smueller1234

They have a few mechanisms to try and drive up commission from the usual 12%, though. They have a preferred program which boosts search results but costs 3%> They would have loved to drop it to better tune search, but they were addicted to the incremental revenue.

At various times there were also dynamic ranking boost efforts, where a hotel could increase boost their ranking (with a preview) by increasing the commission percentage. IIRC that went as high as 18%.

Both of those applied to the default search results order ONLY. If you clicked "order by price" or similar then you simply got that.

(Worked for booking until end of 2017.)

By the way, I've lived in a few European countries and researched many others. The Netherlands was by far the easiest/most efficient in terms of bureaucracy.

That being said, it also sounds like a toxic overall environment, independent from the middle management role (eg. from MoM to (Senior) Director in big corps). Allow me to maybe try and redeem the role just a little bit.

By my own metric, I've been in middle management for over a decade now, and by most accounts probably pretty successfully so. Here's a couple of take aways for folks who are thinking about such a career path. I don't think any of this would've salvaged your situation though.

- Even more so than a line manager, you will benefit greatly from becoming good at transitive gratification. Learn to see other folks' (usually your team) success as a source for your own happiness and achievements. This has both contributed to my sense of achievement and happiness but also helped me learn that credit being split is usually still worth more than half.

- Appreciate the challenge. I've walked into problematic teams/organizations more than once, full knowing, because I wanted the challenge. Sometimes I succeeded and the teams became happier and more productive (which often has causation in either direction). Sometimes I most decidedly did not succeed. It's just like with technical challenges that way. Just try to gauge whether or not you have the support to see it through and drive change. Again, just like in a technical project.

- I've had the luxury of largely working in environments where most people, engineers, managers, executives, etc were reasonably competent. It has been rare that execs were true bullshit artists. Obviously that helps, but most importantly it makes the following feasible: be genuine. You can't always provide 100% transparency because context matters, but you can try to get as close as is safe for folks. State your intentions. Never lie. Treat political backstabbing harshly. Just, well, act with integrity. In my experience, with enough tenacity, this eventually makes it much easier to have your teams' respect. Knowing you can get transitive gratification makes that so much easier. This probably breaks down at the latest around an org size of several hundred where folks can't experience you as an individual anymore.

- Be a bit of a shit umbrella but not in a load bearing way. This is a special case of the previous point - if you try to protect your teams from the latest executive fire drill, but for some reason you fail to deliver on it while insulating the teams right up to the breaking point, it'll be so much worse when it all punches through at once. Equally, you won't get the thing done that is required, eroding your own management chain's trust in you. Bonus: by being transparent to your leads and involving them gently, you give them an opportunity to practice your succession.

- Do not skimp on performance management. Be principled. Don't play favorites. Give feedback early. Be empathetic in how you deliver it, and how you act on it. But don't let that be your excuse for not doing it consistently. It's hard. Exhausting. Often awkward when either party isn't used to giving/receiving it. But it's not unkind or doesn't have to be. Having had a great manager who was willing to give me difficult feedback has saved me from failure more than once. When one of my reports, whom I had done a PIP with, got promoted a few years later, I was happier than if I had been promoted myself. If you do this well, folks on your teams will better understand expectations. If you do it with empathy, they will build trust in you. Good people from elsewhere will be happy to join your teams because they see folks' development. It really can be a virtuous cycle.

- Develop a keen sense for how power distance changes relationships. Treat people with respect regardless of their seniority or lack thereof. That 23 year old intern also brings their unique experiences. Never talk down on anybody. But also never forget that power distance creates severely imbalanced relationships. As much as it may pain you, be very careful about becoming personal friends with your reports. It can work, and has worked for me many times, but there's little more crushing than learning that it was less than genuine. They themselves may not even realize it at the time.

- The move from engineering manager to indirect manager is, for many people, more subtly challenging than when they first became a manager to begin with. It's an insidious change where you can get away with little adjustment of approach for a while. That's usually a straight path to become a horrible micromanager. (Been there, learned the lesson.) I must have asked nearly a hundred candidates in interviews about how they experienced this transition and this is by far the most common pitfall. Instead, build out a trust-but-verify approach, letting go of some details, giving your leads leeway to explore solutions, while creating a set of metrics and controls/reviews that will alert you when you need to step in to help.

