Do we know who “redacted” is? I’ve heard stories that Google set up development office in Denmark because one of their V8 developers wanted to move home and he was “that good” that it was worth setting up an office just to keep him on staff.
Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs
331–340 of 398 posts
Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs
#332I don’t understand Jobs’ logic here. Is he just a bully? If Google makes such a great offer that his employee will leave him, shouldn’t he try to make a better offer, or meet with the employee instead of calling Sergey? Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?
Is he just a bully? From everything I've read in the last twenty years, there was not one single facet of Steve Jobs' life in which he was not a bully.
I think that fact could be reflected in his use of coffee enemas to treat his pancreatic cancer that was easily treatable with chemotherapy which the coffee enemas ultimately resulted in his own death.
Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also my impression after reading Isaacson's biography and Creativity, Inc. At Pixar, he behaved like a feudal lord because he pretty much owned the place and they relied on his money to keep the lights on.
> At Pixar, he behaved like a feudal lord because he pretty much owned the place and they relied on his money to keep the lights on. How do you mean by "behaved like a feudal lord"? Admittedly not read up on Jobs (sacrilege in this venue, I know), so I'm struggling to understand why he who pays the piper calls the tune is somehow objectionable.
Just look at the current state of Twitter if you want a further illustration of the issues with capricious feudal tech lords.
Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
Playing devil's advocate, I'm honestly not sure how I'd behave if I dropped a $10 million personal fortune[1] (1986 dollars; $27.2 million buying power today) for controlling stake in a venture and execution wasn't going as I had envisioned. Being a "jerk" might strike me as an acceptable trade-off if that meant it got targeted impediments out of the way without irreparable damage to the whole. [1] https://web.archiv…
I mean, the argument is essentially one of "sure, he may have been completely awful, but it all worked out so, if we assume that's the reason things worked out (ignoring the myriad other factors and pure luck) then we suppose that, however they had acted or the damage caused, they were right to do so. The ends justify the means - even if we can't tell for sure or not that by those awful means we arrived at those desi…
Not the person you responded to but I find it an interesting situation. I agree with you that jobs (from what I've read) seems to be awful but at the same time I don't believe theft is okay. If I pay someone to do a job and they choose not to do the job after taking my money they have stolen my money. I am not okay with that. In this case jobs invested in them. It was clearly enough money to give him power over them. He had an agenda, they decided they didn't like the agenda and weren't going to do it his way and he came in and cracked heads (in an awful way probably). They can choose not pick his way, but BEFORE they take his money. Once they take the money they are obligated to do it his way or give the money back in my opinion.
Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs
#335Weird that someone so high up doesn't bother to use capitalisation at all. It seems so messy.
Edit: Not sure why the downvotes? I am referring to Sergey Brin's email, he doesn't use any capitals in that email. It just looks very careless.
Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Could you please stop posting ideological battle comments to HN? They're tedious and not what this site is for, regardless of which flavor you favor. This is not a comment on the topic at hand—I'm just noticing that you've been posting a lot like this lately, and it's been a problem for a long while as well. You're clearly using HN primarily for ideological battle, and are way over the line at which we ban accounts—s…
Thanks for the fair warning. I've accounted for your past warnings. I see popular discussion that appear as ideologically informed as my own, yet slide by as status quo positions, which motivated me to add balance to conversation. However I now understand your policy on taking ideological stances too frequently (even if other frequent ideologues don't appear so due to status quo positions). I'll heed this.
Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs
#337Imagine how different the world would be if Google really went with the "enhanced version" of Firefox instead if building Chrome.
There’s no guarantee an independent Firefox could have survived “Embrace, Enhance, ???” at all. Maybe this timeline isn’t so bad since Chrome being what it is means there are actual good reasons to choose Mozilla’s Firefox :)
For sure, I'm not saying it'd be better or worse. It's just hard to imagine a world without Chrome.
Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs
#338I don’t understand Jobs’ logic here. Is he just a bully? If Google makes such a great offer that his employee will leave him, shouldn’t he try to make a better offer, or meet with the employee instead of calling Sergey? Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?
"Pure capitalism", or "war" as Steve Jobs put it in one of his emails, is a race to the bottom in terms of company profits because of countless scenarios like this. I want employee X because he will bring $Y value to me, so I can technically pay anything below $Y for him. But then your company also has similar logic. If we simply aggressively compete then these cost of any employee, who has a skillset where supply Th…
I think it's actually worse than that for the companies, in particular it can easily be a race to negative profits for all companies involved. For example, imagine two competing bridges over a river, where the total revenue available is $100. Each bridge is built of 50 bricks, which collect salary and are free to work for whichever bridge gives them the better offer. The maximum salary that's sustainable if the bridges make a profit is $1 per brick, but it's worth offering vastly more than $1 to "bribe" any particular brick from the other bridge to defect since doing so causes your only competitor to fall down. Similarly, your competitor should rationally be willing to counter-offer up to their entire profit to any single brick to prevent that from happening. Subject to some assumptions about how negotiations work, this can result in both bridges being really far in the red, since the total value of the bridge/team is worth less than the sum of the costs of each individual brick/member departing. The decision theory concept of a "dollar auction" has some similar pathological behaviors.
Obviously, software engineering teams aren't as dramatically interdependent as a bridge where the departure of any one member causes the entire structure to collapse, but they also don't live in the perfect balance where the value of the whole exactly equals the sum of the marginal value/cost of each member. As a result, there's no one number for the "value" of an individual engineer that both represents their negotiated wage and is viable for the company to pay without going bankrupt.
Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At Pixar, he behaved like a feudal lord because he pretty much owned the place and they relied on his money to keep the lights on. How do you mean by "behaved like a feudal lord"? Admittedly not read up on Jobs (sacrilege in this venue, I know), so I'm struggling to understand why he who pays the piper calls the tune is somehow objectionable.
Just look at the current state of Twitter if you want a further illustration of the issues with capricious feudal tech lords.
Interestingly not everybody seems to take away the same lession from what's happening at Twitter. I keep reading from people who say that finally now people can focus on what matters and are not allowed down by lazy people, yadda yadda. Some even claim that Twitter now works faster for them and is generally better.
How can we be objective about subjective things when we can't even be objective by objective things?
Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. Unless you are the one of course.
Are you healthy? Lets harvest your organs to save so many more people for the small cost of one life.
I am not, lets harvest someone elses organs to make me healthy.