It feels so silly expressing this, but the act of putting on a headset that completely engulfs my vision with screens, even if my space is already clear with a boundary, feels like a much bigger commitment than opening Steam. It doesn't matter if I'm standing for room scale or if I'm already seated with the headset next to me. Both cases feel like extra effort for a lesser experience.

It doesn't have to be the most socially competent engineer to gather feedback. Having the engineering team sit with the target users gives so much insight into how the product is being used.

I once worked on an administrative tool at a financial institution. There were lots of pain points, as it started as a dev tool that turned into a monstrosity for the support staff. We asked to have a meeting with some reps who were literally 2 floors below us. Having the reps talk as they worked with the tool in real time over 1 hour was worth more than a year's worth of feedback that trickled in. It's one thing to solicit feedback. It's another to see how idiosyncrasies shape how products get used.

I would argue that the competitive nature of tournaments implies that the entrants all have a copy of the game along with hardware to run the game (emulation withstanding). The only thing is streaming the event. Even then, what would be the difference between streaming a tournament and streaming myself or a small group of friends playing? It doesn't seem like that would infringe upon the core purpose of the game.

Kind of. Some TOs are calling Nintendo's bluff. Nintendo released a set of guidelines[0] on what kinds of tournaments can be hosted. However, Collision 2024 just happened with attendees and a prize pool surpassing the guidelines.

[0]: https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...

We missed a pretty big deadline not too long ago. In the retro, I accepted a lion's share of the responsibility. I'm a senior dev rather than a team lead, but I had my head down during a lot of the technical discussions and PRs rather than diving deep with the juniors and mid-levels. I apologized for it.

I have made myself more available since then. PRs have been under more scrutiny from everyone, and I feel like the constructive feedback and requests for comments have been flowing more openly.

> it seemed like it was mostly intro stuff, or straight to DBA level

This would have been perfect for someone like me a few years ago. I went into my first job knowing how to make simple queries and simple joins. I changed jobs into a legacy system where there was an overwhelming amount of data sharded across few databases and several hundred schemas.

I didn't need to learn how to do simple joins or basic keywords like union and intersect that every tutorial talked about. I also didn't need a bunch of DBA knowledge like distribution strategies, replication, and HA techniques. I needed to learn how to leverage what was in the database to pull the exact data I needed more efficiently than what I was doing - windows, cursors, and good subqueries. I was the type of person being addressed.

The guy has stories upon stories about both hardware and software design and their impact on performance at both high and low level. All of his tangents in class were downright fascinating.

Now I'm at a place that uses Teams. I don't think Teams is perfect, but I feel like Teams gets extra hate just because it's Teams. The best feature in my opinion is the group thread feature. Having people able to start a threaded conversation by default gives a lot of granular control over what notifications I receive by default.

I had an issue once with a claim. It was an ongoing ordeal with lots of small meetings and documentation. It was eventually denied. However, I had a rebuttal window. Unfortunately for me, it came during a stressful period of work. I made the initial call to my rep. No call back. I was buried under work, and the 5 day rebuttal window (how absurdly short) blew by without me realizing it. Turns out the rep was on vacation, and after my case was closed, there was no reason for them to return my call.

These issues are never a matter of urgency that should be dealt with in that instance. However, don't let your window of opportunity close due to an adversarial business policy.

There's also putting restrictions on the input. Have a maximum song length.

Otherwise, require additional constraints before queueing like making it computationally expensive or having a priority system based on criteria. Charge a cover (with increasing costs) or have a membership club that gives more/better access.