Mandar Apte

UI/UX Designer from Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.

Category: Company

  • Accion Labs Employee Churn, Their Hiring Process & Corporate Culture. My Professional Experience with Accion Labs.

    I worked in AccionLabs for a year. I worked on a single long project for my whole tenure.

    At that time, they used to have offices in Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru. And they were supposed to open an office in Pune when I left the company.

    I joined AccionLabs as a Senior User Experience Designer. When I started interacting with my senior staff, who were UX Architects or Project Managers, all were over-stuffed with projects out of their capacity. I was working in the Mumbai office, so I don’t know about office culture in other offices. There was a sense of uneasiness everywhere. Employees were allowed to play cricket outside during office hours. One employee never showed up to work but received a salary for the last four months. My project manager and CTO were rude in every meeting. They will discuss some random employees’ performance and why they should warn them to install PIP (Performance Improvement Program) or why they should have been fired. They were a few billable employees who sat ideal doing nothing.

    It was such a situation that three or four employees resigned and left the company every two or three days. The company ask them to resign but hosts a send-off party somehow out of no shame. Even two colleagues told in the send-off party’s last speech that they had no work since joining or for the previous four months, and the company asked them to resign, so they did. The churn rate was high.

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  • With the release of macOS Big Sur & macOS Monterey, the user cannot format External Hard Disk to ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted)’ format as there is no option to do the same.

    With the release of the macOS Big Sur Mac Operating System, Apple has removed the option under Disk Utility to allow users to format External Hard Drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted) format.

    There is only one option for Mac OS Extended (Journaled) but no choice with encryption. It only allows users to format Hard Disk with Apple File System APFS without encryption, with encryption & with case sensitivity.

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  • In-depth Review of Matrimony Website by Anuroop Wiwaha (anuroopwiwaha.com)

    I have used the Anuroop Wiwaha Matrimony Website for the last four to five years. In addition, I have extensively used their mobile Apple iPhone app and website for my bride search. As a result, I discovered a few points that Anuroop Wiwaha Portal / Company improved upon to help the community get the right matrimony match for their search.

    Observations:

    Few Points that they can improve on.

    Mobile App & Website Portal:

    1. At every event, they talk about having 20,000 Profiles / Accounts of the bride and groom registered on their portal. An average Anuroop Wiwaha account cost is INR 5,000/-.
    2. The user (Bride or Groom) can’t register with a free account as they don’t support free accounts. The user must pay an account fee upfront before registering to the portal. So it gives assurance that the user is at least serious about their search, and even the user has to submit identity proof within seven days of registration. So in a way, it eliminates the possibility of fake accounts or fraud.
    3. Even with this money of 20,000 Accounts * 5,000 Fee, the Bride or Groom Search is cumbersome and hectic. The mobile app is not full fledge as compared to a web portal. They use non-native software technologies for the Apple iPhone app, which takes minutes or sometimes fails to load content and data.
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  • Different ways of sustaining as a Music / Video / Creative Content Creator on digital music platforms in today’s age.

    I just learned that Apple Music pays artists 1 cent (75 Indian paise) for one stream / one audience listens to your song for a single time.

    So if you want to earn $1 (75 INR), the artist should have 100 plays/views by his user/audience.

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  • My Experience of buying my first iMac from Unicorn Infosolutions Pvt Ltd. I received a secondhand machine for the total price I paid. This is a story of fraud and piracy in bright daylight in Mumbai.

    I got a job as a Graphic Designer in a good company in 2007.

    I completed my Final Year Project on Apple Inc. in my previous graduation year.

    So, I was way more familiar with Apple Computers than I required. With a new stream of money, I started receiving money because of the job. I bought my dream computer, a 24-inch iMac.

    Someone from my company told me about Apple Premium Reseller, Unicorn Infosolutions Pvt Ltd, located at Andheri West near Fun Republic Mall.

    The year that I bought iMac was March 2008. I visited their store near Fun Republic Mall. The physical RAM that was coming with the iMac was 2GB. At that time, they told me I must buy more RAM if I wanted 4GB RAM. So I said I will opt for 4GB RAM. They told me they could provide me with pirated apps that were preinstalled and Pro Apple Apps like Final Cut Pro, Logic Studio, and Adobe Creative Suite. I said I was not interested. But this was when I sensed something wrong with the purchasing process.

    The Unicorn person told me they would not deliver the Apple iMac to the home I had to carry to my house, which was 20 kilometres away. I said no problem, I will take it myself.

    After using that iMac, I started experiencing issues and feeling cheated by Apple Premium Reseller when I purchased what was supposed to be a new iMac from them.

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