dareobasanjo

The idea that OpenAI people whose focus is building an AGI that can replace humans in every viable human activity will create a more ethical outcome than Microsoft whose focus is using AI to empower workers to do more sounds extremely unlikely.

People have gotten into their heads that researchers are good and corporations are bad in every case which is simply not true. OpenAI's mission is worse for humanity than Microsoft's.

Benedict Evans is fond of saying that ads is one of the biggest revenue makers for tech but is completely misunderstood by anyone who doesn’t work on it.

An Uber ride typically costs tens of dollars. There is no ad model where you can justify paying that sort of money for random people at scale. All of the examples in the article are forms of specific niches with high ROI (e.g. targeting a user known to buy IAPs to install Candy Crush, email addresses of corporate employees to sell them expensive SaaS products, etc). These are all outliers.

The average Uber ride is about $25 according to https://finance.yahoo.com/news/average-uber-lyft-prices-then...

Facebook’s ARPU in Q3 of 2022 was $50 according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...

So it takes a Facebook user 6 weeks of viewing ads to generate the sad revenue equivalent to one Uber ride. Cool mock ups but this is an idea that makes less business sense than having SBF run a crypto exchange with no oversight.

No one who worked at Microsoft under Ballmer & Satya believes this. I’m curious as to why people believe that Ballmer who missed every major tech trend, threw good money after chasing competitors and had zero idea how to build build good products “laid the foundation” versus acknowledging Satya’s significant success?

What's actually barbaric is forcing people to move away from their friends and family in their hometowns to come live in San Francisco where there's literally faeces in the streets and a shack costs $1M let alone a livable home when can do the work just fine from their homes. The medium to large 6-figure salaries are a trade off and it's actually fairer to employees to allow them to make the choice themselves.

Using the word “evil” to describe these companies when today there are people literally dying from COVID19 because of the policies of their employers & governments seems like a lack of perspective to me.

The framing of your question has no good answer like the classic “are you still beating your wife?” where either a yes or no is still a bad look.

Really weird to see this posted on a site that uses Google Analytics. I performed a quick search and couldn't find a similar post from Mozilla complaining that people can't opt-out from Google Analytics. I guess the > $500M/year Mozilla gets from Google buys a bunch of selective outrage.

Microsoft isn't selling your PC usage data to advertisers. If you doubt me, go ahead and show me how you can buy this data. I'll gladly give you my next month's salary if you can.

There is zero talent involved in investing such that you beat inflation. Inflation rate hovers between 1% - 3% per year. Stock market returns hover between 5% - 10% per year for fairly conservative choices like an S&P 500 index fund.

There is nothing luckier than being born rich. Treating it as some sort of skill to remain rich is part of the dysfunction in US society where wealth is equated with virtue & character.

With the passing of the CLOUD act, moving your server or email outside the US likely won't help. See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/cloud-act-dangerous-ex...

That's really weird math since you start with engineering college graduates then jump to talking about the entire population. So you're comparing apples to oranges.

Here's something simple. Go look at the metrics for demographics of college majors by degree at http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c2/c2s2.htm

Blacks are about 7% - 8% of college graduates with CS degrees each year. So one would assume that if tech companies were hiring US college graduates at an equivalent rate based on graduation rates then most tech companies would look like Apple that has 7%-8% black employees in their workforce.

I'm always amused when people post racist comments and then claim "I'm not racist". Just own your racism.

In my article, I specifically talk about Atlanta which is a "black city" as you term it. Atlanta is home to Georgia Tech which is one of the best engineering schools in the country. So it is strange to imply you wouldn't be able to find CS graduates there.

Secondly, companies have no problem opening engineering offices in China or India to chase after demographics so I find it strange that opening an engineering office in Atlanta is such an absurd idea that one must trot out the must played out racist tropes about black people.

Since you're the second person who's asked on this thread. Here's a link to stats about STEM (including computer science) graduates in the US - http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c2/c2s2.htm

Assuming everyone who graduated with a CS degree from the US was hired at an equivalent then one would expect something closer to 7%-8%.

I'm honestly confused by your response. Companies like Facebook, Twitter & Google hire 1% blacks in tech and 2% overall. Blacks as a percentage of college graduates in engineering or non-engineering fields are way more than 2% of graduating classes.

However most Silicon Valley tech companies under-hire from this demographic for their own reasons.

It's interesting that the author of the article primarily blames stack ranking for her challenges.

From her post she came in with extremely high expectations of how well she'd do at Microsoft (promoted within 6 months), she got a new manager and immediately assumed they'd play favorites with their existing employees then once given a project she couldn't handle instead of asking for help waited too long so "she wouldn't seem clueless".

Then she gets a performance review that says she didn't do well and blames the system & her manager. This seems to expose a significant lack of introspection and self awareness.

Is there a company in the world that gives a good performance review when someone spends months on a project, doesn't make progress and doesn't ask for help until it's too late?

That said there are two places where Microsoft's former performance review methodology hurts here

1. Microsoft used to give people a score in the misguided belief that knowing "you suck" or "you're awesome" relative to your peers is motivational. In some cases, it does but in many cases it has the opposite effect where it causes someone to be so discouraged that they quit. Which is what the blog author did.

2. The requirement to have people who are flagged as "underperforming" in stack rank based models discourages managers from helping people who are struggling. As a manager it is actually somewhat of a relief to have someone who you can clearly award the "sucks" label without the strain of having to decide which of your team of good performers needs to draw the short straw(s). This to me was one of the biggest problems with the model as a manager at Microsoft since your reward for turning around a poor performer is to find someone else to mark as a poor performer.