Windmills? They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They kill all the birds. They ruin your landscapes. Yet, the environmentalists love the windmills. I’ve been preaching this for years. The windmills. I had them way down. The windmills are the most expensive energy you can have, and they don’t work. They last a period of 10 years and by the time they start rusting and rotting all over the place nobody ever takes them down. They just go onto the next piece of prairie or land and destroy that. It’s incredible.
> The Bezos and Musks and Kalanicks of the world believe that this is correct. They truly think they do something in their 24 hours of daily human life that makes them hundreds or thousands of times more valuable than even the absolute best "labor" in their industry.
I mean to play devil's advocate, these people have created organizations that employ hundreds of thousands of people in highly paid tech positions. These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin. Moreover, their organizations also generate useful products that improve society, AND make a profit while doing so. I think one could definitely make the argument that these people are hundreds of times more valuable to our economy than the average worker. The reason our system is set up like this is because there's a strong incentive to create new companies that generate even more useful products, employment opportunities, and returns on investment. It's really not such a bad thing IMO.
Organizations are nothing without labor. The 500k salaries are a but small percent of revenue the labor is generating. These companies are sitting on the largest ungodly amount of cash piles ever seen in history of mankind and that should be cause of huge concern.
These so called tech icons were at the right place at right time and nothing else. I refuse to believe that these individuals are somehow 200x smarter or deserve 200x more than the people who are working for them. The reason they have intergenerational wealth while you & I still have to worry about mortgage is because our f'd-up system allows these "titans" to steal the profit we the workers generate.
It's not a bad thing to generate useful products to improve society but it's definitely a bad thing when labor doesn't get their share.
there is absolutely no way that these guys are 100x as valuable as the people how actually build the product. if larry page and sergei brin's search engine hadn't won out, someone else's would have. these guys are all just average to dumb, and very often end up vaporizing millions if not billions of dollars with stupid decisions. there is no doubt in my mind that these tech giants would be better off if they fired their ceos and c levels. this should be obvious to anyone who has ever interacted with the ceo of a tech company.
> These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin
What has Google done since Page and Brin left? Other than trying to suck what they already built dry for max profit?
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You are equating early technical founders with the MBAs who later took over the big tech. They are not equal. The former builds things and creates new paradigm. The latter's purpose is to suck things dry for profit. Including the employees and the users. The former is scarce. The latter is plenty and it is imposed on the organizations, the tech sector and inevitably the end users by totally un-attached, profiteering, destructive investors.
> > The former builds things and creates new paradigm
Why the religious talk? This sort of talk only happens in SF.
Google is a product/service which serves customers to propel their convenience and quality of life. There is nothing more to it.
Also Google just happened to be the winner in a winner-take-all market which was made of 10s of search engines.
So it's true, MBAs might care about profits, but all the above is very clear to them, founders instead are blinded by these sort of mythological figures who build a cult-like following around them, whereas in reality it's just survivorship bias.
> Why the religious talk? This sort of talk only happens in SF.
Something being exploited in SF does not invalidate it. The last 20 years' of tech progress did create new paradigms. From search to social to Open Source. The last one even became a culture in which we are living today. People are so used to its paradigm that they think its 'normal' and not something different. The world of 90s was a totally different world, including how people worked.
> Google is a product/service which serves customers to propel their convenience and quality of life. There is nothing more to it.
It also made accessing knowledge and anything much easier compared to before. There is no comparison of the search after Google and before, like how it was with Altavista, Yahoo et al. There is even less comparison of the world before search and after.
> founders instead are blinded by these sort of mythological figures who build a cult-like following around them, whereas in reality it's just survivorship bias.
Many technical founders, or rather, 'non-MBAified' people just want to build things. Make something happen. And those things change how we do things. People mythologizing successful, actual founders does not make it any less valid.
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The world today is totally different from how it was in 1990s. Thanks to technology and people who build things with that technology. "MBAification" of things is not a problem only in technology - it always afflicted all the other sectors too. Some people build things and change the way we do stuff, others come to milk it at the cost of destroying it.
> > The last 20 years' of tech progress did create new paradigms . The world today is totally different from how it was in 1990
I feel the opposite, if anything the rate of innovation is slowing down, and besides this sort of religious type words should not be used in the context of business.
And if were to be used it should be reserved for something that really changes human life in a pivotal manner in the same way as the invention of fire or the wheel did back in the days.
I don't know what it could be that can be compared to fire and the wheel but Google and opensource isn't it.
> I feel the opposite, if anything the rate of innovation is slowing down
Of course it is. The sector has been 'MBAified' after the first decade and a half. Its about extracting maximum value by providing the minimum. It happens to every sector - look at computer games. First decade is full of innovation and firsts. Then big corporations take over and consolidate the sector. Now its about milking what already existed by rehashing them.
> religious type words
They are not religious words. They are accurate words. Knowing the difference in between the attitudes in society and tech life are important in deciding what direction to go. Identifying destructive 'MBAification' (or whatever you may want to call it) of things as opposed to 'building' things and telling them apart is critical.
> I don't know what it could be that can be compared to fire and the wheel but Google and opensource isn't it
Wheel is exaggerated. People used other means before the wheel.
