I scrolled down the thread wondering if someone would mention him and if nobody did I was going to.
It's insane how much hype he had at a young age and how he's delivered again and again. The only players with similar [amount delivered] * [hype] values are peyton manning and tim duncan, but lebron's is way bigger.
Also worth mentioning in his accolades: brought a championship to his hometown, has never had any PR disasters (except for "the decision"), has many charities (scholarships, gives out bikes, etc), and elevated his friends and family to make them successful as well. He's basically done everything right.
And I say this as a long time celtics fan and lebron hater.
But wouldn't all those same problems you outline be the case in other countries?
I think the question isn't "Why are infra costs so high?" which I think your list answers, but instead "Why are infra costs so high in the united states?"
Bribery is legalized in the US in the form of campaign contributions. In fact, the Supreme Court determined it was speech, something whose freedom is enshrined in the constitution.
I'm very saddened by this loss. I took him for both 6.034 (artificial intelligence) and his survey course 6.803 (the human intelligence enterprise). Some memories:
1. I still use VSNC (you can read more about it here: http://blog.pptstar.com/?p=441) as a simple model for delivering technical talks. As a coincidence I has already been planning on giving a meta talk about this to my team next Friday. He cared more about, and spoke more about, presentation skills than every other lecturer I had at MIT, combined.
2. He was also the only professor I heard speak about the value of leadership skills and how they can be cultivated.
3. He really did care about his students. I remember his saying to help us get over imposter syndrome, "At MIT, 5% of students think it's too easy, 10% of students think it's just right, and 85% think that at any moment they're going to be found out."
4. I still remember his definition of intelligence as something you almost understand. He would tell the story of giving a preview of an upcoming lecture where they would write a program to do differential calculus. A student came up to him and said "There is no way a computer could ever do that!" After the lecture the same student came up to him and said "That wasn't really AI. The program just does it the way I do it!"
This article is a little bit old because he mentions the upcoming union vote. The vote has now been cast, and 95% of writers have voted to only work with agents signing a code of conduct that bans packaging:
Funny side note I learned from my girlfriend who is an aspiring writer and has worked at an agency: agents call this practice "getting points on the package" which may be a term that rings a bell if you've watched the wire, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Points%20on%...
I would recommend the book, but would skim the first 300 or so pages and only read deeply the parts that catch your eye. I think the author was on a mission to get the book to 400 pages and there is a LOT of filler on every detail of every Jho Low party and the types of gems the wife of the PM of malaysia bought.
I think it is also worth calling out that at least 2 of those acquisitions, android and google, were made before they became as dominant as they are today. Android was purchased by google 2 years before it even launched, and while youtube was explosively popular at the time of purchase, many at the time thought the 1B purchase price for a revenue-less company was a stupid decision, and nobody was concerned about a monopoly. In other words, the businesses, and their dominance in those business, were made well after the acquisition such that I don't think if they had been investigated rigorously by the FTC they would have been stopped.
I'm not sure if the same was also true for doubleclick (I don't know enough about ad tech).
Google was solely responsible for YouTube's ultimate success and they deserve the credit accordingly. It was a dead company if they didn't buy it, they were rapidly bleeding to death financially and the legal picture was disastrous. It was viewed as a stupid mistake of a purchase in part because the argument was they would be a giant red ink pit forever. The sole reason YouTube survived the legal attack was due to Google's enormous resources and market position. Without that, the music cartel and Hollywood would have made sure to kill it or buy it (same difference).
The mobile picture is a lot less clear. Perhaps a dominant open source solution would have emerged. Samsung has shown itself to be mediocre at producing competitive origination platforms, so I'm highly skeptical they'd have produced the big leading platform. Apple's iOS would have never held the dominate market share, because they're universally the high profit small share player. China only came on in the last few years in terms of their ability to originate such a platform, and the rest of the planet is simply not going to adopt a Chinese platform as the 85% global market solution. The Europeans have been entirely absent post Nokia's implosion. So who else was going to fund the expensive creation of and shepherding of something like Android? Nobody. Google deserves vast credit for that accordingly as well.
