
Review of ‘Chaos Monkeys’, Silicon Valley tell-all - mathattack
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/business/dealbook/review-chaos-monkeys-is-a-guide-to-the-spirit-of-silicon-valley.html?ref=dealbook
======
mturmon
The OP mentions that the second half of the book chronicles the author's time
at FB. This was excerpted in _Vanity Fair_ , and the HN commentary from early
this month is here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11830108](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11830108)

The _NYT_ reviewer in the OP was repelled by the author's pose ("The aphorisms
are sometimes lazy, the facts can be sloppy, and the studied cool – all the
while insisting that “I am the uncoolest person you will ever meet” – can be
grating."), but ultimately able to get past it to the anecdotes and
"directionally correct" analysis in the book.

You can note that the HN readership also had a similar reaction, with varying
degrees of being able to move past the initial impression.

~~~
mathattack
One challenge is the most earnest writers usually make the most boring
stories. This is also why the imperfect narrator is used so often in great
literature.

------
gmarx
Most hilarious item is where the author states that we should have a
conversation about whether startups are society's best use of our brightest
graduates, i.e. Harvard Business School grads.

Somehow after years of complaining about financial services hiring all our
promising mathematicians and physicist, this comment tickles me and puts me in
my place at the same time. Sadly, I fear this was not intended as a joke

~~~
jacobolus
A significant proportion of Harvard Business School graduates (though by no
means all of them) are people who are “ambitious” in a way primarily defined
around money, social status, and power, rather than curiosity or societal
contribution. They’re going to inevitably be drawn to whatever field looks
most promising for a lucrative and influential career.

It would be nice if we could economically rearrange society to amply reward
careers in research, teaching, government, public-interest law, community
organizing and development, providing social services, and so on (not to
mention just regular jobs in factories, agriculture, retail, food preparation,
etc.), so that doing work that benefited society was more attractive vis-à-vis
zero-sum financial hocus pocus, predatory legal engineering, aggressive
marketing/propaganda, internet surveillance, quasi-legal fraud, etc.

[My recommendation would be to dramatically increase taxes on land,
inheritances, long-term capital gains, and carbon emissions, and redistribute
the proceeds evenly to all citizens. And also to return anti-trust law to its
roots and aggressively break apart monopolies and monopsonies, separate
different types of financial activities to reduce conflicts of interest, and
to dramatically increase funding for government regulatory agencies which are
currently infinitely outclassed by industry.]

But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards, in our current society. I’m not sure
what can be done to help e.g. the kind of business school grads who have
already decided that personal success is more important than general social
welfare.

~~~
dilemma
These money hungry HBS graduates perform jobs that are in themselves so
boring, stressful and costly on a personal level that nobody would do them if
it weren't for the large rewards they come with -- creating new technological
infrastructure and organizations that supply society with the products and
services it needs.

~~~
chrisbennet
Do you mean jobs in finance? I'm not so sure society really needs most of the
products and services finance generates.

~~~
dilemma
Societies need financial infrastructure. Very little of it can be replaced
with software, and innovations in finance is just as important to economic
development as technology is.

~~~
chrisbennet
While society needs a certain amount of financial infrastructure we can
probably don't need the massive amount of finance biz that we have now.

 _" Market share[edit] US[edit] As of 2004 the financial services industry
(finance industry) represented 20% of the market capitalization of the S&P 500
in the United States.[citation needed]"_ \-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_services)

As Warren Buffet once said: _" It has always been a fantasy of mine that a
boatload of 25 brokers would be shipwrecked and struggle to an island from
which there could be no rescue. Faced with developing an economy that would
maximize their consumption and pleasure, would they, I wonder, assign 20 of
their number to produce food, clothing, shelter, etc., while setting five to
trading endlessly on the future output of the 20?"_ -Warren Buffet

------
dsugarman
I came here to say that this line

"Underneath the braggadocio and evisceration of professional nemeses in
Antonio García Martinez’s book lies the beating heart of a formidable
teacher."

is everything that is wrong with journalism. It is hard to read a single
sentence after that, your brain just shuts off.

...but to copy that line I couldn't just select and paste because of the NYT's
weird website, so I viewed the source. And then it hit even harder...

<meta itemprop="description" name="description" content="Underneath the
braggadocio and evisceration of professional nemeses in Antonio García
Martinez’s book lies the beating heart of a formidable teacher." />

------
antongm
Author here, for all your trolling needs.

~~~
danso
Between physics at Berkeley, derivatives at Goldman Sachs, and analytics at
Facebook, could you summarize their pros and cons in terms of intellectual
challenge and work/life balance?

~~~
titanoceanus
I'd love to know about the work life balance. In an industry where burnouts
are common, and your work history being some of the most demanding companies
in the industry, how did you handle it?

~~~
antongm
I drank a lot, and did stupid things. It was really self-destructive. I
wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Really.

~~~
NegativeLatency
All of them? Or one in particular?

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Varcht
At ~$100k, a 40-foot sailboat seems like a reasonably affordable option for
housing in SF.

~~~
Spooky23
"It's a trap!"

There is nothing about a boat that saves money, ever. It's an incredibly
rewarding hobby if you're into it, but not cheap!

~~~
abduhl
"If it flies, floats, or fucks you should rent it" is the common advice passed
around by jaded and wealthy divorced men that I know.

~~~
gooseus
Also a quote by Dwayne Johnson in the show Ballers... though I think he added
"drives" as well.

------
pmille5
I couldn't get through the first paragraph of that review. I'll try a sample
of the book, but that NYT piece was utterly unpleasant.

~~~
antongm
Well, we agree on that one! I think he just didn't like the voice, but
couldn't admit it wasn't enlightening.

------
rando18423
If you were building a company, would you recruit your colleagues from
Berkeley, GS, or FB, and why?

~~~
antongm
Preferably all three. But I definitely think Berkeley grads are relatively
underrated to Stanford ones.

~~~
stillworks
I have access to a job market where the major employers are Investment Banks
and that's where I have been employed for some part of my career. I am
thinking of moving to technology-first employers... will it make any change to
my life or is it a futile dream ?

------
smoorman1024
Not sure if anyone else has noticed this pattern but I've seen it in a number
of NYT articles that I would like to aggregate. There are seemingly offhanded
paragraphs that ignore the issue at hand and insert something pro-NSA/pro-weak
crypto.

From this article take the second to last paragraph.

 _At the least, readers of “Chaos Monkeys” will think twice before taking at
face value tech leaders’ high-minded arguments for refusing to assist our
national security apparatus in fighting terrorist threats. Even in the area of
advertising, important social and public policy questions are implicated._

This comment hardly fits into the theme and flow of the rest of the review.

~~~
vancouverwill
Yep, I noticed that. A completely biased view to a very important matter.
Completely overlooking the dangers of weak crypto, government invasion of
privacy and safe control of access to information.

------
moo_goose
I have question about the replicating portfolio analogy that the author makes
with respect to getting Facebook to match Twitter's offer. Could he have
(successfully) bargained for a replicating portfolio on an after-tax basis? In
other words, since Twitter was paying with stock options, which are more tax-
efficient than Facebook stock grants, he could have argued that Facebook's
overall compensation package needed to be much more to really match Twitter's.

------
cafard
"Even where Mr. García completely mangles the facts – as he does for instance
in describing the mechanics of the Facebook initial public offering – he
manages to draw multiple fresh insights that somehow feel directionally
correct."

I find it hard to read this other than as "It's bullshit, but but bullshit
that reinforces my prejudices."

------
ionised
_" Beyond the author’s personal story, what connects the two distinct halves
of the book is his area of actual domain expertise: advertising. Mr. García
was a Ph.D. student in physics at Berkeley before joining Goldman Sachs to
model prices for credit derivatives."_

That's so fucking depressing.

