Coups, in general, are the domain of the petty. One need only look at Ilya and D'Angelo to see this in action. D'Angelo neutered Quora by pushing out its co-founder, Charlie Cheever. If you're not happy with the way a company is doing business, your best action is to walk away.
At this point I'm in danger of triggering Godwin's Law so I had better stop.
Comparing PayPal's success in digital finance to cryptocurrency's is an admission against interest, as they say in the law.
They absolutely would. The other thing you should take away from this is how they'd do it-- by manipulating proxies to do it with/for them, which makes it harder to see coming and impossible to defend against.
Whistleblowers are pariahs by necessity. You can't trust a known snitch won't narc on you if the opportunity presents itself. They do the right thing and make themselves untrustworthy in the process.
(This is IMO why cults start one way and devolve into child sex abuse so quickly-- MAD. You can't snitch on the leader when Polaroids of yourself exist...)
> don't take vacations!
This can get used against you either way, so you might as well take that vacation for mental health's sake.
It feels like there is an impedance mismatch here.
Like, being crosswise in organizational politics does not imply less of a devotion of organizational goals, but rather often simply different interpretation of those goals.
That strikes me as someone who is either lacks the ability to do proper due diligence or they're straight up sociopaths looking for weak willed people they can strong arm out. Part of the latter is having the ability to create a compelling narrative for future marks, to put it bluntly.
I’m not sure I can identify exactly who is liable to start a coup, but I know for sure that I would never, ever hire someone who I felt confident might go down that route.
Startups die from suicide, not homicide.
So you hired coupers but you would never hire...coupers? Did you not know about their coups cuz that's the only way I can see that makes sense here. Could you clarify this, seems contradictory...
Also, great quote about startup failure :)
You might have missed this from GP's comment:
>>I’m not sure I can identify exactly who is liable to start a coup
In other words, at least once these people have pulled the wool over their eyes during the hiring process.
The point in my comment was this: in retrospect, I’m not sure there’s anything that would have tipped me off to that behavior at the time of interview. But if this was something I could somehow identify, it would absolute be my #1 red flag for future hires.
Edit: The “twice” part might have made my comment ambiguous. What I meant was after I hired them, these people went on to pull two separate, successive coups, which indicates to me the first time wasn’t an aberration.
2. CEO's at fast growing startups are very different than at large tech.
I've run or defended against 'grassroots organizations transformations' (aka, a coup) at several non-profit organizations, and all of us continued to do our daily required tasks while the politicking was going on.
It's just not possible. We're limited in how much energy we can bring to daily work, that's a fact. If your brain is occupied both with dreams of king-making and your regular duties at the job, your mental bandwidth is compromised.
This makes no sense at all!
Now, that sibling director allows a culture of sexual harassment, law breaking, and toxic throat slitting behavior. HR and the Organizations leadership is aware of this. However the company is profitable, outside his department happy, and stable. They don’t want to rock the boat.
Is it still “the domain of the petty” to have a plan to replace them? To have formed relationships to work around them, and keep them in check? To have enacted policies outside their department to ensure the damage doesn’t spread?
And most importantly to enact said replacement plan when they fuck up just enough leadership gives them the side-eye, and you push the issue with your documentation of their various grievances?
Because that… is a coup. That is a coup that is atleast in my mind moral and just, leading to the betterment of the company.
“Your best action is to walk away” - Good leadership doesn’t just walk away and let the company and employees fail. Not when there’s still the ability to effect positive change and fix the problems. Captains always evacuate all passengers before they leave the ship. Else they go down with it.
Yes, exactly. In fact, it's corruption of leadership.
If an engineer came to the leader about a critical technical problem and said, 'our best choice is to pretend it's not there', the leader would demand more of the engineer. At a place like OpenAI, they might remind the engineer that they are the world's top engineers at arguably the most cutting edge software organization in the world, and they are expected to deliver solutions to the hardest problems. Throwing your hands up and ignoring the problem is just not acceptable.
Leaders need to demand the same of themselves, and one of their jobs is to solve the leadership problems that are just as difficult as those engineering problems - to deliver leadership results to the organization just like the engineer delivers engineering results, no excuses, no doubts. Many top-level leaders don't have anyone demanding performance of them, and don't hold themselves to the same standards in their job - leadership, management - as they hold their employees.
> Not when there’s still the ability to effect positive change and fix the problems.
Even there, I think you are going to easy on them. Only in hindsight do you maybe say, 'I don't see what could have been done.' At the moment, you say 'I don't see it yet, so I have to keep looking and innovating and finding a way'.
Work or transfer of intellectual property or good name into another venture, while not disclosing it with OpenAI is a clear breach of contract.
He is clearly instrumental in attracting investors, talent, partners and commercialization of technology developed by Google Brain and pushed further by Hinton students and the team of OpenAI. But he was just present in the room where the veil of ignorance was pushed forward. He is replaceable and another leader, less creepy and with fewer conflicts of interest may do a better job.
It it no surprise that OpenAI board had attempted to eject him. I hope that this attempt will be a success.
One attempt involved a battleship “accidentally” firing onto another battleship where both Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping were visiting.
https://jamestown.org/program/president-xi-suspects-politica...
Biased source, but she’s able to get a lot of unreported news from the mainland.
https://www.jenniferzengblog.com/home/2021/9/20/deleted-repo...
I will try to find more sources but Google is just shit these days. See my other comment for more.
A big problem is that mainland China is like the hermit kingdom. It’s a black hole for any news the CCP doesn’t want to get out
Hm. That really does qualify as an assassination attempt if it wasn't an actual accident. Enough such things happen by accident that it has a name.
No guarantees about NPOV on that page.
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Falun_Gong
If you want to see what makes WikiPedia tick that's a great place to start.
It's like believing the scientology center. Not trustworthy, they have an angle.
2. It makes sense given Xi’s current paranoia and constant purges
search terms site:nytimes.com
(or bbc.co.uk or ap.com or another trusted source)http://www.indiandefencereview.com/spotlights/xi-jinpings-fi...
http://www.settimananews.it/italia-europa-mondo/the-impossib...
I will try to find better sources. There are more not so great articles in my other comment
Focus on results, not political games.