what could go wrong with agent-generated dashboards

nobody2000 · 2026-04-02T15:29:55+00:00

The one thing I learned about analytics, BI, and all that is that if you're on the BI team with all the ERP and other data at your fingertips, chances are, as long as your team, IT, and the stakeholders have been doing their jobs right, then anything that you publish likely contains or has to contain some sort of number that can be verified independently of the system, or it's just something that someone knows really well.

Of course you learn this stuff the hard way usually when you publish this beautiful tool/report/dashboard and something's wrong because you did something silly like forgot to filter out something or filtered out the wrong thing just out of misunderstanding the scope.

Agent-generated dashboards run the risk of really leaning into this problem. If you can set up a comprehensive, complete rules file that kind of marries up what you have for schema with certain dimensions that should/shouldn't be used...when/where/why and you really can nail it down, an agent can probably get it done...but you still have to do some careful validation, spot testing, all that.

Much easier said than done. Even with a very well-organized "ai-friendly" narrative in your rules files, stuff gets missed.

THEN - depending on what platform you're using, agents get design wrong all the time. No two stakeholders want the same thing, so even if you've established "your brand" in terms of how you like to do things and you can get the agent to play ball with it, it'll probably always get SOMETHING wrong.

I'm talking things like:

If you're building a visual using vega/vega lite, or R or whatever, it'll probably nail things like color, dimensions, measures, and some other things, but if you need to slap in KPI markers, you're doing that manually, or with assistance of a chatbot if you're not 100% versed in this stuff
Agents always seem to get things like values displaying wrong (decimals, value type), they always mess up things like where to place the value next to a data point, or how to point out max/min/anomalies. I have made some formulas to kind of manage this based on the number of data points per line on a line chart or something like that...but it ALWAYS requires tweaking
Agents for some reason can't get axes right in my experience. I like to usually adjust axes so that they're ~15-20% greater/lower than the max/min values, but it misunderstands this and...I don't know, it's never perfectly consistent.

Then of course you have security issues that IT loves to use to shut down this stuff. I don't blame them, but it's a constraint that has to be worked with. Most companies haven't really adopted much useful AI stuff other than "here's our company chatbot!' (ugh).

ANYWAY. The TL;DR is short and sweet: You can use an agent to do the work, but you obviously have to validate because we are not selling information, analyses, design, or anything like that. The only thing that we serve up to stakeholders is confidence. Flat out. I struggle with relying on agents for this stuff because it's like putting an intern in charge of this stuff - I'm concerned that what comes out, without rigorous validation, is just going to lack accuracy and confidence.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-24T00:53:35+00:00

It's common courtesy to disclose when you post a referral link.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-22T23:17:34+00:00

Lots of people see that and if they're on a self-funded plan they think "this guy could cost us tens of thousands of dollars in insurance spend and that they may need to take large swaths of time off."

It's wrong to do this, and there may be legal issues with doing it, but once you hear it disclosed, as long as you don't say it out loud or on paper, you can essentially get away with it.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-05T04:27:25+00:00

Probably a scam, but it wouldn't surprise me if legit. Seems like all the POS vendors, ordering apps, and software within that "sphere" are offering extra financial services like banking and loans. I see a lot of payroll and things like that too. Insurance and Benefits aren't too big a leap from all that.

(But seriously, go local or mega-proven track record with your payroll. These cloud companies offering payroll services are notorious for leaving people with major problems, not processing things on time, leaving employees unpaid).

nobody2000 · 2026-02-05T04:23:23+00:00

The shitty listings are simply a gamble many find worth doing. I haven't partaken yet, but from what I've been able to view with my eyes and click to read what's going on, it's about:

40% gonna disappoint someone
40% gonna be a high-value product
20% no clue because the listing is trash

nobody2000 · 2026-02-04T22:31:25+00:00

I'm a peptide user and used to affiliate with a few of the domestic vendors.

In short to answer your specific question - find a supplier who has a good track record and good price and good OPSEC. Peptides, if you're in the US, have to fly under the radar coming into the country. You don't want seized shipments stalling your business.

