hunter23 · HackerTrans

hunter23

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vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

Yea but the root problem lies in Larry's management. Larry gave Vic pure dictatorial powers for Google+ without holding him accountable for real results. They gave him way too much budget, control, engineers, etc. And they waited way way way too long before kicking him out when things weren't working.

The engineering headcount was ridiculous for Google+. It was also ridiculous to have OKRs for every team at Google to integrate with Google+. Facebook (or really any company) didn't start with Mark Zuckerberg hiring a 1000 engineers and start cranking. If a VC cut him a check for $500 million after his MVP Facebook would probably be a failure. Instead he built the MVP with a few engineers and increased headcount as he increased the user base and shifted vision. Google had this mistaken notion that they could just throw more engineers at the problem and skip the whole product discovery process.

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

I find it ironic that the author is trying to detail core reasons why Google+ failed when they themselves admit they don't use any social media.

While I didn't work on the Google plus team (I was on a different team), the biggest reason in my mind why Google+ failed was motivation. Not a single Google executive on the team had a strong reason for why they should build Google+ besides "we can make a better version of Facebook". There was no real use case.

Facebook, at the time, however had engineers and product managers who were intensely driven and hungry; they were in a fight for their existence against some of the biggest companies in the world. If they failed their company would fail, and they were hugely passionate about what they were doing. For Googlers, it was largely a theoretical intellectual experiment. Tons of Googlers on Emerald Sea didn't even use any of the social media tools and they didn't get "social". To them it was some thing you plug on top of an existing product to increase ad revenue.

If you don't have the drive and you don't understand your users, you aren't going to build something people want.

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

Cognizant should be banned from the h-1 program for these type of employee abuses. If they were threatened with something like that, they would actually listen since thats how they make money. There should be some principle like "if we believe you are a scummy employer, you can be banned from being granted h-1 visas".

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

The biggest problem with slack being used for thoughtful drawn out discussions is that it's UX around recall (i.e. finding a thoughtful discussion you had before) is not good.

You want to document these discussions. In my experience, Confluence, Google Docs, and email are much easier to find things. Specifically because they have a UI which has a unit per discussion (an email thread, confluence doc, google doc) while Slack is a stream of multiple discussions happening at the same time. As such is it very hard to search and also to separate discussions. Discussions can spread across threads while they tend to stay in the same email thread or Google document.

To give an example, let's say I want to have a discussion on a technical design I created. I would probably either create a Google doc and ask for comments or send out an email. If I ever wanted to refer back to the discussion I just needed to find the unit of discussion. It's relatively easy to find an email or google doc.

In slack there really isn't an equivalent. it's possible you could create a dedicated channel per discussion (although no one does) but even trying to find that channel when you have thousands of channels is much harder. Part of the problem is that search isn't very good in slack, but the larger problem is they don't have any equivalent of a "unit" of discussion.

Oh yea and there's also the whole problem that slack only works well internally but there are lots of thoughtful discussions you need with your team and outside organizations.

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

If they use part of the money to lobby local governments to remove these regulations, it might work.

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

The problem is that the local governments are not doing their jobs so private industry is stepping in to address the gap (with obviously a biased interest towards their customers, shareholders, and employees).

Literally every Bay area government has regulations (zoning, community review, etc.) that prevent housing to be put in place. On the transit side, we have multiple transit organizations (Muni, BART, Caltrain, etc.) that do not coordinate and operate as one entity; contrast this with NYC where the transit orgs have a common leadership.

What is happening in the Bay is that we are having an infrastructure crisis because a Nimby philosophy is preventing investment in critical areas like housing, transport, etc.

I agree that private industry won't solve this problem correctly because of its self interest, but frankly the problem is that the policy makers have no interest in solving the issue. Their loyalty is to their wealthy vocal residents who have no interest in creating housing or transit. They definitely do not care if underserved and disadvantaged people are suffering.

So while I agree that private industry will not tailor their solution to the disadvantaged (due to self interest), I don't think policy makers will either (due to self interest). Proposition 13 is a perfect example of how the voting population does not care about infrastructure for the poor. Prop 13 was marketed as a relief provision for the elderly, but the bulk of the measure is essentially a tax break for largely white wealthy landowners.

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

I think the Dropbox announcement is a sign that the enterprise has superceded consumer as the 1st priority for Dropbox executives.

This makes sense, as essentially they wanted a 10 billion+ valuation and the consumer market wasn't big enough to get to that valuation. The problem is their enterprise products don't look look much better than their competitors while their consumer product (sync a folder) was best in class...