That all being said, in the spirit of this thread, I've made a lot of mistakes along the way, and continue to do so. Some mistakes I regret (others I recognize as source of learning). The management mistake I probably make the most frequently is: not doing performance management early/consistently enough. If you let it go for a while because it's exhausting, or because you're not confident enough, or simply because it's no fun, then it just becomes more and more difficult and unkind to the recipient. I still fall into this trap sometimes. Is it their performance? Or are my expectations just not calibrated in this new org I just moved to? ...

But the biggest, most hurtful mistake so far surely has to be a case where my instinct had told me that somebody was toxic, but my hubris won out, thinking I can salvage them for their talent. It even appeared to work for a while, my hubris making me provide them with increasing amounts of sponsorship, which they reciprocated with ever increasing success (they did have talent). Fast forward another year, I've allowed myself to think of them as a friend. Transitive gratification goes into overdrive. Finally managed to establish them as a peer, splitting my own organization in half. The day they became a peer, they basically stop talking to me. Within a month our now mutual manager concludes that the person wasn't ready (did I mention that I over-sponsored them?) and folded their org back into mine. Toxicity back in full swing. Eventually they rage quit by deliberately (I think) getting themselves fired for talking about internals on Twitter. On the way out, they blamed me for all bad things. Wow, did I mess that up, good intentions be damned. Hope they're alright now.

Anyway, I hope that there's still folks willing to try out a middle management role for the right reasons. We all deserve better management. :)

http://what-if.xkcd.com

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss_SMT

15 years ago, when I was there, Zeiss SMT also did the light sources (discussed elsewhere in the thread), btw, not just supplying the lenses. Don't know if that's still the case. I don't know exactly what the lens/mirror systems for EUV look like, but the "old" 193nm ones were something to behold.

tl;dr:There's a real efficiency/security/insider risk trade-off here.

Edit: I should disclose that I work for a competitor. Don't intend any astroturfing.

The "hydrogen" in "hydrogen bomb" relates to fusion. In a nutshell, these types of devices use a fission bomb to create the environment (pressure/temperature) that causes lighter atoms to undergo fusion, which significantly boosts the explosive yield compared to a pure fission bomb.

Managers are happy when they get their hands on a new role to hire into because they all have more projects than they (think that they) can deliver at good quality with the people they have.

That being said, I think it was not a mistake for the previous owner(s) to sell at the time. Priceline had cash, and the marketing heavy ("buy ads in January, stay in summer, bill hotel at the end of the month after the stay") business had significant cash flow challenges in terms of growth.

When I joined in late 2010, Booking still seemed to be viewed as a bit of a poorly understood miracle by the group folks, growing nearly 2x every year. Certainly the engineering department was so much less... corporate... than the mothership's that we were sometimes referred to as the cowboys in Amsterdam.

Shortly thereafter, they hired Darren Huston to run Booking, who relatively soon after that (like 24 months? I'm sure Google search will find that answer) also became the group CEO, all based in Amsterdam. At the latest then, Booking would have been officially the core of the company, even though it had been the growth motor for well longer.

Historically, the benefits offered by Priceline group to booking were IMO chiefly aforementioned cash flow for growth, and shared technical infrastructure (WAN, shared colo space). Booking had outgrown the group infrastructure team's ability to scale. The perpetual culture clash eventually led to the central infrastructure group being broken up (very much an outcome driven by the booking CTO, Brendan Bank). So we built our own network and DC team since we had far, far outgrown the infrastructure needs of other group companies.

For a long time, Booking was so focused on only doing things that were strictly measurable and attributable that we didn't do any brand advertising or classical marketing (cf. quantitative fallacy). We co-grew with Google search ads in particular and had built very significant tooling around AdWords since the Google provided infrastructure didn't scale. Unofficially, we were the largest ads customer for a long time spending billions annually at useful ROI. This "stealth mode" meant that we weren't getting a lot of DDoS type threats to deal with for example and likely less fraud risk. It also meant that we always chuckled in earnings calls when analysts praised the "Priceline business being very successful overseas". Eventually reality caught up and PCLN became BKNG - Booking Holdings.

'twas a wild ride. Not always fun but chock full of learning.

AMA if you like.

I was there from 2010-2017. The philosophy of the holdings was to let its constituent companies execute independently and even compete (this included Priceline.com, Agoda, Kayak, rentalcars.com, OpenTable, etc). Therefore the culture of booking.com remained fairly intact for a very long time.

