Someone did the math on this, right? I thought the amount of revenue generated was a complete pittance.
More likely, this is just something sites start doing on top of advertising.
69 karma · joined September 24, 2017
More likely, this is just something sites start doing on top of advertising.
Most start-ups aren't solving any huge problems, and sometimes market inefficiencies are there for a reason (see all the start-ups involving the field of law, for example).
Even for the ones that are solving a big problem (that people are willing to pay for), it's very uncommon to have no competitors.
So typically the way to make a successful company is to be better than your competitors, and the way you do that is through customer support, UX, etc.
So to your credit, I think for most start-up founders this is the way to move forward. But it's definitely a bit of a sunk cost fallacy - it's really hard to admit your idea will never be successful and to start over from scratch.
It's easier, and has more obvious ways to measure success, to adjust relatively minor things.
I can think of quite a few products that look nice and the workflows are quite easy, but at the end of the day they're just not solving a problem I'd be willing to pay money for (and, often, they disappear later).
It's very hard to admit that you were wrong about the fundamentals of your product, and very easy to think that re-designing the homepage will fix everything.
“Put down” here is an analogy for being fired. I don’t actually think Rick should be put down. I’d hoped that was obvious.
Again this is more like a dog that’s been abused over the years and then mauls a kid.
No ones surprised that the dog is aggressive, and the owners are obviously guilty of abusing an animal - a horrible thing for the owners to have done.
That doesn’t change that the dog’s aggressive now, though, and should be put down.
Good, I’m glad we agree that you insufficiently argued that people backed into a corner aren’t responsible for their actions.
The court might take your emotional state into account when you murder someone, but if they’ve got you dead-to-rights you’re still going to prison.
Does Rick deserve to get blacklisted? No. Would I have been incredibly upset if they named the individual? Yes.
Did Rick deserve to get fired even though they basically set him up to get fired? Yep, he still does.
Did Rick react inappropriately to a horrible situation? Yep, he did.
I absolutely get to say what the arbitrary line is in this case because I’m the one making the subjective judgment that Rick was most likely being an asshole.
If Rick had snapped and shot up the place would you think he should face no consequences?
To go back to my analogy: Frankenstein’s monster still killed a bunch of people at the end of the day, even if it was Frankenstein’s fault that the monster existed at all.
We can blame Frankenstein while still agreeing that his monster should’ve faced consequences for its actions.
That doesn’t mean the dog shouldn’t be put down. It just means there are also other parties at fault.
See also: Steve Jobs, famously.
Similarly I can understand how an aggressive dog came to be (poor training, etc.). That won’t change my opinion that the dog should be put down when it mauls a kid, you know?
Most people (at least in my experience, you know, the one who's making the subjective judgement about him being a dick) can be angry without saying something pretentiously mean like that.
It's ok for the conclusion here to be, "Rick's an asshole who should've been fired but management fucked up pretty badly." Situations don't have to be binary with only one party at fault.
EDIT: Let's also not forget the accounts of Rick supposedly berating people in meetings. If multiple people think you're being mean to them, you're probably being mean.
* Why this became such a big problem (and wasn't resolved earlier)
* How to prevent it from happening in the future
Because if one team can effectively silo themselves so well that problems like Rick are allowed to fester for multiple years, I don't have high hopes for the future for them.
> "He refused to take time off or allow any work to be delegated. He also repeatedly rejected attempts to introduce free open source frameworks to replace hard-to-maintain bespoke tools."
Why did he have the authority in either of those last two decisions?
> "I agree that the situation that came about was also his manager’s fault. "
And his manager's manager, and basically anyone who was aware of this project and the fact that it was delayed by two years.
Nobody above Rick's manager was looking into this project when it was delayed by two years? Nobody took a look at the JIRA/whatever board and saw that one person was blocking everyone despite working 100 hours a week?
I mean, Rick's a dick, no doubt. But much like Frankenstein's monster, it's incredibly easy to see who had a hand in transforming Rick into what he became. It's hard to read the original article and not see several large "where the hell was management" red flags:
> Any time there was a particularly challenging problem, Rick would handle it.
That's a management failure, and a particularly egregious one that I see new or overly passive managers make. How do you expect one person not to have all of your domain knowledge if they're solving all of the challenging problems?
Fixing this doesn't even involve being super confrontational:
"I'll fix <database issue 123>." "Hey, Rick, you're already working on XYZ and I want Summer to get some experience working with our database system, so I'd like for her to do it."
> First, he created a cult of dependence.
Because management idly sat by and let him do that. People want to feel irreplaceable and like they're exceptional. One way to do that is to create this cult of dependence. Management's job is to step in and re-assure Rick that he's a valued member of the team while also directly confronting this cult of dependence.
We do this all the time at my job, and we don't even do it using complete thoughts. We just say "bus factor" and everyone understands why one person can't be responsible all the time for something (or in this case, everything).
> Team members didn’t want to speak up and offer their own ideas because he always berated them for it.
Holy shit, you didn't torch his ass for berating people in meetings? Are there even managers at this company?
This, to me, is the worst failure. Either management is ignorant of the berating (bad) or they silently tolerated it (even worse).
I really hope the managers at that company are taking a long hard look in the mirror and doing a post-mortem on what went wrong with Rick. I suspect they're not, and attributing it to one bad employee, but I can hope.
Sure, you can get to an armistice with Harold and Tammy: Housing costs are high but your salary is such that even spending 66% of your pay on housing leaves you with an ample amount of money.
But I wouldn't call that agreement anything other than begrudging.
It's also worth pointing out that this is pretty necessary from the lab's point of view, especially in some of the more high-end labs: PIs (in my experience, anyway) are frequently spending >90% of their time just writing grant proposals and dealing with the funding side of things.
There's very little time for them to do anything besides the funding circuit, and so the actual research part falls to graduate students and postdocs: People who obviously have less experience as professional researchers (and thus many more of them are required).
I (and many others I grew up with) think of Evergreen in the same way I think of avant garde fashion: It's sometimes a precursor of trends to come, but those trends are heavily watered-down and altered versions of the original.
I don't worry about a cultural revolution stemming from Evergreen any more than I worry about a nazi uprising stemming from 4chan.
EDIT: That is to say, both can be influential in their own way but in both cases their particular viewpoints get really watered-down by the time it becomes "mainstream" in any way.