Much and truly thanks for providing some thoughtful feedback. As someone who personally felt the pain from the juror perspective, I actually had no idea about the pains felt by court administrators. The courts we've been working with in determining our MVP are extremely interested in what Jurymind provides as far as a way to more conveniently connect with jurors. They recognize people don't want to do jury duty, and that manifests in many ways. Anything they can do reduce friction communicating is a welcome tool. If a court can save 5 jurors a month from becoming no shows, that's worth the time and expense. A smaller county can easily send summonses to over 500 potential jurors per month. With no show rates averaging in the 30-40%range, we see a compelling opportunity.
Jury clerks certainly don't want more work, either... Who does? Our process has boiled it down to just a few clicks to send out notifications to any jurors using the app. That's a mere fraction of the time it takes just to record the daily phone message, even if it's done in one take (rare). Having shown our app to a room full of jury clerks, including some voicing concerns about more workload, they were adequately impressed with the easy of use. Some were downright excited.
Privacy is another very obvious area of concern. We actually neither store nor require any personally identifiable juror information. At most, we ask for a juror number from the summons and name of the court. No other info or even password needed. We're ultimately not providing jurors with more confidential information than any person - juror or otherwise - could get by dialing the jury "hotline" and listening to the extremely verbose recording every day. Our objective is to provide it in a much more proactive, clear, and convenient fashion.
Final thought... Courts are already well underway in converting to paperless records and court management software, so technophobia isn't really an option any more. State and federal grants are available for adding innovative technologies into the justice system. Not saying every court is or will go this route, but we're also not pioneering computer use in the courts with our app. They've already embraced it more than I would have thought myself.
Again, much thanks for engaging! I'd be most curious to hear how the added info might affect your thoughts. Feel free to continue here or drop me a line privately.
Does anyone feel more reticent than usual to chime in on these threads despite this being one of the most provocative topics on HN? Asking for a friend...
No, I don't. I admit that I very occasionally think twice about saying some things.
Actually I think writing about the NSA in forums like this, and in email, is the only effective way I have at trying to convince the analysts and spies that they're doing the wrong thing. [You listening, analyst spy?]
Yea, it's hard to not think this is ultimately not a great move. It seems rather shortsighted from a Gmail user's perspective if Google can't address concerns over spammers being able to verify email addresses, or even just analytic trackers. It is also vastly less appealing to hear that Google plans to cache all images, which we know Big Brother is grabbing as well. And in the case where someone may want to actually see images for a marketing email (albeit, extremely rare for me), it actually hamstrings the source of the email from possibly providing customized images/content based on geolocation/browser/etc. that I could be interested in seeing.
So, what's the upside vs. just having the option to display images as desired and NOT have Google cache them?
That feels a bit like the "I have nothing to hide argument." Should we just accept that probably spammers no longer send address verifying emails, and tacitly approve this change helping them out if they do? Ultimately, the default should be to let people decide for themselves to opt in to something like this. Forcing this with some pretty big head scratching holes in the benefits seems rather evil.
I really dislike combining the notions of project and product management as if they are synonymous. It's like saying a developer and a designer are the same thing. That's wrong.
The skills sets, discipline, and day in and day out activities are outrageously different. I get combining the 2 roles into one category for organization purposes, but the description/answer to the inquiring page title doesn't even use the word "project" in it.
Could some project managers do product management and vice versa? Sure. I've even done some of both at the same time, despite it being somewhat of a split-brained job. Do some companies just muddy/confuse the terminology? Sure, but that doesn't mean it should be allowed to perpetuate further and confuse others even more.
I have been wanting to write a much more ranty version of the OP for a really long time. Yes, there are and always will be bad managers out in the world. But it makes me laugh when the immediate reaction people have is to just get rid of all the managers, because developers are all clearly rock stars, way smarter than managers in all ways, and can perfectly self-organize themselves. Really? I would love to see such a group in action. I imagine they must exist, but I also strongly believe people hear the myths of such teams much more than they actually have experienced such a thing themselves.
Meanwhile, I'm going to head back to figuring out to get a QA member to stop being so toxic to our overall efforts, make sure a developer properly knows the expectations on how to interact with the rest of the team, sort out the next 3-6 months of priorities with the executive team accounting for all internal department requests and our lengthy product roadmap, help a lead dev resolve an issue with a really smart developer who has taken twice as long as expected on a straightforward task, find time to look through a whole bunch of resumes that are likely nowhere near where what we're seeking in candidates, and then make sure all the right people receive updates to all of those activities. We'll see what tomorrow brings.
To be clear, I absolutely love my job. It's extremely rewarding to see even one of those items get checked of the list in a given day, or the not-always-well-communicated but good-intentioned appreciation that a single member of my team sends my way after helping him remove an obstacle or provide some sort of useful feedback. It's definitely a much different type of challenge from when I was a full-time dev, but I honestly get at least as much out of the experience as I did solving problems with code.
