I think it’s less about the degree of qualifications (which are mostly different from other jobs), that it is that you live in a different location, have a higher cost of living and wage expectations, etc. They wouldn’t hire me either because it would be a stupid decision to pay me enough to make it worth my time, despite me having a lot of CS experience (I worked CS for multiple Fortune 500 companies, including in higher positions such as training). So while I do have the relevant experience, I suspect they would only agree to hire me if I agreed to move to the Philippines, accept the same pay rate they pay everyone else at their call center, etc.
I think it’s probably less about qualifications than about geographical location and wage expectations when it comes to whether they would hire either of us for that. 
Having said that:
Congratulations!!! 
That’s exciting! They’re seriously doing some incredible things! Most recently capturing the Super Heavy Booster rocket’s return paving the way for rapid reusability, cost reduction, advancement of space exploration, and more. The innovation of pushing boundaries is inspiring.
What kind of work will you be doing for them?
Congrats on the new job. Let’s see, if you working at Redmond, are you going to be building (some part of that process) Starlink satellites?
I imagine Wyze is still a startup. I once worked in one. I hated the 60plus-hour work weeks. It’s very draining physically and mentally.
This is a fascinating topic. I actually see very solid arguments for and against this related to Wyze. I then decided to debate the topic with an AI, and I still am not sure which answer is correct.
The fact that I can so easily argue it both ways and not be able to pick which one holds more weight is intriguing. I am not confident whether Wyze should be classified as a startup or not now. 
You’re qualified to run for a political office. 
Cool and impressive.
I did buy a Spacex t-shirt.
Your deadpan sense of humor got you over the hump with the 
boys.
I think what I was describing is very different from the stereotypical flip-flopping, pandering, dodging, or demagoguery traditionally associated with politicians. They typically do this to avoid alienating certain voter groups, while I am undecided because I can steelman both sides of the viewpoint in question.
Example:
- Time in Business: Companies are typically categorized as startups for the first 3-5 years of operation. Wyze just had their 7th anniversary. So this indicates they are no longer a startup.
- Revenue Growth: Consistent Revenue generation and profitability can signal they are beyond the startup phase, but they reportedly didn’t have a single profitable quarter until Q1 2024, and we don’t know how subsequent Quarters performed, but the fact that they have only had a single quarter being profitable indicates they could still be considered a startup. And while I can’t speak to their revenue, It’s not hard to imagine that they had larger revenue back in the days of like 2022 when they were pumping out constant products without being profitable for them and that their revenue dropped a little since then. But again, that is all 100% guessing for which I absolutely have not heard any inside information. BUT employees have publicly said that when they started working with TikTok their revenue jumped back up. Still, this overall category seems to lean toward them being more startup vs mature.
- Growth focus: Wyze accelerated RAPIDLY up through at least 2022. As for post 2022, it is hard to say how to classify this. When they switched back to their basics to have the “Year of the Camera”…they did still continue to expand their product line in a way, but they also reduced it. There are great arguments for and against them having the startup qualification in this sense. In some ways they are a very established smart camera company now, but in other ways they are still pretty newbie in the smart home industry with a lot of things they are still somewhat lacking with room to grow. It’s hard to say which way this should be interpretted.
- Employee Count: Based on figures they have reported publicly, and on LinkedIn and such, they are still relatively small compared to other bigger established companies, but at the same time, they’d also publicly had reports of periods of downsizing/layoffs too which can also be indicative of no longer being in the startup phase.
- Market position: Wyze is a top seller for cameras, and they are often highly rated and on bestseller lists on major e-commerce platforms, with competitive pricing, and tons of features with a strong presence and ranked among the top camera brands globally, alongside Ring, Arlo, Google Nest, etc. BUT they are continuing to innovate and grow which are typical of a startup…but the the strong market presence, and established customer base are more indicative of a level of maturity. They’re no longer thinking of mortgaging their house to cover the finances like they once had to do.
