431–440 of 448 posts
Seriously if you’re doing a hiding in plain sight technique like steganography the last thing you should do is boast about the fact you’re doing it.
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I think there is a middle area between being a "nice boss" and being a boss who calls out internal engineering implementation concerns (rightly or not) on Twitter. And then fire people who disagree in a response.
Well, Gates is an asshole, Jobs was an asshole - where's the middleground? Maybe niceness leads to [business] mediocrity.
Early support for company health insurance, flextime, work-from-home, free coffee breaks, decentralized decision making, etc.
See the HP Memory Project at https://www.hpmemoryproject.org for some of the stories. ("Jim Catlin's Packard Story" and Packard's 11 rules, "Bill Hewlett and the HP Medical Plan" for their anonymous payment for medical bills for an employee's premature baby, etc.)
The padlock story at https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/john_minck/inside_h... is also pretty well-known, and used as an example of promoting institutional trust.
Packard's support for apartheid profits keeps him definitely on the scale.
[1] Probably better if you were a white male not as subject to the "mixture of machismo and misogyny" of early HP - https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/barbara_waugh/barba... .
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Indeed. For example, Musk fancies himself a champion of "hard work" but what he fails to realize is that humans have not actually merged with robots yet, and we still have human needs. If innovation and brilliant thinking are part of your brand, you actually get higher quality work, sustained over a longer period of time, if you actually back off on the whip-cracking and just give people what they need to produce gre…
I suspect the world's wealthiest man knows how to grow a business better than either of us.
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Stick the email into Google Translate, translate to Spanish and back, correcting any major mis-translations and Juan is your uncle .
Or put your own space noise in the message to frame a coworker.
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>it doesn’t seem like anyone really trusts anyone anywhere anymore No offense intended, but have you considered that maybe you're just surrounded by bad people? I have a reasonable amount of trust and faith in the other people that I work with. If I needed someone to pick me up in the middle of the night from the hospital, I'd trust my coworkers as much as I would trust my wife or friends. My company is hardly some "…
Oh, sure. Me too. And then someone I trusted utterly fucked me over. Like six figure fucked me over. So consider that your trust, your opinion, is based on the past, and you have no actual idea what will happen in the future, or tomorrow even.
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Or put your own space noise in the message to frame a coworker.
Wouldn't you have to have access to your coworker's email in-box to do that?
_WHICH_ coworker is unknown.
Why do people still work at Tesla, or does this toxic behavior attract toxic employees? I guess that seems to be the case, if you read about Uber under Kalanick, or employees crying in bathrooms at Amazon. Before that tweet the thread is talking about an email Musk sent: > Scoop: Elon Musk just sent an email to all staff outlining "Twitter 2.0", writing it will"need to be extremely hardcore". Long hours, high intensi…
Do you know what it's like in military organizations around the world and in history? Most men don't have a problem with authoritarian hierarchies as long as the hierarchy is justified in their view. Tech people are extremely coddled and clueless about how the rest of the world works and the moral intuitions of normal people. "The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither…
Also, militaries do have to care about what the lowest ranks think. Not only to maintain recruiting in places without conscription, but also to avoid fragging in places that do have conscription:
"""Fragging is the deliberate or attempted killing by a soldier of a fellow soldier, usually a superior. U.S. military personnel coined the word during the Vietnam War, when such killings were most often attempted with a fragmentation grenade,[2]
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The high number of fragging incidents in the latter years of the Vietnam War was symptomatic of the unpopularity of the war with the American public and the breakdown of discipline in the U.S. Armed Forces. Documented and suspected fragging incidents totalled nearly nine hundred from 1969 to 1972.[5]""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging
While I am confident that Musk's behaviour is merely close to average USA industrial employment norms and this is just us techies being shocked by what that looks like (for example, while there are stories about Amazon running out of people interested in working there, I've not heard that about Tesla, SpaceX, TBC, or Neuralink), this latter scenario is one of the possible failure modes I foresee with actually trying to colonise Mars with Starship, as there just isn't an easy way out if/when things go wrong 40 million miles from alternative employment/governance.
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I suspect the world's wealthiest man knows how to grow a business better than either of us.
And farm government subsidies better than the rest of us
(Thinking of how much the Artemis cost vs. total SpaceX subsidy here, but subsidies are everywhere and look suspiciously like legalised corruption and/or voter manipulation to me even when I like the thing being subsidised).
Companies: Protect your developers, not your code!