> Google was solely responsible for YouTube's ultimate success and they deserve the credit accordingly.
If they were capable of making a success of video without buying YouTube why did they buy it in the first place. Video.google.com was developer internally, YouTube thrashed it, Google gave up and bought YouTube.
They needed each other. YouTube couldn't survive without Google's money and engineering ability, and Google didn't understand how to quickly iterate in social products.
I'm curious though, was this always supposed to be the case? I think Apple has adapted amazingly well to the market (look at their profits) but I don't think there's any evidence that this has been a holistic, from the start business strategy for them.
I know my Elementary and High schools had Macs because of Apple's aggressive Educational discounts, and at the time it was generally accepted that Apple was trying to get a generation of kids used to Macs so that they would be the mainstream computer when they reached adulthood. Ultimately we were all forced to use Wintel boxes when we got jobs so this play didn't work. Apple didn't get in bed with businesses the same way they did with schools.
Then when we swing over to iOS, the first iPhones were premium devices because they _had_ to be. The hardware required to realize their vision was bleeding edge and they knew it would take a few years to commoditize it. Ultimately Android popped up and stole the budget market (with crappy devices, some of them having keyboards and resistive touchscreens) before Apple felt comfortable putting out something budget like the 5c much too late.
I doubt that was their original intention. However I do think it's an inherent consequence to what they do (building and controlling their own ecosystem top to bottom, not licensing the OS, staying in the higher price tiers, etc).
Steve Jobs basically admitted the Apple approach only works in that model. In the 2007 Jobs / Gates discussion at D5 [1]. He pointed out that the whole thing only works because
of PC guy (they were joking about the PC guy vs Mac guy ads). What he meant was, the Apple approach requires that context. Where they can be the high quality, high profit, smaller market share position and always have the PC guy competitor as the contrast to amplify their own appeal.
If everyone has a Gucci bag, it's not a Gucci bag any longer.
The best thing that ever happened to Apple, was Google buying and building up Android as the 85% market player. Jobs should have been thanking them every day for that perceived betrayal. The ideal was always to have another PC guy scenario to play off of. You want tons of shitty Android phones out there in the market to compete against. Let them have the worthless bottom ~50% of the market financially, where there's zero profit to be had and lots of mediocre consumer experiences. That makes what Apple does a lot easier, in terms of pitching their value proposition to customers.
> The best thing that ever happened to Apple, was Google buying and building up Android as the 85% market player. Jobs should have been thanking them every day for that perceived betrayal. The ideal was always to have another PC guy scenario to play off of. You want tons of shitty Android phones out there in the market to compete against. Let them have the worthless bottom ~50% of the market financially, where there's zero profit to be had and lots of mediocre consumer experiences.
With the EU fining Google 5 Billion dollars for essentially bundling search to google play in order to make some money off of all the money Google spent on android, the EU has shown that the Apple model is the only real way to go.
IOS is way more restrictive than android and they can get away with it because they only make expensive devices that only a subset of people can pay for thus isolating themselves from antitrust arguments.
I don't really see what the political game is here that he lost. What I think he failed to do was show impact in a clear a visible way.
Don't get me wrong, there is salesmanship required here in terms of clearly demonstrating your value, but it's not like Google was giving the promo to some other guys who always went out to dinner with his boss and sucked up to him, or the guy the boss went to college with, or the guy who throws his team under the bus to make himself look good. that is politics, "politics" being defined as acts that make you look good but are detrimental behavior to the team and the company. And I think that's what google is trying to avoid with their promo panels where you get feedback from peer, peer team managers, and make the judgement as an impartial panel.
Also I see this as a manager failure. Clearly this manager isn't well calibrated, because he continues to get "strongly exceeds expectations" and yet can't get you the promotion you obviously deserve if you strongly exceed expectations. They also should be helping you both with your promo packet so that you're putting your best foot forward, and talking to you about how you can improve and demonstrate your value when you do your work to make sure you can get an even strong promotion packet the next time. Given this manager failure, I'm not surprised the employee quit.