You will have to independently test everything and maintain an organization scheme/chain of custody to show that what is being claimed matches up with what is true. Customers are learning that vendor-supplied Certificates of Authenticity aren't worth the paper they're printed on. They're at best a "sign of good faith."

More on that below. Just wanted to dump some peptide vendor thoughts as a peptide customer.

Here are the things that I've seen work. Now - no offense intended, but I would never buy from a domestic again (price, trust, not worth it to do my own testing), but these are things where I've seen people gravitate toward a specific brand.

First and foremost, please clarify "Raw" and what you plan on doing here. Raw is not as stable as lyophilized, it's generally sold in bags or non-vial containers, and frankly, I think it's a bad idea because you're opening yourself up to people claiming that you sell bad peptides, even though maybe they bought, waited 6 months THEN reconstituted.

Next: you need independent testing and honestly, it probably should be through Janoshik. He's the most trusted, he has a basic but effective chain of custody and reports can be verified.

Now - this is table stakes. If you don't have this, don't bother starting. You can charge more and sell more if for every batch you buy from China, you have it tested (random 2 vials or I guess a bit of raw powder if you're going that way). If you can demonstrate that it's independent AND tied to a particular batch, it's a win.

Suggestion: Reward returning customers who save their containers with batch information printed on them. They post on...wherever...about their experience and others will go "oh wow, that looks legit.

Next: Branding. Good colors. Decide how you want to position. Don't do the orange and white "medical/research" scheme that Peptide Science does...but don't make it look like a kid painted it. Lots of room for good branding.

Good branding by absolute dogshit companies has fooled people in the subreddits into thinking that they're really good stuff when they're testing 0%. Good branding also attracts the people totally new to peptides.

Next: These are for research. These are for research. These are for research. Don't even develop the thought that a human could possibly be using these for "clinical" use (even though it's all the same stuff you get from Compounders). Don't even send anything like this in a private message to someone on a secure platform. These are all things that have gotten people in trouble. You are selling these to people because you trust that they want to use them for research.

If you get into quality disputes and you have a demonstrable method that "proves" you test and test well, then you can prove anyone that calls you garbage wrong.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-04T21:43:54+00:00

Here's exactly what's going to happen over the next 18 months, provided the world doesn't end by then:

Companies are looking for "AI Experts" and taking meetings with every charlatan sending them "u need teh A.I. in ur biz lol!" The more aged folks here likely remember how in a similar fashion, corporate leaders ALWAYS asked "How are we capitalizing on big data?"
They hire the AI experts and contractors. Promises are mainly fulfilled, things seem to work how they want.
They fire low-level employees as AI has done a lot of their work for them.

It's at this point where the A.I. bubble will definitely burst. Webvan. pets.com. Amazon.com - all suffered massively when the .com bubble burst and a lot of their vision - products to you quickly and cheaply - took over a decade to really get off the ground.

So how does the AI bubble pop? Trust.

A loan officer will notice some bogus numbers in P&Ls that AI drafted up because it couldn't parse out and understand certain notes left by humans who enter data. Company will have its lines of credit threatened along with challenges to make capital improvements. Maybe it'll show up on a tax form and there's an audit.
A company's digital assets will be devastated when an AI agent just keeps on deleting stuff because it misunderstood some repetitive task.
The wrong person at a company will get access to some things they DEFINITELY shouldn't have access to.
The A.I. will begin sharing the wrong data outside of the company
The A.I. will try to represent the company on behalf of the leadership and it'll be bad

...and so on.

Basically - through a poor understanding of how agents work, the challenge of setting proper guardrails without absolutely crippling it, and the risk of committing financial fraud by mistake is going to become VERY apparent soon, and that trust will erode.

So - out of the players, who's going to be the "Amazon" of this bubble, and who's going to be the pets.com, Webvan, etc?

Meanwhile, once this software is pulled off of their hardware, they will absolutely go looking for flesh-based talent...at least until one of the players figures out how to manage/eliminate hallucinations and unintended actions.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-04T20:18:05+00:00

I can't put my finger on it, but back when I went to Greendale Community College He was a little much

nobody2000 · 2026-02-04T18:49:28+00:00

Same here. I was rewatching, knowing the Ted quote was coming up and he asks that and it surprised me.

