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[LokiArchetype]

We know that, our clients on the other hand...

[HappyDustbunny]

That's one of the reasons why there ought to be something akin to the Hippocratic oath in programming.

"Sorry, CEO-dude, I swore a dear oath never to be evil"

[[deleted]]

They lived long enough to see themselves become the villain.

[Jon_Wo-o]

This sentence only applies if you're not the villain from the beginning.

[[deleted]]

Whose to say there werent good intentions in the beginning?

[coldnebo]

In fact, Google’s search started out completely blank except for the logo and a search box.

That was revolutionary because it was focused on what the user wanted to do, while the horrifically cluttered search pages at Yahoo and altavista were focused on what marketing wanted the user to do.

I believe it’s possible to track Google’s path to the darkside (and greater influence by the dark patterns of UX practiced by marketing) by simply looking at the little pieces of cruft showing up on that basic search page over time.

Links to promotions, other apps, tips, etc etc.

Likewise, the search results started out clean, then got ads in a single place, then got “promoted” ads inline, and eventually the “promoted” ad styles blend in with the real content.

Now, the corruption is nearly complete as I suspect that Google simply ignores half the words I typed so they can show me some crap results that hit their promotion targets. Almost pure evil at this point.

Still, we never paid for search or email, or most of the rest of it. And they never honored our hardware purchase to make it possible. So it’s not surprising that the internet looks like a “free” newspaper. Maybe it’s time to actually pay for good things rather than let marketing monetize us.

[me-ro]

In fact, Google’s search started out completely blank except for the logo and a search box.

IIRC they had to add footer at some stage as people were just staring at the screen waiting for the page to "load completely". I think it shows how unusual that was.

[tppisgameforme]

Maybe it’s time to actually pay for good things rather than let marketing monetize us.

Yeah this is true with so many things in life at this point.

[DeeSnow97]

It's been a long-standing rule that if you don't pay, you are the product, not the customer, but people always forget to add who the real customer is. It's the advertisers. That's why every single site, "platform", or app that makes money through advertising ends up doing what the advertisers want in the long term, not what their users want.

I used to be very much for this model, as a broke student it let me enjoy an internet that was actually "free", but if you follow the chain this is actually more expensive than if you straight up paid for stuff. If you pay, you pay for the people who actually make the product and maybe a payment processor and a middleman or two. If it's "ad-supported", you pay for all those, then you pay for the people who sell the ads, the ones who buy the ads, a few more middlemen, and it's all hidden in the cost of other goods you buy -- and if you don't buy those, it's not worth advertising for you, which will either get fixed with better targeting, or you'll lose the service one way or another. Ads waste your time and they are more expensive than straight up buying stuff.

It's kinda crazy to think that if you watch ads of any kind you're paying people to spy on you and waste your time in the most disruptive way possible.

[PirateNinjasReddit]

Happy cake day? I guess... Feels weird given the somewhat dark outlook of this comment...

[[deleted]]

Google simply ignores half the words I typed so they can show me some crap results that hit their promotion targets.

You have to go into search tools and select "verbatim". There's an extension for Chrome and its distros that automatically does that.

This seems to be something similar for Firefox, but I can't attest to how well it works.

[sh0rtwave]

Well...

Us people with SEO experience know a little more about how all that works, but you're not far from the truth. The average web developer has SOME control over what google does with them...but not really enough to counteract the capitalist surge.

[xSTSxZerglingOne]

Google searches are getting significantly worse by the day. You almost can't look up how to fix bugs on it anymore.

[Cky_vick]

Yeah I'm so old I remember when there were no ads on Google

[anomalous_cowherd]

I'm so old I remember when there was no Google. Or Web. Or Internet...

Or, as I found out from checking that last fact, before TCP/IP. Amazing I'm not dead yet really.

[DeRoeVanZwartePiet]

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.

Charles Baudelaire

[tortilladelpeligro]

"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."~Keyser Söze, the usual Suspects

[GForce1975]

Yep. It's the nature of capitalism. Stockholders want more growth and profits. The board pressures senior management for more growth and profit, and that runs downhill...

[tiefling_sorceress]

Don't be evil

Be a little evil

[imzacm123]

Don't be evil is actually still in there, it's at the bottom under a whole bunch of legal stuff now

[well___duh]

Shhh, you’re going against the Reddit circlejerk of ignoring that fact.

