201–210 of 348 posts
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>It's the only company that let's you openly engage with the CEO and hold them accountable. That's a very big claim. I can instant message mine. And I still have my last one's personal mobile number.
How many people in each of those ?
FAANG aren't the only companies.
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Speaking as someone who was the caregiver for both my parents as they aged, good lord would it have been wonderful if I could have been able to offload some of those tasks to a 'bot while I enjoyed the remaining time I had with my folks.
forgive me for asking, but why not hire a caretaker/nurse?
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I used to work a corporate job in an investment bank with around 30k employees. The majority of those employees were politicking chameleons with little productive output and a disproportionate salary. I used to hope that large innovative tech companies were different. From what I hear on HN it's becoming clear that that's not the case. It's almost as if the "largeness" of a company allows the non productive people to…
> It's almost as if the "largeness" of a company allows the non productive people to hide within it, all while successfully siphoning off their sustenance. Bang. You're spot on. From what I've seen, it's an unfortunate artifact of many (if not most) large companies. There are just too many places to hide. I'm keen to know if it's the same at Apple and Amazon.
I've yet to hear of any large company that doesn't inevitably end up this way.
Having read the article, only 54% of Googlers view their compensation is better than what they could get from another company. I find it surprising. Who else pays more than Google does? Can only think of Facebook, but even then not sure.
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Even on the "shortcomings" he'd be FAR better than Larry could ever hope to be, and Larry wasn't the worst CEO in the world. It's funny how the two very different companies go through the same tribulations, but it's true: Sundar is Google's Ballmer IMO, albeit a more polished version. Larry is Google's Gates, but less ruthless. Compare this to the current Google which is basically run by an ex-McKinsey type of person…
> Urs has as good a bullshit filter and ethics as I've ever seen in an SVP, and he's not "slimy" That's precisely why he's not CEO material (for that matter, this is why Larry was a shitty CEO as well). Being CEO of a large multinational requires an amount of dissembling and two-faced-ness that few engineers (and certainly not engineers with integrity) are comfortable with. You're trying to balance the interests of l…
Strongly disagree. Also disagree that Larry was a shitty CEO.
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Right Google is losing in ML or not caught up to speed ? I don't know when you left but even outside Google it's pretty much known that ML innovation is Google's strength. Two big teams use Rust at Google in production. I guess Google didn't make the TPU or Tensor Flow as well. Take your pitch forks out but once you're done have a look at some facts.
Not losing, but commoditized - in those fields, there are now perfectly good open-source alternatives. I was at Google from 2009-2014. When I joined, Google was literally the only place you could work if you wanted to do data science on web-scale data sets. Nobody else had the infrastructure or the data. Now if you want to do Search, ElasticSearch has basically the same algorithms & data structures as Google's search…
I mean, I first wrote a text-categorization algorithm using a k-NN algorithm about 12-13 years ago, and in order to make it run with acceptable results I only needed to manually categorize about 200 articles for each category training set. That was very doable, both in terms of time spent for constructing the training set and in terms of storage costs. Now, I have been thinking for some time to write a ML algorithm that would automatically identify the forests from present-day satellite images or from some 1950s Soviet maps (which are very good on the details). I’m pretty sure that there already is some OS code that does that, but the training set requirements I think would “kill” the project for me. I read a couple of days ago (the article was shared here in HN) about some people at Stanford implementing a ML algorithm for identifying ships included in satellite images, and I remember reading that they used 1 million high-res images as a training set. Now, for me as a hobbyist or even for a small-ish company there’s no cheap way to store that training set. Never mind the costs of labeling those 1 million training images. Otherwise I totally agree with you, we live in a golden age of AI/ML code being made available for the general public, but unfortunately is the data that makes all the difference.
Arguably, Google's best CEO was Eric Schmidt. He's the one that turned Google from a startup into an awesome tech company. But nobody ever accused him of having no vision. That's because vision was not his role. That role was for both founders who acted in a duo CTO role. Looking at Google today, they have a CEO but no CTO and the founders seem to be not involved in day to day strategy of Google. So, the real problem…
They want more people writing amazing content, and not SEO garbage.
They want to offer people focused answers to their questions.
They want to serve as your personal assistant.
They want people to really trust the first answer they get from Google.
And they want to be deeply integrated with your life.
The thing is: building AWS is more of an engineering project. Achieving Google's list is more of a research project - it's just far harder and less predictable.
Some will even say those goals require artificial general intelligence.
Assuming that's the case, the fact that Google leads the world in AI/ML , hints that they are doing a good job, right ?
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I've had a similar feeling about how our society deals with people who don't fit in in this way (non-productive), and it's a fun thing to play around with in your head because in a loose way it undercuts a key selling point of organizing your society capitalistically like ours: during the cold war, it was like "yeah well you Soviets just give every lazy bastard some meaningless quasi-task in a widget factory or in so…
I have been thinking on this. From a capitalist point of view, an Universal Basic Income may be useful to remove non-productive people from companies. I think the productivity increase (because non-productive people tend to drag productive people around them) May very well offset the costs.
Some non-productive people are non-productively lazy, and UBI may work for them.
Others are non-conformist creative types, and UBI will half work for them. IMO it's good to have some of these types around in a business to shake things up - as long as they have some practical skills and aren't just dreamers.
Others are primarily interested in accumulating power, and corporations provide a perfect cover for them. They will get off UBI as soon as they can, but they're often incredibly toxic, and large organisations of all kinds are very good at empowering them.
With the odd exception, they're probably the biggest threat to the future of any business. And they're very good at disguising this. They're the people who turn in solid financials and performance stats. But the results are built on rubble, and often their management doesn't discover this until it's too late.