- Scaling is debatable…they are still successfully scaling their camera line, but they are rarely scaling their smart home line anymore. So in some ways they are startup qualified and in another they are more mature and settling.
- Funding: They’ve gone through some Funding stages. From public information, they Went through a Series A funding round and had extensions of the Series A, but there weren’t any reports for a Series B or Pre-IPO or SPAC. Public information shows their primary investors are Marcy Venture Partners (Co-owned by Jay-Z, Jay Brown, & Larry Marcus) … - Their total investment amount is estimated that it could be as high as $110M (they led the initial series A funding that totaled that). and the second primary investor is publicly listed as American Family Ventures (a corporate venture capital arm of American Family Insurance with 15 people on the team…Dan Reed is the managing director, John McIntyre is the parner and Molly Bonakdarpour is the principal. They also have a network of advisors including Steve Young from the NFL Hall of Fame) -Their total investment appears to be less than $15M (They participated in a round that totalled $15M, but I believe most of that came from Marcy Venture Partners). There are online estimates that Wyze’s valuation from the investments may have 10x’d their value in just a year and a half to be as high as $1Billion (I think this is too high). In August 2021, they claimed to have 6 Million Active Users, and they’re much higher now. Anyway, the point is that based on public info, they are in a sort of in-between stage on the funding maturity. They’ve had Series A funding with extensions, but no Series B, C, etc. No IPO or Pre-IPO.
- There are other smaller factors, but for the sake of brevity, we’ll limit this to the above.
It’s hard to say what to classify it as. In some ways it’s still a growth company (still scaling in some ways, but not in others). In some ways it’s a mature business (based on stability and market presence). In some ways it’s got aspects of an enterprise since it’s a large, well-established player in the smart camera industry.
I am not flip-flopping or dodging the question of whether they are a startup, or trying to sway anyone for personal gain, I am simply conflicted about what they best qualify as since they exhibit characteristics in different ways depending on the perspective and the specific context which is being considered. I could make a steelman case for or against Wyze being a startup. Since it’s so easy to debate either side, I’d say they’re in a transition period. But again all of the above is only considering publicly accessible information, so a lot of it could be wrong due to limited information. The main point is that I’m not saying it lightly and I have definitely put a good deal of thought (and research) into trying to decide which it is. I thus say if people think it is one way or the other, they could absolutely be right. I don’t think there is enough strong evidence either way at the moment to make it obvious which way it is right now.
At first I thought I bought the wrong t-shirt. 
Sorry about referring to you as a politician. That is horrible now that re-read my statement. Guess I need to add a satirical tag or icon.
I am glad you don’t speak in word salad dialogs. You offer a lot of meat and potatoes. Adding a dessert would be nice though. 
I was not offended, it was a hilarious relevant comment because of what seemed to be indecisiveness, which is true, and thus a relevant funny observation…though I think the main difference is WHY they dodge making a decision vs why I was choosing not to make one.
Haha, too much meat and potatoes sometimes. I think my dessert skills are better outside of the watercooler when I want to help SOLVE something for people. Here in the Watercooler I can BS around a little bit more and be semi-philosophical or muse on randomish things. I like the watercooler in this forum. Looks like it’s my 3rd favorite place to spend time on here with all you fun people:
I am guessing CS stands for Customer Service or maybe Conjugal Servitude?
I never applied for customer service but as a tech, I had to work on a helpdesk-type role long ago.
