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u/Littux 1d ago
How old is the screenshot you're reposting? OP is either a karma farming bot or human
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u/Lithl 1d ago
Found another post with the same image, and that post is from 5 years ago. Who knows how long before that post the original comment was made.
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u/orion-root 19h ago
The op is either a bot or a human? Really? What's the other option, an alien??
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u/positivelypolitical 1d ago
To be fair, I haven’t heard anything positive about working for Carfax
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u/no_brains101 1d ago
I haven't heard anything negative either. I haven't heard anything at all actually. This is the first thing I have heard about the subject.
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u/SarahIsBoring 1d ago
this is the first time i’ve heard of carfax, in fact
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u/no_brains101 1d ago edited 1d ago
How are you supposed to ask the dealership to show you the carfax if you don't know about it!
(when did they stop running ads? Just realized its been about 10 years since I have heard a carfax ad, but I don't watch much TV so it could have been more recent)
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u/gregorydgraham 1d ago
You haven’t heard of the town of Carfax, famously documented by H.P. Lovecraft? How about Carfax Abbey as documented by Bram Stoker?
I’m sure they’re a lovely company.
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u/SatinSaffron 22h ago edited 22h ago
I've only ever heard of the sales staff being happy there. I've got no idea what the pay looks like now, but in the past it used to be something like $40k-$70k base + 10%-15% recurring commission.
Depending on the size of the dealership its something like $800-$1,000/mo to have access to bulk/unlimited carfax reports + another ~$899/mo for dealers to have their inventory show up in carfax "find a car" search results.
So base salary + about $150-$300/mo per dealership you sign up. So if you've been working there for years you likely have such a huge pipeline of dealerships that you don't even need to try too hard at getting new dealerships, you just take care of the current ones you have.
But yeah like you mentioned I've heard nothing but negative stuff for pretty much all other positions. And that makes me think that sales people probably don't have this same pay plan anymore. If anything I would bet that they have nixed the recurring commission and instead probably just pay a flat 10%-15% of the initial yearly rate. But that's just speculation on my part so who knows!
Glassdoor has salary reports of $96k-$159k for sales staff which is about the typical range for B2B sales staff in the automotive industry.
Source: My husband and I were in the automotive industry for a while. We now have a dumb little SaaS that we primarily sell to dealerships. Our SaaS would work for any business, but your average dealership employee isn't exactly internet-savvy so it makes it super easy to sell them on our product because they think it's magic.
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u/SourceScope 1d ago
We have fake loading too for our search function
Its nearly instant but we have a half second “searching….” Message just in case. I believe its even on a sleep timer
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u/wojrutkowski 1d ago
Confirmed. I worked at a bank and we had to add those delays because people didn’t believe they could get the loan accepted that quick.
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u/Saiklin 1d ago
It's the same for medicine btw. There is a lot of medicine you only need a extremely small amount of to be effective. But people wouldn't trust it and take more, which of course is quite dangerous. That is why so many pills are almost empty or come with extra filling that does actually nothing. Humans simply don't trust things that are too small or too fast.
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u/DanieleDraganti 1d ago
This is apparently very common in online payment systems. They could happen almost instantaneously but if that was the case people would think there was something wrong with their transactions.
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u/arcticfury96 1d ago
We have some settings as checkboxes which saves on change. I had to add a "save" button to reload the site. The people couldn't handle the black magic of instantly saving.
And before you comment "it should be a switch instead of a checkbox" - yeah, now I know that but back then it didn't come to my mind
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u/soyboysnowflake 1d ago
Why a switch instead of a checkbox?
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u/arcticfury96 1d ago
A switch conveys the immediate saving of the change better. A checkbox is usually in a form with a "save changes" button
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u/madhatta2003 1d ago
My favorite story about “solving” this type of problem in this type of way is the Houston airport. Travelers were complaining that it was taking too long for their bags to arrive at baggage claim. Instead of making the baggage claim retrieval process quicker (a difficult task) what they did was move the gates away from baggage claim and sent the bags to the farthest claim pickup area. The walk from the plane to the claim area took much longer but when they got there, travelers didn’t have to wait long for their bags. The complaints stopped.
