I always ask about the sales team - How many are there, how many years experience does the manager have in this sector, what's the experience of account execs, do they use BDRs, are they meeting sales goals.

Then, further, how does the sales team interact with engineering. How does customer feedback come back to engineering features, who demos, etc.

It doesn't matter if the engineering is top notch and there's no one to sell it. To me, if a company is past series A and the number of engineers is more than the number of sales employees, that's a warning sign.

Ugh. Tell me about it.

There was some poor lost delivery driver in a McHouse subdivision about near me. In one hand she was holding a plastic bag with food containers, and the other she was holding a phone. Two people posted video/photos of her clearly looking at house numbers. Both people posted "be on the lookout for this suspicious person casing the neighborhood" posts.

Like, come on. How stupid do you have to be.

> It is more about inertia.

Can't agree more. A few years ago, I joined a large healthcare organization to take a break from the startup grind. During my tenure, I witnessed the selection process of an issue tracking system and a chat platform.

They picked Teams for chat even though Slack ruled, and Teams was way behind in features. Why? Because it was the easy choice. They had the typical Microsoft stack just like every other large company, so go with Teams even though it sucked.

They picked Jira for issue tracking. Why? Because it was the easy choice. No one knew how to fully leverage it, and there was no way workflows would get buy in across the whole organization.

In large companies, especially non-tech ones, tooling decisions are driven more by laziness and CYA than what's the superior product.

git's performance increase came around at the right time, too. Code bases were becoming bigger and bigger, and Agile's popularity preached a lot of branching. SVN branches were a full copy, making things way worse.

I really, really love Shortcut. Unfortunately our org is looking for a traditional Gantt chart, and Shortcut is a bit lacking in that.

However, up to this point in our company, it's been great. It's very deliverable-centered. Stories are the deliverables and are the centerpiece of the flow. Tasks just make up a to-do checklist for a story - there's no endless wrangling about that is a task, there's no credit for doing a task (shitty devs can't game the system). Shortcut feels like it hits a nice spot between the monster that is Jira and too-basic tools like Trello. Shortcut is made for developers.

It seems the pro-Jira comments here are basically, "It's fine if your organization isn't a mess and you don't abuse it."

That's the problem with any tool, framework, language, etc where the defenders main argument is, "It's great as long as you don't abuse it." or to put the former bluntly "It's not the tool, it's your organization." Over and over and over again, if an organization is allowed to abuse and misuse something, it eventually will.

Good tooling has opinions and will give you guardrails to not hang yourself.

Calling that a monopoly price shows ignorance on what a monopoly is. Even large metropolitan areas have just a handful of emergency vet hospitals. Emergency vet hospitals don't have an army of vets on standby to handle cases. 2-3 is common and they might be just interns/residents supervised by a more experience vet. Scarcity and lack of supply have a much greater effect than collusion.

Pet owners should know this before getting a pet, or properly plan.

Being able to come up with $500 or $5k at a moment's notice is part of pet ownership. If your financial situation prevents coming up with it, don't get a pet. You're just shifting irresponsibility in the guise of anti-corporate crusading.

This was pre-COVID in suburban midwest, if I recall. On the low-end of the estimate, and nothing happened that required intervention, but certainly possible in the market location. Major city? Good luck.

Mars was also forced to sell some emergency and speciality clinics about 3 years ago, too. Today's action isn't entirely unprecedented by the FTC.

My wife's practice has gotten insanely busy post-COVID. She doesn't deal with dogs and cat's so it's not that boom. Decreasing slots due to safety and health was an issue at first, but they've since returned to normal towards the last half of 2020. Staffing shortages, sure, but the slots are still the same as before.

The only thing she can think of is with more WFH, more people are noticing things wrong with their pets.

I lost my shit at a redditor for complaining about a $500 overnight bill. $500 for a doctor and three nurses to watch over your animal like a hawk for eight hours, plus IV and medicine, is a damn bargain. I thought HN crowd would be smarter than that.