I can't point people at a team of 100 developers that operate like a herd of unicorns, negating their 1 bumbling manager. However, I can provide examples of teams that perform really quite well and have competent managers who deserve at least a bit of credit in their teams' successes.
Let's be honest here... Nearly everyone who is passionate about one platform or another lives in some kind of glass house. Why does Arment feel it's necessary to throw stones like this? I realize some are reading this as a more "balanced" post, but I have to side with those considering this to be yet more elitism as I've come to expect.
Just as anecdotally, but no less data-driven, there is an obvious counter argument to his claim. I will concede his notion that Apple people don't spew anti-Android on pro-Android posts. That is because, from my own informal observations, Apple fans are too busy defending their own gates on the Apple support forums. It is unequivocally the most combative and abrasive "help forum" I've ever experienced.
As a person who owns and really enjoy Apple products (the MacBook Air, for my needs, is hands-down the best computer I've ever owned... and what I'm typing on at this moment), they're still far from perfect. Numerous times I've tried searching for resolutions to issues, and naturally, discussions.apple.com is typically a top result on Google. Even when finding an OP that precisely describes the issue I'm experiencing, more often than not, responses are along the exact lines of how Arment describes Apple's response:
"You don’t need that. Here, try this partial workaround or alternative solution instead."
Except, they usually don't "just work." And yes, I really do need what Apple broke. It took until 10.8.2 for Remote Desktop to work reliably again after Mountain Lion's initial release. I spent hours researching and found no reasonable workaround to get an piece of software written by Apple to work with Apple's OS. But yet, there were plenty of people asking why that was needed. I merely had to setup this convoluted alternative and I would be back in business... oh, wait. That still didn't work.
In my mind, this is worse than Arment's claim, as it's Apple people getting attacked by other Apple people for the heresy of wanting something to work. He's railing against the anger from Microsoft and Android, but he is okay with the cannibalism in the Apple camp?
I could go on, but I feel like I've already written a disproportionate amount more than I actually care about this guy's hypocritical, fact-less editorials. I guess my opinion finally got dragged low enough with this post to finally speak up. I would suggest he looks a little closer to the mothership before trying to paint this kind of picture. However, I can't fool myself into thinking he'd be the slightest bit open to the feedback.
For me, while it's absolutely no surprise, it's still quite depressing the clear lobbying that is/will occur to trample this project. As others have said, the cost seems quite realistic and I would put my money on the 8-person having a much better handle on the end-users needs over some big consulting-ware shop. But the big firms surely have great influence with those most able to appropriate the funds for whatever solution B.C. opts to implement. There's obviously maintenance, support, enhancement, etc. that must go on after initial launch, but that still should not get anywhere near the monster price from an outside vendor.
I hope their fate is not so dire. I will definitely be interested in updates on the school district's efforts.
It's a little amazing, when you think about it, that a lot of people think you need to spend $100 million to build software to manage grades and attendance.
Especially as geeks in the startup world often build far more complicated software on budgets quite a bit smaller than $5 million.
Even if all it did was grade and attendance. It is not trivial to get that right. My own little pet project http://gradezilla.com took years of refinement before it could handle just those things. Tying in with other aspects of a schools system makes it many multiple more complicated.
The original post was on 2012-09-21 and still no resolution. Not to mention, as others have pointed out, it's for a cert that expired several months ago. But this link is public acknowledgement of the issue and it's still unresolved as of today. Regardless of bureaucracy, that should be considered highly unacceptable for the largest consumer ISP in the United States.
Jury clerks certainly don't want more work, either... Who does? Our process has boiled it down to just a few clicks to send out notifications to any jurors using the app. That's a mere fraction of the time it takes just to record the daily phone message, even if it's done in one take (rare). Having shown our app to a room full of jury clerks, including some voicing concerns about more workload, they were adequately impressed with the easy of use. Some were downright excited.
Privacy is another very obvious area of concern. We actually neither store nor require any personally identifiable juror information. At most, we ask for a juror number from the summons and name of the court. No other info or even password needed. We're ultimately not providing jurors with more confidential information than any person - juror or otherwise - could get by dialing the jury "hotline" and listening to the extremely verbose recording every day. Our objective is to provide it in a much more proactive, clear, and convenient fashion.
Final thought... Courts are already well underway in converting to paperless records and court management software, so technophobia isn't really an option any more. State and federal grants are available for adding innovative technologies into the justice system. Not saying every court is or will go this route, but we're also not pioneering computer use in the courts with our app. They've already embraced it more than I would have thought myself.
Again, much thanks for engaging! I'd be most curious to hear how the added info might affect your thoughts. Feel free to continue here or drop me a line privately.