121–130 of 147 posts
There is a certain amount of irony when the cookie policy agreement is buggy on a story about complicated & complex systems. Clicking on "Only Necessary" causes the cookie policy agreement to reappear.
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That's what the math is reflecting. Project succeeds if all of 10 people does their job well. Each person has a 95% chance of succeeding. 0.95^10 ~= 60%, and so the chance that all 10 people do their job successfully is ~60%. Those jobs also include things like management and product design, and so the coordination risk is reflected in the 5% chance that the manager drops the ball on communication. (As a manager, I s…
That's what I mean "only 5%" encapsulating all failure modes (comms/implementation/coordination/etc) is very low. And that under-estimation compounds to make the top level 60% much higher than it should be. A 7.5% rate takes top-level success odds below 50% - 46%. A not unrealistic 10% takes the top level down to 35%. Etc.
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I’d wager 90% time spent at Google is fighting incidental organizational complexity, which is virtually unlimited.
Equally important is the amount of time they save because of available abstractions to use like infra, tooling etc
Google has all sorts of great infra projects that simplify complex domains. Those are solved problems now, so nobody notices it.
The existence of incidental complexity isn’t evidence that the counter factual is less complexity.
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I don’t get the connection to capitalism here. Care to elaborate?
I have several times saved my companies multiples of my salary in saved cloud costs or other instances, and always of my own initiative out of "professionalism". There are lots of stories I recall on HN comments of similar things, and sure maybe they got a promotion or a title... I have heard of AWS tech people getting pretty big bonuses for big service wins. But that was a huge anomaly.
Capitalism is supposed to (in theory) reward efficiency and productivity. The CEOs certainly know how to advocate for financial performance rewards, as do many other managerial tiers.
Candy bars? Christ, it's kindergarten. I just never fail to be amazed that "capitalism" is a bunch of rigid hierarchical despotic firms fighting in a "free market"... well back when there were approximation of free markets. When you're in these tightly structured orgs, it's like authoritarian planned economies (that is communism in the totalitarian soviet sense, not any putative ideal of communism).
I'll spare you all the further rants about Middle Manaagement Machiavellianism.
Congrats on your candy bar and employee of the week picture.
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The phrase thrown around was “collaboration headwind”, the idea was if project success depends on 1 person with a 95% chance of success, project success also had a 95% chance. But if 10 people each need to succeed at a 95% chance, suddenly the project success likelihood becomes 60%… In reality, lazy domain owners layered on processes, meetings, documents, and multiple approvals until it took 6 months to change the te…
Another side of this coin is that the expected payoff from a project depends on how many unrelated projects your organization is engaging in , which is deeply counterintuitive to most people. Every project carries with it three possibilities: that of success, where the company makes money, that of failure, where the company does not, and that of a "critical failure", where the project goes so wrong that it results in…
Interesting, Thanks to the writer. However, all this amazing stuff in the service of .. posting ads ?
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I don’t get the connection to capitalism here. Care to elaborate?
Really, it just references the ridiculous lengths companies do to not actually pay employees to do good work. Utterly broken reward systems, foosball tables, etc. I have several times saved my companies multiples of my salary in saved cloud costs or other instances, and always of my own initiative out of "professionalism". There are lots of stories I recall on HN comments of similar things, and sure maybe they got a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t get the connection to capitalism here. Care to elaborate?
Really, it just references the ridiculous lengths companies do to not actually pay employees to do good work. Utterly broken reward systems, foosball tables, etc. I have several times saved my companies multiples of my salary in saved cloud costs or other instances, and always of my own initiative out of "professionalism". There are lots of stories I recall on HN comments of similar things, and sure maybe they got a…
Also, there was no middle management.
(And yes, I know, there are real problems with that sort of popularity-based thing that can absolutely cause bias against the quiet, well-performing type too modest to ask for a raise either.)
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This is probably the most accurate statement possible. “I just want to store 5TiB somewhere” “Ha! Did you book multiple bigtable cells” https://youtu.be/3t6L-FlfeaI?si=C5PJcrvLepABZsVF
What are peer-bonuses?
It technically requires manager approval but it's kind of a faux pas for a manager to deny one unless it's a duplicate.