Agree with the demand elasticity, but I'd like to add something about higher prices. It's been studied in the industry very well that you can't have good care without higher prices and "things." It's just not possible, and people that say their vets are "good and cheap" are just fooling themselves.

As an example, prior to certain surgeries, my wife offers drug A to the clients. It adds to the cost but increase the chance of survival. However, drug B is not an option because studies have shown in increases survivorship by 50%. She bakes it into the cost of the surgery and refuses to do the surgery without it. Clinic down the street offers both drugs as options, bringing the base cost of the surgery down.

So now she has a reputation of being expensive vet. If she offers drug b as an option, patients die more frequently and she has a reputation as a bad vet.

She'd much rather have the reputation as an expensive vet.

Ideally they shouldn't care. I was giving an example of why consumers would choose to go to a corp clinic over independent - they simply don't know it's corporate owned.

I'm not going to argue whether it's bad. I've met plenty of good independent vets, plenty of bad ones. Plenty of good corporate vets, plenty of bad ones.

My wife is a vet and is affected by this. We are not in the states affected, but she works for one of the corporations involved.

This has been a long time coming. As another comment said, with a few anecdotal exceptions I can think of, many vets simply aren't good business people. Margins have been incredibly small since veterinary care became a thing. Vet schools have required business literacy classes for a few decades, but this is an industry where people get into it to help animals first, not get rich.

Corporatization came in to fill a void, but whether it's good or bad, the economics for veterinary care, and especially consumer perceptions, are due for a reset.

Higher prices == worse Yelp reviews. You then get a reputation for being expensive, and Yelpers warn people to stay away.

This is an emotionally charged industry where 99.9% of the customers have no clue what goes on business-wise behind the scenes. Yelp has been a curse, giving voice to these people.

It's not as simple as hiriing vets. It's having techs to support the vets. Minimum, you need two techs to support a vet, ideally three. Many states require techs to be licensed and have at least AA degrees, so you're paying for an additional 2-3 educated people plus the vet.

Of course, the "ideal" rarely happens, the point is, with every vet you add, issues of juggling staff, scheduling, and turnover skyrocket

Most of the corporations don't make it known that the clinic is corporate owned. They sweep in, buy the clinic, and keep the owner in charge. Marketing and branding is kept as-is to keep the small, neighborhood clinic feel.

Some of that is changing depending on the corporation. Sometimes you'll see "Main Street Vet Hospital, a Megacorp Vet Clinic" or they'll rebrand speciality clinics and large hospitals with the corporation branding. However, a lot of small general practice clinics still make no mention of corporate ownership and clients would never know unless they ask. And they never ask.

>It is a sad and exploitative industry.

What an insulting, belittling comment. I don't know why you think veterinarians are charities, and don't know why feel entitled to pay people less than they're worth.

Veterinarians hold doctorates. Four years of undergrad, four years of vet school. Many emergency vets are board certified, meaning they've done an additional 3+ years in internships and residencies.

In running a practice, ideally you also want a 3-1 ratio of techs to doctors to monitor patients. Many states require at least an AA degree to become licensed. These days, it's common to find people who have undergrad degrees who go into vet nursing as a career. Therefore, clinics are paying for 3 others with degrees.

Add in costs like support staff, and the fact that 80% of medicine and equipment are repurposed from human use. Distributors don't give a shit that it's for animals and will charge a vet clinic the same as a human hospital.

Don't blame the vet for charging $5000 for a surgery. Blame owners who can't afford to raise a pet but have one anyway.

Except that the majority of content there are posted from karma-farming bot aggregators. Reddit does the same thing digg did that got them killed - curate submissions, but they wisely didn't announce it. Reddit uses a combo of algos, mods, and other bots to promote this curated content and bury unwanted content on frontpage subs.

Ad blockers unfortunately don't work on those.