1,234 karma · joined May 14, 2020
But don't you think that a more civilized way to solve it is by voting and changing the legislators who think this is right?
I mean, the issue is when it goes from a sacrificed lamb CEO from a very disgraceful industry and replicates to the rest of society.
For instance: The shareholders of Tesla know that it has a huge dependency on the services of Elon Musk, and the continuity and value of the business rely upon his ability to work (i.e. not being dead); I strongly believe that if the board of directors does not allocate security services to keep the continuity of his life (i.e. to keep him working) I would be surprised that it wouldn't be a gross breach in their fiduciary duties.
[1] - https://fortune.com/2024/09/14/tech-billionaire-ceos-securit...
[2] - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000119312510...
The problematic aspect of this argument is that if expanded to the whole society, it can lead to a very dark place.
I come from a place that has 40K+ murders per year [1]. People literally dies all the time there, and as much everyone is so fed up with corruption and inequality, I strongly believe that institutions, law, and order are the best solution once I experimented it in another place.
People all over the internet are using the narrative related to the insurance industry that let people die, and this CEO was the sacrificial lamb of this narrative. Its an easy thing to do since it's a direct cause and consequence thing.
But expanding the same logic, should politicians have the same treatment since their decisions have way more consequences [2]? Of course not.
As someone who saw civilization and savagery, I would choose the first in a heartbeat, and the main issue here is the incentive structure that rounds the health system in USA and why the political class does not take action to change it.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/312455/number-homicides-...
[2] - https://www.metropoles.com/brasil/eleicoes-40-candidatos-mor...
It's bonkers to me that the board of this company did not know that he did not have any personal security, and definitely someone somehow will open a lawsuit to uncover that.
If a S&P 100 CEO is so approachable like this, what this company board thinks that it would hold someone to threaten or kidnap the CEO himself or it's family members to get some advantage?
My impression is that in the B2B sales there’s a huge component in terms of being a corporation to give some sort of credibility.
[1] - https://medium.com/@MohapatraHemant/ai-the-last-employee-aa0...
For example, in a large company, no one will allow you to make changes during your first day or month of work. Unlike start-ups and scale-ups, where there may be an automatic assumption of competency, in larger organizations, you need to demonstrate your skills and convince those around you of your capabilities.
It can feel like a ritualistic corporate dance, and for someone like me, who comes from smaller organizations, it was challenging to navigate. However, over time, people began to recognize my work, and now I can handle most tasks independently.
A lot of companies are firing people and keeping some kind of skeleton crew, and a lot of institutional (tacit) knowledge is being lost, and at the time those companies/teams need to do some of the fix or evolution in their product, everything takes at least 3x more time and effort.
I can see in some interviews for MLE/DE where companies aren't hiring for new products and/or sustain and support (OK, fair enough for this market), but the ones hiring are actually doing that for deep issues in terms of technical debt or losses in terms of institutional knowledge that went away with the layoff.
One company was offering some lateral movement in terms of role plus 10% salary increase to essentially migrate their whole orchestration system, move away all data pipelines from Scala to Python, and do the knowledge transfer because most of their staff just quit or was fired and none of their DS/MLE (star staff) knew about those technologies. Unless I'm unemployed, there is no way I would leave my job to a death march project like this and get fired after 6 months.
That was my case when I was hired to a DAX50: My manager told me to get the first year to learn about the company. At the first moment, I thought that was stupid and in 3 months I could be up to speed. For the technical and product part it was quite everything OK in 6 months; the part that took more time was the organizational and getting the organizational capital.
They were unfit to complete the tasks. But again was not their fault, I think was the hiring that failed.
One concrete example was the fact that our pipelines was quite straightforward for data engineers: packaged Ruby and Python CLIs that runs commands. The runtime was k8s. One of the biggest issues were when something broke in production, none of the people couldn’t go to the container, check the logs and understand the failure.
There’s one situation where I think makes sense to hiring without a test: if the company has the resources and money to provide levelling training for all new hires with no exceptions. I do not know how practical it is.
The issues began when we started working together in a Data Engineering team. Most of our stack was based on Hadoop, Kubernetes, Ruby, Python, and several other technologies that required a basic understanding of cloud computing.
However, since we had such a wide range of work experiences and backgrounds, I often found myself not doing the work I was hired for but instead covering for others. I ended up doing a lot of "glue work" to compensate for the fact that some colleagues couldn’t even handle basic tasks, such as Python CLI packaging using Docker or inspecting jobs in Hadoop. After some time, I decided to leave—not because I thought I was special, but because I was fed up with spending 80% of my time providing support for people who were hired at the same level or even higher than me.
I recognize that the company had very poor hiring practices, but some form of basic technical testing is necessary.
In our case, we made some ensembling with several small models using Keras. Our secret sauce at that time was in the specificity of our data and the labeling.
The ecosystem, roughly speaking was: * Theano: Verbosity nightmare * Torch: Not-user friendly * Lasagne: A complex attraction on top of Theano. * Caffe: No flexibility at all, anything not the traditional architectures would be hard to implement * Tensor Flow: Unnecessarily complex API and no debuggability
I do not say that Keras solved all those things right away, but honestly, until just the fact that you could implement some Deep Learning architecture in 2017 on top of Keras I believe was one of the critical moments in Deep Learning history.
Of course today people have different preferences and I understand why PyTorch had its leap, but Keras was in my opinion the best piece of software back in the day to work with Deep Learning.
When the product was starting (2017/2018) the whole setup was quite straightforward: Notebook instances, Inferences, REST APIs for servicing. Some EFS on top and clear that the service centered around S3. And of course, closed price without any surprises.
