421–430 of 464 posts
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Fuck that. Nobody is being served by that arrangement. Nobody.
I would, because I wouldn't be bothered by a useless manager running around calling meetings and doing other useless activites. They're saving a bunch of money just having one useless person.
I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google's problems can be traced back to scale. Loss of trust, distance to top leadership, tone-deafness, repeated failures, escalating surveillance dystopia, perf management overhead, leaks...all of them are fundamentally due to scale. And scale is simply because greed. Gotta make that 23% YoY revenue g…
Google has 140,000 employees, the size of a size-able city in the U.S. Does anyone really care when someone leaves Google?
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> Google buying green electricity makes green electricity cheaper, not more expensive. The marginal cost of puchasing more energy might go down (or it might go up if you are pushing up the demand). But not the total expenditure on energy. > Prices start collapsing. This is actually happening right now. Thermal coal prices are at all time record highs right now. It's 4x the price it was a few years ago when we were al…
How is the price of thermal coal spiking and solar prices collapsing not a good thing?! Are you sure that if the situation were inverted you wouldn't still be complaining? Damned if you, damned if you don't.
> Second, management was spread way too thin. My last manager had around 25 reports It would be rude to describe my anatomical response to having 25 reports, but suffice to say it wasn’t good. I generally consider 6-7 the ideal max, and 8-9 the “I’m dropping all the unimportant balls in order to keep juggling” line. 25 is so far beyond the pale I can’t imagine how any manager of managers’s worth their salary would le…
Counter anecdot - I managed about 20 directs for a few years and it was fine. Of course in reality I was grooming a bunch of them to become team leads (which eventually happened) so I was leaning on them to take care of and lead others day to day. It was fine - everyone grew through the experience. No idea if this type of thing is common but bottom line it doesn't have to be awful.
My manager has about 25 reports and he thinks it's ok, because we're all organized in smaller teams that manage daily work themselves. That's true, but the effect is that the person who should care about people aspects has no idea about you (how you're doing, how you want to evolve, whether you're performing, what you need to improve, whether you deserve a raise or a promotion, whether you're burnt out, whether you're looking for a new position...).
And nobody tells him, because he's the manager and you don't go to your manager with problems, especially if he doesn't maintain a close relationship with you.
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It is just my personal opinion, but I think that it is what is going on with gitlab now.
Can you elaborate on that? Why do you think is Gitlab turning evil?
When it was created, gitlab core value was to be the open source alternative to GitHub. Then, it started to add light premium features.
Now, free versions have a lot of frustratingly limited features with nag screens to push you to subscribe. The free core is less and less a priority and less and less sufficient.
After the ipo, things will get even worse. Most of new shareholders (Ie owners) are just profit led. It's an investment for them and they will want the net result to grow at whatever cost.
Management has no choice else than to follow what shareholders require.
So, if it is economically viable, nothing prevent gitlab to stop new versions to be open source if they think that will make them more profitable.
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Exactly, perhaps people read too many comic book with these one dimensional villains to think that an employee asked Google to be more ethical and then they fired them right there and you could hear an evil laugh in the background. I've looked at some of the correspondence between Timnit and others and it's fairly unprofessional on her part if you ask me and it has this self righteousness tone to it too. Another very…
Do you think she got fired for those reasons? Citing her as sounding self righteous or unprofessional seems weak.
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There are plenty of small family scale business in fields like alcoholic drinks and food, and they have large, fierce competitors.
These businesses have a natural limit to their growth due to the estate tax. If the company grows too large, the taxes on death can be crippling for families that can not plan decades in advance. Public corporations do not have to pay this tax, and therefore have an unnatural advantage in holding valuable assets over long periods of time. The estate tax is well-intentioned, but because it hits only family firms it’s…
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It's not cultural at all -- it's economics. Businesses are valued based on discounted cash flows (DCF). If you're profitable and not growing, your cash flows are very stable & easy to evaluate -- you get a low P/E or P/E/G ratio. But if you're growing quickly with sane unit economics, most of the DCF value is in future years... which then results in much higher multiples relative to today's revenues & earnings.
So is there anything to be done about this? It seems from this thread that the conclusion is that companies cannot avoid constantly seeking growth, and yet that growth ultimately destroys internal social mechanics / culture.