As a manager it's your job to figure out what my impact is.
If you make it my job to show what my impact is I (and everyone else you are responsible for) will simply spend my time coming up with ever more creative ways of doing this instead of engineering.
But hey, maybe I'm being silly and your company has no problems finding competent engineers, all your projects ship on time and under budget etc. etc. etc.
First, just to make sure we are on the same page, are you in agreement that this wasn't politics, but perhaps a disagreement in the roles and responsibilities of a manager and an engineer and what an engineer is expected to do at google? I just want to make sure we're on the same page on that, which was the crux of my point.
But as to your point, on the roles and responsibilities of managers and engineers, I mostly agree with your comment about the role of a manager, which as I said before should be responsible for working with the engineer both to show their impact, but also making sure they're actually doing impactful work.
I disagree that if it's your job as an engineer to show what your impact is that you'll come up with creative ways of doing this. You can try to come up with creative ways of showing impact, and maybe a promotion panel will agree with you, but maybe they won't and you'll be left without recognition (I've seen this happen before).
To your last comment about competent engineers, I don't know what company you work at, but at mine, shipping projects on time, and under budget, especially when they are large in scope and involve complex technologies or large teams that you've led, and especially when those projects have impact on the company's bottom line, those project are considered major impact and and those engineers are amply rewarded.
> shipping projects on time, and under budget, especially when they are large in scope and involve complex technologies or large teams that you've led, and especially when those projects have impact on the company's bottom line, those project are considered major impact and and those engineers are amply rewarded
Wasn't the point of the article that the Grunt work that has to be done and makes things better for everyone in the future isn't rewarded at all? That work may have an impact on the bottom line of the company, but be spread out over years of maintenance and prevented (potentially disastrous) bugs. However, as the author states, it's almost impossible to quantify that.
You cannot tell your selection committee 'I refactored code and that'll save us probably 100 bugs in the next year, times 2 hours per bug, at $300 per man hour, a $60000 savings.'.
Whereas it's easy to tell them 'I built a new feature x, in the past 10 weeks it's been running it's improved sales by 3%, leading to increased profits over the next year of $60000'.
Both 'earned' the company the exact same amount of money, but the first one is much more speculative.
You make an interesting point, and I'd like to suggest an alternative lens to view it from, as a thought experiment. Let's say company X values work that benefits company X, and that's why they hired you and pay your salary. You've given two examples of promotion rationale, one in which you clearly and objectively demonstrated the impact of the work. And the other, speculative, as you say. Now speculative implies not necessarily real -- it's possible that your guess about how much it will probably save could turn out to be wrong. If you don't have a way to measure this, how do you know that it's the case? It feels good to refactor the code, but just consider for a moment the possibility that you could travel through time and see the future results of current behavior. What if you fast-forward and discover that refactoring that code had no benefit? Now return to the current time: is it actually worth doing? If you're spending time refactoring that code at the expense of developing the feature? Maybe this is why company X prefers to promote people based on actual impact rather than speculation.
Perhaps another solution here is to look for ways to measure the impact of that refactoring. Surely your bugs go through some kind of bug tracker, and you would be able to count the before and the after? Is there no line on no graph anywhere that shows an improvement attributable to the refactoring? Can peers at least speak to how crappy the code was before and how much easier it is to work with now? Perhaps the new employee got up to speed in record time because of it? If, at the end of the day, there's absolutely no way to show that this work was valuable, then perhaps... and here's the part we don't like to think about as engineers... perhaps it wasn't all that valuable. Here's the part we like to think about even worse: you could spend 6 months of your career working really hard on something that turns out to be a dud. And it may be entirely rational that you don't get a promotion on the back of that work.
I'm not saying this is how Google works, or describing any particular situation, but I find it valuable to consider different points of view.