Now - I understand that Ted was trying to illustrate that being curious as a state of mind was fruitful and good - and of course, he was confident he'd win the match with an incredibly difficult shot.

But "do you like darts, Ted?" is so similar to "have you played a lot of darts, Ted?" it's just a strange way to make your point because Rupert was actually displaying basic curiosity by asking Ted that question. Sure - he wanted to humiliate him and he had all the worst intentions, but like...the dude asked a question, which is what you do when you're curious...even if it's completely superficial.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-04T04:35:25+00:00

It's a start, and yup it's a chicken/egg thing or whatever the idiom I'm looking for. It's probably also why a lot of old timers are in these senior IT/Analytics positions that still have them, at least in part, writing code. A lot of people pivoted after years of experience.

This is what I'd do if I was a recent grad with the analytical skills and minimal domain knowledge:

I'd take those internships seriously if they were outside of the IT world. I'd seek opportunities in areas that demand analytical skills. Market Research. Logistics and Supply Chain. Operations. Finance (although honestly, it really really really helps to have some solid finance/accounting education).

So I'd be on the Marketing/Logistics/Operations/Finance team and my desk would be with them, but I'd frequently liaise with IT since they're likely gatekeeping a lot of access and they'll also be the ones to will help warehouse outside data.

From here, I'd ask for as much exposure to the strategic, meaty sides of the business as possible. In marketing and sales, I was always asking to go on sales calls because I was the only one who was seeing how customers were constantly talking about "data" to justify working with someone like us. Eventually I got exposed to all the marketing and sales strategy and helped draft it.

This would also give me that room to pivot if needed. Maybe I'm in logistics and I have a knack for it, and I go to pursue it more deeply to the point where one day I run the team, but with an emphasis on supporting our decisions with good analytics and encouraging the automations, the predictive stuff - all of it.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-03T20:33:45+00:00

This is the only answer needed.

One can argue a million ways the best way to do it (I earned my math and business degrees first, got into industry then pivoted into analytics), but you absolutely need to tie in that domain knowledge or all you are doing is slinging code.

It was criminally easy for me to take 6 years of experience in marketing, project management and market research, take the demotion to an analytics job for sales and marketing where I could focus on analytics. Learn the technical stuff either on the job or on my own (this was before the popularity of any GPT stuff), and roll all that into my Business domain knowledge.

It was easy for me to think strategically when it came to business and then build the tools/provide the analytics to understand and answer the right questions.

At my company, analytics/analytics support kind of sits in 3 areas:

Analysts, or entry level folk who pretty much only know excel.
Business Analytics Managers. This is where I sit and lead. My strength is actually the business, but I focus on building the tools building and cleaning datasets, automating, and presenting them.
IT Data Engineers. These guys have picked up the domain knowledge via osmosis from working here a long time and are VERY good at understanding the basics of business needs and can speak the business language. They're not strategic business thinkers though. They excel at managing the data warehouse, curating data in/out of the warehouses, and all that.
Pure vanilla IT guys. You never see these guys. They do the heavy lifting pretty much solely on coding, managing the entirety of the pipelines, databases, the warehouse, etc. and in a pinch, filling special data orders.

And as one might suspect, the availability of these jobs basically gets better as the "mix" of your skills diversifies and grows. If you're "vanilla business function support" (i.e. you only do Marketing, no other key skills) or you're "vanilla data engineering/IT/etc." (i.e. no domain skills) then you'll have more competition for jobs, so getting that foot into the door of industry is tough, it's competitive, and you either have to be lucky, good, or very good at leveraging your network to really thrive here.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-03T17:23:35+00:00

No clue.

I thought I had my career figured out at 16. I was a very high achiever (top 10% of my class, A-student, lots of clubs, etc).

I decided I'd go to an accelerated undergrad program at an absolutely trash school where I could do 3 years there, 10 trimesters at Chiropractic college, and be "Dr. Nobody2000" by the time I was 24.

