The vast majority of jobs could be eliminated today without AI and still they are not, so we are very safe. Even with AI getting better and better we will be
For all the people that say this is easy. Try it ! That's not easy at all, I've tried it and spend a few weeks to get similar performance. Receiving thousands of request is not similar to making thousands of requests, you can saturate your network, saturated with latency of random websites, get site that never timeout, parse multi megabytes malformed html, get infinite redirections.
My fastest implementation in python was actually using threads and was much faster than any async variant
Well I do not feel any of the 3 advice he gives, good advice.
First the longer you stay in heroku ,the most complex is it to exit it the time you really need it and the less flexible you are in the time being.
Second, wish he had pay for a pit team sooner, but could this money better used investing in marketing or sales like he probably did ?
The guy has obviously succeeded as a business owner, would it still be the case if he had implemented these advice ? We will never know, but what we know for sure is not implementing these advice made him successful
> We will never know, but what we know for sure is not implementing these advice made him successful
"Made him successful" implies a causality that is a bit too strong.
Indeed, we will never know for sure.
Maybe implementing these advice would have impeded development of other critical areas of his business.
Maybe it would have would have helped make is business more successful as he would have had a more reliable product.
Or maybe the business impact would have been neutral, but would have resulted in better quality of life/less stress for him and his employees.
But in general, the way I read this article is: they made good decisions overall, but as everything in the world, it was not optimal (switching platform too early, making some big mistakes like the credit card one, etc).
It's a very interesting read nonetheless, with clear take away:
* chose boring tech you know and focus on your product, not the tech, specially in the early days
* grow your infrastructure and complexity with your product needs
* accept you will mess-up but properly learn from it, and grow your organizational knowledge, structure and processes accordingly.
I think he meant, to stay with managed services as long as possible. Which makes sense, as in the early stage, the focus has to be the functionality rather than cost/performance optimisation.
Tech workers just discovered that they will be kept only if they are performant, and they are stressed about it. Welcome in the real world.
Most meta employees don't produce any value but are getting well paid because in the past meta has managed to be the most used social network. Produce value for the company and not what you believe is value and yoi will never get fired
Sweet summer child. Who do you think determines whether you are "productive"? Your manager. If you don't play the political game and get on their side, you get fired, no matter how "productive" you think you are.
Or your entire team gets fired by their manager, because you are collectively considered unproductive. Sucks to be you if you worked on a project that was considered to be Hot New Thing that Saves the Company up until 5 minutes ago.
The average individual contributor in a big company is not able to meaningfully influence whether they produce value or not. They might be stuck in a team or even department with an agenda that produces little value, with no opportunities to make proactive change. It's quite intransparent in the FAANG hiring process if you will end up in such a team after your offer.
If ensuring your part of the company is working on the big picture right things becomes your responsibility, what's even the point of joining an established enterprise over a startup?
In many of these companies the system, process, algorithm, whatever that lays off individuals just informs people from senior manager down, they don't even know who's going away. How do you imagine that correlates with individual performance? The correlation is basically 0, maybe negative sometimes :-)
I'm exactly working on that too, and don't have the answer. The problem is we all have our way to classify things and this is never the same way. The same word also never mean the same things for each one of us.
Two aspects I'm trying currently are (that need users browsing history):
- Dont try to recommend similar website, but recommend users that like similar things as you, and you can list the website that this user likes
- Create tags with accuracy. For example you will tag a website "product management" "startup" and "b2b". You can go one step further and ask users to rate how this tag matches the website. Like 90% for "b2b" and 50% for "startup" and 20% "product management". Then you can let users search tags and their accuracy (I want "product management" at average more than 50%)
Like you I feel like something can be done with LLM but I just haven't found it yet, maybe to suggest the tags of a website from a restricted list of tags, and then to suggest tags from an explanation of what the user is searching and then search those tags
Well I agree that this is poorly written (I wrote it).
The point of the article is not that companies shouldnt have PM, but that you shouldnt make them owner of the innovation in a B2B context. Of course if you start with the assumption of "Good PMs" it will work, but you will rarely find these "good PMs"
100% what others are saying. This is a hot take rant with bad arguments based on an experience with a bad product manager (or maybe you're just difficult to work with and your ideas aren't as innovative or as good as you think).
I can easily flip the script and say "Devs at B2B shouldn't be anything more than oompah-loompahs" or "UI designers shouldn't be allowed to give ideas" based on a couple of my own isolated experiences.
You want to be taken seriously? Don't rant and explain what structure/methods would be more appropriate for a B2B business that would balance the need for innovation that makes users happy with keeping the paying gatekeepers willing to keep paying
In this whole article the word "problem" is only written once, and it's in the line "the problem with product managers is".
Given you don't understand that the core pillar of the product manager role is to be the owner of the problem space, I'm not sure how qualified you are to comment on how valuable our role is or isn't.
