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Comment by mathgenius | Hacker News Reader

Ugh. I've worked for, and with, people like this. Never again. It's clear from this article that he still has no idea why he "failed". Apparently his failure was too many ideas, and yet later on in the article he says they failed because execution slowed. Finally he admits it was magic lost, ie. he has no idea.

The best solution he comes up with amounts to better planning and "Decide where to focus limited resources." Duh.

This guy is ernest, but clueless. If you meet someone like this, run for the hills. They should not be in charge of anything apart from the excel spreadsheet in front of them.

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Would you please not post comments to HN that consist just of personal attack and bile? What's the information you're really intending to give here? If you'd tell us, perhaps we could learn something, instead of just joining a little flash mob.

Indignation attracts more upvotes than anything else, which means a comment like this will stick to the top of a thread (where I just ran across it a minute ago), collecting mass. In other words, HN can't live by upvotes alone. There need to be countervailing mechanisms, such as flagging, software, and moderation.

Note this from the guidelines: "A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thankyou dang. This is not personal at all. I wish this person well, I'm sure he's a nice guy!

I wanted to point out a phenomena, that I happen to be passionate about. I have thought alot about this. It was not meant to be a random twitter comment. But I am very serious about this, and hope that people notice this pathology. This guy is clearly lost in his "left-brain" [1]: full of details, trees with no forrest. It's all about plans, manipulation, linearity, verbiage, control. No wider context, no magic. Probably he has an impressive mastery of details, but basically clueless, as I said. Very likely he is a positive energetic person, full of charisma, nice to be around. Yet too often we put these charismats in charge! So that's my Dr. House run-down that I was reluctant to give. In summary, good with spreadsheets, hopeless at finding a direction.

[1] See "The Master and His Emissary" by Iain Mcgilchrist. Awesome book.

In case it helps anyone for the future: in order to make that a good HN comment, two things would have needed to be different. First, much less of the toxic blend of personal language and pejoratives. Second, more information to feed intellectual interest. There many ways to do that, such as bringing in other examples, drawing analogies to other areas, and best of all: describing what works better and explaining why.

Since you've thought about it a lot and are passionate about it, I'm sure that there was no ill intent behind your comment. But somehow your benign intent still translated into a passionate putdown of someone specific. Imagine if you ran across a comment like that about yourself on HN: run for the hills if you meet this guy! Ugh, duh, clueless! It would feel like a gut punch to most of us. When we write such comments, we badly underestimate the impact they might have on whoever we're talking about by 10x or more. In fact, we usually don't take it into account at all.

Another way to mitigate that, and make the comment more interesting, would have been to talk about your own experience, previous encounters you've had with this theme, cases where you've seen it applied, and so on.

The company I work for still uses Kissmetrics but are navigating away from it. I have to agree that the author misses the point.

We’ve used them for almost... 5 years now and I have no idea what the author is referencing as their “fire” product.

The UI never made much sense, and above a certain number of streaming events the live view was useless.

The reporting is not great or reliable, the “SQL” report is a nightmare to use. It doesn’t follow many of the normal SQL syntax and was sorta just dropped onto users without much information besides a two paragraph help article that isn’t that helpful.

Simply put, they built a great initial product and then spent so much time twiddling their thumbs to not improve the product or help customers who stream a lot of events get them into better pipelines (e.g what segment does very well) and then built out pretty shoddy reporting tools on top of it.

We had to build our own reporting tools through a myriad of ETLs using spark + other technologies just to clean the events coming through. Some user error and bad eventing policies on our side? Of course but Kissmetrics didn’t do much to help customers with tooling.

He is pretty clear that once they located the market he continued to inject too many of his own ideas not directly based on customer or prospect needs into the development queue, slowing progress on the core features needed and giving competitors a chance to out-execute and ultimately out-innovate his team.

These may be obvious mistakes in some ways but it's important to note that having a lot of ideas during the exploration phase helps you discover the market. It can be difficult to realize that the practices that got you onto a successful trajectory need to change if you want to be able build on your success.

Yes but this may have nothing to do with the failure.

He may not have nearly been as disruptive as was articulated.

Maybe he talked about a few ideas, and there were some distractions ...

... or maybe the company was never very good in the first place. Maybe they didn't have insightful devs, designers and staff who could move at a quick enough pace, identify the best trends.

Even in full hindsight, these things are really hard.

I worked for BlackBerry, and I have many concerns about culture and leadership that led to their demise. At the same time - you're up against two of the most formidable companies in the world, one (Apple) with the best product of the new era, and the other (Google) giving it away for free. And BB didn't have vast surpluses and an arsenal of competitive advantage to lean on. In hindsight, it's possible there was nothing at all BB could have really done, it was going to get beat.

Also, sometimes the operational reality of a company trumps all narratives. What everyone does on a daily basis, grinding, is the 'real reality' of a place, and the rest is just talk.

Your experience at BlackBerry sounds like a fascinating one to experience. Care to share more details? Was there just a few things/initiatives that the company tried to execute on and just failed repeatedly? When did people at large realize that there was just no way they would beat out competition?

I guess even to casual observers it was pretty clear at a certain point that Apple and Google had already won the smartphone market (BB, Nokia, Microsoft all tried hard but they have always been the niche), but BB hung around for quite a bit and now I had to look it up to figure out what they're currently doing.

Sounds pretty fascinating that a company that looked absolutely dominating in the smartphone segment was totally decimated so quickly.

I was on the inside and wanted to write a book about it, because it was bizarre.

+ BB culture was full of smart people, but we were not hugely innovative. It's like we were the 'greatest toaster maker' in the world. In any other business, we would have dominated.

+ BB was not a 'smartphone' - it really was just 'great email and long battery life'. The underrying OS, features etc. could not enable it to compete with iPhone. BB bought an OS later, but it was too late.

+ BB was way smaller and did not have vast talent pools. Google had a few hundred people in mapping. We had 2. Consider a similar story across other cross-cutting verticals. iOS is basically MacOS-light. That's a massive advantage.

+ When apps came along, Apple just dropped them into iTunes as a new category. BB had to come up with things from scratch.

+ BB was a hugely utilitarian in focus. The 'Tech' CEO did not speak the language of design. He basically had no clue, no understanding of the language. Talking design to him would be like talking about his daughter's shoe colours.

+ BB sold to carriers, and did whatever they asked. That's what made them huge. So we made a new device for each carrier. Apple, because they had power, made '1 device' and told carriers to shove it. But it was hot so carriers did as they were told. BB was 'told' to make an iPhone killer by Verizon (AT&T got the original iPhone deal) and it turned into the BB Storm, which was crap by any measure.

+ BB was sold as a 'solution' not a 'platform' - meaning all of the 3rd party stuff was an afterthought. We never cared about apps. I know, because it was my job to care about apps :).

+ The two CEO's hated each other and never got along. I'm ashamed to say this but they were both narrow, arrogant people. The opposite of thoughtful. One was a NYC style hardened sales guy with quirks, the other a techie from the 1980's. They did not come up with the BB. The BB was originated by a PM called 'Dave Castell' (great man) as almost a 'last resort' 20 years into the startup. It was a pager with email on it. It sold extremely well to execs. Everything was just a scramble from then on.

Indeed it's a fascinating story.

Despite our failings, I don't think we could have beat Apple + Android.

Sounds like BB didn't stand a chance.

> iOS is basically MacOS-light

Yeah, I often forget that Apple had years and years of building engineering expertise around Operating Systems (MacOS) and Embedded Hardware (iPod) which they smartly leveraged into iOS. Google had something similar, but for different reasons (Google Research, ChromeOS etc.).

I wonder what the best course of action would have been. If the CEO's had recognized the futility of a fight, and had pivoted the company into an App company (BB messenger was extremely popular) or had adopted Android earlier ...

What kind of person is this? In your estimation, what is his tragic flaw, apart from existing and being involved?

Probably the arrogance to write about his "mistake" without actually learning the core reason for the failure. The author starts out owning it, but then shifts the focus to "we" and other things like execution.

In the end I think once KISSmetrics became a hit, it was hubris that took over and the mistakes followed. That's likely hard to own and admit in a blog post, because you'd basically have to be a different person to write it.

So to me, the "ugh" response makes a lot of sense.

Agreed with this. There also seem to be a few comments in this thread which makes me wonder how truthful the author really is (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19767442)

For those of us who want to learn the lesson, what is he clueless about?