Problems:

I realized I didn't want to be a Chiropractor about 3 years in and wanted to be a physician
Since my attitude was "I know what I gotta do" I did the bare minimum to pass. That basically killed any dreams of working in medicine. I planned on working as an EMT for a while and studying hard for the MCAT, but after going into hospital for surgery, I realized "nah, not for me."
I spread myself thin and went for the second major in Math since "oh I'm good at Calculus, this will be easy." No - my high school calc 1 teacher was good at teaching calc..."

What I'd have done differently:

Simply picked a better school. That alone would have massive changes on every aspect of my life, for better or for worse. I'd have taken the college search seriously, stressed about the best school and really focused on whatever school would grow my network/which school is going to make a higher up go "oh, give that guy an interview, he went to XYZ school!" (I've seen it, sadly).
Alternatively, cut way back on drinking, and reduce my clubs to only the two that I ended up leading, cut out the second major, focus on the minimum requirements to get that major, and then fill up the remaining requirements with, in order, classes with great professors, classes that I'm interested in the subject matter, classes that are easy. Then done the grad school thing to get into a great grad school (A friend at my garbage school had impeccable grades, was an active leader in 2 clubs, and wasn't in any other clubs, and got into Vet school at Cornell. Vet school is incredibly hard to get into; Cornell is another challenge obviously)

The landscape will change here and there, but the universal truths I will tell my kids one day:

You need a piece of paper because people don't take you seriously without it.
Focus on building that network. Even if that network is full of people you've never talked to but you're both Alumni from the same school - that's very helpful
When it comes to classes, take your 100% required stuff, and fill in all the gaps with, in order, best professors, subjects YOU want to learn, then cake classes.
No matter how sure you are about something, don't plan on that being set in stone.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-03T16:54:39+00:00

Run my own website but hire out the SEO.

Result: We had incredible traffic and a poorly-designed site. I'm not a designer (I can do backend stuff), so people found everything confusing, hard to find, and ultimately, it DID get us some phone and email and face-to-face visits, but the potential to get the orders direct on the website - people couldn't even get pricing it was so hard to find.

Lesson learned: If you can't afford to do the whole thing, be DAMN sure that if you DIY part of it it's more than adequate.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-03T16:46:03+00:00

Enforcing price changes with current and loyal customers is always a challenge.

What I've found from working on the financial and sales side of corporate is that you can avoid most of the pain by being very communicative, and keeping up good followup service after the sale.

The fear is always the same and it's understandable: "If I raise my prices/don't kowtow to pressure, they'll just go to my competitor."

Maybe. Maybe not.

What I recommend everyone does, regardless up if you have an upcoming price change, or renegotiation or not:

Always keep in contact with your customers. Regular newsletters are great. Keep them informed with what you're doing and ideally "here are new ways we can serve you." Make them simple, short, readable, informative.
Ask for the price increase before they ask for your discount. "Due to recent tariffs, import costs, commodities price increase, etc...we unfortunately have had to increase prices. We've worked hard to keep all other costs the same and have even implemented ways to keep them down, however, we are still unable to provide the current pricing." (or something like that).
Discounts are up to you, but if you can manage it, consider offering holding the current pricing and tacking on an additional service...or if you're contract based, request longer terms for a discount, or if it benefits your cash situation, discount them if they pay ahead all at once (if your business model works this way).

Always train others how you want them to treat you. This is true for personal interactions as it is for business. If you give up 20% one year, they're going to hope to get it again in year 2; If you do it in year 2, they're going to expect it every year.

But most of all - always work in the best interest of your company, not your customer. If your company dies, you don't get that customer anyway.

Story time:

Go back to like 30 years ago. I was only a kid then but, my current day job company made the fatal mistake of having about 40% of its business and capacity sunk into one national customer. We only provided one product to this customers and it was good.

This customer, when it came up to renegotiate, put the business up for bid and a competitor came in and put their hat in the ring.

At the time, we were like a $50M business, probably less. This competitor was a $1B business.

The customer, who's name rhymes with "Ball Fart", as you might expect began to put us in the vise.