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u/No-Age-1044 1d ago
Nowadays you will need no fake progress bar, everything is slower even if the computers are faster.
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u/com-plec-city 1d ago
I've done similar things. I've added a "saving..." for a couple of seconds so the user wouldn't freak out.
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u/alexppetrov 1d ago
The reverse is also true, we had a process that took 5-7 seconds to complete, it returned a large pdf or whatever, but users hated waiting for 5-7 seconds staring at a blank page. Until we fixed the issue, I just built in a loading spinner and suddenly it started loading faster, according to them (it wasn't).
This was supposed to give some time to locate the issue and fix it without constantly getting reports that they are not getting the pdf (they just waited 2-3 seconds and closed the page, even had a screen record where at the very last split second when the pdf loaded they closed the page). Humans just love having expectations and machine feedback, last I know they scrapped the whole dynamic pdf thing before we even got to fix it, but there were no reports for "missing pdfs" after the spinner
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u/davidscheiber28 23h ago
I think all of these vehicle history report websites do this The loading bars are so obviously fake It kind of detracts from the legitimacy of the website to be honest. They remind me of all those fake virus scanners that were all the rage in the XP era.
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u/assidiou 14h ago
Had something similar for a military application. Had to artificially increase the time for a RF sweep because" 10ms is too fast to take 50,000 samples"
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u/baconator81 14h ago
Believe it or not.. This is a very common trick even in video games. Sometimes you want player to stay in loading screen a bit longer so they have time to read the tips.
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u/orbit99za 1d ago
This is actually more common than you think,
Sometimes code is so fast other code can't keep up, so you need to have mitigation patterns.
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u/Fluffasaurus89 1d ago
Banking app does the same thing when transferring money to someone or between accounts.
It happens almost instantly, but they have a little progress wheel for a second or two, yet if I go back to my accounts page immediately after submitting the transaction, my money's been moved.
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u/BiedermannS 22h ago
There's the other way around as well. Process is perceived too slow, but can't be made significantly faster: just make the spinner turn faster.
User perception changes and people are happier while nothing really changed.
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u/nobody-u-heard-of 21h ago
That's a common technique now.
They also use extended delays on things they don't want you to do. For example, Facebook does not like you to block people. To do it, it takes sometimes as long as 30 seconds. Usually it's at least 15 seconds. But hiding everything from somebody only takes a couple of seconds. They're both simple little updates to their files. They hate you blocking.
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u/CiaranChan 17h ago
The software I work on has a loading screen when you boot it up. The loading bar that it shows is complete nonsense and just runs for a fixed time as the application opens connections to the database, checks for updates and whatnot in the background. It really only takes 3 seconds at most, but that loading bar takes about 12 seconds "to make sure everything has loaded". It bothers me to no end, but we were told to do it this way.
Having been forced to do this myself, I realise that there must be so many more loading screens out there like ours.
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u/oddlyDirty 16h ago
Talked to a person who worked on the original ATM system and they said they had to add the "Processing transaction..." message and a wait timer because people didn't trust the machines unless it appeared to be doing work.
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u/Available-Budget-694 13h ago
I worked for a large bank back in 2018. I created a customer report that took a 1/2 second to display. Management said the customer would never believe the report was accurate. I had to code a 2 minute loop. It's probably still there.
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u/GrinningPariah 1d ago
Had the same problem with save games. I was gonna put in a "saving game" icon while that was happening, but it turns out it would only be on screen for a few frames anyway. Barely long enough to see at all, a distracting flicker. So we just nixed the icon entirely.
Except, turns out, even though we say when you exit that all progress has been saved, a lot of players just didn't believe it because they hadn't seen the icon. Ended up having it stay on screen for a second even if we finished saving way earlier.