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Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

fivethirtyeight.com

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Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#101

Post by nostrademons »

dpritchett wrote: post #93
nostrademons wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote work eliminates the emotional content of the communication channel between workers. That is bad for team cohesion and serendipitous collaboration. Humans have evolved a number of emotions that enable us to work together even when it's not in our immediate self-interest: guilt and shame to realize when we've hurt somebody else and discourage us from doing it again, excitement to pick up on and pile into promisi…

This really sounds like status quo bias to me. No one's going to tell you that face to face communication isn't an incredibly efficient medium, but that doesn't mean teams and companies built around remote work can't (and don't already) thrive. I would even hazard that your experience is possibly colored by the teams you've worked on and the companies you've worked for.

If there's a status-quo bias, it runs the other way. In college, I led a website rewrite with team members in Massachusetts, Oklahoma, France, and Australia, with the site owner in Florida. For my first startup, my cofounder and I usually worked remotely, though we were within driving distance so we could easily have meetings. I've worked on both distributed and colocated projects at Google.

My personal preference, as a developer, is for remote work. But when I look at what the team actually accomplishes, the level of creativity in its solutions, and how quickly it accomplishes them, a colocated team almost always beats the distributed one. There's an energy that you can get when everyone is in the same room that's impossible to replicate when they're 1000s of miles apart.

The cases where I think remote work can do fine is when you have a simple tool or interface that needs implementing, or if you're just trying to optimize one number (eg. performance of a library). These are the same situations you'd use a contractor for.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#102

Post by Zigurd »

autokad wrote: post #97
Zigurd wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit unfair to to US universities to suggest they made this situation. There is a huge demand from foreign families who have the means to pay for a quality education and who live where university capacity it not able to keep up with demand at home. US schools can raise the quality of their student body, not to mention raise their income by meeting this demand. And on the other side of the ledger, it can be argu…

certainly they arn't all the blame, but they are also not blame free. for some reason, engineering programs over favor test scores. In China, their schools prepare their students to take our tests such as the GRE. also in china, they take paper exams (because that makes it easier for them to cheat). As an engineering student, i met several chinese students who got perfect verbal scores for the GRE but could barely ho…

I have seen where foreign students who are very well prepared by an excellent high school education but who would not make it into an elite school at home due to pretty much infinite demand for a constrained supply get a quality university education here, and I have seen both graduate and undergraduate foreign students cheat their way in, and in too many cases, through a US university education, and everything in between. Though it looks like the numbers favor the former being the majority.

I think we can agree any visa program would need a way to distinguish among them. But also consider that George W. Bush graduated from Harvard Business School. If you have the juice, anything can be made to happen.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#103

Post by cratermoon »

araes wrote: post #89
rayiner wrote: post #3

I think there is a bit of cognitive dissonance in the tech community about "disruption" versus "big companies." Technology, in general, makes it easier to scale companies to large sizes, and "disruption" often involves using technology to enter an existing industry that is dominated by small, inefficient companies. A great example is Uber. Uber is making the taxi market a lot more efficient, but it's also well on the…

Unfortunately, large companies can also much more easily engage in rent-seeking behaviour ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking ) which small competitors can't engage in effectively unless they organize as a group (effectively a small business union) Even worse, rent-seeking is often a better use of money than actually innovating in the market you supposedly compete in. If I can disadvantage all of my competito…

Regulatory capture is the word of the day.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#104

Post by bwaxxlo »

blutoot wrote: post #98
autokad wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

certainly they arn't all the blame, but they are also not blame free. for some reason, engineering programs over favor test scores. In China, their schools prepare their students to take our tests such as the GRE. also in china, they take paper exams (because that makes it easier for them to cheat). As an engineering student, i met several chinese students who got perfect verbal scores for the GRE but could barely ho…

If you don't have a visa, you can't stay in this country beyond a certain point. That has nothing to do with having killer chops for entrepreneurship.