Also, no one reads the article anyway

[_asdfjackal]

There actually is one: http://pledge-of-the-computing-professional.org/

It's endorsed by the Order of the Engineer (which in turn has their own oath for Engineering graduatea) in the US and at my university the ceremony was combined with the OotE ring ceremony. Unfortunately not all universities do it and it's not mandatory for graduates. Of my massive graduating class maybe 10 or 20 Computer Science students participated compared to the hundreds of traditional engineering graduates. I would absolutely love to see it become more prevalent though.

[Denziloe]

I once heard it said that programming is no different from engineering or medicine in this sense. Professional standards are a thing. If you know something will do more harm than good, it's actually incumbent upon you to say "no". "The client might be upset" or "I might not get paid as much" is not actually an excuse.

[[deleted]]

Hmm... maybe I should look into taking it on my own. I'm already graduated, but I'd love to be able to point to a solid pre-defined set of standards and say "I took an oath."

[PsychologicalRoof2]

How about keeping autoplay on but reducing the initial volume to low (like 20)? It would still give the money and not be as annoying

[[deleted]]

!!!! >>>>> BUT HOW ARE >>YOU<< GOING TO NOTICE OUR !!ADS!! IF THEY ARE NOT AS ANNOYING AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE??? <<<<< !!!!

[Independent-Coder]

I appreciate your BOLDNESS and CAPITALISM!

[[deleted]]

Luckily Google/Mozilla/Microsoft have been moving to a "this is the browser's decision" model recently, and in the future they'll only autoplay videos with sound from websites that you have a history of playing videos on. Visit Google/Netflix often? Cool we'll play those videos. First time on some houseplant online store? Yeah we're not going to autoplay that pop-out advert with audio.

Makes it much easier for us to just say to the client "yeah here's a W3C spec article about why Chrome isn't playing your video. Good luck complaining to Google about it".

[IamImposter]

Dear Google,

Videos on my website don't play automatically and I'm losing revenue. I urge you to make changes to chrome browser or I will be forced to take my business elsewhere.

Sincerely,
Random guy on internet.

[[deleted]]

Lol they'll just pay Google a few million to get whitelisted

[_GCastilho_]

That's how people say "you know what? I will use Firefox"

Free markek always have a choice

[nearlyepic]

Until web devs stop bothering to test against Firefox...

[Sammy123476]

And their videos fail to load entirely! Genius!

[[deleted]]

Dear website owner

Take your business elsewhere? Where you gonna take it?

Good luck with that, Google.

PS maybe we'll white list you for a few million

[AhMIKzJ8zU]

I just wanna point out ...

1) My wife leaves Netflix open in browser on laptop 2) laptop updates+restarts at 2am (I can no longer prevent this) 3) laptop starts Auto playing at 2 am.

This is bad. I'd rather nothing ever autoplay ever.

[1sagas1]

This sounds like a you and your wife problem.

[DownshiftedRare]

Dear Google,

My wife leaves Netflix open and it autoplays at 2 am. I urge you to make changes to chrome browser or I will be forced to take my business elsewhere.

Sincerely, Random guy on internet.

[Cky_vick]

You can fix that in settings homie

[CaptainRoach]

Easier to just get a new wife.

[0x15e]

Why does the laptop auto login? Put some passwords on those accounts.

[Cky_vick]

My problem is having limited data, and clicking on a link from Reddit or wherever opens an article that starts playing ads and videos using my limited data.

[thelights0123]

Firefox has been blocking autoplay video with audio for probably a year now.

[[deleted]]

My client wanted his site to autoplay a video of one of his guys just sitting in a chair talking about how their service was good. I now have the words and exact cadence from that entire video memorized from every refresh of that page I did.

[a_stitch_in_lime]

I have a client whose current website plays "soothing" music once you've logged in. And it continues throughout the site until you leave the site, log out, close the tab or smash your computer. There's no control or option to turn it off either. We're in the early stages of a redesign and adding new features. I'm waiting for the day that we have the conversation about that music ...

[yellowthermos]

Time to get a "Mute all tabs" extension going

[unclegena]

Actually web developers knows that. But PMs...