These people* think that you build a plan, or set a direction, by assembling many details together. Imagine just memorizing facts until you had enough facts in your brain that you could formulate a plan. It's ridiculous, but surprisingly difficult to criticize, because they have their facts to back them up!

The other way is this: use your intuition, and then go to the facts (details) to verify or disqualify the intuition. It's top-down rather than bottom-up. You don't get intuition by memorizing stuff. Beware the clean desk. I could go on and on ...

* I hate to categorize people, but there it is.

“”” I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief. “””

This is true except for the "clever and lazy" part. In reality this should be "intelligent but with no skills, let more accomplished people do the work but take the credit".

Cleverand lazy is best because they find ways to get the job done with the least effort.

Biggest reward for the lowest cost.

"least effort" just means their own least effort - I've known folks who were happy to let other teams slave away unnecessarily because it optimized their own effort. long term that's a bigger cost for the whole org - short term it's a win for "intelligent but lazy", who may move on to something else in the meantime.

That's lazy and stupid. Clever considers all factors in the math.

The quote is not about a Lisp programmer finding the shortest way to solve a problem.

It is a quote from a psychopath who tells other people "take that hill" and then lights up a cigar in the officer's club and brags how brave and smart he was.

Irrelevant, unless your point was that that's not fair, in which case: still irrelevant.

It's considerably more relevant to high-tech work than a comment from a military commander from 100 years ago.

Grit (determination, resilience hard work) is often indicated as the #1 predictor of success - not IQ, and I agree with this.

Unless what you're doing is very new, or super sophisticated in which case brilliance is really a key ingredient, give me 'smart, gets along, works hard and accomplishes things' any day over 'brilliant and lazy'.

Someone has a job that makes them push a button every 5 minutes. They write a script so they never have to push a butten again. That person is clever and lazy. That is who you want.

Except this anecdote is not representative of much of anything in the real world.

'Taking the easy' path is not 'clever', it's just a good habit, and there's no reason that this person cannot be hard working as well.

Smart and diligent will get you a push button every day instead of one every week.

There is no substitute for fairly hard work in most startup environments. There are so many details, so many little things to consider, so much to be done that cannot be replaced with a button.

> Except this anecdote is not representative of much of anything in the real world.

It relates well to my experience.

At a hosting company I worked for, many of the system admins and developers were promoted from within technical support.

Technical support had one very awesome feature I only ever saw at this company -- you had a quota of how many tickets you should complete in a given day. If you completed that number, you could leave and were paid for the full day. If you had 80 tickets to complete and did them in 2 hours, you left. If you had 80 tickets and couldn't complete them, you left after working for 8 hours. You could work from home every other day if you were hitting your quota, and work from home increased your quota by like 10 tickets. Quota numbers were based on some average of your tickets over the last 8 weeks, and for most people were somewhere around 70-100.

Categorically, each and every person who was promoted out of tech support had written scripts to fix common issues that were happening and frequently only worked a couple of hours a day while they were in technical support; other times would spend a lot of extra time working out programs to automate their jobs. Looking back at it, I think each of us thought we were getting away with something, but it was noticed and encouraged.

I don't see how any of that would imply 'lazy'.

Then perhaps you disagree with GP's perspective? You responded initially to this:

> Someone has a job that makes them push a button every 5 minutes. They write a script so they never have to push a butten again. That person is clever and lazy. That is who you want.

I believe my story very strongly correlates with the spirt of GP's explanation; if you do not see the similarities I'm not sure I could explain further.

If you do see the similarities and simply disagree with the word 'lazy,' then I should make my assumptions of the word more clear. In GP's context I've assumed the definition by Larry Wall from the Three Virtues[1]:

> Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure

[1]: http://threevirtues.com

I would say that person is clever and resourceful. Usually the task is still manual because of potential gotchas and you'll need a diligent approach to automation to take those into account.

Most lazy people I know will stick to manual action rather than take the time to script it out, mostly due to that initial overhead or having to potentially iterate on the logic due to future unknowns.

No, that would be stupid and lazy. The cumulative effort of pushing the button is far more than the initial overhead and they just can’t realize that because they are too stupid.

Man, what is it’s both clever and stupid? Like too clever by half?

More common than you think. People who do clever things for stupid reasons, I.E. a developer who prematurely optimizes or uses unnecessary technologies

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