221–230 of 268 posts
When your primary goal is to repackage existing value and make money from usury, it's a little bit steep to expect your employees to care about anything else - your primary incentive is how much money you can extract from dead labor, and not 'the success of clients' or anything else.
I've no love for GS, but an interesting counterpoint to consider (from http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2012/03/14/unshocked-... ): "'There are a couple of things out of place. 1) This guy has been at firm for 12 years and is only a VP…a pissant of sorts. He should have been an MD-light by now, so clearly he has been running in place for some time. 2) He was in U.S. equity derivatives in London…sort of like equ…
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HackerNews got me - moving to a tech firm
Sign of the tech bubble? Financiers jumping to tech companies? The chemists and high school teachers turned ninja hax0r can't be far off. Someone please warn me so I can short XLK.
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Currently work at Google, obviously speaking for myself and not my employer. In my experience - yes, this moral decay is a necessary part of the current corporate world. Or any corporate world. Or really, any world without the possibility of failure baked into it. I've seen a lot of idiotic decisions made at Google, many of which have been complained about on Hacker News, many more of which are hidden causes of thing…
I really think that you're completely missing the point in defending Google and maybe Goldman Sachs by saying that their decisions are ok because they are made rationally. Rationality is emotionless and mechanical. It's about making a reasonable decision based on whatever information is available to you. However, rational decisions do not involve morals, culture, or feelings. This is exactly what companies like Googl…
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD1175... (search for 'buxton index')
It would be awesome if he pulled a George Costanza and showed up to work next Monday and pretended that the op-ed piece was a joke.
"What?! When?
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Perhaps the positive consequence could be the simple matter of having done something because it is right. Perhaps he could look back on that period of time and reflect that, rather than watch it happen, he took action. Even if it accomplished nothing, he could at least say "I saw something wrong and I worked to right it." What can he say now? "I saw something wrong, watched it happen, and vacationed in Europe until I…
There is a lot of gray with this story. One IC vs many middle managers and a VP will never turn out well for the IC, especially at Microsoft. I don't know what I could have done. To whom would I have sounded the alarm? What I did: "I told my manager," "realized it's a systemic problem," "I was a friend to someone who needed one," "I helped her leave and get her next job," and "I quit." I made lemonade and enjoyed tim…
Even if someone had solved this particular crisis, it sounds like she wasn't going to thrive in this political environment anyway. At that point, leaving is the best choice and, all too often, people don't see that.
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HackerNews got me - moving to a tech firm
Sign of the tech bubble? Financiers jumping to tech companies? The chemists and high school teachers turned ninja hax0r can't be far off. Someone please warn me so I can short XLK.
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Yeah, Goldman Sachs made a predatory loan to Greece in 2002. That is just 2 years after this guy got hired.
Got any details? Predatory loan usually refers to taking advantage of someone who doesn't know what they are getting themselves into. Are you saying that Greece lacks the financial knowledge to understand what they are signing?
Greece wasn't innocent in this, but it's pretty obvious that Goldman took advantage of them.
Tech bubble or not I am just glad that we may be seeing a decline and maybe even a reversal of the brain drain by Wall Street.
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Some start-ups have their employees working 90+ hours. This isn't because they're evil but because they have limited resources, a lot of work, and the people there are amazingly passionate about what they're doing. Limited resources. That's why the long hours are not a sign of evil in startups but are one in banking. Banks could easily hire more people. Startups generally hire good people as soon as they can.
Whether they could is debatable given that many of them are aggressively trying to raise capital, even if it means laying off workers to cut costs. But let's assume they can. That doesn't mean they should. Most bankers I knew were much more upset about losing their week-end beer fridge or a $5 reduction in their daily meal allowance than they were about putting in a few more hours. You have to remember that most anal…
This is incredible. You're the third person I know from the financial industry who has admitted that they have no transferable skills. And I don't know too many people from the financial industry.
These are the captains of industry, dictating how billion dollar corporations that make real stuff should be run. Jesus Christ we're so fucked.