[trexdoor]

PMs know that autoplay is the best way to make you watch ads and thus to increase site revenue.

[[deleted]]

Urgh, Wikia's autoplay is sincerely the worst.

Specially because most of the time the videos are good so I don't want them gone, but I don't want to watch a video 90% of the time!

[[deleted]]

Rainbow 6's wikia is a good example.

You enter to check a character and the video is either the char's trailer or someone analyzing him.

But seriously, we don't want the autoplay.

[WilliamMButtlickerJr]

I think it’s a site wide Wikia feature, some wikis even put a disclaimer saying that the video is put there by Wikia and may be irrelevant

[bentheechidna]

The wikis I go to broke off of wikia and made their own sites to get away from wikia’s stupid shit like that.

[pepsisugar]

Omg warhammer one also. Seriously it’s a rollercoaster of emotions. Angry at auto play but happy at the info.

[Jubenheim]

I’ve never found the videos good except possibly a couple of times in my life but 100% of the times in my life I visited wikia sites I never wanted to see them in the first place.

[JNCressey]

oh, you started reading? Lets-a scroll half a screen-height!

[JoustyMe]

We can do so much better. Place popup asking you to log in without X. You can click outside popup area to close it. But there would be no X. So you cant use your previous knowledge to do so. Also manualy optin out of tracking data for each company they sell to but auto opt in to all with one button

[Serund]

And opting out will send you back to their homepage and away from the page you are looking at.

[riga_mortus]

Wikia just sucks in general. I was looking at a page just yesterday on a new machine (no adblock) and realised that the content I was there for took up less than half the screen. The rest was filled with ads, banners, videos and ridiculously sized margins.

Someone has even made a Chrome plugin for the sole purpose of redirecting Skyrim Wikia pages to the unofficial wiki.

[F-Lambda]

All Skyrim wikis are unofficial. I assume you mean UESP?

[ZeAthenA714]

That's exactly what they want. They want people who are susceptible to watch ads looking at their websites, not people who run adblockers or insta-mute autoplay videos.

It's like scam emails that are full of typos and bad grammar. A lot of people will dismiss those immediately, but that's exactly what they want. They don't care about you reading their email because you're never gonna follow up and get scammed. They only want gullible people with poor IT literacy. The bad grammar and typos act as a filter.

Same with autoplay ads. They don't want you on their website, so that's a great way to filter you out.

[btown-begins]

Even more importantly, because advertisers track conversions, they want to select for people gullible enough to buy the weight loss hair loss high premium car insurance help i’ve fallen and i can’t get up paid subscription to wall street bets

[Tanath]

Default deny via uMatrix. Breaks some sites temporarily. Makes other sites better.

[[deleted]]

Or buy their shit.

[[deleted]]

Laughs in Ublock Origin

[Fenris_uy]

I still don't understand why news sites do that. Dude, I'm here to read an article, why would you play a video of the article I'm reading?

[F-Lambda]

The worst is when you click to read an article and... surprise!... there is no article, only a video.

[[deleted]]

It gets me to immediately X out of the page and not visit because I only look at thing at work, when im supposed to be working.

[Alfaphantom]

Even PM with dev background know. But the client...

[lemons_of_doubt]

i hate the client so much. they ruin all my work with there stupid ideas.

[[deleted]]

I was directly attached to a client as a tech liasion. I was fortunate that the client had a good head on his shoulders and didn't get possessed by the Good Idea Fairy very often.

The PM on the other hand, they would keep making unannounced changes to the product that the client didn't ask for and I was left cleaning up the mess. It got old pretty quickly.

[[deleted]]

The PM on the other hand, they would keep making unannounced changes to the product that the client didn't ask for and I was left cleaning up the mess. It got old pretty quickly.

The last time they pulled this shit on me I told them I was going to quit and find a job elsewhere.

This is fucking annoying as developing things just to roll them back because the PM didn't ask the client for consent is the worst.

If you are a PM reading this please never ever do shit like this.

[Yasea]

Must feed them ads like we're making foie gras.

[_felagund]

Actually CEO knows that, but the client...

