Starts with how you evaluate employees for bonuses and promotion. Do you evaluate people on the impact of what was delivered? How fast they delivered feature work? The quality level of what they delivered? How well they worked with others?
The answers to basic questions like that already starts to shape behavior. If you pay zero attention to how people behave, and only look at impact of what was delivered you may promote people who optimize for their own work, but make others miserable. If you don't properly weight quality, especially now with AI code gen, you'll promote people who move fast break more things than is reasonable.
We can easily find examples of suboptimal behavior that arises out of poorly shaped rewards incentives at companies. Empire building is one behavior that is the result of managers getting promoted based on headcount. Stack ranking can and has led to people limiting collaboration with peers because someone has to fail in order for someone else to get a favorable rating. Or people avoid riskier work because failure can put you on the hot seat.
> but to attack the core idea as essentially wrong is anti math, science, and rationality
The way Microsoft implemented stack ranking was anti math. You're supposed to measure the data then calculate the level of fit to a distribution, not artificially shoehorn the data into buckets to create the curve. If you analyze the data honestly you may find you have a bimodal distribution, or a heavily skewed distribution, who knows.
Stack ranking just clumsily says, I'm gonna give x% a bad score, y% a middle score, and z% the top score.
So if a SaaS offered a prepaid consumption plan alongside a monthly subscription you'd be more likely to buy?
Like $19/month unlimited use or $50 for x amount of usage (api calls, transactions, assets, etc.)? Then you decide if you want to reup when you've used up your credits?
Probably a lot to do with this. Incentives are probably the strongest driver of behavior in a company, much stronger than any stated strategy.
If people are richly rewarded for launching new products, they'll optimize their work for launching new products, even when that product doesn't make sense, or when more business value could be created by supporting/enhancing an existing product.
For another example, Microsoft's dysfunction and infighting in the Ballmer era can be tied to stack ranking. If your success depends on your peers doing worse than you, you're incentivized to not cooperate at best, snipe and sabotage at worst.
Google absolutely has to change their internal incentives if they want to sustain success into the future. In the case of GCP they're gonna have to start figuring out how they can shift their culture to wooing and keeping enterprise customers. This leak, their culture, and their history is gonna make that a tall order.
> A well compensated white collar professional will get judged hard for driving a pickup in some social circles and I think this styling is to help get around that.
I think Tesla could've met that desire without making the truck look like a low-polygon model from a teenager who just learned to use Blender.
Tesla's design language from it's other models could have been smartly applied to a truck design and they would've had a winner.
The average consumer of a truck cares about the looks. Unless the Cybertruck allows buyers to address a use case that is so compelling that they're willing to excuse the looks, Tesla is not going to sell many of these.
Maybe Tesla is banking on luring people who don't usually buy trucks, or that truck buyers are so hungry for an EV that they'll go for it. But someone who doesn't usually buy trucks, would just buy a Model 3 or Y.
Traditional truck buyers tend to be fiercely loyal to their brand so they'd probably be more likely to wait for EV versions from the favorite truck brand.
How would it make your life worse if in addition to the usb-c ports there was a sd card port and usb-a? Does switching away from magsafe make it more likely or less likely for the MacBook to get accidentally pulled to the floor?
I'm not saying that no one will find usb-c useful or that it works for no one's workflow.
I'm saying that going all usb-c doesn't provide much, if any benefit. They could've given you your usb-c ports and included the other ports.
If it works for you, great. The problem is that they could've made it work for a lot more people, but they chose not to in their Don Quixote-like chase for thinness and aesthetics.
The point is not that you can't do those things, the point is that it's been made more difficult for little to no discernible benefit.
Apple has been going down this path of making thinness such a high priority that utility has become a second class citizen. So yeah I can carry around dongles for everything, but why? So the side of my MacBook Pro can have pleasing congruity in it's ports?
It is good that Apple has moved towards a standard port rather than just slapping 4 Thunderbolts on there. But the loss of HDMI, USB a, and sd card slots makes for more hassle with little upside, not to mention they did away with magsafe.
At least they fixed the keyboard and upgraded memory in a bug way, so maybe things are headed in the right direction now.
Interfaces change, but making the switch too early makes it needlessly painful. I mean, how does it make sense that Apple's own iPhone and iPad don't plug directly into Macbooks without a dongle?
I mean, why stop there? Apple could just go to zero ports and force everyone to use Wi-Fi peripherals. They could sell a wi-fi peripheral hub for backwards compatibility. Then they could get rid of the power port and use inductive charging. That would make for an insanely sleek machine, even if it were insanely painful to use.
The long game may trend towards USB-C, but in the meantime Apple made the Macbook Pro less usable for people who want to do actual work. How is it better to have to manage a bag full of dongles when Apple easily could've included the ports that people frequently use like SD and USB-A?
It was a bad decision 2 years ago when they introduced this generation of Macbook Pros, and it's still a bad decision.
Investors have been massively wrong before on all kinds of things which has led to market crashes. So the fact that some investors believe Uber will become a strong, profitable business in the foreseeable future doesn't count for much.
The market is not perfectly rational. It's vulnerable to hype and there's a lot of money to be made by exploiting that hype and selling before the bubble bursts.
To start with, many cities have no fly zones around their airports that already cut down on who you can serve. Then there's the fact that you need a sizable drone to carry a payload big enough for meals. The bigger the drone, the bigger the landing zone you'll need.
Flight times are heavily limited by batteries which means you'd have to swap batteries frequently. Then there's the fact that you'd need someone to pilot them, at least for the landing part. On top of that drones would be heavily limited by the weather.
And all that is not even getting into liability and FAA regulations. There is no way Uber or anyone else is gonna be air dropping food deliveries without charging a pretty big fee and even then there'd be a lot of limitations.
What food delivery logistics? Ubereats is not tackling any part of the food preparation, food supply chain, or even the problem of keeping food hot.
All they're doing is pick up and delivery. There's no moat there and there's not a lot of untapped profit margin there. Ubereats could win in this market tomorrow and it still wouldn't be worth billions.
The problem with that is that the restaurant business is low margin in the first place. So Uber cutting into the restaurants' margins will quickly make it not worth it for the restaurants.
Kind of like how Groupon and Living Social often made these money losing deals with small businesses. Many of those businesses figured out that the one time influx of customers was not at all worth it, which is why both Groupon and Living Social are shells of their former high-flying unicorn selves.
> A truly senior developer who really wants the job, with a few weeks of practice for an hour every night can considerably improve their chances.
Thing is, very good people always have a plethora of options. So a company that tries to make a talented developer jump through somewhat silly hoops, is often going to miss out on that person. Google for example will say, 'we're ok with a lot of false positives' but they are also missing out on outright brilliant people who can make an outsized impact.
The FAANG companies can get away with it to a degree, because their compensation is so high. But there are a bunch of companies out there copying these hiring processes when they can't pay anywhere near what those companies pay, nor offer anything else compelling enough to make up for that.
So on one hand, yes, if you want to get paid the big bucks to work at one of the FAANG companies, you play ball their way and jump through the hoops. But that strategy is not going to work very well for the vast majority of other companies.
I think we're going to find in the coming years that there is a lot of white collar crime going on at any time. It seems like it would be foolhardy to attempt this stuff, but greed compels people to do stupid things all the time. Wealthy C-suite people are not totally immune to that.
The answers to basic questions like that already starts to shape behavior. If you pay zero attention to how people behave, and only look at impact of what was delivered you may promote people who optimize for their own work, but make others miserable. If you don't properly weight quality, especially now with AI code gen, you'll promote people who move fast break more things than is reasonable.
We can easily find examples of suboptimal behavior that arises out of poorly shaped rewards incentives at companies. Empire building is one behavior that is the result of managers getting promoted based on headcount. Stack ranking can and has led to people limiting collaboration with peers because someone has to fail in order for someone else to get a favorable rating. Or people avoid riskier work because failure can put you on the hot seat.