HACKER Q&A
📣 MollyRealized

What unattended-to 'housekeeping' would you fix at Google, MS, etc.?


Just curious what little things you feel have been left unattended-to, what things have been left only partially completed.

For me, for example, I am transgender, and Google makes it quite difficult to transition one's everything to an account with your new chosen name.

As part of that, I've noticed GMail has Takeout, but it doesn't complete the thought by offering a clean quick import back of what was exported. You can do some things through a great deal of hassle, but it's definitely an uncompleted thought.

That being just an example - but what "little things" do you feel have been left unfixed?

(And, should you work at one of the Biggies and want to bring this to someone's attention -- I imagine people would love you for it.)


  👤 leros Accepted Answer ✓
Amazon sends order confirmation and shipment emails, but all they do is reference an order number. Getting an email like "Your Amazon.com order #112-7222326-5625868 has shipped" is absolutely useless for me. I'm not a robot, nor do I have access to Amazon's order database where the ID has any meaning.

I would modify this email to be human friendly. List the items in the shipment.


👤 fallowkevin
Google could go for true diversity? (Including economic diversity)

It's wonderful they're hiring trans folks like yourself, but speaking as someone who fought hard outside the org for equality, it seems like it's a rainbow of people who went to CMU or Stanford (or other top tier school), and absent having a "partner" in the romantic sense to get you in, you'll never be lifted out of the precarity that drove many of us to learn to hack in the 2000s.

(For context, I'm homeless and writing this in a coffee shop with terrible wifi over Tor. I don't begrudge those who are doing well, but I deeply regret that I sit here reading posts like these and feeling like some folks have advantages I never will because I'm "just" a queer, autistic guy from a lower middle class catholic home.)


👤 novia
The chart showing the quarterly earnings reports on Google has the wrong dates.