If dropbox hadn't raised so much money they could have stuck to their core vision. Instead they will have to compete into the crowded world of mediocre SAAS products that duct tape different solutions together badly.

All because they wanted that sweet VC money so they could have a $100K chrome bear in their office and dropbox branded water in their fridges...

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

I haven't worked at Google in a while. Is this the same Claire Stapleton that was responsible for doing the quirky Company weekly update / TGIF email? If so, it's a bit sad because when I worked at Google (2009 - 2012) she was one of the voices of the company (kind of like Victoria for Reddit AMAs).

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

No, options are not the same as shares. Options are a contract that allows you to buy or sell shares at a certain price.

The employees are part of the 72 billion. All employees (current or ex) have a lock up period after the IPO where they are not allowed to sell.

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

There are 80 billion dollars worth of shares that exist. However only 8 billion of those shares were released for the public markets. The remaining 72 billion dollars worth of shares are held outside of the public markets (insiders, vcs, the company itself, etc.)

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

This is incorrect. There are lots of cases where profitable companies want to IPO. Specifically the public markets are where you go when you need to raise money at significant levels. Nowadays this happens less often as their are bigger and bigger private investors (so you can raise billions in private markets). However there is still a point at which you may need to go public for fundraising.

You are making a mistaken assumption that only unprofitable companies need to fundraise, there are lots of profitable companies that want to raise capital to fund future growth (and their current cash flows aren’t enough).

Also I am very surprised that you named Github as a well run private company. As far I know, they were definitely not profitable (their spend was crazy) which is part of the reason the board took the acquisition offer from Microsoft. I really don’t think they are a good example of a well run private company.

You are correct that only companies that want capital IPO but that is by definition as an IPO is a capital raise. I believe that direct listing is an exception to this.

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

Lol wut, I have a 2 bedroom in the most expensive city in the Bay Area (San Francisco) in one of the most popular neighborhoods in the city and my rent (not rent controlled) is 4300.

You can get a 3 bedroom with that budget.

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

> The system should never had become so complex as to need a program.

Actually there were bills in congress that would have made it so a program wasn't needed because the government would file on your behalf (https://slate.com/business/2019/04/turbotax-bipartisan-tax-f...). In most cases the government knows enough about you to calculate your taxes for you. Turbotax lobbied the government to kill these bills because it would have destroyed their business model.

So the reason you have to use a complicated form or program to file, is entirely Turbotax's fault because they have lobbied the government from making it simpler for users.

Of course a bigger root cause is that lobbying is undermining our democracy.

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

The truth is that almost half of our non-sleeping lives are spent in the workplace. We are inherently social animals (if not the most social animal on the planet). You've pointed out that there are lots of avenues for socializing outside of work, but I think it may be important for humans to socialize in the workplace too since we spend so much time there. It seems like we are wired to want to gather around the water-cooler and chat. As you mention, there's something quite natural about "wanting humans around".

One way to achieve this need to socialize is to work out of a co-working space or coffee shop.

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

Ok, I guess I am out of the loop on the meaning of fascism. However, even if I substitute the word "bullying" the statement doesn't make sense to me:

"Google employees protesting the makeup of the AI Ethics council appeared like the closest thing to bullying in the USA that I have ever witnessed"

I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm splitting hairs, but I genuinely don't understand what the OP is trying to stay in that statement. Is he saying Google employee's protesting of the AI board is the worst example of bullying they have seen?

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

Nothing about this has anything to do with the word fascist.

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

Fascism tends to have these attributes:

  * dictatorial power 
  * totalitarian one party state
  * embrace of political violence as a means to silence opposition
  * strong opposition to Marxism, liberalism, conservatism
  * radical nationalism
  * nationalist economic policy through protectionist schemes

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#Definitions

What about a group of employees collectively organizing and protesting non-violently against an internal board at a privatized company is exactly fascist?

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

What is the correlation between IQ tests and algorithm interviews? Do people with better IQ scores do better on algorithm interviews?

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

Do you have evidence that Youtube Premium is giving a good ROI to Google? I always thought of it as one of their experiments that they will kill off in the not so distant future.

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

Obviously you shouldn't log passwords, but what kind of security mechanism have been effective to catch this error?

One thing I can think of is have some production test accounts that are regularly used and have a unique password. Then have an automated task that periodically greps the production logs for the password to see if you have a log leak.

Any other approaches?