Some IT guy, IDK.

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  • 37 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Days in lieu, from working OT on salary… IMO, is required.

    I don’t work for free; if you’re paying me to be present for specific hours, regardless if it’s salary or not, then I expect to work during those hours and not any other time.

    If, as a salary employee, I’m paid for results and as long as I meet my deadlines (and deadlines are reasonable) I can work whenever, then yeah, I’ll probably put in unpaid OT sometimes. I’ll tell you something though… With my level of experience, it would be unusual for anything to take so long that it requires that I work more than what is typical.









  • Let’s stop mincing words here.

    You want me because I have a particular set of skills that you think will be helpful to you in your pursuit of profit.

    I want your job because I can leverage the skills I have for money and benefits that will provide food, and shelter.

    Your main concerns are profits.

    My main concerns are survival.

    Employment is where these things meet in the middle. Let’s not pretend that we’re here because we’re friends. We are not family. Fuck you, pay me.







  • It really doesn’t do much and the cost is barely pennies per user when you operate at scale. The largest costs will be for the DNS resolver service and the domain registration, both of which you are already required to have, in order to have a functioning presence on the Internet. The cost of the issuing intermediate certificate is probably the largest single cost of the whole operation.

    To be fair to Plex, they run some intermediary (caching) metadata servers to offload the demand their users put on services like the tvdb and IMDb. Honestly, is probably not required… But they do it. (I’ve seen their caching system fail more often than either site, so, it’s not all good), but even with that, you can put most of that load into your existing webhost, and it’s unlikely to make an impact on performance.

    When you do this stuff at scale, the costs of simply having it set up, usually cover the costs of using it for thousands, if not tens of thousands of users.


  • I have two pieces of paper from my time in post-secondary education. One says information technology, the other says business. I’ve worked in an IT field for well over 10 years in a B2B capacity. I’ve had to handle cost/benefit and ROI arguments with customers, and justify having them spend incredible amounts for their own good.

    Are we done dick measuring about what we think we know?

    Listen, we’re not going to agree on this. I couldn’t give any fewer shits if you do or not. Bluntly, I’m unbothered.

    Good day to you sir.


  • I have a very good knowledge of business operations.

    They already offered Plex pass to earn their income. Plex is an extremely price elastic product, given that alternatives like jellyfin exist. They are taking features away, and charging people if they don’t want to lose those features. That’s a really good way to piss off your existing userbase (or customer base). Better would be to offer something new, and charge for that. Keep existing products at the same cost, but have “better” products at a premium. You won’t get a huge number of people buying the extended product, but it will likely be more new paying users than how many you would get with the crap they’re doing now, and they wouldn’t lose any customers in the process.

    When you understand the social and economic factors here, this is a super idiotic move. When you’re only looking at how many dollars you can extract from the customer base, this is a golden idea… I mean, it will fail, but it looks golden if you’re only looking at the money numbers.

    I would question whether you know how a business works (or whether Plex does, for that matter).

    As far as I’m concerned, Plex failed to read the room. They were already walking a fine line with the people in a legal grey area, which comprised a good amount of their customer base (those that are sharing media at least). There’s a nontrivial number of people who share media that are rather paranoid with reason. Nobody wants the RIAA/MPAA to have any reason to investigate what you are doing on the Internet. We all know how well that goes from the whole Napster thing. So now than a few are almost tinfoil hat level of paranoid. Many have already jumped ship to jellyfin or something similar. The rest are either unconcerned, not paying attention, or simply don’t care. I would argue that the numbers of people who run servers currently that host content using Plex, that are not looking at alternatives because of this, is pretty damned low.

    Plex alienated the group that brought everyone into their umbrella. When the people who host media entirely abandon their product because of this shit, their client base vaporizes.

    Can’t have a product or company with no clients. At least, not for long.