Stryder

We are quite literally running out of productive things to do so we (the collective group) are all currently micro-optimizing everything we can lay our hands on. It's like a pond that's shrinking with all the fish gasping for air.

A paradigm shift is necessary before we end up strangling ourselves.

The effects we've observed so far of the wide-spread social media with regards to our social and political systems seems akin to a 5-yr old walking in on his parents having sex; old enough to be traumatized, but not old enough to successfully deal with it.

Jury's still out on the long-term consequences of this exposure. Suffice to say, it doesn't look particularly healthy.

I was surprised to learn as a grown damn man this past week that Democracy, capital letter political system, was designed and architected to be a more stable political system less prone to systemic ripples, rather than a system designed for the people to govern themselves.

"For the people, by the people" is basically a marketing slogan.

Note that I'm not passing judgement on whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, just that it is, and that I didn't realize it until now.

Dealership is an outdated component that needs to be phased out as quickly as possible.

"At that point they stopped being real investors and became financial engineers looking to play the angles to remove risk from their position and shift their risk to everyone else."

Sadly this seems to be the game being played by literally every person and their grandma these days. We need a mentality shift as a society in order to find real innovations and growth again, or else, well we're just digging our own graves really.

The nature of VC is to build portfolios. The success and failures of individual companies within that portfolio matter very little- what matters a lot more is whether the lessons learned and knowledge/IP generated can spill over to other portfolio companies to eventually produce winner(s) somewhere.

The success of the portfolio is what matters to the firm, and the returns are what matter to the LPs.

It is what it is, so entrepreneurs should use it for what it is. The hype over the past decade has been ridiculous.

Re: moat- it's gotta be price and accessibility.

Since there's no ownership, reliability and durability don't matter as long as it can complete the ride, although it does matter that it's not so crappy a scooter that it's falling apart while riding.

After that, it's just about ease of accessibility and price. I'll walk a block to use a service that is dead simple and painless to use compared to a more complicated app, but I'm not walking a block for something that's slightly nicer, or 10% cheaper.

Da real MVP

It is 1000% true that /High Standards/ are "teachable, and contagious".

But what a company, or indeed, society as a whole set those /Standards/ on matters so much much more than anything else.

We are just humans, after all.

What do you think about the idea of just actualizing your own potential one step at a time, rather than comparing to other "successful" people and what they do?

I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just curious.

Do you feel like this is a problem? Were you able to become financially secure following your path?

Some things that stood out to me after reading the whole thing:

- Other engineers dog-piling on her first few PRs showed that there was a complete lack of trust in her, and perhaps an active distrust in her abilities. I have no comments regarding whether this was deserved or not, but the known facts point to such a reality.

- Writing a feature blog post based on a personal perspective and personal past experience is not something a matured corporation can allow. This should not have been a surprise.

- Being the most productive engineer is not the goal of a Principal level engineer. I don't believe any software management would expect their Principal engineers to be sitting at the desk cranking out code all day. Influencing large scale initiatives across the org is more of the job expectation. This means building relationships with lots of people, which means less coding and more guidance of other engineers to do the coding.

- By that point, the expectation must have been high for what she can contribute on the diversity front. The terse messaging regarding the survey probably didn't help, but I also don't see it as a big deal. It's probably just piling on past issues.

- The rest is standard PIP procedure of managing out someone who isn't working out. I would love to say that I know how better to handle a PIP, but I don't.

It seems to me that Github expected a much stronger engineer, but feel like they didn't get one and that she was underperforming. Was that the actual reality? I don't know, and I don't feel qualified to pass judgment.

Which leads me to my final thought: it does seem like Github might have an empathy problem. My guess is that Coraline had her own set of insecurities about being at Github going into the job, and the first few encounters with the rest of the org put them into overdrive. It's unfortunate that her manager did not deem it productive to learn what her insecurities were and validate her on those fronts, which I believe might have put her back on the right track towards success. Instead, Coraline hunkered down and started cranking out code, and possibly withdrawing from the org around her? Rather than doing her intended job.

But, it is a lot to ask for a manager to do all of that, and she was a Principal engineer after all.