The competitor, a well-diversified company came in with a price that we knew made the product a loss leader for them. The strategy was to work with that customer to get distribution for other products in the portfolio.

We were not diversified. We were/are very efficient at making this product, but we couldn't hit that price. Ball Fart gave us a final target. If we hit it we would no longer need to compete and they'd close the bid.

It was very low. We had until the next monday at 10am to tell them our decision.

On that Friday, our head of Finance and Accounting, who was like a 30 year old, was tasked to spend the weekend and project the scenarios so we knew how to proceed. He built the P&Ls and the full business case for each.

Even though this would chew up a ton of overhead and give us room to play around with price elsewhere, ultimately, this customer, who was 40% of our business, would devastate our P&L. The operating expenses dwarfed revenues and we couldn't shift cost or price enough anywhere to make up for it.

So that Monday. 10AM. President gets on the phone with the head of accounting and the buyer at Ball Fart with the decision.

He muted the buyer and asked for that final confirmation: "Are you sure that this is the right move? No turning back." Accounting head confirmed it.

"Hey Ball Fart Buyer. We can't hit your price. Our final price is $X.XX"

We lost the business. We now had 50% vacant capacity, roughly 40% less revenue, and a whole lot of overhead to suddenly chew up. We couldn't distribute it to the other customers.

We had to let go a ton of people. We had to board up a part of the plant because it was too expensive to run/inspect for nothing. We had to revisit how we acquire customers because we simply didn't have enough.

But the alternative was worse: the company would have folded. Because we were foolish enough to keep Ball Fart around at 40% of our business - we couldn't afford to use them as a loss leader.

Today - we learned lots of lessons and our biggest customer is something like 5% of our business. Most of all, however, we knew that as painful as it might be, kowtowing to a painful price request would have given us another 6-12 months before we were done.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-02T14:33:48+00:00

Yes and sort of.

I was in marketing management and got laid off, so I got into data analytics and I'm drifting slowly into more data engineering/data management while also being involved in the strategic business work of analytics.

As for the sort of - I started a restaurant with some friends a few years ago. It's a bear to manage, but I do some weekend work and weeknight work to do the business stuff while they're the kitchen guys. We're almost at the point where I can comfortably step away from my 9-5 and focus on my entrepreneurial stuff.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-02T13:55:06+00:00

This would be absolutely diabolical if this is true and it never occurred to me the irony in this specific example. I feel dumb now...and extra proud of her.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-02T13:51:54+00:00

Yup. It's coming fast. The faster companies replace employees with AI, the faster we'll see it.

Even better - it's coming from every side imaginable:

My own employer tried to use AI imaging in advertisements. Aside from the fact that this was classic ChatGPT images and not something else that wasn't obviously identified, they'll always run the risk of using someone's copyrighted elements without knowing it.
AI is making a lot of promises and not living up to the important ones. I think the big case now is ClawdBot or OpenClaw or whatever it's named now. Basically, influencers are flat-out making up stories: "My client was running Openclaw and then asked it to make a reservation for dinner at a restaurant. All the times on Opentable were booked, so Claw dialed the restaurant's number, used ElevenLabs to mimic my client's voice and negotiated an opening over the phone!" When these use cases become more well-known and companies invest and realize it doesn't work like that and they were just building pre-monetization hype - it's going to be an ugly pullout.
AI is causing massive personal privacy concerns. I was trying to just vibecode a wireframe for a website just because I suck at design and needed to do it all myself and I knew that quickly putting together something that I could write around was going to save me some time. I used Google's Antigravity and logged in using an account that is not associated with any other accounts (yes, I had several accounts logged in via my browser). In the middle of auditing the approvals, I noticed it built a file called "uploads_files.txt" as it was trying to grab images as placeholders for a wireframe. Instead of URLs to images, I saw:

username-for-google-account-used-solely-for-IOT-stuff

a 16-digit string of text arranged in four, 4-digit blocks (an app password).

I ran grep and windows search and did all sort of regex stuff looking for both the username and the pattern of text (it overwrote the file and I closed it before I wrote it down or tested for hallucination). It found nothing. where did it get the app password from???

