> Data Science Manager at Uber
> 2018-present
Geez. I guess this guy loves working at companies run by psychopaths.
> 2018-present
Geez. I guess this guy loves working at companies run by psychopaths.
I just watched "wild wild country," so my mind is on a different flavour of euntrepreneurship and euntrepreneurship. But...
Jobs, Kalanick, Gates... By all accounts were very difficult people personally & professionally. By most accounts, they crossed all the lines to get where they were trying to go. Can someone who doesn't do that get where they got to?
Uber is a good example. They're model of expansion led to Uber being all over the world. Ubers' product meant ignoring, bending & breaking "taxi laws" all over the world. It just couldnt have been done legally, especially given that these are often municipal rules, and Uber operates in thousands of jurisdictions. On the labour side, a standard labour model wouldn't have let them take over the world.
Ubers' "gigging" labour model didn't/doesn't have a legal or normative framework. Without bending these rules, they would not have gotten so big, so fast either.
These are just the most legible, concrete examples. By all accounts this mentality permeates everything. Move fast and break things, I guess. Break rules, conventions, people....
Some people want to fight for Fabien. Some people want to fight for Xenophon.
If, on the other hand, we tested everybody for sociopathy before they were allowed to manage other people or manage other people's money, I believe we'd still get at least as much innovation. Probably more, as monopolists like Gates and Kalanick were happy to work to crush competitors. See, e.g., a small sampling of the companies Microsoft screwed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Private
They did break rules though, sometimes laws. More notably the trailblazed rule/law breaking. In some cases this led to rules or laws being renegotiated. I think both taxi laws and labour laws are currently under review in a lot of places, owing to Uber's bulldozing.
I'm not making any normative judgements. I'm just correlating such a personality type to certain businesses, at a certain place and time. If you are going to be part of an uber-like story of nothing to global generic within a few years... You are probably working for a rule breaking, screaming unreasonable Jobs type. But... You get to go on adventure in Persia.
Whatever your intent, you are in effect justifying their actions. My point is that you can use your exact logic to justify anything that succeeds at the expense of others. It's used all the time with political leaders in other countries who succeed through violence.
Instead of justifying it, we can work to change things. Sexual abuse was perfectly acceptable for decades, probably centuries. But the #MeToo movement shows that standards can change, and that abusers can face accountability. The same sort of change is possible if we want to limit other kinds of abuse. It's up to us.
I don't think we're talking about the same thing, but even if we are civil conversations end when metaphorical accusations start, so... I guess there's no way to right this ship.
Why is Gates on that list?
" ... “Four,” announced the f[uck] counter, and everyone said, “wow, that’s the lowest I can remember. Bill is getting mellow in his old age.” He was, you know, 36.
Later I had it explained to me. “Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it’s never happened before.” "
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
He's such a sharp pen. Too bad he isn't blogging. I wonder if he's got some new takes. He was a small codeshop CEO when he wrote that. Now a multiunicorn CEO.
"I don't know," I replied. I was finally beginning to see where he was coming from. Bill was trying to get me to brag that I could write the application switcher really quickly, so he could justify paying me a lower price for it.
"Well, I don't think that you could expect to get more than four thousand dollars per week, tops. Actually, I think that's too much, but let's go with that. If it takes ten weeks, and you get paid four thousand dollars per week, that means you should get paid $40,000 for writing it."
$40,000 didn't sound like very much to me, especially if it was as strategic to Microsoft as it seemed to be. I think Bill was expecting me to make a counteroffer, but I wasn't very enthusiastic about selling it to Microsoft regardless of compensation, since it really should eventually be part of the Mac OS.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
Anyway, better than a company run by "the clueless". See the MacLeod Life Cycle of the Firm, in:
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
"The defendants are Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay"