921–930 of 1001 posts
I appreciate this is how a startup must run, but must every small tech company be a startup? Where do you find jobs for small companies which are just happy to exist and grow sustainably. Where you can come in at 9:00am, have an uninterrupted hour long lunch break at 12:00pm and stop working at 5:30pm? While also not being paid pennies? I can care about your company and be passionate about my work without having to s…
There are lot of comments here disliking MrBeast and what not, but some of the advice can definitely apply to all organizations. > Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUB…
> Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc. I think these are clear signs of a dysfunctional organization. I want to associate that with company size (larger -> more bureaucratic, counter-mission nonsense), but I've also seen large companies th…
One example is a disaster readiness organization which mandates that teams cannot deploy code in only a single datacenter. What they should really be doing is making it so code automatically runs in multiple datacenters.
Facilitate instead of forbid.
Some dramatic takes in this thread. Is watching a mr Beast video really that much worse than watching Friends or Spongebob or Game of Thrones?
At least your two examples try to tell a story. They have some artistic integrity. Mr. Beast has one goal: Eyes on content. For a long as possible. There is no artistic vision - every decision is made in the name of profit, attention, and addiction.
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I always love the "just hire A-players" line. As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice. And that 95% of startups don't know their metrics. Pretty sure almost all do but again don't have the skills or resources to meaningfully move them.
I am hearing this stuff from bigger companies too now. By definition, everyone cannot hire A players.
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> Clearly some people do like the terms of employment, otherwise they wouldn't work there. This is a deeply naive understanding of employment. Almost no one has a huge array of job opportunities, and they can select the one they want based on company culture. Most people have one viable job offer at a time, and they have to work hard for it. This is even more true in entertainment fields. Many people in entertainment…
This is not a foxcon factory, this is the most famous and productive Youtube production company. People here work incredibly hard IN ORDER TO get this particular job, seeking it out specifically. > Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid employee at all And this is BY CHOICE. I fundamentally disagree with your positioning.
Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success. I think a lot of the advice is applicable to startups. 1. KPIs, for Beast they are CTR, AVD, AVP, will look different if you are a startup. I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than >95% of startup founders. Because he is literally hacking/being judged by an algorithm, his KPIs will matter more and can be closely dissected. Startups aren't that…
Re-read those operational principles out loud. Now imagine them being executed at-scale by a fraudulent enterprise to the net detriment of society. You don't have to imagine very hard.
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> can't deny the success I don’t disagree that there is some value in this knowledge. But success has different definitions. I do not consider Jimmy successful. In relation to classical virtues, he hasn’t truly lived up to many. That would be success to me. He is popular and his business is rich. Some people consider that success, but not all. Not even in business and start-up circles. Edit: some people below (quite…
> I do not consider Jimmy successful. In relation to classical virtues, he hasn’t truly lived up to many. That would be success to me. He was a tiny YouTuber 6 years ago with under a million subscribers, and has become the biggest despite tens of thousands of competitors who were better placed than him. The difference between just a few short years ago and now is what impresses me and makes me consider him a success,…
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> Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. Some counterpoints: - Xerox knowingly didn't fix the problematic gear trains to guarantee periodic part changes, prioritizing money over "best copier possible". - Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class". - Microsoft is did tons of shady things in its OS development history to prio…
> Some counterpoints: The goal would be to be more customer-focused in those cases. "No one prospers without rendering benefit to others." — Tadao Yoshida, founder of YKK zippers, https://ykkamericas.com/our-philosophy/ With MrBeast, the "best YOUTUBE video" would be one that causes engagement with the viewer throughout the video: > The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail…
In the other aforementioned cases, in absence of an algorithm, revenue-generating activity wasn't as well correlated with meeting customer expectations. The point is that companies will always optimize for their own revenue, regardless of how well or poorly their activity meets customer expectations.
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>Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Sounds like they're doing their jobs, which is to protect your future selves from your current selves. Sure, finding solutions is great, but faulting them from finding problems and slowing things down until solutions are found is odd. Yes, security or IT does sometime have to act as a reality check in an organization that…
See this all the time - for example, zealous dev "if I had production DB read/write I could get things done so much faster." Sure, but the production DB has an incredible amount of PII and we are audited out the wazoo, but even if that weren't the case and it was totally fine, all it takes is you being careless with your credentials one time and the company's hosed or we have a massive breach, or some rogue employee…
This is a solution oriented approach instead of a lazy ass covering approach which I think the GP was referring to. The job should be finding risks and then figuring out how to work around those risks. Very rarely are there no solutions, most of the time it is due to general laziness or in aptitude where someone can find risks but they do not find solutions.
One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors. He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized t…
The "sour grapes" attitude has IMO really started crowding out other content. Pretty much any popular content here just has a flood of social signaling content all about how morally wrong, bad, evil, etc the content is. And if you don't want to pile on the commentary, which is all pretty much the same thing regurgitated in different ways, then your content just kinda languishes at the bottom of the page. I don't real…
It's pretty out of touch, exhausting and kinda makes me feel embarrassed for whoever posted it.
People think they are so high and mighty and have everything figured out. The fact is, they are just an average human trying to make it through this world like everyone else. Just like me, just like you. Nobody has it figured out.
And to go back onto topic, I thought the leaked PDF was fascinating. There is a lot of good management stuff in that document.