671–680 of 689 posts
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/uber-on-thanks-memories-thuan...
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I always feel thankful that I don't have to deal with taxi drivers when I travel.
It's interesting that you say that, since it was one of my favorite parts about Europe being able to just walk up to any main street corner and have a ride somewhere. No need to have an app or anything, always works, no privacy/data issues. And it was never a big deal to walk a couple blocks to the main roads
Everywhere else though, I take Uber/Lyft.
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> Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business. Three questions. (1) "What would the impact on our business be if we built the best possible, state of the art feature here?" (2) "What would the impact on our business be if we half-assed a solution in a quarter of the time?" (3) "What would the impact on our business be if we utt…
The problems caused by "half-assed" solutions are likely somewhere down the line, in distant future and their true costs impossible to estimate.
Ergo, standing in the present, one should do ones best to estimate future costs and decide what percent of perfection seems optimal.
In reality, when asked to self-estimate, too many teams (and especially naive PMs) select perfection as the optimal approach.
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I don't know whether it's an urban legend or not, some HR people were asked to write their own emails firing themselves at Lehman.
A few years ago I worked at a small-ish company that had to do a mass layoff of about 10% of their employees. The only HR person had to write her own layoff letter. A few days later she had to walk back her own layoff because the company realized they probably shouldn't layoff their only HR person during a mass layoff.
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> Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business. Three questions. (1) "What would the impact on our business be if we built the best possible, state of the art feature here?" (2) "What would the impact on our business be if we half-assed a solution in a quarter of the time?" (3) "What would the impact on our business be if we utt…
Those questions assume an existing framework where "the feature", "state of the art", "half-assed", and "failed" are all well-defined. But my experience is that the framing itself is most of where the challenge lies. You end up with team A who wants to add the feature, team B who thinks it's an anti-feature, team C who thinks the entire application where feature lives should be scrapped, PM D who says users can alrea…
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I think there is a lot of truth to both your comment and the parent comment. Everyone underestimates the complexity of systems they aren't personally familiar with. Ask the average person how many parts are in a modern automobile and they'd probably guess too low by an order of magnitude. But it is also true that large organizations get weird when money is easily available. You get a Cambrian explosion where without…
Every tech company thinks they’ll just build their own CRM until they try.
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> But if I get hit by a meteor tomorrow, they would send flowers to my wife and open up a req and keep moving. You don't have a group life insurance policy through your company? Sudden unexpected death is exactly what that supposed to cover. If not, that's unfortunate, especially since it's fairly common among white collar jobs at least. If you do, it should cover at least your funeral costs, which should be pretty m…
Group life through most companies are 1x salary. That amount is a pittance to buy on your own. But the point is everyone is expendable. I worked for a company around 2009. They laid a lot of people off that had more seniority than I did. I wondered why they kept me around. Three months later I found out. The founder had written a bespoke development tool chain in C++ using MVC and assembly. The board push him out and…
In the extremum, everyone is expendable, but not everyone is equally expendable, as your own anecdote bears out.
When you expend enough people, especially increasingly less expendable people who carry your basic institutional knowledge and skills, you do so by inflicting damage on your company or organization.
The economic winds may dictate that, as they did frequently in the 2008 economic crisis, but it's not like there is no institutional cost to expending people. This is the basically why countries like Germany and the UK are paying employers to keep idled people on payroll.
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>> You have man-years worth of work going nowhere as projects get scrapped mid-development. That's better than seeing man-years go into features that get deployed. I witnessed one successful control system company spin up a team of new hotshot UI engineers, all right out of the best schools. After months of work the team "updated" the product. Withing hours the call center was hit with hundreds of "You changed the g-…
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Internet forum threads can't withstand this sort of provocation, which means your comment had troll effects whether you that was your intent or not. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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> remuneration for drivers lately it was very comparable to taking a reverse-mortgage on your car I've still yet to see any analysis show this that didn't have serious problems. The most common, and most severe, failing of these studies is the way they assume that time-based depreciation on a car is zero...implying that buying a car and letting it sit idle would maintain 100% of its value. That is to say, these studi…
the cost per mile of maintaining a fleet car is one of the subject matters best studied and quantified in the entire universe. My wife is a fleet manager, I'm very damn well sure what I'm talking about (contrary to you). I'm also a product manager so I did some back of the envelope math because I REALLY wanted to understand to what I was missing that Softbank wasn't. Turns out, absolutely nothing, I'm the sane one.
Yeesh calm down, drink a glass of water or something. Do you always fly off the handle when people have a different understanding of a situation than you? I was going off of the popular coverage of studies that I've seen, much of which has been widely discussed here before. It's a pretty reasonable assumption that that's what you were going off of. Good to know that you have more rigor behind your assumption than those sources did, but I'm still left wondering why they have such glaring holes.
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Dev-hours, suggested below, also sounds harmonious. Employee hours sounds okay; it's cumbersome but it seems to project the concept of hourly pay directly into my mind. Hu-years and hu-hours are physically uncomfortable. Is there anything to learn about our society from that? I think language is something we don't really understand. Maybe you have a more refined model, but any reflection upon this for me will be comp…
> If people's feelings matter, why don't mine? Of course your feelings matter. I'm sure there are plenty of situations where your feelings are the most important factor to consider. But this is not one of those situations. Your feelings of minor inconvenience from being asked to use different words are less relevant than others' feelings of oppression from decades/centuries of societal biases.
There's a notion in improv that when you respond only to the last thing that someone said, it's because you are in your own head and you're not listening. Additionally, it feels like you're talking down to me and others in this thread. Are those feelings invalid? It just seems like showing some respect to others should be a precursor to caring about whether a word could be misinterpreted as exclusionary, if the goal really is to make people feel less bad.
I personally devote a huge amount of time and energy to the feelings of others. I need to be doing it less, it degrades me. If I were to start caring about this on top of everything else, I would be completely dysfunctional. You call it a minor inconvenience, but if I were to accept that this is worth doing, I'd implicitly be agreeing to a thousand minor inconveniences, overthinking everything I say even more than I already do (this is a fifth draft, and look how long it has been made so I can feel I'm communicating effectively), and inevitably retreating altogether from social interactions that already give me anxiety.
Back to the subject at hand. What the word 'man' as in 'mankind', 'manpower', or 'man-hours' means to me is a dehumanized, de-individualised, notion of genetic humans working towards some end. This is a _very_ useful construct for me. A person is something else, a human individual. It is impossible for me to consider a single person, let alone thousands. People have 86 billion neurons of uncompressable complexity, and I've only got 86 billion of my own to try and grok that. This is also an incredibly useful construct for me. I can't just swap one for the other, it would be a significant long term effort to rewire all of the associations.
A better solution would be a new word to take the place of 'man' there. 'Man' already does the job, but I'm sure there are other prefixes in english that also mean human. I don't think it's a material issue, so I'm not going to devote energy to solving it. But if someone is going to tell me how to talk, they can afford to make the damn effort to find a suitable alternative instead of forcing me to adapt to the first thing that comes to mind. And when it is pointed out that it doesn't work, and it doesn't sound right, they could maybe try to figure out what is wrong with their solution, rather than assuming I'm a closed-minded closeted sexist. I don't know.