Thanking the author for "13. The work that makes other work possible is priceless - and invisible."
Lessons from 14 years at Google
701–710 of 732 posts
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#702Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everybody can be a shareholder in a publicly traded company. It's pretty easy. If you want to spin up some conspiracy theory about elites snatching up productivity gains, you should focus on top managers. (Though honestly, it's mostly just land. The share of GDP going to capital has been roughly steady over the decade. The share going to land has increased slightly at the cost of the labour share. The labour share it…
Everyone with excess disposable income can be a shareholder in a publicly traded company. The oligarchy of the CxOs and boards and cross-pollination has led to concentration of the rewards of companies into the their hands, compared to 40 years ago. All the productivity gains have not gone to labor, its predominately gone to equity and then extracted via options and buy backs to avoid tax which means public service a…
> All the productivity gains have not gone to labor, its predominately gone to equity [...]
What your evidence for that? See https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r... for a good account.
> [...] and then extracted via options and buy backs to avoid tax which means public service and investment has gone down.
You seem very confused about how capital markets work. Are you also suggesting buy backs are morally different from dividends?
In any case, the whole point of investing (at least to the investor) is to eventually get more money back than you put in. Returning money to investor is not a bug, it's the point.
> The craziness of the USG borrowing to fund tax cuts is the ultimate example.
Blame voters.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#703Earlier quoted context omitted.
The price of housing can rise even faster than incomes. Housing is only a part of the basket used to measure inflation. Housing's price rose faster than the weighted basket average, some other goods and services rose slower or even fell.
Accommodation costs are the first part of any sensible measure of inflation. If you're not factoring in housing then you're fudging the figures.
Yes? Who says otherwise?
As long as accommodation isn't 100% of your basket of goods and services you use to measure inflation, accommodation can rise in price faster (or slower) than the basket. This ain't exactly rocket science.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#704> 16. Admitting what you don’t know creates more safety than pretending you do.
> Senior engineers who say “I don’t know” aren’t showing weakness - they’re creating permission. When a leader admits uncertainty, it signals that the room is safe for others to do the same. The alternative is a culture where everyone pretends to understand and problems stay hidden until they explode.
It's interesting to contrast this with Sean's statement here www.seangoedecke.com/taking-a-position/
> At that point, you need to take a position, whether you feel particularly confident or not.
> If you don’t, you’re forcing people with less technical context than you to figure it out themselves
To square the circle, I think the lesson is hide uncertainty to higher-ups, but don't to peers/ other ICs.
Of course, the challenge is that often, unfortunately, both the manager and the other ICs are in the same meeting.
Probably this is one justification of one reason why I hate meetings that include managers.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#705Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't make assumptions. My employer does not do end-of-year reviews. To make a long story short, my manager got angry because I wrote a quick and dirty tool that bypassed a lot of confusing abstraction layers, and is significantly easier to use than the tool the company currently uses. When my manager got angry, I first told my manager that we shouldn't argue in front of the entire office. Then I went to the CEO for…
>I suggested that my manager discuss the issue with the CEO Point blank: Why not tell your manager you already spoke with the CEO instead of 1. Not mentioning you already overstepped your manager 2. And the skip-level boss/CEO liked the idea. This seems like potentially good intentions being easily perceived by your manager as passive-aggressive. Maybe your skip level told you to use that phrasing. Regardless, good l…
I think you're misinterpreting the situation, because I didn't "overstep" my manager, and in a small company everyone has a relationship with everyone. (IE, what I did was taking initiative and making good use of dead time.)
I'm not comfortable discussing this further in a public forum at this point, but you're welcome to look at my profile to contact me directly if you want to.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#706Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I suggested that my manager discuss the issue with the CEO Point blank: Why not tell your manager you already spoke with the CEO instead of 1. Not mentioning you already overstepped your manager 2. And the skip-level boss/CEO liked the idea. This seems like potentially good intentions being easily perceived by your manager as passive-aggressive. Maybe your skip level told you to use that phrasing. Regardless, good l…
I think you're misinterpreting the situation, because I didn't "overstep" my manager, and in a small company everyone has a relationship with everyone. (IE, what I did was taking initiative and making good use of dead time.) I'm not comfortable discussing this further in a public forum at this point, but you're welcome to look at my profile to contact me directly if you want to.
I understand and don't have your context.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#707Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many laws solve the problem of high initial cost dissuading globally good actions. Laws forcing everyone to buy insurance, for example. It's very easy to see that where such laws don't exist, almost no one buys insurance, making everyone worse off. This is also an example of the same kind of law.
Insurance is an interesting example, I would have expected one that causes more direct harm to others like drunk driving. How are we all worse off when fewer people have insurance?
Think of something like home owner insurance. Your insurance rates depend on exactly how your home is built, what type of heating system it has, where it is, etc. The rates, carefully calculated by actuaries, act as a signal to you as to how dangerous your house is to yourself, but also to others. If you set your house on fire due to negligence and cause the next house to burn, you might be liable for damages there as well.
Forcing everyone to buy such insurance forces everyone to fully pay for the expected cost of the danger inherent in their house. Over time, this causes houses to be constructed in a safer manner. If people are not forced to buy insurance, they don't buy it, and so this evolution over time does not happen. Also see [1].
Some financial tools are amazingly clever - whether they are morally good or bad. Bits about Money is a great blog to build insight into some of these constructions [2].
Another example for your initial question is car seats for kids. If you don't force em, nobody buys em. Then their kids die.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#708Earlier quoted context omitted.
> no license, and seemingly intended to share it freely with the world No license means you don’t intend to share it “freely”, since you didn’t share any rights. By default, you don’t own things people shared on the internet just because it’s there. That being said I’ve even seen people with licenses in their repos who get mad when people used their code, there’s just no telling and it’s best to just treat random sou…
Per Eli's own comment here, the original copied code was straight up public domain and thus does not even require attribution. https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/pull/684#issuecomment...
Correct. He did not commit copyright infringement. Just plagiarism.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#709This feels somewhat hypocritical coming from Addy. Addy Osmani plagiarized my code and 'apologized' years later by publishing an article on his website[1] that he has never linked to from his social media accounts. I cannot accept his apology until he actually syndicates it with his followers. Seems relevant to note this behavior in light of points "6. Your code doesn’t advocate for you. People do.", "7. The best cod…
That code from your post is fairly standard image load handling, but the notable part is this line: self.apng_supported = ctx.getImageData(0, 0, 1, 1).data[3] === 0; Unless I'm misunderstanding, it's basically a "neat trick", like using ~~ for rounding or a fast inverse square root. Is the intent that everyone who makes use of that trick is supposed to link back to your blog?
The notable part is the PNG file was copied exactly. He could have generated one himself.
Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google
#710Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although little note at the very end explains why: > This note is in response to emails from Eli Grey to Chrome leadership from October, 2023 In other words, he wrote this because he was forced to.
[flagged]
That is not what I posted. My original post, accessible via the GitHub comment version history is
"@addyosmani No problem; just remember that modifying someone else's code does not grant you any copyright to that code. I don't agree with your opinion that inserting existing code into a template (the API) for a framework (Modernizr) warrants a notice of credit, even with a few changes to the code being inserted."