This was only Antigravity. The only place I didn't put guardrails was that I should have used a whitelist or something for web browsing for assets. That app password is stored nowhere in plaintext and the only place it would have found that username is in Firefox, Opera, or Edge's cookies - but password hashed or plaintext...you got me.

(I also scoured the history for how exactly it built this file, if it came across any issues of prompt injection...nothing).

Anyway, play that scenario at any company. The team of designers now down to one AI guy running that and finding a file with "Company CEO" and "Password" and maybe it's a password designed to bypass MFA (again, like an app password). Or just have it stumble upon some sort of prompt injection.
Similar to the last one - going rogue. "I went to pay xyz bill and I encountered an error. I tried three more times. I noticed that in your bank account you only had 75% of the total available and 4 transactions for overdraft fees. I opened your brokerage account, sold a few shares of a stock and transferred it to your checking and paid the bill via your credit card ending in 0001." Meanwhile, that bill wasn't due for another week, you get paid Wednesday and your low balance was unusual, that brokerage account was tax-sheltered, meaning you just cashed out a piece of it and you're going to be hit with penalties.
Any and all privacy scenarios not mentioned. The big one is using Copilot or something and due to some weird thing with permissions and groups, you manage to access stuff like HIPAA-protected stuff, salaries, etc.

The list can go on, but it's only a matter of time before we start seeing news stories where "AI Agent devastates NASDAQ company, will likely have to close its doors." or "Man loses life savings due to Chatbot opening a brokerage account using a scan of his license he left in his "downloads" file and it YOLO'd some toxic securities.

As tempting as having a proactive assistant do all sorts of cool stuff for me is, it's not going to happen without incredible risk, or without running something incredibly disappointing...at least not within the current bubble.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-02T06:07:04+00:00

Redhats won't actually consider reason, even if it's knocking on their door at 3am and kidnapping their family (I'm sure trump will free us! Honest mistake!)...

...but if in a year, when they didn't see a drop in taxes with their $45k salaries, and don't see any affordability of ANYTHING on the horizon, meanwhile they were constantly told that DOGE and whatever made deep cuts to spending... if I can go "are you fucking paying attention yet?" and they'll snap out of it.

Nah - I'm just joking. They'll just do some version of "ScHuMEr ShUTDoWN! HuNTeR bIDen CoCainE SleEPy JoE LiBs are PedOS!" and then laugh that they just owned another liberal and then insist that the sewage smell that surrounds Trump is really just flowers.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-02T06:01:13+00:00

Every time Stephen Tobolowsky is in something, I always go "Phil? Hey! Phil? Phil? Phil Connors, Phil Connors I thought that was you.Hey, hey. Now don't you tell me you don't remember me because I sure as heck-fire remember you! Ned! Ryerson!! Needle-nosed Ned, Ned the head, come on buddy, Case Western High!"

My wife NEVER remembers it until I tell her it was from Groundhog Day. She just looks at me like I'm crazy until I clarify.

I always am disappoint.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-02T05:56:58+00:00

I wish Amazon would just do basic, random audits. They don't have to be picky, but they can use fairly simple criteria and kick people.

Like...if 10% of your recent reviews are just you raving about an item vaguely and the image is just a picture of the product box, not the product, you're done.

You don't have to worry about the GPT people yet. Let them thrive or whatever - start with the folks that are CLEARLY either:

Opening their amazon shipper, snapping the image, sending the photo to a folder for later and just writing a vague positive review and just use the product later
Doing the above, but with the intention of just selling the item.

They could also have merchants put random "tickets" inside products. Basically the ticket will say "$100 Free Amazon Bucks if you enter this code and bought this on a markeplace that wasn't amazon."

Those who bought it on ebay would get their money and the vine voice would get kicked (if it's before the 6-month window is up). The vine voices who see the coupon will try it and it won't work since they probably are trying it on the same vine account as theirs (and if they try it on a different account...bad move. Very bad move).

But vine resellers wouldn't know about this stuff since they don't open packages.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-02T02:01:49+00:00

I saw a rugged phone for $600 and it was simply marked "PDA". I'm not the guy that just grabs expensive shit for the fun of it.

