I don't know if it was the intent, but I read your entire article twice.
Overall, point 2 is the most interesting/troubling. I'm glad to have read it.
However, point 9 is beyond ridiculous. You claim that Protonmail devs don't use Protonmail. That's an interesting claim.
I was expecting a quote from devs making this claim.
Instead, it links to an article and uses the fact that Protonmail devs don't have an explicit @protonmail.com email address on GitHub as evidence (of the 13 devs inspected, the most common case is not having an email address public).
The article even makes this snarky remark when the dev is using Protonmail with a custom domain: 'Does not use Protonmail.com (No pride in “@protonmail.com”)'.
That's a very weak point to make compared to the seriousness of your other claims.
I spent a few years laser focused on web property arbitrage in my spare time.
This is my general advice:
* The deals at the lower end (a budget of $2500 is in that segment) are often trash. You'll need to spend an insane amount of time vetting those deals. And most will be niche products with either no route to profit or a severe decline.
* The best deals are the really poorly built PHP SAAS applications run by an old tech-oriented person that has zero marketing experience (one of my best flips was an awful codeigniter tool related to pets.. I literally only added Adsense, cleaned up the copy, and slightly improved the loadspeed, then sold it for a 2x profit).
* If it's a prior flip (e.g the current owner is not the original creator), turn around and find something else. Sometimes they are fantastic, but it's usually a terrible idea.
* Flippa is the Amazon <2015 of web property purchases (in terms of product quality). The best deals are usually in forums, Reddit, or even locally if you know a lot of devs.
> I know that I used a very permissive license and that the project can be forked and modified by anyone but this is a theft more than a fork.
You used probably the most permissive license available (MIT).
However, it does look like Parrot is not attributing Gravity anywhere in their repo (which is the only requirement of MIT).
If I was in your situation, I'd open a pull request with an attribution in the README.
> The only people to who can afford to go to school to broaden their education without a clear job benefit are those born rich.
I respectfully disagree.
I've spent an enormous amount of time inside universities (as both a student and employed as an engineer). The vast majority of students have no clear job benefit at the end of their degree.
Most students are studying something with no obvious job correlation. The largest schools at most second/third rung universities in the western world are humanities (which I'm not knocking, but the employment rate for these degrees into related roles is abysmal).
Honestly, it's really sad to see. I've spoken with countless third year humanities/law students that are completely lost and have no idea what to do as graduation approaches (about 20% of law graduates at my last uni went on to practice law). Oh, and they're crippled with debt (in both Australia and the US).
In my experience, the worse off the student, the more likely they were to study something with poor career outcomes (one of the worst offenders was the bachelor of business, which was a popular choice for students hoping to escape the lower/middle class but had atrocious outcomes). I chalked this up to fewer educated role models when they were growing up.
HN is fairly skewed towards tech. The tech-related courses (CS, EE, etc) have great employment prospects, but they're the outlier.
> Honestly, it's really sad to see. I've spoken with countless third year humanities/law students that are completely lost and have no idea what to do as graduation approaches (about 20% of law graduates at my last uni went on to practice law). Oh, and they're crippled with debt (in both Australia and the US).
> In my experience, the worse off the student, the more likely they were to study something with poor career outcomes (one of the worst offenders was the bachelor of business, which was a popular choice for students hoping to escape the lower/middle class but had atrocious outcomes). I chalked this up to fewer educated role models when they were growing up.
Grandparent said these people can't afford to go to school; I don't think what you've said contradicts that.
I think we completely agree. Unless you have a clear job benefit (like studying CS) you should only go to college unless you're already rich and it doesn't matter.
Respectfully, this is nonsense. Employers still very much prefer people with college degrees for many roles, even if the degree itself isn’t 100% relevant to the job.
A four year degree is better than nothing. But its much worse than a few years work experience in your career field.
Obviously there's a huge exception for technical college degrees like CS, science, etc which are worth a ton. This applies to degrees in business, liberal arts, etc.
I was in the interested cohort of long-term remote workers before COVID.
One company I worked at attempted a hybrid remote experiment. It was awful at every level.
Having half a business in-person and the other half remote creates a massive rift between the "real" employees and the cogs (yes, it's company dependant and some business has probably made this strategy thrive, but it takes a lot of work).
Eventually, in-office was mandated. I quit a few months later.
I watched this partly unfold recently. Luckily, this company decided to scrap the office outright and now the entire company is distributed across the country (and a little international).
> Working support must suck, but being first line support in a call center truly sounds like hell
I spent my first 3 years in tech working in phone support (a few different Australia companies). I was young and dumb and thought any tech job would be awesome (tech was my passion/love, after all).
It was absolute hell.
I've been journaling several times per week for my entire adult life. Re-reading the entries during that 3 year period is depressing. My feelings towards other humans was truly distorted (I saw strangers as awful even outside of work). I spent every afternoon in a daze of depression and anger.
In my experience, companies treat support staff pretty poorly as well. And the pay sucks.
The mental toll of handling constant abuse from 8-6 every day was insane in retrospect.
After spending a few years as a dev, I wish I could teleport back to my first week in support and punch myself in the jaw. Working at a grocery store and applying for dev jobs would have been a much better strategy.
Depending on the nature of the hierarchy, they can engage in dishonest one-sided discussion because if you agree with them, good, if you disagree with them, they can just say something like 'I hear your feedback and will keep it in mind but we are going to go ahead with the original plan' and then pull rank.
This is, however, only as bad as your lack of leverage as a subordinate. If your dissatisfaction can make your superiors' lives harder (by quitting or by working suboptimally), you'll find that they become quite a bit more reasonable.
Overall, point 2 is the most interesting/troubling. I'm glad to have read it.
However, point 9 is beyond ridiculous. You claim that Protonmail devs don't use Protonmail. That's an interesting claim.
I was expecting a quote from devs making this claim.
Instead, it links to an article and uses the fact that Protonmail devs don't have an explicit @protonmail.com email address on GitHub as evidence (of the 13 devs inspected, the most common case is not having an email address public).
The article even makes this snarky remark when the dev is using Protonmail with a custom domain: 'Does not use Protonmail.com (No pride in “@protonmail.com”)'.
That's a very weak point to make compared to the seriousness of your other claims.