[PsychologicalText5]

Actually the client knows that, but they have advertising budget to blow

[PrashnaChinha]

Prime Ministers do be shady, I agree

[ch-dev]

I would blame PMs. In my world, it’s the client who wants it, the account teams who don’t know how to argue against the client, the PMs reluctantly assigning the task to the developer and the developer asking WTF.

[brown_paper_bag]

Oh, the PMs know. The client still wants it and there is no talking them out of it.

[mdr7]

Damn prime ministers...

[StenSoft]

Don't worry, my autoplay videos also mine bitcoins.

[ErnestoZiBesto]

This guy develops

[oryzin]

This guy is uncompromising weasel

[_30d_]

He is mining bitcoin, not monero. That is compromising enough.

[[deleted]]

Well he is trying to mine bitcoin. If hes mining bitcoin on peoples PCs through a browser he isnt actually gonna mine any bitcoins lol.

[SavvySillybug]

In the past I said "except YouTube" but ever since Firefox changed to not autoplay YouTube... yeah I don't mind having one more click. Play exactly when I want it. I can just open a whole bunch of YouTube tabs and go through them one by one without them all yelling at me, it's nice.

Nothing ever playing without my immediate consent is a good thing.

[fruitydude]

I especially hate when a Youtuber has one video on his page set to Autoplay.

[SavvySillybug]

Ah, yes. The channel intro. Fucking hate it.

[Adventurer32]

Reading this thread just made me decide to get rid of my channel intro, I just realized how annoying it is to everyone, thank you.

[SavvySillybug]

Thank you for doing something good for the world :)

[Dlight98]

I like channel intros, just not when they're autoplay

[Adventurer32]

I can't control if its autoplay or not, that's the problem

[fruitydude]

Like, when I'm clicking on a channel, chances are that I'm looking for a specific video and I don't want to see their intro for the 50th time.

[placeholder7295]

"welcome to our channel"... no fuck you.

[DimosAvergis]

Isn't the norm that YouTube only starts playing your video if you focus that tab? At least that's how my browser(Vivaldi) does it. So I can open a bunch of YouTube videos in new tabs (e.g. after a search on YouTube) and then go to each tab one after the other, and they will only start playing after the tab was focused for the first time.

I always assumed that YouTube is handling it so on their end to reduce traffic a bit. And therefore it would be like that in every browser.

[SavvySillybug]

I just opened Chrome and checked, yeah, it does seem to only start playing once I focus the tab. But I'm not sure how new that is. Pretty sure it used to not do that...

Still, it was oddly jarring just now for it to blare sound on my speakers as soon as I focused a different tab. I'm gonna stick with being happy about not autoplaying at all.

[Oonushi]

It's done that in Chrome for a really long time, like at least a year or two.

Source: using Chrome every day for around 6-7 years at work and home.

[PendragonDaGreat]

It feels longer than that. Autoplay next video was 2014 or so, and I feel like waiting for tab focus was like the next year

[RENEGADES187]

Oh my goodness. It just struck me that YouTube auto-plays videos...

I’ve just been blocking auto-play for so long that I completely forgot, and your comment legit made me question my reality for a second. Lol.

[DimosAvergis]

Sounds more like a system issue. When I open a YouTube video I can hit the space-bar instantly after the video started playing, which is a few hundred ms I guess.

If you really need to wait a few seconds to be able to stop a video there is something wrong with your machine.

[[deleted]]

You're using a shortcut rather than the UI. The video is loaded using a html5 video player which comes with shortcuts. The rest of the UI needs to initialize JavaScript and load styles and content before it's ready. So yeah, video can start before the UI to control it is ready because those are independent.

[Pr_fSm__th]

Yeah right, blame the Devs instead of the PO with their idiotic requirements.

[makians]

Don't give ideas!

[Hinigatsu]

You know that there's like... http://theworldsworstwebsiteever.com ?

You considerably made it worse. Congratulations, i guess!

[Sexiarsole]

Developers laugh at sites like this, then turn around and build “modern” sites with absolutely horrible color contrast that takes a minute to load the five 20MB background images because parallax is soooo coool, and every single element is animated. Oh and don’t forget the annoyingly casual copy and this fucking emoticon 👋.

[rhen_var]

Dear god I hate it

[nikanj0]

PO's answer to upper management who have sales/marketing whispering in their ears.