Was a kind Digital Ocean vibe the whole experience, and a Data Scientist with a rudimentary knowledge and curiosity around infrastructure could setup something affordable, predictable, and simple.
Today we have Wrangler, Feature Store, and RStudio, the console for the notebooks has an awful UX, and several services are under the hood moving data around (and billing for that).
+1
Last year I went to self-hosting and I felt the same. I paid less than USD 2000 for a small laptop that I use as a server plus a home NAS and by my current utilization I got in 3 months the return plus the ownership and flexibility.
I do not know what others feel but with this kind of frictionless setup, plus low intuitivity in the UX/UI of those services, people are not concerned about setting up a credit card, and billing bundling between services (e.g. AWS batch + Lambda + EC2) is part of the business model.
I do not know how to articulate it, but it's more or less like those modern amusement parks where you pay to enter the facility, and for every attraction and even the toilet you pay to go.
I had 14 years of this method and personally, it made me not like any school at all. It makes sense for Math and Grammar, but for most other disciplines (Life Sciences, Geography, Science) I think it's harmful to say at least.
At the time that I got access to Encarta 95 [1] for me was the tipping point that I could explore any topic and navigate until where my curiosity got me.
The missing part of the actual EdTech for me it's that they try to emulate the hiperpassive method of learning of a class with the only difference tgar the people are in the computer.
Now with augmented reality and virtual reality, it's a shame that we still do not have more immersive classes. For instance, would be great to have a class about dinosaurs with some kind of immersion, understand the cell's lifecycle using some VR, see the human body in more specific details, or even learn art via complete immersion.
[1] - The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most - https://a.co/d/eInjwZD
Most of the people that I know that consumes a blend between MSm, independent media, and citizen journalism would not expect the victory of the former POTUS.
It tells a lot about the level of alienation and narrative entertainment that our public media became.
I used to listen more but I agree with this point.
The most fundamental insight that I took from the show was in the episode 80 when Chammath talked about the “hard conversations” between founders of late stage companies and employees about liquidity.
At that time I was working in a late stage SaaS company and after some research I just discovered that our stock options were not only underwater but the founders screwed most of the early employees.
Honestly I started to lost interest mostly cause of the focus about US politics and Ukraine.
The problem with the “something that damages the ability of society to make decisions” it’s with who establishes that and what’s the self correct mechanism those institutions that establishes that has.
The final assessment in the Incident Review was that we should have a multi-cloud strategy. Our luck that we had a very reasonable CTO that prevented the team do to that.
He said something along the lines that he would not spend 3/4 of a million plus 40% of our engineering time to cover something that rarely happens.
I agree with the premise here, but in my experience running incidents review the issue that I see it’s a mixture of a performatic safetycism with reactivity.
Processes are the cheap bandaid to fix design, architectural and cultural issues.
Most of the net positive micro-reforms that we had after incident reviews were the ones that invested in safety nets, faster recoveries, and guardrailing than a new process and will tax everyone.
We used to have an issue of deployments breaking in production, and one of the reasons was that we did not have some kind of smoke test in the post deployment (in our case we only had a rolling update as a strategy).
The rational solution was only create that post-deployment step. The solution that our German managers demanded: cut access to deployment for the entire team, “on-call” to check the deployments, and a deployment spreadsheet to track it.
For instance that passage:
> I first found definitions of 10x engineers, superstars, or rockstar developers, which aren’t definitions of good engineers in any way. Someone may produce a lot of work but it’s often at the cost of team spirit and results in low-quality code. Ultimately, the team is demoralized and the organization bears the cost of substandard code.
I used to work in a tech company (bytes), and now I am working in an old money/traditional company (atoms) that uses technology marginally to stay ahead. My team's (a couple of dozens) median age is 53, and I do not see how this relates to them or even to myself.
I definitely would like to hear more from "Working Bee Engineer", "Dark Matter Engineer", "How I survived 25 layoffs Engineer", "How I kept my sanity working with internal clients Engineer", "I managed to raise kids being in Tech as Engineer", "The bodybuilder/triathlete/sports(wo)man Engineer" and so on.
I'm not being cynical, but I miss the old days of actionable and down-to-earth blogposts that anyone could relate to.
My point is, considering this specific arrangement of 7 hours a day/workday (35h), what would be the offset comparing this same company with 28h/week (4D) with another company not in that arrangement in scenarios where throughput per hour matters?
Local companies in Germany have a very defensive business due to the nature of the market (not so internationalized, highly consolidated, a lot of small businesses that no big corporation would try to enter, and low competition in mid-sized businesses due to bureaucracy).
For local SaaS companies or local companies for sure, it can work since no big competitor can rise. Still, the real test would be Germany placing that in their industrial base (e.g. cars, industrial instruments, chemical industry, logistics), or in some other businesses where the entry barrier is low.
The main problem with those companies is that none of them will have any moat and those businesses aren't defensible.
I resonate with the OP because I am in this exact situation that I am building something but I cannot leave my current job now.
When some friends started to build companies in mid-2000/mid-2010 you could code/build something, try to get some traction and you could be received by VCs/angels and occasionally they could write a 25K check for you to work for 3-6 months to build it and perhaps you could get some traction and then scale or go burst.
Now the bar for new products it's absurdly high if you're out of the YC or San Francisco VC circles or if you do not have anyone in the industry; plus most of the VCs prefer to invest in "pedigree founders" than in unknown people, especially if those people are outside of the bay area.
In my first endeavor, I went with a finished product that undercut some big enterprise SaaS vendors, and we lost space for a bunch of non-technical guys with PPTs and one idea.