To me, this thinking seems like a sure way to get an unmaintanable mess. Now, just polishing a codebase forever without adding any features obviously isn't a valuable way to spend time. But the difference between changing one value in one configuration struct and it having no unforseen side effects and having to go trough multiple classes and reasoning about possible thread races etc. Can make a huge difference in feature adding time. However, how do we measure this?
If all features were equal, like widget production, we'd definitely be able to prove or disprove the productivity boost, but I haven't ever worked in a context where this is the case. There's no guarantee that feature implementation time will go down, maybe it did just not go up as much as it would otherwise, maybe people manage to make more useful features in the future, or at least not as much less useful as they would have been (we would expect utility/feature to go down as a system matures)
When I worked in a two-person team it was easier, of course, the time I spent on improving the code base I soon got back when I had to implement new functionality on a short deadline, this reflected well on me in performance reviews. The problem in a larger team is that it might be someone else who is able to implement a feature quickly due to my improvements.
My guess is that we should be lucky that there are guys like the OP who naively spend time on "low impact" code improvements even though they might not reap the rewards. Without them we would only have people doing the bare minimum to implement new features with a big ball of spaghetti as a result, where projects are abandoned just because no one is willing to maintain them any more. (does this sound like some company we know?)
I guess what I'm describing is that we might end up with a prisoners dilemma situation, where optimising for short term measurability represents defection.
> You cannot tell your selection committee 'I refactored code and that'll save us probably 100 bugs in the next year, times 2 hours per bug, at $300 per man hour, a $60000 savings.'.
You can't? Especially if you have documentation of the bugs that were previously happening, this is very solid evidence. Another one I've seen, "This would cause a weekly page a 2 am, and half the time ended up being an all day problem that needed to be put out. This no longer happens and is worth $X of engineering time."
I would agree though that second example "built a feature that saved $60000" is a stronger statement because it's so much more quantifiable to the businesses bottom line.
To go back to my original point though, we all (not just managers, but the entire team) should constantly be pushing to get ourselves to objective measure. The more subjective measures are used ("I refactored this code which is now easier to read") the more you allow the bad politics I outlined earlier where a boss and his buddy team up to get raises. It's very toxic and should be avoided at all costs.
I've often wondered about the selection bias of the "80% of restaurants fail, they're the worst investment" because I had a suspicion that many people start restaurants thinking essentially, "My Mom's pasta sauce is so good, people say they would pay for it. I should open up a restaurant with her recipe." and then proceed to fall flat on their face.
Reading this article, I think I'm right. I wonder what the success rate is of a restaurant is when the owner has even a basic idea of how the various positions in a restaurant work and the important business metrics.
Unfortunately I agree with your intent (going after your dreams, trying to enrich your life or enlighten yourself in a way that may seem crazy to most) but disagree that it can be applied here.
He literally did nothing to prepare himself to fulfill his dream other than a mandatory 3 months of lazily being a line cook learning nothing, and a weekend cooking at a festival.
I'm not in the food industry, but off the top of my head here are basic things I would advise to prepare yourself for success:
1. Get yourself a year of runway so that you can spend 1 year being a restaurant owner's apprentice. Spend 3 months being a line cook, 3 months working bar, 3 months wait staff, and 3 months helping with the book.
2. Use this year network with restaurant owners. Agree to buy 10 them drinks so they can tell you about their biggest mistakes. This < $1000 investment probably could have saved him 10s of thousands.
3. Use this year to also network in the service industry generally, which tends to have high turnover and is good to have a network to find replacements.
This plan took me 10 minutes to think of and could probably be vastly improved. Instead he just hoped things would somehow work out. At some point you shouldn't applaud someone for following their dreams and instead just call it what it is, dumb.
It's insane how much hype he had at a young age and how he's delivered again and again. The only players with similar [amount delivered] * [hype] values are peyton manning and tim duncan, but lebron's is way bigger.
Also worth mentioning in his accolades: brought a championship to his hometown, has never had any PR disasters (except for "the decision"), has many charities (scholarships, gives out bikes, etc), and elevated his friends and family to make them successful as well. He's basically done everything right.
And I say this as a long time celtics fan and lebron hater.