141–150 of 488 posts
Initiatives like the Dot Collector and the Performance review system that has led to a toxic workplace culture I was curious about that "Dot Collector": Dot collector was an application invented by Ray Dalio’s hedge fund and Bridgewater Associates. The application has set its foot in Coinbase since the start of the year and has been in use by the HR and IT teams of the company. The user interface of the app is quite…
Companies should only hire entrepreneurs and engineers who has proven track record as builders as execs. Hiring people from business schools and non engineers as execs is the stupidest thing you can do for long term sucess of the company. Hire builders. Not resume builders.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m fascinated by the idea that, once a company reaches a certain size – let’s say 100 – then it is, by definition, average. Any claims to be above average may be summarily dismissed. This exhibits most clearly in large IT integrators. I know, I work for one. The marketing spiel makes me feel sick. If I were ever to start a company – I probably don’t want the stress – I’d want to keep it small. It is for this reason…
Netflix for many years was an outlier because of the stupidly high bar they kept for engineering hires. Obviously that all fell apart a few years ago and have since diluted their talent pool into mediocrity but I still think it's a counter-point for the argument that you can't maintain a high quality team into the ~200 engineers range.
I’ve become convinced that hiring more people is generally a warning sign. A team of between a few and about twenty people seems to produce all the good stuff. Anything beyond that, your value per employee drops drastically, and your cost per employee goes up as you need to offer higher and higher salaries to stay in competition. A company going on a hiring spree is now a negative indicator for me. I think FB, Goog,…
Back when i was testing so setup a startup I proposed a crazy idea to my cofounder: Let's setup an equity programme where every time a new person is hired, a chunk of equity would be taken directly from the existing employees(including founders!!), and would go to the new hire. So that 2 founders would start with say 80% of the company (20% was for VCs) , and after hiring the first hire, he will get 20%, and founders…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Netflix for many years was an outlier because of the stupidly high bar they kept for engineering hires. Obviously that all fell apart a few years ago and have since diluted their talent pool into mediocrity but I still think it's a counter-point for the argument that you can't maintain a high quality team into the ~200 engineers range.
Netflix has a strange technical management philosophy: they have zero interest in any technology other than their existing streaming infrastructure and traditional media production tools. I've had conversations with members of their tech management, and their ability to investigate new technology directions (such as a Netflix Game Service, or a Netflix Online University) are absolutely zero. One of their identified s…
Initiatives like the Dot Collector and the Performance review system that has led to a toxic workplace culture I was curious about that "Dot Collector": Dot collector was an application invented by Ray Dalio’s hedge fund and Bridgewater Associates. The application has set its foot in Coinbase since the start of the year and has been in use by the HR and IT teams of the company. The user interface of the app is quite…
It indeed was hell.
The primary problem with it was that most people in my business unit (I don't remember the numbers, but the business unit was originally a large startup that got acquired and then multiplied 10x as similar work Deloitte already did got folded in) didn't operate like the rest of Deloitte. Our business unit performed more like a software consultancy than a management consultancy, so most people who weren't director level never interacted with anyone other than a core group of people and a single, direct manager. That manager was also responsible for your assignments, whereas the rest of Deloitte is much more unstructured, people move around on assignments and don't necessarily have a fixed management structure. On top of that, my particular group was in a very niche field, with only two other groups in the entirety of Deloitte doing similar work (one in Australia and another one in Chicago, I believe, whereas I live near DC), which compounded the "you only work with a small set of people and have no chance of escaping personality conflicts".
I got drummed out pretty fast by a boss who was pissed off that I was more internet-famous than him. Not that I'm actually internet-famous, but what little following I have on Twitter occasionally gets me invites to give talks at conferences. All of their marketing was centered around one person being the "genius" behind our group, and I wasn't that guy (hell, I never once met him in the year-and-a-half/6 projects I worked on while I was there), so I was accused of trying to undermine the org.
It ultimately worked out in the end. I got to milk the system a little bit. One of the only advantages of working in a gigantic corporation is that HR is systematized. If you have an issue that is strictly limited to yourself, and can figure out the right levers to pull, the machine will engage and you will eventually get what you want. You are entitled to your benefits. So I was able to take advantage of some very generous family leave and childcare benefits at a rough time in our lives. It also looked good on my resume, which helped me land my current role, which is the best job I've ever had.
Notably, the CEO was not mentioned in this petition. Putting on my tinfoil hat, could this be a ploy by Armstrong to continue purging the political activists within the company?
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have just written three negative sentences. You have a somewhat negative nick (nowherebeen). Your previous three comments on HN were negative. Perhaps coinbase doesn’t target employees like you. Maybe they like happy clappy medicinally-well-adjusted type employees?
That's fine by me. I have never applied to coinbase nor intend to. I do agree I am a somewhat negative nick as well since I tend to comment on stuff I disagree with on HN. Thanks for the heads up though. I shall see if I can improve upon it.
Companies should only hire entrepreneurs and engineers who has proven track record as builders as execs. Hiring people from business schools and non engineers as execs is the stupidest thing you can do for long term sucess of the company. Hire builders. Not resume builders.
Sheryl Sandberg - Facebook COO - Harvard MBA // David Wehner - Meta CFO - Former investment banker // Zachary Kirkhorn - Tesla CFO - Engineer, but also Harvard MBA // Brian Olavsky - Amazon CFO - Carnegie Mellon MBA // Ruth Porat - Alphabet CFO - Wharton MBA
Initiatives like the Dot Collector and the Performance review system that has led to a toxic workplace culture I was curious about that "Dot Collector": Dot collector was an application invented by Ray Dalio’s hedge fund and Bridgewater Associates. The application has set its foot in Coinbase since the start of the year and has been in use by the HR and IT teams of the company. The user interface of the app is quite…