Look up PUE for data centers. Because I work for Google, I recall, for example, that we build very efficient data centers:

https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/

Ie. just 10% overhead.

I'm not involved in any of the ongoing and wouldn't comment on it. Came here to assert that this team is neither stupid nor callous.

At a large trade show, I once ran into a retired nuclear engineer and we had a long conversation: he had been called back into service by the state out of desperation. There weren't enough knowledgeable folks who could do safety audits of the plants for TüV. This was 14 years ago and things would be far worse today.

Restarting a complex industry (and it's ageing plants) that's been out of favor for literally decades is difficult and in this case also dangerous.

I'm a (German) physicist by training and worked at a nuclear research facility at the time.

That being said, I'm perfectly happy to just be proud of what DeepMind has achieved. They've been great to interact with when there were shared challenges, and I - and to my knowledge all colleagues around me - aren't very interested in a question of credit assignment.

And from a different field, but closer to the quip: semiconductor lithography lenses' own weight causes stresses that cause birefringence in the optics that has to be explicitly corrected for. And that was true 20 years ago already.

(Recovering particle physicist here and thinking about this even much later gives me mild trauma. ;) )

https://perldoc.perl.org/perlop#Relational-Operators

Case in point, I'm in my forties and have a family with young kids and have arguably been successful as well.

The PAO published an article on the highest energy arrival directions in 2007 (https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.2843) and I was very sad that I wasn't on the author list (yet) at the time since I hadn't been around for a full year. The discovery was a correlation in arrival directions with the known location of supermassive black holes in the center of other galaxies ("active galactic nuclei"). I was less sad when it appeared to have been a statistical fluke a couple of years later (about 3 sigma worth, enough for a discovery claim in astronomy but not in particle physics - PAO is a mix of both disciplines and the arguments were always thrilling).

We then went back to data collection and analysis and became much more cautious about publication of correlation analysis. (I moved on in 2010.) More recently (2018) it looks like there's a higher significance correlation study: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.06160. An outstanding breakthrough, yet I think in principle this surprises nobody in the field. They also published a paper purely about the anisotropic arrival directions (no correlation analysis with known objects) that showed that far more of the highest energy events arrived from the side facing away from the milky way. This shows (again to no surprise of anybody in the field, but you need to prove it anyway) that these particles are of extragalactic origin. A mechanism that puts this much energy into a single particle might not be conducive to life nearby (ie. in the same galaxy).

With that background back to your topic of inquiry: Regarding origin paths of such high energy particles.

~All ultra high energy cosmic rays are believed to be charged particles. That means their path is changed by galactic and intergalactic magnetic fields. (Mostly the latter, they are weaker but the distances are so very much longer.) That means the higher the particle's energy, the less it's path will be bent by the magnetic fields. At lower energies, they are basically arriving from random directions (isotropically) because their paths are bent into curves. We don't have a great way to get super accurate models of these magnetic fields (I lack the detailed background to comment on the theory here). Still, at these energies and with the upper limits that we believe about the strength of the fields, and with the measurement accuracy of the more modern PAO detectors (angular resolution better than 1 degree) we get something on the order of a few degrees or so (didn't have a chance to reread entire paper, this is from memory) in terms of uncertainty on the arrival direction.

The upshot of that is that a single event isn't really useful on its own. There's also significant uncertainty in the energy measurement, so again, a single event like the flys eye event doesn't make for finding an origin. But the larger dataset does, if you match it against potential sources. (In case you're wondering: yes, one has to be careful with bias in those analyses.)

On an aside, such a setup is also a layer of defense-in-depth protection against a certain, uncommon class of bugs.

I do work for Google, but don't, in any way, speak for the company. All of the above information can be found on the internet, eg. https://www.quora.com/Does-Google-really-delete-the-account-... about Google accounts themselves.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-shredding

The remote connection to safety (did you mean security?) would be that static source analysis tools don't work as reliably with dynamic languages. That matters at Google. But you don't even have to think as hard about it: Python is simply comparatively slow and inefficient. Google's fleet is large. It pays off to use more efficient languages.

(There's also the whole thing about Python being largely single threaded and computers being very wide these days, as well as being a terrible memory hog and memory making up half the cost of servers.)