I can attest to this. I had to leave US last September due to visa expiration.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#105

Post by autokad »

blutoot wrote: post #98
autokad wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

certainly they arn't all the blame, but they are also not blame free. for some reason, engineering programs over favor test scores. In China, their schools prepare their students to take our tests such as the GRE. also in china, they take paper exams (because that makes it easier for them to cheat). As an engineering student, i met several chinese students who got perfect verbal scores for the GRE but could barely ho…

If you don't have a visa, you can't stay in this country beyond a certain point. That has nothing to do with having killer chops for entrepreneurship.

i'll bet you if you gave an hour to think about it, even you who made that comment can think of at least 3 ways that statement is wrong.

entrepreneurs find ways.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#106

Post by ninguem2 »

autokad wrote: post #78
spodek wrote: post #28

As a Professor of entrepreneurship at NYU's engineering school (that VC Fred Wilson called a jewel -- http://avc.com/2014/03/the-value-of-an-engineering-degree ), I can summarize the problem in one phrase many of my students said when describing their goals after graduation: "... but I have to get a job at a big company to sponsor my visa." They're brilliant, motivated, and capable, but almost none are citizens. To s…

I know i'm going to be slaughtered in downvotes, but have the top schools ever considered admitting more citizens?

The top schools are private. They are only interested in their bottom line.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#107

Post by drcode »

walterbell wrote: post #54
drcode wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CoinJoin is a technology that can be viewed as atomic in regular usage (it's a generalized way of mixing coins.) As for complicated/heavyweight, most computer technology we use today was viewed as too complicated/heavyweight a couple decades ago.

Thanks for the pointer. Found a design thread that's been going for a year, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0 , but no implementations. This approach seems to have the same challenge as Tor or email encryption, i.e. convincing everyone to use it.

Sure there are implementations- See darkwallet.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#108

Post by madengr »

ganeumann wrote: post #94
madengr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No sh!t it is! If you can develop that for the tax codes in all 50 states, you'd have a winner! I think it's impossible to do though, unless you are Quicken.

But you could get 2/3rds of the US population operating in just 15 states. 1/3rd in just 4 states.

Yes, good point.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#109

Post by nostrademons »

S4M wrote: post #99
nostrademons wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote work eliminates the emotional content of the communication channel between workers. That is bad for team cohesion and serendipitous collaboration. Humans have evolved a number of emotions that enable us to work together even when it's not in our immediate self-interest: guilt and shame to realize when we've hurt somebody else and discourage us from doing it again, excitement to pick up on and pile into promisi…

I know it's not exactly a company, but the linux kernel (and other big open source projects) managed to do quite well with its "employees" being remote, which proves that a big project can be successful without face to face communication - and since you mention the emotional content of the communication, I'd say Linus is quite good at conveying that in his own way. IMHO the employees engagement to the project can be…

Linus's big observation is that "debugging is parallelizable". Product development isn't, though - Linus had to release an operating system on his own before he could recruit volunteers to help with it. And many of the outside contributions come from corporations who would like to use/support Linux but need to modify or extend it in some way, and so they contribute the patch themselves.

There are big companies that work the same way. Cisco actively encourages employees to work from home. However, Cisco's product-development strategy is "buy startups that are already succeeding in the market", and so if you work at Cisco your job is generally bug-fixing and incremental improvements to existing products. If this is the sort of work you want to do, there are a bunch of options that will let you work remotely. I suspect that much of HN wants to develop new products though, and for them, empirically you need the team to be colocated in one location.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#110

Post by rayiner »

araes wrote: post #89
rayiner wrote: post #3

I think there is a bit of cognitive dissonance in the tech community about "disruption" versus "big companies." Technology, in general, makes it easier to scale companies to large sizes, and "disruption" often involves using technology to enter an existing industry that is dominated by small, inefficient companies. A great example is Uber. Uber is making the taxi market a lot more efficient, but it's also well on the…

Unfortunately, large companies can also much more easily engage in rent-seeking behaviour ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking ) which small competitors can't engage in effectively unless they organize as a group (effectively a small business union) Even worse, rent-seeking is often a better use of money than actually innovating in the market you supposedly compete in. If I can disadvantage all of my competito…

I've said this in other threads, but I think this angle is overstated by people who underestimate the purely business advantages that come with scale. Look at the tech industry, which historically hasn't had much involvement with regulation and thus little opportunity for regulatory capture. Is Apple using regulations to keep Jolla from succeeding? No. They use their scale to amortize their OS development work over tens of millions of units. They use their scale to invest in manufacturing processes and equipment that allows them to release complex designs that competitors can't match at the same price point. They use their scale to do in house CPU development, etc.

People want to believe that the free market means tons of little companies duking it out. They blame consolidation on the government and rent seeking and regulatory capture. But the fact is that there are massive business advantages to being big, and the natural state of the market is in the direction of consolidation (e.g. the trusts back in the day of Carnegie).

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