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Focus

boz.com

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Re: Focus

#41

Post by hasteg »

andreygrehov wrote: post #31

Boz, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts if you had become the CTO at Facebook after joining as the 10,010th engineer, not the 10th. Pretty much everyone on this forum would have become the CTO at Facebook if they had been employee #10.

Yeah, clear example of survivorship bias... not to sound negative, but if Facebook had become nothing, odds are Boz would be nothing more than another engineer. It's all too common a tale to hear people spout their nonsense and think they got to where they are because of some inherent talent or skill, but at the end of the day, getting to somewhere like Boz these days is just luck. Does anyone really think you could start as an L4 at something like Amazon these days and end up as a CTO? Nope.

Re: Focus

#43

Post by thin_carapace »

LastTrain wrote: post #14
allthetime wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The early iterations of Facebook, just like the early iterations of most internet community and social platforms legitimately brought and kept people together and helped them forge and maintain more solid group connections… I still communicate with a wider range of people from my past, high school, university, etc because of it and enjoy easy access to excellent information about certain vehicles and natural areas (h…

The focus wasn’t making the world a better place, or even to provide any value at all to its /users/, who are not its customers. The focus it was and is making money and to take this essay at face value, nothing else. Nothing wrong with making money - honestly.

nothing wrong with the concept of making money, sure. let's look at the specific method that meta uses to make money. meta onsells private information about their platform users, to more accurately program those same platform users, according to commands of those supplying money. this can effectively be seen as slavery coercion (because slaves have no privacy, slaves obey their masters command, and nobody truly wants to be a slave). personally I don't agree with slavery and I don't agree with coercion, so I see plenty wrong with the way that meta makes money by middlemanning slavery. therefore I see your generalization as insidious because it downplays other viewpoints without adding anything.

Re: Focus

#44

Post by jrflowers »

I like that this is gibberish. “Giving money to charity makes products worse”, “It’s good but I bet that it’s bad”, “I’m using ‘giving to charity’ as a stand-in for anything else bad that I can imagine”

Every now and then it really looks like the hot new drug in Silicon Valley is MPPP and the tech bros got hit with a bad batch

Re: Focus

#45

Post by remywang »

It’s time to pull yourself out of your tunnel vision and look at the wasteland left behind by the ruthless machine you are building.

Re: Focus

#47

Post by iambateman »

I really liked this article. FWIW, I didn’t know he is the CTO of Facebook until just now.

But I can relate to the challenge of making decisions with a lot of competing interests, especially in comparison to the clarity that comes from feeling like you have a mission to accomplish.

I checked Facebook every single day for over 10 years, until I left the platform. Today, the only thing I use Facebook for is Marketplace, which still has the focus he’s talking about.

Hopefully we can all learn from their mistakes as we build products people want to use.

Re: Focus

#48

Post by sandspar »

What's happened to HackerNews? Look at the vitriol of this comment thread - it looks like a 2 Minutes of Hate thing. Set aside your feelings about the author of the linked article and just look at the HackerNews comment chain. What is going on? Since when do HackerNews users write like this?

Re: Focus

#49

Post by cloverich »

sandspar wrote: post #48

What's happened to HackerNews? Look at the vitriol of this comment thread - it looks like a 2 Minutes of Hate thing. Set aside your feelings about the author of the linked article and just look at the HackerNews comment chain. What is going on? Since when do HackerNews users write like this?

It's the world that has changed. Back in the day that I assume you are remembering, it was easy to look at tech as a force for good. But soon Google and Facebook became ad machines first and foremost, consolidated untold wealth towards the top, and discarded any burned out employees they no longer had a use for, while raking in ever more profits.

Personally, I'm unsure of how to read this post as anything but representative of everything that has gone wrong, comically using charity as an example of a mistaken focal point of one of the worlds most powerful tech companies. On top of charity being obviously not a meaningful distraction anyways (its not in the same ball park as the feature factory + ad machine + poor strategy that has defined facebooks existence the last several years running).

Re: Focus

#50

Post by camillomiller »

I wish I had 1/1000th of the ability to disassociate myself from my actions that these horrible hypocrites have. This one is a quite slimy example
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