496 karma · joined August 5, 2009
It doesn’t happen often because most companies don’t want to grow their people that much. Consider the frequent HN comment about finding it easier to get a promotion/raise by finding a new job.
That outcome usually comes from some carefully crafted policies at the company level. Stack ranking is an example, though it is more popular recently to talk about in terms of bell curves (of 4-7 people, hah). Caps on raises, onerous documentation processes, and explicit and implicit limits on the number of promotions a manager can request at a time are all popular. There’s a lot of creativity going into crafting policies that limit career growth without saying they are limiting career growth.
Managers that care about people eventually figure this game out, realize how career limiting it is to push too hard on it, and either leave management or switch to caring about org/product stuff more. This has been consistent in my unscientific study of a dozen friends.
That said, I agree with you. I’d like to see that experiment done with a lot of intentionality and care.
How else would one predict the outcome of a die roll, specifically?
It becomes slightly more reasonable if you turret the gun, until you factor in the weight of the necessary ammunition to neutralize multiple threats, the turret itself, and the independent radar used for target acquisition and tracking. A B-52 could pull it off, a fighter couldn’t yet. Not without massively compromising their payload and aerodynamics.
Chaff, flares, stealth and jamming are used because they actually work in practice. Jamming is a big one that people don’t hear about much. Wonder how the B-52 is still in service? Jamming. Wonder how wild weasels do their job? Jamming.
When you see a turret like that on a bomber then you can get excited for self-guided bullets shooting down dozens of multiple incoming missiles. But tbh at the rate we’re going it’ll just be a laser instead.
But for the hacker news crowd, I’d point to this: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-real-class-wa...
TL;DR the income growth of the 0.1% is having a chilling effect on mid-level executives at Amazon and Google, too.
The bulk of the article laments the reality that the media, writ large, wants to report on “Tim vs Jeff”, not on “wealth inequality is out of control and we need to at least break up tech darlings, maybe much more.”
Which would be a big deal, indeed.
https://www.dummies.com/education/history/american-history/h...
Ultimately if you can't be bothered to read a short book on the subject, you can just live with your confusion on the subject. The world can't be boiled down to sophomoric sequences of logic that ignore the complexities of reality and human behavior.
TBH I can see an argument for a college student living at home with low expenses, a job, and/or plenty of loans having more disposable income than 90% of the population. But I’d hesitate to call that the average student experience. The average student income seems to be around $25k/yr as best as I can find on a quick search.
I don’t see how the math works out for your average student to have more disposable income than someone making 300k/yr. How does that work?
Whereas Bernie immediately denounced the shooter and reached out to Steve Scalise. Steve does not blame Bernie for having a deranged fan (https://www.newsweek.com/steve-scalise-shooting-bernie-sande...). Bernie did not imply Steve deserved to be harassed or shot. He has, in fact, asked his supporters to back off (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bernie-s...).
These two things are obviously not equivalent.
I grew up in a lower-middle-class household. We declared bankruptcy once when I was young, and I was told to prepare to have "strangers come and take away furniture" (which, thankfully, never materialized). I never went hungry, but we did live paycheck-to-paycheck and frequently relied on the charity of our extended family to make ends meet. In short, money stress was a thing, and it was obvious from a very young age.
So I consider an attack on someone's employment to be a very serious road to go down because:
- Most people don't have savings, and it isn't necessarily their fault.
- Not everyone has a support structure, we were immensely lucky to have wealthy and generous relatives.
- 4 weeks of unemployment is plenty of time for bills to pile up if someone doesn't have savings, I've taken longer than 4 weeks to find a job every time I've looked.
- COBRA is insanely expensive and may be required if, for example, a close relative is very sick. Fighting with an insurance company as an individual is immensely difficult and interrupting someone's care to have that fight can be life-threatening.
- Desperation breeds poor decision making. That individual may take a pay cut or change careers and never recover.
- The various social consequences of being fired can make finding a job extra difficult.
Basically, I've seen my own family one fail-safe away from disaster, so its easy to imagine the bottom. In fact, that money stress from my childhood has haunted me as an adult -- even though I've never needed to worry about it from a factual standpoint.
I don't have any of these concerns if the individual is obviously wealthy, and I wouldn't go so far as to say one should never try to have anyone fired. But I do personally believe the bar to do so is very high.
Note: I'm not interested in convincing anyone of my point of view. Just giving context for why people think like this.
There are outliers, of course, but that’s the nature of large groups of people.
If we as a society want deep, accurate, journalism we have to figure out a way to make it more profitable than clickbait.
In short, yes, it is beating lobbyists and opportunistic political opponents. Even if this issue is important to you, political capital is not limitless, so it has to be weighed against a whole host of other issues.
I'm expecting a massive backlash against the "culture-forward" style of running a company as the article describes. There's always been a lot of cynicism around things like company values, but that cynicism appears to be increasing at a rapid pace with a meaningful portion of employees (see all the recent articles about Google's internal culture). It doesn't have to be a majority of employees, 20-30% is plenty to materially affect an organization.
Personally, the reason is that a company ultimately isn't "culture-forward" unless if it's willing to take a financial hit in order preserve its culture. Few companies are willing to do that, and that's OK, we are a capitalist society after all. It just isn't OK to hammer culture like its the most important thing while twisting themselves in logical knots to justify highly-profitable activities and actions that the employees call out as being counter-cultural. Some of those conflicts become public & newsworthy (ICE contracts), most of it doesn't (retaining that effective asshole).
Importantly, whether or not senior leadership agrees with the vocal (often significant minority) employees is besides the point. It's a communication issue -- they've created an expectation that isn't being matched -- not an issue of truth. Many of these "culture-forward" companies are losing the ability to tell their employees to "shut up and work" because they've explicitly said they don't want day-to-day work to operate in that manner. But for some reason senior leadership hasn't figured out that they can't operate like that anymore either when they push a culture like Microsoft has.
I think the end game here is companies like Microsoft painting themselves into a corner where a big, big, fight over unionization is all but inevitable. Knowledge workers want a seat at the table precisely because companies have told them they should have that precisely because it improves the bottom line on a small team to be self-organizing (see: Google's project aristotle for more).
https://www.google.com/search?q=do+unions+benefit+employees+...
First two links have loads of commentary with citations. There's plenty of books on the subject, as well, if you're interested. Amazon is a good place to look for them.
He’s presumably happy, his customers are presumably happy, yet we insist on giving him obvious advice about a 25 year old venture. It’s honestly hilarious to see the immense amount of time collectively wasted armchairing over it!
It is really interesting, especially on a site like HN, because the latter is directly contrary to the ethos of most startups.
Compared to Orlando and Salt Lake City, Seattle feels about on par to me with regards to safety and the homeless problem (adjusted for the much higher population & density). Which is useless information because it is an anecdote, but the best way to bring data into a conversation is a lot of useless competing anecdotes.