Inside PayPal (2010) • Hacker News Board

Re: Inside PayPal (2010)

#11

Post by apples_oranges » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 9:21 AM UTC

Croftengea wrote: post #3

apples_oranges wrote: post #2

Sounds like a great place to work. I wonder about the "young people with extraordinary ability" however. Surely they would have also succeeded with "older people with extraordinary ability"? (ok they probably would cost them more..)

I wouldn't want to work at a company with controversial business practices and "screw you we do what we want" attitude towards their customers, no matter what a great environment is inside.

Depends on what you want of course, but I want to extract peak performance from myself that's why it sounds good to me. (I do not however like working overtime.)

Re: Inside PayPal (2010)

#12

Post by redis_mlc » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 9:34 AM UTC

Croftengea wrote: post #3

apples_oranges wrote: post #2

Sounds like a great place to work. I wonder about the "young people with extraordinary ability" however. Surely they would have also succeeded with "older people with extraordinary ability"? (ok they probably would cost them more..)

I wouldn't want to work at a company with controversial business practices and "screw you we do what we want" attitude towards their customers, no matter what a great environment is inside.

> controversial business practices and "screw you we do what we want" attitude

Well, here we are. Paypal is a bank in Europe, but not in the USA.

Re: Inside PayPal (2010)

#13

Post by Tycho » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:02 AM UTC

Great entrepreneurs maximize their impact by identifying and working with people who have great talent. I wonder, then, how many people of average ability will simply never encounter any of these legendary founder types, because the founders create this bubble around them and don't waste any time trying to co-operate with the rest.

Re: Inside PayPal (2010)

#14

Post by dilpreet_singh » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:38 AM UTC

I believe the #1 reason is just the accumulation of really smart people in a place like silicon valley, at the time of infancy of internet. That makes things click like nothing else.

Re: Inside PayPal (2010)

#15

Post by gexla » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:40 AM UTC

bb101 wrote: post #7

Reads the same as Netflix. Individuals empowered to make decisions and execute, at all levels of the organization. With higher responsibility also comes the risk of exposing the company to situations that a more practised individual would know to avoid. It'd be interesting to hear about how these companies mitigate risk from their armies of ambitious underlings.

As the article mentioned, few other companies were hiring. The mentioned period was 2000-2002, which was during the carnage of the dot com crash. The economy was in a bad state. Maybe pushing hard to make the case for the start-up to exist in that environment was far riskier than any other mistakes they could have made along the way. Maybe you could say the same about start-ups today.

Keep your focus on the first thing which will kill you.

Re: Inside PayPal (2010)

#16

Post by spockz » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 10:45 AM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #8

There is something nagging at me - it is something deep. It is that there has to be a set of values, a set of cultural red lines that we do not cross. Every branch of the military will happily tick pretty much all of those "do it now, don't let anything stop you" boxes. But every branch of the military has in place very deep redlines (sometimes expressed as rules of engagement, sometimes as "honour") - because they k…

I agree with your first bit, without boundaries we will get a runaway system. But what does the reference to Ming China mean?

> Yes there is danger in retreating from the edge of chaos - but then we all live in Ming China. That is a better problem than going too far over the eve of chaos.

Re: Inside PayPal (2010)

#17

Post by SigmundA » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 11:57 AM UTC

dilpreet_singh wrote: post #14

I believe the #1 reason is just the accumulation of really smart people in a place like silicon valley, at the time of infancy of internet. That makes things click like nothing else.

It also helps they went to Stanford together.

Re: Inside PayPal (2010)

#18

Post by at-fates-hands » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 12:08 PM UTC

gexla wrote: post #15

bb101 wrote: post #7

Reads the same as Netflix. Individuals empowered to make decisions and execute, at all levels of the organization. With higher responsibility also comes the risk of exposing the company to situations that a more practised individual would know to avoid. It'd be interesting to hear about how these companies mitigate risk from their armies of ambitious underlings.

As the article mentioned, few other companies were hiring. The mentioned period was 2000-2002, which was during the carnage of the dot com crash. The economy was in a bad state. Maybe pushing hard to make the case for the start-up to exist in that environment was far riskier than any other mistakes they could have made along the way. Maybe you could say the same about start-ups today. Keep your focus on the first thi…

>> Maybe pushing hard to make the case for the start-up to exist in that environment was far riskier

Agreed 100%.

All of my friends who were bragging they were going to retire at 25 millionaires and then three months later were flat broke. They were so disenchanted with the startup scene, they all went to work for big corporations.

As I remember, nobody I knew wanted to work at a startup, let alone start a company in that environment. There was no money - VC or otherwise. You were left to bootstrap it yourself. If it had anything to do with the internet, you were toxic so even getting clients to support you was insanely hard.

The fact they came out of that crazy time and were able to prosper against all of those odds is really impressive.

Re: Inside PayPal (2010)

#19

Post by bitexploder » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 12:20 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #5

lmm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that only young people can be that ruthlessly data-driven. Us older people tend to have experience that we're attached to, and a certain psychological resistance to the idea that the stuff we've been doing for most of our career was actually a waste of time.

I would say it depends on the person. I personally assume that how I did things in the past is no longer the state of the art and I always look towards younger engineers or outside resources to figure out the new best way, informing my decision based on mistakes of the past. And if the data says I'm wrong, I trust it. I have no belief that I've already found the best solution.

I don’t see how you can be a technologist in the long run without this attitude. Maybe this is the no true Scotsman fallacy, but one of the key aspects of technology is it will change right underneath you often. (Except SQL injection, apparently, the team keeps finding it at an alarming rate in modern apps).

Re: Inside PayPal (2010)

#20

Post by vkk8 » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 12:35 PM UTC

apples_oranges wrote: post #2

Sounds like a great place to work. I wonder about the "young people with extraordinary ability" however. Surely they would have also succeeded with "older people with extraordinary ability"? (ok they probably would cost them more..)

Older people with extraordinary abilities have, in traditional bureaucratic companies, learned that bullshitting and playing politics is the easiest way to succeed. When they internalize this way of working, there is no going back; it makes them lazy and cynical.

Somehow, it requires a certain amount of naivety to _actually_ try to solve a hard problem instead of pretending to do something and then write a 100 page bullshit report (or mostly copy an old report) on it.