Getting a job is like getting married, even if things look all good at the ceremony, there's still years of sustained work/relationship-building to come. This one looks like a case of bad matching. In no way as to diminish Coraline's story, I've seen this happen to a lot of different kinds of people from all walks of life.

My 2 pennies.

I was 20, naively unaware of the ways of the real world, and nearly overnight, I lost everything and everyone I cherished in my life.

Over the next 6 months, it slowly dawned on me that those who survive and thrive are those willing to screw other people over for their own benefit without as much as blinking an eye, as long as it suits them.

"This is the way of the world", I thought to myself.

Over the next decade, I focused, and worked my ass off. On my way up, I encountered countless more rich, successful and morally bankrupt individuals, and the higher I go, the more sophisticated the moral bankruptcy gets.

To be fair, it's not the fault of a lot of these individuals. Some of them genuinely do not comprehend the consequences of their actions - it just doesn't cross their mind. Instead, the fault lies with a system that not only enables but promotes this kind of behavior to the very top, without an effective counter-balancing weight on the other end. And we are the custodians of the system, we are the ones who shape it on a daily basis, by the actions that we take, the investments that we make, and the kind of relationships that we build.

Uber is now more popcorn worthy than both HoC and Trump administration combined.

TK has the unfortunate habit of leaving a trail of history of screwing his employees, and that shit stinks, and sticks.

You either: Treat your employees well such that they will go to war for you because protecting your interests is as important as protecting themselves and their own interests.

OR

Be the unbendable, spotless and ruthlessly calculating leader raising a horde of mindless robots. You churn them out and turn them over as soon as they're used up, but there's no room for you to be a flawed human being.

Can't have the cake and eat it too. Know thyself, and choose your path.

I uh..... I've always been talking to myself when I'm not talking to other people.....

I didn't know it was unusual....

Same here. Getting fired is stressful, but losing a loved one is a soul-crushing experience that will kick me into a deep depression for months.

Work is a means to getting money, and curing boredom; precisely in that order.

I suspect this is some clever social engineering to get people to be more fearful over losing their jobs.

Or, to put in a different thought, we are all subject to the physical realities of the world we live in, and we barter and trade what we each have with one another to better control the world itself, while being controlled by it simultaneously.

Or, to put in even another way, Life.

People still use Google+?!

Because an obviously incompetent hustler feels like the lesser of two evils compared to a well qualified snake who's secretly stabbing you in the back.

Not saying it's rational, or correct, or wise. Just saying that I'm pretty sure that's how people feel.

In a functional society with strong leadership, people are allowed to come up short, and not suffer as a result of coming up short.

The US used to be like this, and people thrived as a result. We've been heading in the opposite direction.

Slavery lasted for thousands of years, and it's REALLY hard to argue with the "business results" of slavery.

Having "success" be the metric is a very slippery slope.

Good leadership can have the power to stop a good amount of squabbling between teammates, simply by spreading their view point and guiding people through tough situations.

You seem like a good leader. I felt more stressed after reading the original post, but I felt a lot less stressed after reading your comment.

I hope you use the way you think to lead and do good.

Zenefits had their fuck-ups and they've been paying their dues and righting their wrongs.

This feels a bit much.

Kicking people when they're down is just bad karma.

The voice of reason.

This is a race to the bottom.

The real survival struggle is against Apple, Tesla and Google.

They probably tried to modernize GoDaddy and the efforts didn't take. Look at the folks she's brought over from MSFT.

This is just moving on to greener pastures as the market shifts its expectations. This is potentially a well timed career move as well depending on what she's going to be doing at Google.

How is this even possibly legal? I know some folks who are trying to build a new service to revamp existing corporate personnel performance reviews and this is exactly the kind of thing that is proving to be difficult.

Seriously. How?!

http://www.hg.org/defamation.html

I agree.

This seems more like a good example of the kind of mistakes/challenges that an inexperienced manager would encounter.

People are people, which is to say that people will always attempt to game the system, in one way or another. The keyword here being "attempt". Strong and experienced leadership should be capable of not only managing the human nature of the workforce and help bring out people's best, but also have enough experience to understand how to maintain the integrity of the company's culture. There is no perfect system for structuring a group of human beings. You have to deal with things as they come up.