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Showing posts from April, 2019

TurboTax Dark Patterns

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If you don't know, TurboTax is a popular tax filing product in the USA. TurboTax has been found to intentionally hide it's free-to-use product from the general public. TurboTax offers a free product for tax payers who belong to a certain income bracket. But, it actively works on preventing the product from being found online. To do so, it employs dark patterns. Specifically, it tells search engines to not index and therefore not display the free version of the software. Search engines are what we use everyday to find the website that we are interested in accessing. There are few that remember the exact URL that needs to be accessed. Therefore, if a website wants to be hidden from the general public, it can tell search engines that it does not want to be found. See the coverage by ProPublica for more information - https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hides-its-free-file-page-from-search-engines . What I'm interested in knowing now is if this cov

Hertz v Accenture

I just came across a very interesting story Hertz is suing Accenture for not delivering. Hertz hired Accenture to enable Digital Transformation. Specifically, Accenture was to revamp Hertz's online presence. Alas, Accenture didn't deliver on the statement of work and it asked for more money in order to complete the project. I don't remember the last time I remember a tech consultancy firm was sued for doing a bad job. I have heard about tech consultancies doing such a horrible job that all of their work had to thrown out. Actually getting sued is a first as far as I can remember. Ohh. The actual amount. Hertz is suing Accenture for the 32 Million $ that was spent and additional fees Hertz had to spend to rectify Accenture's mistakes. The actual lawsuit can be found here -  https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture_lawsuit/ [PDF] The Register's coverage of the story can be found here - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture

WFH

Here's a quote from an article on working from home and productivity hacking from the article - "I Let a Stranger Watch Me Work for a Day — And I’ve Never Been More Productive" . ... , I work from home. ... , let me assure you of one cold, hard fact: getting shit done without anyone but your staggeringly beautiful cat to hold you accountable is hard. Rampant procrastination, on the other hand, is easy. Without the social pressure to be productive enforced in more traditional workplaces, it’s all too easy to succumb to tempting diversions like ... Because of this, I often find myself wishing I had a regular office job. That way, I’d at least be part of some sort of team; a team whose judgment I’d be so pathologically fearful of that I’d rush to get the job done with sparkling focus and productivity in a time frame that would make my boss weep with pride. I’m not even being delusional with that fantasy — studies show people are