451–460 of 520 posts
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If you think Ruth and Patrick are the same, I'd hate to work at whatever company you actually admire.
Not the same - Ruth is far more effective version. Guessing you missed the whole “scrappiness to help investors out oops nvm we are investors” thing or just hadn’t yet run out of coolaid at the time
It's interesting. When I moved to California in 2012, Google was exciting. They had hot stuff, new platforms, very exciting. Six years later, you were hesitant to hire Google people. Today, it's the Bay Area retirement home. No one takes a Google resume seriously and everyone who works there talks about little they work. In a sense a massive transfer of wealth from capital to labor: the finest example of redistributi…
I'm sorry, I'm speaking from a point of absolutely no experience in these high-profile Silicon Valley jobs, but "companies refuse to hire Google employees" strikes me as a statement akin to "the king refuses to dine from a 99.999% gold plate because they skimped out on getting him a 100% pure plate". Even right now, many tech workers see Google and other big-name tech companies as basically the ultimate goal of their…
I worked at Google from the early(-ish) days up till 2019. My hot take is that the employees broke the social contract first. Sundar "MBA" Pichai is not the cause, he's the effect. The truth is, the early Google would have had no patience for the "problems" Googlers cared about between 2014 and 2020. The levels of internal hubris and employee activism about every random topic were insane. People cared more about cafe…
Do you care to speculate about why the culture changed?
How much of the ability to have the company culture like the early Google is being described in the article is due to the ability not to worry too much about growth, competition and margins? If your business is growing 30-100% YoY with high margins, you can afford to throw money around and spin all the narratives you want. Some companies who are lucky to be in that position still don't choose to prioritize employees…
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Not the same - Ruth is far more effective version. Guessing you missed the whole “scrappiness to help investors out oops nvm we are investors” thing or just hadn’t yet run out of coolaid at the time
I guess you missed out on the notion of "fun." Thoughts and prayers.
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You're confusing "rational" with "competitive", which is neoliberal sleight of mind. There is absolutely nothing rational about terraforming your own planet to make it less able to support you.
Your politics are bleeding through here and it’s clearly fogging your mind of reality. I made a statement considered factual by political science/international relations and you’re strawmanning about “neoliberalism” and bringing up climate change. Do better, be less emotional. If you can’t do that you have no business making statements about nations and their relations with one another which are rational.
This is typically termed a "belief".
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when in the history of anything was that the case? democracies make terrible choices, with voters often voting against their interests all the time. dictators make dumb-ass calls often, like Erdogan of Turkey making random (randumb) pronouncements about the currency and causing terrible inflation (or Saddam's "let just fight all our neighbors, Suharto's random evil, etc.).
It’s generally accepted in international relations that it’s always the case long term. States can make bad calls in the short term but you’ll often find they are rational decisions regardless of if they don’t turn out well. Erdogan has greatly expanded turkeys influence in the region and been relatively successful in playing the west and russia off each other for instance. Saddam I’ll give you but that also led to h…
This line of reasoning only makes sense when compared with counterfactuals, which seems like a waste of everyone's time. It's easy enough to justify an arbitrary action as rational if you have no basis of comparison.
Anyway, "rational self-interest of the state" is not the same thing as "rational". There are other ends other than self-interest of the state—for instance, self-interest of the constituents of the state, or self-interest of humanity. All states put their own existence before the welfare of their people. A state is not a natural thing outside the vying of capital to institute economic stability for the ends of its own empowerment.
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>I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Many companies used to do that both in the US and other countries. Some probably still do. SAS Institute (well-known maker of statistical and other software) did, for many years, last I checked. Don't know if they still are that way. Update: Looks like they are: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute [ In J…
If SAS is the paragon of a company not pursuing growth at all costs, then maybe we do need to start looking at quarterly metrics. As a customer their business model sucks and they are doubling down on "either we're a solution for your whole enterprise or else."
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I didn't see Google's board fire it's CEO and then he gets reinstated and basically fires the board. Instead Google had more drama with the inappropriate behavior kind.
To be fair one could argue that was still in vogue at the time…
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And yet they crank out new and innovative "products" every 4 years. So much so that they were essentially doing 90% of what Meta is trying to do now with 100x less people and budget. I think the real answer lies in the fact that at a public company, you will need to answer to shareholders, but at Valve, you actually need to answer to the whims of benevolent dictator Gabe Newell.
Valve also has much better hackers than Facebook.