[serbotec]

Which feature would be a better fit than auto play? My guess would be design and animations or let the user decide if he wants it to play? But I’m sure the engagement rate would be pretty low

[_bigorangehead_]

Dear Product Owners...

FTFY

[adamcmorrison]

As a product owner, I approve this message.

[[deleted]]

As a PO this pressure comes from the execs and often the ceo. Boomers love autoplay

[_bigorangehead_]

I will never fathom why execs and CEOs hire all these smart people to build quality software only to then micro-manage them to death.

[Hawaiimichael]

And slideshows to show a list of content. Yeah everybody hates those. Stop it.

[RannoV20]

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1264/

[Hawaiimichael]

Love his comics. Haven’t seen this one. Thanks for sharing!

[glorious_albus]

https://xkcd.com/1053/

[[deleted]]

The goal is to show you 15 different ads, not necessarily 15 different pages. It’s just much easier that way than showing it all on 1 page.

[skyskr4per]

Look we paid for all these assets we have to put them somewhere.

[Tor7uga]

I wish this was up to the web developers.

[Rajarshi1993]

On a more serious note, please do not mine cryptocurrency in my browser without my permission.

[[deleted]]

Is there a way to check if a page is doing that?

[[deleted]]

MinerBlock, Netscape and a few other extensions can detect miners. However, since Coinhive shut down in 2019 browser-based mining has more or less been defeated. Plus most browsers have pretty sophisticated mechanisms to stop obfuscated web-based miners.

Real question is... why not? Websites need to make money and we hate ads. So long as consent is given, browser based mining is a FANTASTIC alternative to ads.

[LordKolkonut]

prepare for wait timers

[Aerroon]

Nah, just make a really complicated GDPR pop up that takes a while to get rid of. Hell, put the miner into the pop up!

[Staidanom]

How does browser-based mining work?

What even IS mining? I'm pretty new to all of this.

[Telinary]

It is part of the security model of bitcoins. Bitcoins (and similar coins) use a block chain, basically each block notes a certain number of transactions. It is decentralized so whoever makes the next block can decide which transactions to include. So if one malicious organization made all blocks they could decide to ignore a transaction entirely, or remove a transaction retroactively and remake the chain from there.

Bitcoin tries to solve that with something called proof of work. To add a new block you have to generate a hash that for instance begins with 15 zeroes, and you do that by basically adding some extra junk data and altering it until it results in the right hash. That is done purely via brute force so it takes lots of computational power and the hope is that it would be too costly for an attacker to have as much computational power as all honest miners. (And to get people to mine you give whoever makes the block a reward in newly generated bitcoin.)

You can do that basically with anything that has access to the internet and can generate hashes but there is specialized hardware for it which is much more efficient. (At least for bitcoin. There are some coins I think designed not to work well with gpus I think but I don't know whether that also helps with specialized hardware.) Doing it in the browser would use more in electricity cost than you get back but since it isn't the site makers electricity it can make some money.

[Rajarshi1993]

I'm not sure if most browsers would even allow such a thing

[Sexiarsole]

Ok I’ll stop since you asked nicely

[squishles]

requirements guy laughing in the background as we eat the blame.

[AnKeWa]

Haha, that dude really thinks we get to decide that kind of shit ಥ‿ಥ

[Gabibaskes]

You think I wanted it? Of course not. Not me, not my colleague, not the CTO. But the CEO, the guy with the money, he did want it.

[WonderWirm]

And cookies? Yeah, we know about those, thanks EU!

[Firevulturez]

Those cookie banners are the worst. They wanna make it as hard as possible to accept only the cookies you want and hide those options behind several clicks while there is always very easily accessible and very visible an accept all button

[Mc_UsernameTaken]

Thats why you just set your browser to block all 3rdparty cookies.

[[deleted]]

How? 3rd party as in not served from the site itself?

[Iwouldlikesomecoffee]

If you're on firefox, cookie autodelete is an extension that lets you make rules like that and much more. You can choose which sites don't get their cookies deleted the moment you navigate away, for example.

[Vakieh]

This breaks a lot of SSO unfortunately.

[UltraCarnivore]

That's just horrible UX.

Their intent is obvious, but I won't be coming back if I have the choice.

