Well, I can actually confirm WHY it is you haven’t been selected.
The real answer is that we have 18.2k people wanting to work with us. Each test gets about 7k applications on average. I suspect that the standard company doesn’t have 7k prototypes to ship out for beta (though I WOULD be excited if that were possible for us). Then you need to factor in that we need balance in the testers we select. As an example, California has a LOT of people in Centercode that apply for tests. But we can’t fill up our tests exclusively with people from California… And we need a spread of ages… And we need to get a spread of genders… And…
So we’ve been filtering out people that have already worked with us. But there’s still a LOT of folks that are interested in joining! When we tried to send out callouts to only a portion of folks, we got people angry that they weren’t notified and they caught it by accident. We had people feeling like they had to check Centercode every day just in case we added a new opportunity (which is SUPER not fair). And we had trouble with getting the right balance of testers (“Why didn’t we have more than 2 women apply? … Oh.”).
We have ratios and qualifications set for every test. A recent callout asks about an existing product in someone’s home. We’ll be selecting a ratio of testers for each of the responses to make sure the product has compatibility AND that we’re not letting issues slip between the cracks on that front.
And all of this comes together for…
Smaller odds of being selected for a limited number of products.
I know it’s frustrating. We hear you. It is a weird blessing and curse to have so very many people excited about beta testing with us (kinda like when we run out of stock for a product people are stoked about).
But we are excited to work with you in the future and the enthusiasm from our end is real. We wish we could add everyone into the projects they want without having to worry about product supply, bandwidth for managing testers (it takes resources on our end when we add more folks into a test because we want to reply to people’s feedback), cost of shipping, etc.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to address this. I hope this helped shine some light on things from our end.
You’re not actually excluded unless you’ve done something specifically to warrant it (e.g. breaking NDA, being abusive to people in a test or the staff, etc.). The real reason why folks aren’t selected is due to a large pool and a small supply of devices while trying to balance the requirements of the test.
Haha, I wish I could take the credit for the dubbing. I’m not that cool,
I'm just a nerd and call it what it is named.
It was just a coincidence that I used a disclosure tag while giving a personal disclosure of something. It’s been called:
Disclosure widget
Disclosure element
Disclosure tag
Expander
What it’s called seems to vary a little by the programming context, but “disclosure” is part of the name of what that element really is. Basically just used to declutter the dialogue…
It’s useful to not ostracize any of the personality types. Too many details will bore and turn off certain personalities, but others are detail-oriented and want the details. The disclosure tag allows catering to both groups. TLDR; people and detail-oriented people who want a better explanation.
I really support people learning to use it though
It helps TLDR; people from being frustrated at having to sort through so much stuff they don’t care about, while still having more details available for the detail-oriented people who are frustrated there aren’t more details for them to read. This tag helps cater to both personalities without ostracizing either of them. Inclusion is good.
I recommend surrounding disclosure tags with lines above and below it (use a triple hypen “—” on it’s own line with a blank line above it), so when expanded it’s still obvious where the disclosure section starts and stops. This formatting helps to make the forum much more organized and readable.
If anyone hasn’t completed the basic or advanced Forum training with discobot, I would highly recommend it as it will teach fun tricks like these so everyone enjoys the forum and content more.
There are occasionally projects where we’re specifically asked to call back effective, awesome testers or we need to work specifically with folks that were part of a previous test. They’re pretty rare but I do fully encourage you to continue applying if you don’t mind the risk of stubbed feelings.
So far, we’ve worked with around 1,000 different testers during our life as a company! I’m so excited to watch that number grow over time.
Dad, I was thinking about opening a lemonade stand, waddaya think?
No point son, Amazon’s got it covered.
Looks like you’re developing a hemorrhoid. Can we get you some salve?"
Oh, I guess so. Blondie’s been after me about that. Same-day shipping?
Steals your wife.
