector will accept Good Enough & fast Vs moving at a reasonable pace.
I don’t think there would even be an appetite for hard research at most companies. Takes too long, too much of a risk, the boss’ cousin had a really cool idea instead…
Private sector is very good at operationalizing existing technology. Outside of the FAANGs(/MAMAAs) being good enough is too easy, or investing in research is considered to be too high an expense with no guarantee on return.
I have. It’s pretty short and to the point. They’re based out of Germany so their requirements for clarity are pretty high by law. They go into quite a lot of detail about what is sent.
In this case they send date, time, language, processing time, number and the type of errors, but not the text itself
However, they do have an optional feature that uses OpenAI to rephrase sentences so that might be training through the back door.
I’ve been using it for years and have been very happy with the service.
Interesting fact: The same parent company owns both Reddit and Turnitin.
The DuckDuckGo browser has this baked in as ‘Cookie Pop-up Protection’. It doesn’t quite get rid of them all, and doesn’t let you set a default for what you want (it’ll basically pick the most privacy-forward option) but I’ve found it works pretty well.