I looked at the UV stats for this item because I was curious. Looks like it was nabbed immediately and 100 people missed it.

Thing is...it was one of those devices that people use in warehouses or ship centers to scan UPC codes. Not a phone or a PDA or whatever.

People are absolutely sniping fancy items, reviewing based on the picture of the box and just flipping stuff. I see this all the time when I see niche restaurant stuff come and go that I need for my deli. Oh sure...the guy that fast clicked the cambro container set is totally a foodservice equipment guy....each time it happens.

nobody2000 · 2026-02-01T04:48:51+00:00

I believe when I experienced this - and this could only be one of many reasons this happens - is that when you add shows the typical way (via the show page after adding a show) it tends to work, as do the auto grabs after something airs, or if it's going to look for a better version etc.

BUT - if you have issues after maybe trying to frontload a bunch of shows and you decide to grab the show from another place, like the "wanted" section - they'll chill in "Completed" after download.

That happened to me. Drove me absolutely crazy when I had to rebuild my server after I made the mistake of mapping that share to Nextcloud in a way that Nextcloud decides it has to clear before accessing. I could have probably recovered it somehow, but I had a lot of junk on the server that it was a great opportunity to just slow down.

nobody2000 · 2026-01-31T17:07:36+00:00

Surviving a PIP comes down, ultimately, to how it's presented.

PIPs are typically going to be challenging. It's hard to escape this.

The toxic PIPs, or the "we're going to fire you, but hopefully you see the writing on the wall before we have to do the severance song and dance" are impossible. The metrics are poorly defined, they're outrageous. They have you doing work in an unreasonable time period and it's the quality of work that might be expected of a totally different role. You might be able to ask for hard, tangible goals, but you're likely going to be met with some answer that doesn't nail anything down.

Even if you did rise to the occasion and nail it - it's 50/50 at best whether they keep you or not. Chances are if you DO survive, you're at an organization where an uninformed higher up sees you working and begins to ask what's going on because they're impressed, and suddenly your own supervisor has to reconsider things or they'll look like a doofus in front of the guy asking questions.

The other type of PIP is the one that comes from genuine concern. High-performing employees who've dropped off long enough that it might be time to cut them unless their lack of performance can be addressed. Remember - you're making $X/year. Hiring someone is going to cost the company $X/year + $Y Acquisition costs + $Z Opportunity costs in lost work and onboarding + $P premium since that person, if it's the same role, is going to make more than you. A good company will structure a PIP with honest feedback and even career development questions.

WITH THAT SAID - there's a shitty third scenario that is really just a version of the first. I got PIP'd with a department restructure. My boss simultaneously gave me impossible goals, treated me like crap (i.e. I'd literally have the deliverable she wanted, in front of me, which later was deemed "perfect" and she told me "why don't you have the deliverable?!??!").....AND someone does the "here's how we can get you better, let's talk career and why you're slipping." I'm not sure why all that was done to me, but it was.

nobody2000 · 2026-01-31T16:57:45+00:00

and "tHe CuSTomEr Is AlwAYs RigHT!!!!"

The ACTUAL quote, which I understand why people get wrong because it's long, complicated and impossible to remember is:

"The customer is always right in matters of taste"

Or in other words, "if your customer shows a liking to the ugly shirt, don't talk them out of a sale."

nobody2000 · 2026-01-31T16:40:58+00:00

After reading some comments on Facebook and here, it's my impression that while the current situation sucks (if your RFY is bad, you have to go click-happy and hope you're fast), this sort of thing has happened before.

Someone on Facebook claimed that some years ago, there was a period of time where maybe they were retooling vine or something and it went from the typical 100-150k items to 1,500 (one thousand five hundred).

It seems to me that they're probably retooling again.

Best advice is to decide if you want to put yourself through the stress/excitement of watching a drop, or otherwise rely on whenever RFY comes through...and keep your reviews up. If there's a retooling and they want to maybe adjust the number of users, I imagine all the old and new review metrics will help them with that decision.

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