They must like Counter Strike on Steam 
Yeah, common acronyms in the industry are:
- CS = Customer Service/Support
- CSA = CS Agent
- CSR = CS Representative
Less common:
- CSC = CS Consultant
- SSE = Senior Support Engineer
Though, anyone who has ever worked CS may think it actually means:
- Constantly Sympathiing
- Customer Shrink
- Constantly Surprised
- Constant Stress
- Customer Stress Absorbers
- Crisis Soothing Representative
- Customer Story Relayer
- Can’t Stand [it] Anymore
- Customer Sanity Avoider
- Chaos Specialist
- Complaint Sound Absorber
- Customer Shinanigans Analyst
IYKYK…When I was working Customer service, and people would ask me about it, I would tell them that it led me to believe that people are basically morons with occasional bursts of intelligence --I don’t actually believe that, and it’s usually easier to love humanity more after leaving that industry a long time ago-- but it sure felt that way pretty often when working customer service because so many of the calls you get are completely and utterly absurd beyond what you can probably think up with your imagination with requests and questions that defy all logic and reason. After a couple of years you’ll think you’ve heard all the possible ridiculous things you could ever hear, and seen it all, and then comes the next person to totally be outside of reality. CSA’s have such a rough job. I did it all through college and it was insane. But it is a necessary job for those people who sincerely have REAL needs.
If it taught me anything, it is to go out of my way to be extra courteous to them and most of them will go out of their way to give me any reasonable discretion at their disposal…but if you are not nice, many of them will often go out of their way to use their discretion to make your day worse. Even if I am really upset at a company about something, I am always extremely courteous to the person I talk with who has to meet specific scripting or policy requirements, etc. Some of the companies that I personally know have required upselling requirements in their script checklist or they’ll get marked down and fail QA, etc (but a lot of agents hate to do it in certain circumstances, I will even go so far as to tell them when it’s a good time to hit their upsell checklist during the call so they can get full marks. I like to have good fun on such calls when I know their scripting, etc. Seriously, they’re just people doing a job and not all of them agree with the company, but they still have to represent the requirements issued to them. I don’t take it personally. Once we get through exhausting all their [scripted] requirements/checklist then they sometimes have more flexibility for discretion. So I tell them to go ahead and get through everything they have to do, and I’m totally courteous the whole time. After that we can sometimes get somewhere. Taking anything out on them gets me nowhere at all and sometimes less than nowhere (ie: opposite direction from my intent).
I guess we generally agree on customer service. I just like the abbreviations defined at least once in the conversion. Maybe it was defined in a message far, far away.
I just wondered what kind of job @07w went after. My English teacher in the last century said to never use abbreviations and define yourself. It’s now the 21st century and we live with abbreviations and acronyms of all sorts. Sometimes we need clarity for those outside of a field of service.
In the US Navy avionics, we worked on Traveling Wave Amplifier Tubes. I also saw a code for a control box that failed testing that was abbreviated from Control Unit No-go Test. Both of those abbreviations were unique to electronics. These could mean something else entirely to different people.
I guess I wasn’t debating Customer Service but Clarity is nice. 
Thanks for explaining.
Great. Sounds better than CS.
I once was interviewed by 12 people taking turns. It was challenging but it wasn’t timed like yours. I got the offer but found a better job the next day.
It’s nice to work for a well-known company. While I worked for some well-known companies, I also worked at some where people ask “Who?”
Best of luck.
This is why I often use the <abbr> tag to define things like TLAs in my posts.
I also tend to use full product names in order to minimize ambiguity and confusion.
Congrats on the gig, @07w!
Very cool and exciting, thanks for sharing.
I should do that now. I didn’t even know that tag existed in Markup until you started doing it everywhere. Then it’s hard to figure out because it doesn’t copy over in a quote…and I haven’t manually typed HTML in decades 
It doesn’t render in the quoted portion you selected (using where you quoted me above as an example), but if you click the downward-pointing chevron () to expand the quote, you can hover over the area where I used the <abbr> tag and see it working, so it’s actually still there in the quote (at least the way Discourse connects to the original content and renders it). I get what you’re saying, though: The HTML doesn’t show up in the actual text snippet when you’re selecting and quoting in a reply post.
It’s fun! I like the control of content I get with it, and here in the Forum I use a mix of that and Markdown (not so much BBCode). I just recently started playing with Visual Studio Code because of the SVGs I’ve been writing, which are really just XML, and that helps with the structure and organization as I learn how to use the <animate> element. 
