Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | smaug7's comments login

do you have examples of companies that are rational and steady?


the rest of the Fortune 500


I'm curious, if you're interviewing at a company, what's the best way to figure out of the lead/team has this balance? What kind of questions could you ask without sounding like you're trying to be lazy?


What works better than it should: just take a good look at the people you are talking to.

Basically, do they look like they are chronically sleep deprived zombies? Are their eyes bloodshot? Hair kinda greasy? Movements shaky? Do they stare off into space? Reaction times slowed down? Essentially, do they look like a harried medical resident?

If it's just one person, maybe they are having a bad day, getting sick, or that's just their style. If it's everyone - you know the answer.

Why does this work better than it should? Because once you start down the path of sacrificing long term health for short term gains, there's nothing stopping you (or the management doing the pushing) from escalating further. The difference between normal and zombieland is quite stark.

Note that this is not a good heuristic when talking to managers of said team. They tend to always look fit and polished and well rested. Only the rank and file tend to look this sad.


That's a fair point. I have coworkers with kids but I've noticed the lead is a workaholic (with a child) and that reflects on the rest of the team.


Love this. Can you clarify what a state org is? Do you mean like a tech department within your state government?


Yes, exactly. Government orgs also need IT, developers, etc. I get to end my day at the same time every day and while major changes make for a week or so of a ton more work responding, there aren’t sprints to deliver important PR-sensitive releases. My off time is my own.


FWIW, I saw Tim Cook in Pac Heights a few months back just walking around. There were two "guys" in plain clothes in front and behind him on that Saturday morning. I was able to say "hello" and he was nice. I imagine there are probably others monitoring his security that I couldn't see also.


I don't have a specific answer to this as I'm not a trained historian. However, didn't we see this with the invention of the printing press back 500+ years ago? That also dramatically increased knowledge distribution and probably lies and mistruths. How did society handle that?


Exacerbated witch hunting, for one[1]. Enabled the Protestant reformation which led to the 30 years war, among others[2].

[1] https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept09/2009/10/31/unintended-con...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War


I've thought about this a lot too and I think about a few things:

- The barrier to creating and distributing content was higher (it still had to capture people's attention).

- We didn't have all the tools to artificially create content, just our imaginations.

I'm no doomer by any means, and I think it's useful to look back at history for clues as to how to manage it but it's hard to find clues when the situation is so different.

I still believe education and critical thinking are the best antidote for disinformation, but higher education in the US has continued to come under attack (and perhaps rightfully so with the costs rising extremely out of proportion to inflation).


> The barrier to creating and distributing content was higher.

The printing press lowered the barrier to distributing ideas. The internet lowered the barrier further.

In each case, there is a period of social turmoil as society "catches up". The Peasants' War, Müntzer, the Münster Rebellion, Matthys, Hoffman, and on and on are all events and products of the change in availability of printed word.

We developed social technologies to counter the faults exploited by increased information availability. "Don't believe everything you read," is a meme which acts against the bias exploited by highly available text. The invention of journals, newspapers, and citations all act in the same way.

We haven't developed enough new social technologies to counter the change in information availability. Our existing techniques aren't enough to hold tide and frankly, like all change, going back is never an option, but finding new ways to exist are.


Maybe Elon Musk should enter the education game too.


A key difference was the lack of democracy. There was plenty of misinformation, but it didn't channel quite so directly to the levers of power.

That wasn't necessarily better. We put democracy in place for a reason. But there has been a shift in the societal basis that underlies democracy, and we'll be forced to come up with another set of solutions.


It's weird how people can recognize early versions of manmade things are usually primitive and need numerous iterations to get working at acceptable levels of optimality but when it comes to democracy there's some sort of a magical force hiding it from sight in this regard.


The scarcity of printing presses and costs associated in running them by definition made distribution a calculated financial endeavor. Cultivating a positive reputation would therefore be a valuable asset in order to reliably recoup costs via sales and/or retain patrons.

