4 ms·

I hate this thing with a passion, my corporate job mandates it and you can't turn it off, so Ecosia is the default search engine. 9/10 times I type something in

I hate this thing with a passion, my corporate job mandates it and you can't turn it off, so Ecosia is the default search engine. 9/10 times I type something in Chrome's URL bar it's 'Google'. There's no opt-out. Ecosia is fine but I just don't get the corporate policy. It's making my work a lot more inefficient, and when I worked for clients (I currently work for internal clients which isn't chargeable) I billed $300 per hour. An Ecosia search is worth half a cent, you need 45 searches to plant one tree. Suppose I do 20 searches in a day, that's 10 cents. Suppose the extra search to Google takes 3 seconds, at a billabe rate of $300 that's 25 cents times 20 searches is 500 cents, about 50x whatever Ecosia is gaining. I just don't get why my employer can't just pay 20 cents into Ecosia's tree fund, get the same marketing, contribute 2x as much to trees, save 25x as much money on this thing and save me frustration. If I then figure that (1) a search for Google (I don't use Ecosia search results at all) is not contributing any revenue at all and (2) even those who use Ecosia search results are getting worse and less time-efficient information versus Google, the economics of simply letting people use Google instead of Ecosia (Bing) and contributing the equivalent in money, makes even more sense. And then (3) corporate actively does not want you to go shopping online during work. This idea to show ads during workhours when employees just want search results is a ridiculous idea. Other than that I think Ecosia is a great idea, but it must be opt-outable. tl;dr I hate big corporates. In other words, at the cost of 8 cents per second in billable time, I'm generating half a cent

growt 6y ago
The billable $300 an hour go to your company. So if your company can charge for more time because you spend more time searching, that's actually good for your employer!
- tlrobinson 6y ago
  Of course that only works if there is no competition that is more efficient.
- IkmoIkmo 6y ago
  Haha, not sure if you're serious but of course charging doesn't work that way. Otherwise it'd make sense for every company to just implement as many unnecessary time-sinks as possible. Being higher-cost than competitors (or hell, even higher-cost without competitors) without adding proportionate value (e.g. when you add a time-sink) will lose you business. Second, as immoral as it may sound, plenty of companies or rather employees within companies don't write time purely on a time-spent basis. Time spent is one of the variables, but you'll mostly look at sensibility and industry practices, too. If you did project X for a client for $10k and can modify it and do it for $8k for client Y the week after, you're likely still going to charge something close to $10k even if you didn't spend the time. And vice versa, if you bid aggressively on a project claiming you can do it in less-than-ideal amount of time and spend more time anyway, you'll get push-back and will not be able to charge it fully. In other words, operational efficiencies are helpful in a world in which you agree to get paid on a time-spent basis.
  - growt 6y ago
    I'm only half serious ;) Of course this doesn't scale to infinity (work as slowly as possible), but I think some "tactical" inefficiencies are part of almost every project (especially in the public sector). But I didn't want to accuse you or your company of doing this!

growt 6y ago

The billable $300 an hour go to your company. So if your company can charge for more time because you spend more time searching, that's actually good for your employer!

tlrobinson 6y ago
Of course that only works if there is no competition that is more efficient.
IkmoIkmo 6y ago
Haha, not sure if you're serious but of course charging doesn't work that way. Otherwise it'd make sense for every company to just implement as many unnecessary time-sinks as possible. Being higher-cost than competitors (or hell, even higher-cost without competitors) without adding proportionate value (e.g. when you add a time-sink) will lose you business. Second, as immoral as it may sound, plenty of companies or rather employees within companies don't write time purely on a time-spent basis. Time spent is one of the variables, but you'll mostly look at sensibility and industry practices, too. If you did project X for a client for $10k and can modify it and do it for $8k for client Y the week after, you're likely still going to charge something close to $10k even if you didn't spend the time. And vice versa, if you bid aggressively on a project claiming you can do it in less-than-ideal amount of time and spend more time anyway, you'll get push-back and will not be able to charge it fully. In other words, operational efficiencies are helpful in a world in which you agree to get paid on a time-spent basis.
- growt 6y ago
  I'm only half serious ;) Of course this doesn't scale to infinity (work as slowly as possible), but I think some "tactical" inefficiencies are part of almost every project (especially in the public sector). But I didn't want to accuse you or your company of doing this!