Discovery isn't about decided what does or doesn't get built, it's about discovering what the real problem is that your customers need solved (almost like it's in the name).
If your PM is good at their job, the answer to that question should be pretty clear once they're done. That's not them "telling you what to do", if you want to go build a solution to a problem nobody actually has, you have fun with that.
And if you PM is defining solutions and telling your team how/what to build, that's on you to push back and take ownership of the part of the process that you're meant to be owning.
A lot of PM's end up overreaching because they're just tired of there being a leadership vacuum and nobody willing to fill it. Trust me, we're busy enough, we don't want the extra work.
It's not meant to be apologising, it's meant to provide context so that engineering teams can be more comfortable pushing back and retaking control of the solution space.
Should PM's be better at not steam rolling engineering teams? Yeah, 100%, it's literally the #1 thing that I consciously work on when it comes to personal development and self discipline etc.
But it would also help if engineering teams were more... I want to say "aggressive" when it comes to solving new problems and building new solutions.
I get that "new features" is seen as a PM thing and we always get shit for pushing "new features" over things like fixing tech-debt. But for 95% of products, "new features" are going to be a very consistent reality and often they're responded to extremely negatively by engineering teams, even (and some times especially) when those engineering teams are placed in the drivers seat to come up with the solutions.
Sorry if you took it personally or you think this is a rant. This is clearly not the case, I can repeat it, PM have a lot of value, but there is one specific area that we shouldn't give them control over.
It doesnt mean they are bad PM or good PM, innovation requires just fundamentally opposed skills to the standard product management ones that we see in books.
I didn't take anything personally. IMO your implication that I did just feels like another attempt to straw-man PM's.
Trust me, we deal with so much psuedo-emotional garbage every day that stuff like this just slides off our backs.
My point is that you obviously don't actually understand what a PM's job is, so you probably shouldn't be telling everyone what they can and cannot do.
As a PM I've been the one that's lead some of the largest and most successful innovation focused initiatives that the companies I've worked at have ever delivered. In some cased delivering revenue uplifts totaling 20-30% of the companies entire income.
Engineers don't have a monopoly on innovation. Innovation is what happens when a great solution is paired with a nasty problem. For at least one half of that calculus, most companies need good PM's.
> but there is one specific area that we shouldn't give them control over.
This is a bit like encountering an engineer who isn’t very good (or maybe it’s just a lack of experience) and then concluding that the engineering org should not be allowed to control architecture based on that experience.
Or encountering a dev team who goes off and builds some complex feature that no one asked for and then concluding that dev teams should never have a say in what should be built.
The existence of bad PMs or bad devs (or good PMs/devs executing a misguided plan) shouldn’t be used to justify a general sweeping argument about either discipline.
Going by this article and the rest of your writings it's hard for me to think that this 'one specific area that we shouldn't give them control over' isn't really 'whatever area polote happens to be in right now.'
I don’t get all this criticism. It’s a rant, I personally enjoy a good rant so thanks! Now everyone saying you don’t understand the role? Hogwash, most companies and their management are incompetent and don’t understand the role either, they simply hobble along on their “chaos is a process” BS. I read this as one of those. It happens, a lot.
Yep. It's no longer a rant when a recognizable pattern emerges.
(and I don't think they are personnally incompetent - quite the contrary; but in my experience, it's the managerial process that is often designed to generate incompetency as a side-product)
I’ve had the same b2b PM woes. I even had my PM tell someone that they (the PM) didn’t really need to know how to use our product, as long as they talked to users and wrote down what they wanted into stories.
I have since taken back more product owner power as founder. Innovation is up again! So I think it’s helping.
Paul, it’s a bad article. Your arguments don’t make sense and are mostly strawmen. If you want to improve it, show it to someone in real life and have them talk over it with you. You’ll probably get a lot farther than a few sentences of feedback over the internet. But it’s really bad.
Imagine feeling qualified to write this article without knowing the difference between a project manager and a product manager. Imposter syndrome indeed. Thinking you are the correct person to evaluate a “PM” without knowing what half the letters mean is pretty amazing, leaving us to wonder what would happen if this person ever were to encounter a program manager.
Let's be fair here... I consider myself a pretty proficient Product Manager and even I would struggle to tell you what the Program Manager in our Org is actually meant to do.
Don't get me wrong, they do a lot and it's all valuable. But even they can't tell me what their fundamental role responsibility is hahaha.
On the other hand you’re not out there writing slam pieces on project managers, so I don’t think your lack of clarity around these terms is causing anyone any heartburn. And yeah these terms are a little under-differentiated in some shops. How I learned it [0]:
Project manager handles a discrete undertaking with a beginning and an end that falls outside whatever your org considers “ongoing operations.”
Program manager handles a portfolio of interrelated projects. If a lot of projects are failing and you want a single throat to choke, the program manager might be a good person to replace.
