I really fucking hate somebody asking me to implement a scammy function on a shop/marketplace like "if theres 54% items left, put up a red label that says almost sold out", it works, it drives sales, and they will just find someone else to do it, if its not me, but its such a fucking dirty and ugly way of making people buy your own sold shit more than actual legitimate sellers (that already pay like 25% off of sold items) in the same category, since the shop/marketplace allows for other sellers to sell their stuff on there too, but those tricks don't apply to them, only after they cash into the "booster" program that costs almost 150$ a month, disgusting.

We hard coded to add 5% extra cost on preview budget report just try to surprised the boss we are saved 2-3% budget on final. Don't ask me why numbers don't add up. It's deep learning AI

We have clients ask for sketchy stuff like this all the time. We usually just tell them no and give them some canned "technical" reason as to why we won't do it, like "The extra code will slow down the site" (which it does sometimes depending on their site,) but really we just know it's a stupid idea and don't want to set the expectation that we'll do stuff like this when other clients see it and want it on their sites as well. But once they hear the words "slow down your site," they go running for the hills and decide that they don't want to do it anymore ;)

@ElbowDeepInElmo I do similar things too, but sometimes you get clients that might ask somebody else for a confirmation and then you end up in deep shit, it really depends on who youre talking to

@teganburns not my style, they will drop dead eventually with all the scams they run on there, many of the sellers are running to other alternatives already anyway (I have access to the stats and see the previous page they come from to copy paste products they have on this one), trying to get in contact with some to maybe incognito lure them into creating their own networked shop, where they all could sell together.

@JoshBent do you consider using linear regression to forecast budget but labeled as machine learning AI as a scam? Everybody else are using similar stuff. If you don't, you can't even compete.

@sunfishcc I am not sure what you mean by that (smth like travel companies, where they adjust price based on location, gender etc?), but what I described is def. scammy and playing/abusing with the customers mind/psychology, especially with other things combined, like fake countdowns they have for fake sales, which only on some pages alter prices (by raising them in the "original price" and then giving -60% off)

@JoshBent Yeah we run into that sometimes. The client asks a non-developer is we'll do something, and they stupidly tell them "yes of course" because they're scared of getting yelled at, and then they set the expectation that we'll do it. When the request gets to us, we'll still say no, and then they have to tell the client that we won't do it and explain why they originally told them that we would.

Luckily, we have a manager who will back us up and happily tell the client "If the engineer said no, then the answer is no."

There are some large clients that pay us $50 million+ per year that can throw their weight around and bypass the rules. But then if we do something for them and another smaller client sees it and says "You did that for them. We want that," then we can tell them "Well they pay us $50 million per year, so they can request things like that. Pay us that much and then you can request things like that too."

@ElbowDeepInElmo I know what you mean, gotta love when some clients are allowed more and then it drips to the others, so they all throw a tantrum about why they dont get that 😅

@JoshBent I call it marketing strategy. Just like the diamond for a wedding ring.

@sunfishcc marketing has its boundaries too, even if only morally imho