1. Experts in their field often reach a point in their career where they've run into enough road blocks and solved enough major problems in their field that they can see some benefit in helping others avoid/solve said problems on fast track. [This is where I'm at]
2. Companies often have need for on-tap expertise to solve problems on fast track without being required to commit for the long haul.
And here is the intersection of consulting. I've solved about a million problems at this point in my career. Many of them solved the hard way - the way I'd like you not to have to solve them. I've spotted patterns that allow you to predict what kind of behaviours and working processes will cause what kinds of problems and I've formed patterns and processes that allow clients to sidestep issues before they become issues.
Wouldn't it be useful to benefit from that?
Many major consultancies, sadly, hire a ton of people that haven't put in the time and built the skills to be as effective as you may like - which is reflected by the fact that every time I've been approached by Accenture they've offered rates that only a junior or intermediate level consultant would go for.
This explains why a lot of customers part ways with consultancies with a bad taste in their mouth. This isn't the grade of "expertise" you expect when you hire a consultancy. You expect senior or principal level resources for the rates you pay - people who have done the time, solved the problems and come armed with the solutions; not juniors and intermediates who may be great bums in seats, but not what you hire big expensive consultancies to provide.
I've also been on a team with a technical consultant. Finding someone with that specific expertise and fitting into the environment would have been really difficult and probably more expensive, also considering the risk of a bad hire.
I will tell you, having been approached by Accenture a number of times that the rates they offer their consultants are far below what a decent consultant expects to get paid. You get what you pay for. You're mileage may vary.
I haven't had a printer for the past 3 years and I refuse to buy one because of the disgusting economic and environmental practices of the ink mafia. Their behaviour has been beyond despicable for decades but somehow the world has just shrugged their shoulders and accepted it.
I have an iPad and downloaded PDF Expert and got an Apple Pencil to sign digital documents and I've only occasionally had issues I can't get around - Amazon return labels are the biggest pain in the ass.
If you're from Amazon, sort out a way we can ship returns without needing a printer!
You can return Amazon purchases without a printer. I've done it multiple times. You can either have them mail you a label (for $1) or take it to a UPS Store where they scan a barcode on your phone.
Lately, they've had our regular UPS guy, doing usual deliveries, have a shipping label with him, and he just picks up the return. We put a post-it on the cardboard box to let him know that it's the box to return.
I don't think you get to pick that service anywhere as such, so it might be regional or limited in some other way. When you initiate a return, you don't know whether you'll need a printer or not.
In the U.S. maybe those options work, but in Canada they don't. If by chance the goods were shipped via a courier that will scan the barcode to return, that works - UPS for instance, but 90% of the time you need to print a return label because the goods aren't returned via a carrier that supports that.
Well I can't speak for everyone else obviously, but I find traditional notation much easier to read than Clairnote's alternative. Even with the description, I find it harder to glance at the Clairnote notation and see what it means.
Along with a host of other server side "languages" - ASP, PERL/CGI... all this has been done before. Just as we've come full circle on infrastructure where we were trying to eke every ounce of performance out of memory and CPU cycles because supply was short, now we do so because we're charged by the cycle, memory overhead, bandwidth we're beginning to recycle concepts like server side rendering... which has been done since as long as PERL/CGI existed back in the 90s.
It's funny how we just keep reusing the same ideas and calling them new... it makes me wonder why the history of relevant technologies aren't taught in software development classes so we can actually forge a path forward instead of keep doing the same things over and over again...
If I recall rightly, this is why VHS beat out the higher quality Betamax back in the day of video tapes - it was cheaper to produce using VHS so everything was on VHS. Because everything was on VHS, that was what people bought and the higher quality Betamax lost enough market to survive.
It's a shame that the higher quality product isn't always what wins and kind of says something about our Walmart approach to life.
"While VHS machines' lower retail price was eventually a major factor, the principal battleground proved to be recording time. The original Sony Betamax video recorder for the NTSC television system could record for only 60 minutes, identical to the previous U-matic format, which had been sufficient for use in television studios. JVC's VHS could manage 120 minutes, followed by RCA's entrance into the market with a 240-minute recorder using VHS. These challenges sparked a mini-war to see who could achieve the longest recording time."