Product manager seems like it could be interpreted as kind of like a program manager (for a large, complex set of inter related projects) or a project manager (if there’s only one project) except that the organization’s ongoing operations include the creation and development of the product, instead of the product being a single event/discrete undertaking.
Source: read PMBOK decades ago
[0]: maybe others who learned differently can chime in? Doesn’t seem like this terminology is universal.
It is. But without survival bias no successful company would exists.
The success of a company is highly tied to the intuition of the founder, thet are usually the only people that are critical to the company still improving. But the opposite is true, they are the only ones that are critical to bankrupt the company. But they take decisions taking into account the success of the whole company, something that team don't do as much
> It is. But without survival bias no successful company would exists.
I agree with your overall argument but not this premise -- without survival bias you still get all the successful first-time companies who, through more dumb luck than anything else, happen to luck their way into a perfect situation without any past company experiences to bias them, survival or not
But you wouldn't luck into a new market if you just listened to old data, meaning that such luck requires founder intuition and not expertise or customer expertise. Established companies will always beat you on expertise and data, so founder intuition is the only reason a startup can compete, if you don't rely on it then you have lost before you even start. That doesn't guarantee success, but not doing that guarantees failure.
Why is founder randomness interesting? It doesn't matter if you got good or bad intuition, if you don't trust it you don't get that chance to succeed. Both talented and lucky founders did it the same way.
It's interesting if combined with the insight that a lot of founders were simply lucky, regardless of what they tell themselves and others about why they succeeded
I don’t understand how survivorship bias is being used here. I thought it was a wholly backward-looking error of not taking into account failures along with the successes, not something that somehow empowers future success.
I'll answer. It sucks. But they had a leg tingle during the SBFs presentation when he said that his vision was for FTX app to buy bananas. So they bought in. Now to be fair all facts are in so maybe it went bad after so maybe controls were more of a factor than due diligence.
Are these the same VC's that, would grill, up and down, eventual founders on:
- The minute details of a startup 5 year out business plan, cash-flow previsions, the impact of currency fluctuations of their profitable horizon...but ...
- Would allow him to get his girlfriend as the CEO?
> Would allow him to get his girlfriend as the CEO?
Ellison was CEO of the hedge fund, Alameda Research, not FTX.
Also, while the descriptions of her in this and other threads as a "Harry Potter fan" and "his girlfriend" dovetail with the erstwhile HN tendency toward "it's so simple, everybody is an idiot except for me," I don't think their relationship was public knowledge until quite recently and until that point she was probably more likely viewed through the lens of "Jane Street alum and Stanford grad."
Which is not that different from SBF's VC friendly pedigree of "Jane Street alum and MIT grad," so given their relationship wasn't public, it's a bit unreasonable to claim she should have been the red flag.
The same kind of posts happened when zuck changed the private policy of whatsaap a few months ago, everyone was migrating to Signal. Who uses signal now?
It's the typical anti-<whatever> hate waves that happen in HN. Outside of this bubble, people don't really lose sleep over it.
Signal is a very good example because WhatsApp is getting more popular as the days go by as opposed to what one could possibly infer from the waves of posts that appeared not long ago here about it.
It's just so important to separate this otherwise insignificant group of minds vs the many other several millions that aren't here and don't share the views - or perhaps (some) do but then it comes down to the network effect once again which has always been a present issue in every alternative among other factors. This time won't be different I'm afraid.
I just counted all of my signal chats that have had activity since the beginning of September and there’s 34 of them. On WhatsApp that number is 29 and on iMessages(not SMS) it’s 21.
The best way I’ve found to actually get people to keep using signal after you’ve got them to download it is to respond to their WhatsApp messages on signal. It won’t take long until they stop initiating conversations on WhatsApp.
Or do what I had done - delete whatsapp and text them saying it’s either text messages or download Signal from here [link]. Everyone I gave a shit about had done that.
I use WhatsApp. Everyone in Latin America uses it. I don't believe that Zuckerberg is reading my chats, and not concerned enough about E2E encryption to bother evangelizing another app to everyone I know.
Is there a proof that there is no backdoor in WhatsApp? Client code is not released. By default it does unencrypted backup to cloud. You don't know if encryption keys are leaving device.
I don’t know if there’s proof, but I have a friend that works on the team that I trust. I’ve also seen the tools for analyzing the metadata for police warrants and they only deal with metadata (because content is encrypted).
For signal - phone numbers as IDs allow them to retain no other info on their servers. They don’t have your phone book (though if someone gets your device and forced you to unlock it that’s different, but then they’d have your contacts anyway). There’s a reasonable tradeoff here imo to retain as little as possible server side. Signal is also working on a non phone ID option iirc.
