81–90 of 106 posts
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I found the swearing more distracting, but then I'm apparently old-fashioned... Rgds Damon
Please don't sign your comments on Hacker News. It's against the site guidelines, and ultimately clutters the page. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Maybe I should stop replying...
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But that's not what people mean when they say they could run a Fortune 500 company if given the chance. All of the things you list are things that are easily learned, the bigger question is whether in addition to that knowledge the CEOs of big companies have any particular character traits, unique skills or business insights or not.
Why do you think learning all of those things would be "easy"?
I have a feeling that if I took all the time and energy I've put into studying and working with computers my entire life and chose to put all that time and energy into studying and working with business concepts instead, I'd be able to run a business, possibly even a Fortune 500 one.
Alas I didn't spend all that time and energy on business, so I can't run a Fortune 500 company, but alternate universe me might.
As an amateur programmer and a part-time freelancer, I didn't have a slightest clue about the value of my work. It was only 5-6 years back when I gladly did small gigs on Want-to-Hire forums for tens of dollars. One particular gig was about scrapping data from a car sales website which I completed for $30 (should have cost at least 10x). The client discussed about the possibility of converting the phone numbers, whic…
I think understanding the value you're giving is key but it's somewhat of a black art. Freelance bidding sites that have something like 'build complete Facebook clone for $29.99' are a huge red flag to me. The client obviously has no clue what goes into something like that, even if you paid someone $0.99 an hour it would blow past their 'budget' almost immediately. On the backend when what you delivered was functiona…
And this is why I think fulltime employment is the wrong way to go for many people today. In fact the whole "we are an institution and you are a peon" mentality needs to be disrupted. More companies should hire on a project basis and share the revenues. More companies should try holacracy and abolish a top down chain of command for everything. Then people can really will be compensated on their merit, ie their contri…
Kiss goodbye to any kind of code hygiene.
>abolish a top down chain of command
You now have a squeaky wheel company. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
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> Most of us COULD run a Fortune 500 company as well as the average CEO I appreciate your optimism; at the same time, I think it is somewhat unwarranted. Running a 10-person company is challenging enough to have your shrink on the speed dial. As for Fortune 500 CEOs, those are superhumans on steroids (or cocaine and alcohol), who bend reality by their very presence. You have about the same chance of approaching their…
this kind of absurd lionization of the wealthy is part of the problem. I've met some extremely wealthy CEOs, and they warp nothing around them. It's an elite career track and old boys club, that's it.
I have no doubt that a lot of big-co CEOs are operating at the limit of human capacity, but that doesn't really have any effect on my opinion of trust fund kids.
Author here. Hacker News has long ago blacklisted/blackholed my domain (I am often critical of YCombinator's investment strategies), but the original post can be found on my blog http://warpspire.com/posts/pixels-dont-care — with apostrophes!
I don't know the full backstory of why your domain was blacklisted, but if it's only because of your criticism of YC, that sounds wrong and I'm sure the HN moderators will be happy to remove your domain from the blacklist. Also, what is the #caboose channel on freenode about? I tried joining to see what it's about, but it looks like it's invite only.
Author here. Hacker News has long ago blacklisted/blackholed my domain (I am often critical of YCombinator's investment strategies), but the original post can be found on my blog http://warpspire.com/posts/pixels-dont-care — with apostrophes!
Author here. Hacker News has long ago blacklisted/blackholed my domain (I am often critical of YCombinator's investment strategies), but the original post can be found on my blog http://warpspire.com/posts/pixels-dont-care — with apostrophes!
Great story and I shouldn't nitpick this, but it really drags down a story for me when it's stated matter of fact like (rather than as a "memory") and yet has an obviously flawed timeline. "Eight years ago", aka 2009, is "long" after Facebook became publicly accessible and Twitter had existed publicly for about the same duration. Are either the point of your story? No, but it detracts from the point when readers know…
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Great story and I shouldn't nitpick this, but it really drags down a story for me when it's stated matter of fact like (rather than as a "memory") and yet has an obviously flawed timeline. "Eight years ago", aka 2009, is "long" after Facebook became publicly accessible and Twitter had existed publicly for about the same duration. Are either the point of your story? No, but it detracts from the point when readers know…
This was posted in 2013. Maybe a mod should edit the title?
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I honestly do not think most of us could. I hand out with three groups of people: geeks, hacks and lawyers. All of them often easily think they could easily do any other job. This includes the lawyers and journalists thinking that making software is easy. Based on that, I think we're as deluded as they are.
I imagine a whole lot of people could do a better job than Yahoo's new CEO, for example. At that level, being the CEO of a corporation with that level of money that already runs itself, you could likely get by doing pretty much nothing/just going along with your advisors'/the board's advice to keep the company at least in the black.
At the CEO level though, even if you don't fill completely, even if you're 99% as good as the previous CEO, that 1% difference on a massive company translates to a loss of tens/hundreds of millions of dollars. And that's assuming you're 99% as good. If you're only 90% as good, the damage is even greater.
Can you scrape by as CEO without bankrupting the company? Sure. But there's a reason why boards are still willing to pay millions of dollars to hire the best possible candidate. Because when you're managing assets worth billions of dollars, scrimping on a few million is simply premature optimization.