Considering beta 2 matches VHS's LP, the quality advantages of Betamax may have simply been that beta 1 just used more tape per minute of recording time.
popularity is expensive. people want quality, and generally arent happy to sacrifice it. but the diminishing returns hits way harder and faster for the common person than a hobbyist typically wants to accept.
popularity is also skewed young. income is skewed old. VHS was a much better fit as a lowest common denominator. If a product is trying to be a popular medium, cheap is necessary.
That said, once the medium is established - people will still happily pay a lot for a high quality product within the medium. iPhone popularity is a good example of this. People bought expensive VHS players with bells and whistles too.
Having spent half a decade working in Oil & Gas flow control systems directly, I can confirm that 10 years ago when I left that industry, cyber security was still not even a consideration. Light years behind wasn't an accurate statement - non-existent was more accurate.
Admittedly computer systems have come a long way in ten years, but given the attitudes and technical expertise of a lot of the people I worked alongside, I would say there's a reasonable chance the needle hasn't moved very far.
They're excruciatingly good at getting oil out of the ground and getting it to market, but they're not going to be winning capture the flag at Defcon or Blackhat any time soon...
I just had that request from my girlfriend in the Netherlands to bring back an iPad mini in this trip because they're $100 less for the 256GB model here in Canada than they work out to in the Netherlands once exchange rates and taxes are considered.
Living close to the U.S. border, it's quite easy for me to do a 24-48 hour jaunt down to the U.S. - long enough to qualify for the customs exemptions and bring cheap electronics back to Canada. The only down side is that if anything goes wrong with them, I have to cross the border back to the U.S. to deal with warranty issues.
Having an address in the Netherlands and parents in the UK also means that I have similar benefits in the opposite direction, sometimes stuff is way cheaper in the UK or Europe and if I need it I just pick it up there when I'm there. The down side there being that they're obviously cabled for European or UK plugs which means I either need to replace the cables or, thankfully, most stuff is rechargeable via USB-C now, so all I need are European, British and American USB-C charging units and everything carries on as normal.
I love the Reuters app for my phone. I can listen to the roundup once in the morning while I'm getting ready or in 10 minutes on my way to the gym. It's all the basic headlines with a little blurb. Read to you with very little in the way of emotion, passion or hype. It plays in the background while I do other things and it's done. It doesn't drone on and on like the radio does until you realize you've heard this story 3 times already like on CP24 or whatever other news channel keeps blathering on while quietly promoting their hidden (or not so hidden) political agenda and gradually sapping at your will to live.
I've cut off my cable/satellite TV. I don't listen to any other news sources. I read BBC's headlines once a day.
Cutting off the "mainstream" media and advertising from my life has done more for my mental health than my gym membership, diet, meditation and fresh air combined. Not to say those things aren't important, but they didn't have nearly the impact that cutting off the constant drama, heightened emotion and propaganda have.
1. Experts in their field often reach a point in their career where they've run into enough road blocks and solved enough major problems in their field that they can see some benefit in helping others avoid/solve said problems on fast track. [This is where I'm at]
2. Companies often have need for on-tap expertise to solve problems on fast track without being required to commit for the long haul.
And here is the intersection of consulting. I've solved about a million problems at this point in my career. Many of them solved the hard way - the way I'd like you not to have to solve them. I've spotted patterns that allow you to predict what kind of behaviours and working processes will cause what kinds of problems and I've formed patterns and processes that allow clients to sidestep issues before they become issues.
Wouldn't it be useful to benefit from that?
Many major consultancies, sadly, hire a ton of people that haven't put in the time and built the skills to be as effective as you may like - which is reflected by the fact that every time I've been approached by Accenture they've offered rates that only a junior or intermediate level consultant would go for.
This explains why a lot of customers part ways with consultancies with a bad taste in their mouth. This isn't the grade of "expertise" you expect when you hire a consultancy. You expect senior or principal level resources for the rates you pay - people who have done the time, solved the problems and come armed with the solutions; not juniors and intermediates who may be great bums in seats, but not what you hire big expensive consultancies to provide.