There are two sides to this medal, modern medicine also brought us hyper procedural deliveries in hospitals that can result in a terrible experience for healthy women. My 1st child was born in a hospital in north America. When the contractions were not happening close enough fast enough we were strongly advise to start chemical induction - stress of the mother increases - something is not going as excepted - chemical induction is a lot more painful, lead my wife to ask for an epidural 3 hours later. More stress, pushing becomes very hard and ineffective. Once the contractions are close enough, the mother is asked to lay on her back, which drastically limit the movement of the pelvic bone - making delivery harder. At that point she slowly ends up in the zone where the delivery has to happen NOW, leading to episiotomy and use of forceps.
For our 2 other children my wife went with a midwife in a Home Birth, the midwife provided everything modern medicine has to offer, if at some point she detects something risky the hospital takes over and she will accompany the mother to the hospital, if not the mother can decide to deliver in the Home Birth at home or at the hospital. In UK I read that hospitals are very much closer to Home Birth in the way they treat patients, I wish more hospitals start following that path and that Home Birth was accessible to more people. I don't believe the vast majority of deliveries should be treated like high risk from the start. We also need to recognize and address that a lot of misinformation is happening around birth.
I was on the same boat, went back to senior dev but found myself missing the leadership side of the job (improve engineering process, cross team architecture etc) so I'm moving to principal SWE which seems to be the sweet spot in my current company.
Netflix is following FB tracks it seems, 1st degrade the user experience, then poor company ethics surface. Soon we'll need food like "humane" labels in tech..
[edit : user not customer]
What did the user experience used to be like, if the current version is 'degraded'? We only just got Netflix but it seems pretty slick and well-thought-out.
I don't know what it was like before, but when I signed up for it after Netflix went international in 2016, and my first reaction is: this is it?
Using Netflix feels like giving up control, over both the viewing experience and the recommendation system. The recommendation system that Netflix poured millions into developing, with hyperoptimizations down to the thumbnails you see? I can't get it to stop recommending me shows I don't want to see. I can't pick the genres I want to show up on the homepage. The automated genre generation/clustering algorithm occasionally generates hilariously poor results. I can't leave my mouse over any thumbnail for a few seconds to read the synopsis because the trailer will automatically start playing.
Another example: No control over stream quality. I'm fine with waiting 30 seconds for the higher quality version to buffer, but Netflix forces me to watch the first 30 seconds in glorious 360p with sharp edges and features on actor's faces smudged out of existence. There's no way to change this setting, which exists on every video player I've seen since before YouTube existed.
Auto play video trailers.
Star ratings are almost invisible. The currrnt Betflix percentage ratings have almost no association with reality and once again seem to exist to promote Netflix shows.
It’s harder to find an episode that I stopped watching midway the previous night, because Netflix is promoting its own shows.
Non Netflix catalog is buried deep. I’m not sure if this is because they simply don’t have much Non Netfkix content anymore.
Movies are hard to find. Again, this could be a content issue.
The UI is slick. It’s also simply geared towards making you zombie watch Netfkix branded shows.
Those who have been subscribed for a long time know that the content selection is abysmal compared to what it was in the past. A long time ago, I remember feeling surprised when they didn't have something specific I wanted to see; now I am surprised when they DO have something specific I want to see.
That and there were things that, yes, might've taken a little time to maintain, but at least gave it a 'face' outside of normal corporate BS such as being able to share stuff with friends on there. Also, star ratings going away, I think reviews are gone now too, as well as the ability to dismiss things you aren't interested in the past (I think that disappeared a few years ago).
The UI and findability sucks if you're on a PC but is fine if you're on a big screen tv (which is the direction I assume it's been aimed in, as well as big buttons for touch screen or visibility). When I was subscribed, I would use a third party website like instantwatcher to easily sort and search what so I could browse quickly.
Recommendations and the whatever algorithms they're using now aren't very useful (maybe coming full circle on the limited content leading to limited choice).
FB has been accused of poor ethics since the start. They were barely three years old when they launched Beacon[1], to much criticism and even lawsuits.
A little bird told me it's because they still use cobol fixed width data and are basically scared to change it. To fix, first they have to finish their rewrite.
Sometimes people resist fixing serious issues with a legacy system, because rewriting the legacy system is seen as preferable to evolving it. But, the rewrite always takes a lot longer than you expect, which can result in a lengthy period in which those issues continue to bite you. Just hire a few good mainframe COBOL programmers (they still exist) and fix the serious issues in the legacy system.
Changing a legacy mainframe COBOL system shouldn't be scary. Provided you have qualified staff and the right tools (such as COBOL static analysis tools), it is not inherently more risky than changing a Java or .Net app.
What I don’t get is that tangerine was originally ING Direct. Which was a new bank that just started in Canada toward the end of 90s or early 2000s. How did they end up with a COBOL system?
6 character limit was already there during ING Direct years. Possible they were using the old Dutch systems but i find it a tad surprising, they would have needed to set it up from scratch in Canada (as I don’t think anything was stored in Netherlands). So they purposely setup an old-ass system in the 90s. What a shit show
Ouch... It saddens me when rewrites are not taken as seriously as they should be... Instead they rather risk people's personal information and finances.