This form of gatekeeping has been eliminated with the zero cost of any person being able to publish their thoughts digitally and without review. Furthermore, misinformation and disinformation now has a financial incentive by way of "driving the clicks."

In short, not everyone's voice needs to be heard by all, especially when extremism is required in order to "stand out."


This is fundamentally different. Arthur Anderson was an auditing firm and did accounting. Their selling point was to be the "source of truth" for their client's books. What's that confidence is lost, then no one would hire them for their work. McKinsey, as a management consultancy, doesn't have to be a "source of truth" and offers perspective, which can be neither right or wrong. Management makes decisions on if they want to take McKinsey's advice or not.


I used to work for Twitch and built the Custom Live notifications for streamers. It was a relatively straightforward change where we just changed the payload of what the streamers wanted the iOS, Android, email notifications to show. There were some behind-the-scenes work where there is actually a language/curse word check and decisions on if we needed to translate the copy to the receivers local language.

The measurable change was a 30-60% increase in the notification CTR and resulted in hundreds of millions of incremental hours watched.


While I don't necessarily disagree, my understanding is that engineering tends to drive more of the product decisions. I question how much power the product team actually has.


That has ceased to be true in vast tracts of the company. Cloud, for example, is chasing feature parity with its competitors and engineers are told to implement things because AWS or Azure have them, not because they organically grew out of the architecture of the existing system. In fact, quite a few features annealed poorly onto the existing architecture (which users of Google Cloud may have memory of).


Huh, citation? :) I'm not saying you're wrong, but as a GCP engineer I have never seen us (well, my org) implementing something because of "AWS or Azure has it".


Memory's a little fuzzy, but I'd put IAM and workspaces in that category.

IAM, in particular, was a huge undertaking in jamming fine-grained access rights onto existing resources where none such existed before, and it was pretty much marching orders from above: "Potential clients can't migrate off AWS because AWS has this and we don't." And it caused more than its fair share of "Why is this API suddenly throwing errors" tickets from existing users who were accustom to the pre-IAM permissions model.

ETA: Re-reading my initial statement, it was over-broad. There is room in Cloud for bottom-up engineering and product design. However, especially relative to the rest of the company (where Google is an industry leader, not entering a market already heavily dominated by an elephant), Cloud spends a lot of its time chasing "table-stakes" features to enable new customers to be on-boarded who can't subscribe to Cloud because they can't migrate their existing flow off AWS without X Y or Z analogous feature available in GCP.


I have been interviewed multiple times by GCP product managers seeking to understand how my team used specific AWS services that Google lacked at the time to learn how to implement Google's competing service.

I would be more concerned if your org wasn't doing this. AWS does it all the time too. The parent post is wrong to paint this as a negative. And GCP has some unquestionably industry leading products too (BigQuery, GKE, Spanner, AI/ML services)


Online disk resizing was the one I tracked as it slowly trickled through alpha/beta. To be fair, pretty much every virtualization product had online resizing before GCE, so it could have been a matter of prioritization.

Whatever the heck Vertex AI is compared against the Sagemaker+Ground Truth pile that AWS has. By no means is any of it groundbreaking from either company, just piling open source software and buckets behind UIs, but it seems GCP is doing catch-up there.


Yeah I think this is rather disconnected from my experience building products inside of GCP.

I'd be curious where you think we could have done better on the annealing with specifics :)


IAM rollout was a chore (and introduced a whole layer of abstraction that users who didn't need fine-grained resource management now needed to be aware of / care about) and workspaces interacted with the existing billing infra in a messy fashion, if memory serves. On the plus side, that was years ago and AFAICT Cloud learned the relevant lessons from those stumbles.


Was looking for this comment. In McNamara's reflection, a tenant he called out was to understand the enemy. US didn't understand the Viet Congs motivation for fighting the war (freedom from colonizers) whereas the US viewed the war as a larger Cold War. This is the same as what happened in Afghanistan that we didn't learn.


I'd argue the US has not tried to understand the enemy since the Cuban missile crisis. There are more failures outside of Afghanistan, and I think the US is going to walk right into another one.


Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: