Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors • Hacker News Board

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#361

Post by lugg » Thu, May 02, 2019, 12:34 PM UTC

apetresc wrote: post #214

lugg wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Penny payments will never* be viable. * Never say never. Basically I don't think it could possibly be viable because it would require the total cost of transaction to be less than pennies. That includes the shopkeepers time to manage the automated store, the electricity used in the transaction, and a bunch of other non zero components. Hell even transactions with real pennies today are almost a net loss. We eradicate…

> We eradicated 5c coins in NZ because they cost something like 6c to make. Why would that matter? A 5c coin is spent thousands, millions of times. Why would there need to be any connection at all between how much it costs to make the coin and the value that coin represents in a transaction?

I think it was actually the cost of the metal, i.e. the metal was worth more than the denoted value.

There were other reasons like inflation making 5c coins largely irrelevant (we also had 1, and 2c coins phased out years earlier) (also 1nzd=0.5usd at that time)

NZ has also been largely cashless for at least 20 years now. (Link below has some interesting info/graphs)

https://www.paymentsnz.co.nz/resources/articles/two-sides-of...

I think the only reason this happening was even a big deal at the time was because they replaced all coins at the same time with much smaller, lighter and cheaper versions. I.e. it wasn't a big deal at all but rather the swap over was.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#362

Post by vl » Thu, May 02, 2019, 6:43 PM UTC

baby wrote: post #225

fareesh wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of those leaked videos of the Google team discussing politics with their top management at one of those meetings, are disturbing.

Link or it doesn't exist

Ironically, one google search away: there is a surreal leaked video of company-wide meeting after Trump Election:

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...

Google's response: "Nothing was said at that meeting, or any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias ever influences the way we build or operate our products."

Which of course is not true, as was ironically demonstrated on the same meeting pre-election, when instant answer cards in search results were popping up for Hilary queries, but not for Trump queries.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#363

Post by lsc » Fri, May 03, 2019, 9:19 AM UTC

jcadam wrote: post #360

lsc wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Very few companies include bonus as a part of a software engineer's compensation (large SV companies are more or less alone in this). Bonuses are generally reserved for executives (excluding sales staff, of course) in most industries, including mine (defense). Yup, that's what I'm saying. I'm just a sysadmin; I'd never gotten a bonus in my 20 years working as a programmer or sysadmin, mostly at tier 3 tech companies…

I'm much too old to work at a FAANG :), I do make a pretty good salary for the area of the county I live in, though. In any case, moving to SV would only be worth it if salary+bonus were close to half a Megabuck, and I doubt there are more than a dozen engineers in the world making that kind of money as a FTE.

https://www.paysa.com/salaries/netflix--senior-software-engi...

so, uh, if you think software engineers are engineers, half a megabuck is a lot more attainable than you think. I mean, I'm not saying it's easy, but it's not 'no more than a dozen worldwide" - a megabuck just isn't what it used to be. (I mean, to be clear, if you limit the field to people I'm personally close enough to share this sort of data with, you are looking at a quarter megabuck if you really are pretty good, but from what I see? paysa isn't lying; I punch in my title and job and location, and it's not far off.)

My own personal impression is that it's easier to be 60-somthing man at a faang company than it is to be a woman. mean, I'm not saying age discrimination doesn't exist, but I do work with a fair number of folks in their 60s.(Of course, not being a woman and not being 60 something, my impression here is somewhat suspect.) I'm pushing 40 myself, and on my current team there are more people who are obviously older than I am than there are people who are obviously younger than I am.

(Systems administration drifts older (I assume 'cause kids don't have to learn command line stuff to use computers anymore, and if you are gonna learn it, you might as well go for SRE or SWE and get a pretty good pay bump) and the last half-decade or so, I've been supporting server farms for folks doing electrical engineering, system verilog and the like or kernel-type/embedded work, which also tends attract older people.)

(Of course, your locational preferences and housing space requirements are yours, I'm just saying)

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#364

Post by srndh » Fri, May 03, 2019, 3:24 PM UTC

Better late than never, but the main question is who are left behind and do they have the same mindset as Eric. He is the virus that has multiplied well. Just another member in the club of Gates, Ellison, Ballmer, Jobs, Zuckerberg & more.

Question is, can we undo the damage done. In 2019 lingo, reverse the Thanos snap. Not sure of Sundar but I still hope that Google twins might do the right thing.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#365

Post by otakucode » Mon, May 06, 2019, 7:05 PM UTC

sjg007 wrote: post #332

otakucode wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No poaching" is underselling it. It was wage fixing plain and simple. He was also the one who, with a straight face, said "if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to fear" in response to widespread surveillance. Of course, he would not then open himself up to any scrutiny.

I am surprised that the Feds didn't go after them or take an interest.

They did. And they were found guilty. This was widely reported years ago.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#366

Post by cwillu » Tue, May 07, 2019, 11:49 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #299

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pushing adds is a service that means it is a 'product' that advertisers are buying. Of course google is also buying our data: its the price for using free products such as search, android and gmail; google is then reselling this data; this takes place either by reselling it directly or by using it as part of their service .

If a fast food chain recorded all customer conversations at its tables and then mined that information for profit, most people would consider that unconscionable - even if the conversations were anonymised. Similarly most people wouldn't be too happy about a physical newspaper or a TV that tracked their eyeballs as they read/watched it - at least not without an opt-out option. And yet this is very close to what Googl…

If they let you eat there for free, I suspect you'd find that significant chunk of the population would consider it to be an acceptable trade.