In 18 years from now, which company will have employees writing blog posts like this about it?
I hear amazing stories about the early days of Google and I can’t help but think, which engineering company that is in its infancy right now will have employees reminiscing so fondly of the early days? An AI startup?
The first time I used Airbnb, I stayed on a living room couch in Hull, Québec for $20/night and this old drunk Québecer, the roommate of host, sat in the living room with us until 4am (despite not really being invited) telling us about anything from his experience working in an Albertan sulfur mine at 15, to his favourite local working girls.
Now when I use Airbnb, it costs $80/night and there are no creepy French people to keep me company. So I would definitely agree that Airbnb is broken.
If you could opt-in to change Amazon and other online retailer's customer aggregated reviews to an authoritative nonpartisan review created by a professional product reviewer, would you do it? Why (not)?
I had a 'fun' experience along these lines with health insurance and medical bills a couple years ago. I can confirm that in our case at least, /every/ error we found was not in our favor, and took usually about an hour on the phone to get fixed.
The somewhat-less-malicious interpretation is that the companies have a strong incentive to detect + fix errors that cost them money. Meanwhile, consumers are a) non-centralized, uncoordinated, and often unaware of errors, and b) have no way to fix systemic issues that impact them. And the companies therefore have no /real/ incentive to fix systemic problems. It is literally more profitable to fix the bills of the few people who complain, as they still make money on the remainder who don't notice the errors in the first place.
(on edit; exactly what the other comment one subthread over said. :P )
Looking through the FAQ on the USDS website that is linked in the source, it seems a lot less bureaucratic than I would've ever anticipated. No job descriptions, no dress code. It seems more like a startup than I would've expected from a government org.
We're trying. There's still a lot of bureaucracy around USDS (which we work with to make things happen), but the org itself aims to be an excellent working environment. Happy to answer questions.
They're trying to hire people for a role where the industry custom is to dress less formally. It's possible they loosened up the rules after dumping the mega-IT project contractors behind the first healthcare.gov site and going with smaller, decentralized teams for the rebuild.
