FWIW, I just heard this guy (Head of Growth) on Lenny's podcast a few days ago and one of the things he explicitly mentioned was creating intentional friction for growth. This seems to be one of those tests.
649 karma · joined January 25, 2010
But there's competition out there -- the open-source chinese models. In their current form, I assume that will turn off many people but new models -- based on those -- are likely to appear. Also, OAI and Google will release new models and pick up the lost customers.
And for what? For clicks? To tell on someone? To smear someone? What "good" was accomplished from this leak and this article? Some advertiser dollars were made -- probably a trivial amount compared to the value of honest debate among the most powerful in tech.
The average ICE engine hasn't changed, from a technology standpoint, has not changed in decades. What's changed is all the internal technology (entertainment systems, parking cameras) as well as trim that's become standard (power everything). These standards are defined by the market. Case in point: see what the standard for cars (both quality and price) are for a given market like US vs India.
It's unlikely they will lower margins so much as to make less money from EV's than from ICE cars. An analogous model are iPhones. The old iPhones could be sold today at a fraction of the price but instead they release new models with better features to justify the higher price point.
(This is all with a caveat that I'm talking about sticker price. Given that EV maintenance should generally be cheaper, without a doubt the target is to have the total cost of ownership be lower than an ICE car as that's how EV's are being positioned today.)
1. It felt like a nuclear winter for tech jobs between 2000/2001 and 2004/2005. Jobs were available but it was way more competitive to get them and you were a lot less likely to get that dream job. You either settled for a crappier job or you changed directions. Many younger people just went back to school (get the master, law degree, etc.) as an alternative.
It felt like the party was over. All the great company perks disappeared. Traffic on freeways disappeared. The mood was very flat. It wasn't sexy being in tech like it is today. Nowadays people just talk about TC or stock. That kind of talk disappears.
2. Like I mentioned above, it was about a 3-5 year period. Again, not all situations are the same. But whenever you have large macroeconomic problems, they take time to sort out. It also depends on how quickly the downside factors resolve themselves. The longer it takes to solve those, the longer a recovery is dragged out.
It also depends on what the growth engine is for pulling things back up. Back then, there was a resurgence in internet business starting around 2005 when "web 2.0" got popular and many new businesses came on the scene. This includes social networking, ecommerce, web publishing.
Imagine the mechanics if they involved every single low-level manager in decision making. You'd never find 15%. Everyone would justify where a person on their team or their team as a whole deserves to be saved. So you apply broader rules (eg certain products, certain types of jobs, performance based). The upside is that you can avoid people-specific favoritism. The downside is that you lose good people in those areas as you're not distinguishing good from bad.
However, their coverage of Facebook since the election has showed me how much bias there is in the media as well as how much an entity can serve their own agenda.
Unfortunately the truth behind these integrations are beyond what your average person can understand. Your average person doesn’t understand how OAuth and user consent / permissioning works. And so media can prey on the ignorance of people to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt. NYTimes comes off just as bad as Fox News.
I bet you none of the authors have ever implemented 3rd party auth. I doubt any engineers were consulted. Instead they quote so called “media experts” that are just professors at universities who again know nothing about the technical integration and how it works.
I’ve seen some people who understand how OAuth works but these are clearly engineers. NYTimes could’ve used the opportunity to explain how people gave consent but instead chooses a different narrative in order to 1) get page views; 2) attack an arguably competitor in the media space and 3) blame FB for getting Trump elected.
In the beginning, Facebook was, to some extent, private. I'm thinking back to the days when they were rolled out college by college. Even after then, mostly people of a certain generation were on FB.
Since then, their reach has gone global and it reached the late adopters: parent, grandparents, uncles and aunts. As that circle became larger, Facebook felt less private.
What the article seems to have missed is that the popularity around other sharing models is actually relatively new. 1-1 messaging, at least on mobile, really only got huge within the last 2-4 years. How old is Snapchat? < 3 years? And it's been mainstream-ish for less than that. Secret, Whisper, Kik... all of these apps with different sharing models are a pretty recent phenomenon.
It seems pretty silly to call this an "about face" considering the span of time considered. Opinions always evolve over time. Look at Steve Jobs: Famously known for saying that Apple would "never" make a tablet smaller than the original iPad. Lo and behold, they did.
Products and the philosophy around them change over time, especially in an area like tech which is quick moving and ever-changing.
After 4 years and earned all of that initial grant, it probably will make more financial sense to move on as the refresher grants don't come close to the initial grant. It also is a point where salary disparity might be significantly different (depending on economic conditions).
These users are what typically is referred to as whales. The biggest obstacle to monetizing whales is new content. Also, whales tend to be less price-sensitive. That is, they will buy what content you have at a reasonable price, and that price should be based on what those (paying) users will pay.
I don't really buy the convenience argument. It's unclear whether they released 10 books and users were still only buying 2. That is, they were unable to test whether convenience or the lack of new content was the gating factor. I suspect it was the latter.
I do think there are false negatives through this process but that's the trade off, I believe, for efficiency. Considering how time consuming interviews are (for the interviewer), there has to be some ways of reducing the wheat from the chaff.
After all, many use a university degree (from a prestigious university) as an initial filter. However, I'm sure there are many talented people who don't have degrees. But when looking at the probabilities, your chances of finding a great candidate are significantly higher if you filtered on that degree.
When dealing with scale, its important to have efficient solutions. They may need to be time efficient or space efficient due to constraints. Even though space is cheap and hardware is fast, inefficient algos may never work or be very high cost.
Maybe you won't be the one implementing this infrastructure but you may be implementing code on top of this infrastructure and it matters that you understand (at least the basics) the consequences of designing things a certain way.
You could prepare for months but if you don't understand the core CS concepts then it's difficult to hack these kinds of interview problems. Having a solution is one thing, but coming up with 3 different solutions to the same problem based on various constraints (preprocessing, space/time constraints) requires understanding.
If they "hacked" this, then thru likely understand the concepts well enough such that its sufficient for the job.
Also, interviewers should ask if they interviewee has seen the coding problem before and come prepared with a backup. Interviewers are also looking to see if the interviewee derives the answer too easily. Usually scraping the surface reveals whether the person really knows what they're talking about or not.
- In the beginning, there are few rules and so it's the wild west. Developers see what they can get away with.
- As time goes on, platforms look at what uses of it pose a key threat to their core product (e.g. social graph, twitter client, payment platform, third-party engines, etc.) Those threats will be extinguished. Developers dependent on those key threats will be burned as they get shut down.
- Ad rates when the market is empty will always be cheaper than when the market becomes crowded.
- Competition makes it harder for smaller devs to survive. Remember the days when you could be an indie developer and have a chance at succeeding on iOS? Now all the big guys chart and the small guys don't make squat.
- The part about mobile is true but this is affecting ALL web platforms, not just FB.
Yes, Supercell got a huge investment but they are the exception, not the rule. They are the "Zynga of iOS" if you will (in the context of success/investment). The question is whether we'll see more of these kind of investments. Given that games is a hits-based business, I'm guessing it'll still be pretty rare.