4 ms·

I'm going to call out bad actors here too: * GenDocu - Jared Madden. Something gRPC related * Steven Zhou - PhD student in organizational psychology at George

by msoad 4y ago

I'm going to call out bad actors here too: * GenDocu - Jared Madden. Something gRPC related * Steven Zhou - PhD student in organizational psychology at George Mason University * Elliott Ash and Swagatam Sinha -- Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich)

woodruffw 4y ago
I get dozens of these open source research emails a year, and they annoy me greatly. But I'll point out: these are graduate or PhD students, traversing language and etiquette boundaries, under pressure from their advisors to acquire the data they need to publish (or perish). I wish they wouldn't do it (and that their advisors would nudge them away from pointless surveys), but naming individual students isn't really calling out the bad actors here.
- pcai 4y ago
  Wait why? Do the students not have agency?
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    They have some agency, but they're not independent from their academic advisors. Given the volume of emails I get (and their disproportionate sources from a handful of the same universities) over 5+ years, I'm inclined to believe that there are a handful of advisors that push their students to do these surveys as "easy" research.
dbingham 4y ago
Students and researchers reaching out to collect data is very different from marketers trying to sell you something. These folks aren't marketing, they are trying to learn something about the world and then share that with the rest of us. We would probably benefit in the long run by participating, but I know we all have limited time and survey research has its flaws. Still I wouldn't call them bad actors, they're acting in the public interest (building humanity's knowledge base). Just ignore them if you don't have time to participate. If they're trying to build a startup and sell you that startup that's different, but you don't seem to be listing startups you seem to be listing researchers. If you want to talk about tech sales people with no respect for boundaries desperately willing to do anything to sell you something you don't want and don't need - then yeah, lets rage against that. I've been in a role where I became a target for tech SDRs and it was absolutely miserable. My phone wound up in a sales database and I came very close to changing my phone number (a number I've had for almost 20 years). It stopped when I left that role - thankfully. The last year I was in it, in particular, once they got a hold of my phone number was miserable. Multiple sales calls a day, my work inbox snowed under, often 3+ outreaches followed by a phone call. One SDR emailed me 6 times, called me, I chewed him out on the phone and then he emailed me again. I blocked his email and then instituted a policy of silently marking any 3rd outreach as spam. I wish phones had a similar feature.

by msoad 4y ago

woodruffw 4y ago

I get dozens of these open source research emails a year, and they annoy me greatly. But I'll point out: these are graduate or PhD students, traversing language and etiquette boundaries, under pressure from their advisors to acquire the data they need to publish (or perish). I wish they wouldn't do it (and that their advisors would nudge them away from pointless surveys), but naming individual students isn't really calling out the bad actors here.

pcai 4y ago
Wait why? Do the students not have agency?
- woodruffw 4y ago
  They have some agency, but they're not independent from their academic advisors. Given the volume of emails I get (and their disproportionate sources from a handful of the same universities) over 5+ years, I'm inclined to believe that there are a handful of advisors that push their students to do these surveys as "easy" research.

dbingham 4y ago

Students and researchers reaching out to collect data is very different from marketers trying to sell you something. These folks aren't marketing, they are trying to learn something about the world and then share that with the rest of us. We would probably benefit in the long run by participating, but I know we all have limited time and survey research has its flaws. Still I wouldn't call them bad actors, they're acting in the public interest (building humanity's knowledge base). Just ignore them if you don't have time to participate. If they're trying to build a startup and sell you that startup that's different, but you don't seem to be listing startups you seem to be listing researchers. If you want to talk about tech sales people with no respect for boundaries desperately willing to do anything to sell you something you don't want and don't need - then yeah, lets rage against that. I've been in a role where I became a target for tech SDRs and it was absolutely miserable. My phone wound up in a sales database and I came very close to changing my phone number (a number I've had for almost 20 years). It stopped when I left that role - thankfully. The last year I was in it, in particular, once they got a hold of my phone number was miserable. Multiple sales calls a day, my work inbox snowed under, often 3+ outreaches followed by a phone call. One SDR emailed me 6 times, called me, I chewed him out on the phone and then he emailed me again. I blocked his email and then instituted a policy of silently marking any 3rd outreach as spam. I wish phones had a similar feature.