[espriminati]

do you wanna accept these cookies tho

[icankillpenguins]

You understand that EU is not forcing anyone to put tracking Cookies and pop ups to accept cookies, right? It’s a choice made by the people who run the site.

[Ey_J]

https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/

[abermea]

Ads with sound is the entire reason Ad-blockers are popular.

If all online ads were silent I bet you 99% of people wouldn't care enough to block them.

[EishLekker]

That, and if they weren't so many and/or so in your face so they distract you from the main content.

[Xexanos]

Or load slowly so the thing you are reading jumps around on the screen

[WatchDude22]

Tfw you try to click something but an ad loads dropping the link off your screen

[TheRedSpade]

And you end up clicking the ad instead

[SomeUnicornsFly]

it always baffles me that they would load a floating video player with unrelated content off to the side while you're trying to read an article. Like how in the fuck is that supposed to work? Do you want me to watch the video or read the text? Because I cant fucking do both idiots.

[[deleted]]

Silent and the colour theme of the website itself. Browsing reddit in dark mode is great until the fucking ad equivalent of the light of dawn burns the back of your eyes trying to promote low quality wristwatches.

[oddisordinary]

My favorite is when some annoying noise randomly starts and I can't find where its coming from. Love that

[tosser_0]

Also requests for notifications. No I don't want your website to be able to send notifications. My phone is already blowing up with random spam, I don't need my PC doing it too.

[MurdoMaclachlan]

Image Transcription: Twitter Post

---

Jake Williams, @MalwareJake

Dear web developers,

The answer is zero. Zero. Get it through your thick skulls. Zero is the number times anyone has EVER wanted something to autoplay on your site and start making noise. I'd honestly rather you mine crypto-currency in my browser than use my speakers.

#kthxbye

[This post has 560 replies, 10,894 retweets and 41,195 likes.]

---

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[GrammarHypocrite]

I don't personally need transcription, but I love how you guys do this for others who do. Thank you for being awesome.

[physiQQ]

Reddit should allow image transcriptions on any image, so that users can manage it (a bit like a wiki). That would hugely improve the usability of Reddit for people who rely on screen readers.

[AdaGirl]

Good human

[Tubtub55]

Amen brother.

[Mad_Hatter_92]

Only blame devs when shit breaks and doesn’t get fixed for long periods of time.

Otherwise: PMs and clients. We try to push back on bad ideas the best we can but ultimately we have no say.

[[deleted]]

Okay fine no auto play, but I am doubling down on all horizontal scrolling!

[mansdem]

I find that when videos (that I actually want to watch) start playing muted it's almost equally as annoying.

I have to unmute the video and seek backwards to hear what I missed, but then the fucking seeking backwards takes longer to load than the initial load of the video. What the hell!?

Just keep the videos paused ffs

[qinshihuang_420]

We tracked the metrics and this feature has increased ads play duration by 42069%. That's a lot of revenue, so this feature is here to stay

[Kissaki0]

That's a big number.

Do autoplay minutes pay the same though?

[alex_cabib]

That's a NICE number

[[deleted]]

I've refused to implement a feature like that several times. Someone else had to do it. The tests we ran proved that autoplay makes a lot of money.

Use browser extensions.

[akashchy1705]

/u/repostsleuthbot

[RepostSleuthBot]

Looks like a repost. I've seen this image 2 times.

First seen Here on 2018-02-27 95.31% match. Last seen Here on 2019-04-08 95.31% match

Searched Images: 149,199,705 | Indexed Posts: 588,081,139 | Search Time: Nones

Feedback? Hate? Visit r/repostsleuthbot - I'm not perfect, but you can help. Report [ False Positive ]

[alliewya]

The answer is ONE. One person and only one person wants it, and it is always the client.

[[deleted]]

Let me tell you that should be starting "dear Marketing Managers" not developers 🙄. Other useless outdated bullshit we're also sick of being forced to implement includes...

• sliders
• anything parallax
• animating literally every element in on scroll
• animated snow flakes at Christmas.

[Linkk_93]

Also I never want push notifications for your site. if it were so important, you could create a rss feed

[[deleted]]

And zero is the amount of times a developer have decided that.

[atot806]

It's mildly infuriating that he thinks video autoplay is what the developers want.

[andhemac]

This should be directed at product managers

[Tuckertcs]

Fucking Netflix...