Same problem. I have multiple groups on WhatsApp that I don’t want to leave, but don’t believe they’ll migrate. Three family groups, close friends, school parents, son’s football club.
A lot of these people were the last to migrate to WhatsApp from email and SMS, and will now be the last to migrate away from it. And they’re a huge majority compared to the early adopter crowd we see on HN.
Have you tried a WhatsApp-bridge with element/matrix? You could use matrix internally while being available to clients via WA. I would strongly discourage any company to use meta-clients internally.
I'm having a bit of a... culture shock? Not sure how to call it. We're a small company from an eastern european country, building one product and trying to make it into the big world. We don't have the luxury of caring about if a messenger app is meta or not. Is it doing its job? yes. Is it encrypted? Sortof, but truth be told we'd use it anyways.
If we have extra time we spend it on checking backups, or improving performance, or researching new cool stuff we can add to our product. Which messenger app to use?! Yeah, definitely culture shock. Severe, too.
This was the event that pushed me to go XMPP only for messaging. Pulled in my family and some friends. Internet standards without vendor lock-in is now a requirement for me.
The sad thing is that I jumped to Matrix (with Element) and waited for the influx; 2 people moved. The rest either stayed on WhatsApp or moved to Telegram (to be fair, almost all my contacts, including my mother, actually did move to Telegram from WhatsApp). No signal, no matrix.
Matrix is nice in theory but Element is not very nice and the messing around with keys is not something most people will understand. This needs to be automatic by default, not a complete pain as it is now.
We have an example of a perfect chat client UI; Telegram. Why is no one just copying it verbatim for matrix? This is a question to, mostly, Element developers really. I don’t know why it is quite as unfriendly as it is, but of course we can all jump in and help out, that’s why I keep using it and sponsoring it. Even though I can only talk to 2 people.
> This is a question to, mostly, Element developers really
o/
We’re currently rebuilding Element on mobile (and native desktop apps) so it behaves much more like Telegram or similar, built on matrix-rust-sdk. The codename is currently Element X, but it will shortlyish replace Element proper.
Quite possibly the most responsive native social media application for all platforms.
It's got free storage (basically free Google Drive), behaves like Messenger, has public channels and groups like Discord and YouTube, mind-blowing cloud sync, can connect to people without sharing a phone number and tons of features that I can't really list here but you can check them out here: https://t.me/TelegramTips
Couldn't have said it better. If they would have e2e for all chats & groups I would live in this thing. It's much better than Slack etc for me, but I trust them even less than Slack.
Matrix has, like Slack, sub conversations which I like, so they have, on the server, everything that Telegram has and more, is open source and I can host myself, but the clients :( Yes, I can write one myself or help with Element. I guess this is something to really think about as the commercial offerings are simply not very good outside Telegram but I don't really trust them with my data.
Yeah, I'd really like an option for permanent E2EE on all platforms but I trust Telegram with my data.
As long as they're not selling it to advertisers and their apps remain FOSS, I'm fine with sharing my data.
I also really like Telegram's privacy policy (https://privacyspy.org), which is why I'm okay with cloud side encryption instead of E2E.
Every E2EE app that I've tried in the past, has been a UX nightmare and cloud sync is something that's extremely essential to my workflow so Telegram has been a pretty amazing free service.
This seems a bit different, given that Musk's leadership has a high potential to very radically change Twitter; he did just lay off half the company, for example.
People keep talking about laying off half the company like it's a bad thing.
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of negative factors to laying off staff and I'm not denying those.
But anyone who has worked in a large org, especially a public one, knows that there is excessive bloat. Many people at large orgs do nothing. They go to great lengths to ensure it looks like they're doing something, which I guess is something itself.
PS - I'm neither for nor against the layoffs at Twitter.
I think even if he was correct that Twitter has a lot bloat that needs to be cut, I really struggle to believe you could accurately judge who or what needs to be cut when slashing your 7000 employee business in half within 5-6 days of walking in the door. The chance of making big mistakes and cutting critical staff and teams is very high.
I think that even worst is that it does not look fair or transparent at all. Which means, remaining employees are going to be demotivated and resentful. It is going to be chaos organizational, competences will be unclear etc. Which will make organization as a whole more dysfunctional then it needs to be.
Exactly. It smells very strongly of the same kind of overgeneralized superficial thinking that leads people to believe that less moderation is always good. You can’t possibly expect that everyone in your company will be 150% invested work-any-time business evangelists. Maybe the 50% who are left now have to work double? Are they so incredibly enthusiastic about the job to take the hit silently?
Technically I use it (although I haven't had a legitimate message on there since ... 2016?) but I'll tell you what I don't use any more - WhatsApp. It's either iMessage, Telegram, or for a (dwindling) handful of annoying people, FB Messenger.
All my family and about half of my friends are still using it. In, almost everyone who I know who joined during that time stayed, but most still use WhatsApp and Telegram as well.