However Open Source is a major change in most attitudes. It even changed the hierarchical, feudal work relationships and organization that corporations inherited from early Victorian corporations. But that's a long topic that involves history and social sciences.
> > of things as opposed to 'building' things and telling them apart is critical.
Innovators of the past would call Brin and Page 'MBAs type' like you do, or better yet they'd call them not imaginative or risk taking enough given that MBAs didn't exist back then. It recursively goes like this the more you go back into the past.
In the end it's all about risk. You think MBAs are risk averse. People like Edison and Rockefeller would think Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are risk averse.
Guys like the Montgolfier brothers and Christopher Coloumbus would laugh at Edison and Rockefeller for being risk averse and they themselves would be subject to the same ridicule from the guy who invented fire and the wheel.
This is coherent with the idea that the rate of innovation is slowing down because of less risks being taken.
The only difference between my stance and yours is that you only analyze the last 10 years and identify a bogeyman in the MBAs, and hail founders as the great pioneers, whereas in reality it's a phenomenon which traces its roots way back into the past.
As kids say: 'fuck around. Find out'
I don't think MBAs were the first figures who refused to 'fuck around' and I don't think Silicon Valley founders are the kings of the 'fuck around' either, that title belongs to our early ancestors
The rate of risk and innovation will never be as great as the time that we invented the wheel and fire. As I said it has been slowing down ever since, mostly because people 'fuck around' less and less. Not just MBAs but everybody.
> Innovators of the past would call Brin and Page 'MBAs type' like you do
They objectively wouldnt. The science and engineering history of late 19th century is filled with people like Brin and Page getting 'MBAified' out of their inventions. Tesla and Westinghouse is a good example of such stories.
> Christopher Coloumbus
A genocidal profiteer is the last person who you would want to invoke as an example of such people. He didnt invent or innovate anything, he didnt want to change anything, he didnt bring about any new paradigm.
> because of less risks being taken
Equating innovation with taking risks is a faulty concept to start with. You can bet that the 'person' who invented the fire or the weel didnt take any risks. To start with, those were not invented by singular people 'taking risks' but invented by entire species (likely more than one) by adopting them gradually through observation from nature and learning from each other. Likewise agriculture. If anything, risk-taking was not something that early human ancestors or their close relatives would risk themselves.
> The only difference between my stance and yours is that you only analyze the last 10 years and identify a bogeyman in the MBAs
Sorry, but its otherwise. Thinking that fire or wheel were invented by singular people shows the lack of insight into science of history, leaving aside the history of this species.
> > Equating innovation with taking risks is a faulty concept to start with. You can bet that the 'person' who invented the fire or the weel didnt take any risks. To start with, those were not invented by singular people 'taking risks' but invented by entire species
Back then people were making human sacrifices and starting wars because 'the Gods told them to do so'.
Innovation happens when risks are taken (eg. Montgolfier brothers, Wright Brothers, the guy who discovered testosterone by self injected blood taken from the testicular veins of horses...) and given that risk and confidence are a state of mind much less a business practice, you cannot conflate it just to science and technology but said risk and confidence will be visible all around society. So wars, genocides, violence and genearlly stuff considered bad.
The rate of innovation has been slowing down due to the diminishing in the standard deviation of human behavior. Or as kids say: 'Less fucking around, means less finding out'
Standard deviation of human behavior goes both ways, people rejoice that we eliminated the negatives but we have also eliminated the positives. No Einsteins without Hitlers, no Archimedes without Alexanders etc.
So even if the guy who personally discovered fire or the wheel didn't take risks personally (I doubt it) he operated in an environment where the standard deviation of human behavior was much larger. For sure there were people jumping off trees with wooden wings, wars, genocides, much more violence. And that is statistically enough to make sure that at least one unit in the sample stumbles into something great like fire or the wheel.
> Back then people were making human sacrifices and starting wars because 'the Gods told them to do so'.
Not relevant. All of those were established behavior patterns at the time. Not 'risk taking'.
> Innovation happens when risks are taken
For every such example you can pull out from history, there are dozens of innovations resulting from incremental improvement and learning from others and the nature.
> The rate of innovation has been slowing down due to the diminishing in the standard deviation of human behavior.
There has never been more deviants in human history than now. In human history, sticking with the social norms, known behavior patterns and keeping the existing social group and its framework safe were critical to survival. From traditions to laws everything were based on those. With your logic, it should be the most innovative period in history whereas the past should be the least innovative. Yet you are saying the opposite.
Innovation as you see it has been slowing down because science and technology have been privatized through patents towards the end of 19th century by big money entering the field and consolidating it. Exacerbated by the 'state secrets' concept. Before that, virtually everything was Open Source during the scientific revolution.
> So even if the guy who personally discovered fire
This is what happened in the Soviet Union. Leadership at consumer-facing enterprises had no incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum because profits are socialized. Meanwhile the Soviet military did a much better job of keeping up with that of America because that was of upmost importance to the politburo and and successes were rewarded with political capital.
If it's so easy to start a FAANG-grade company, why has there been no real equivalent to Amazon in 20 years? It's not like they even have a real anti-competitive "moat", and yet no one is building a competitor.
Amazon's moat is massive vertical integration across multiple verticals, which they also leverage cross-vertical for e.g. promoting new services (say, their streaming service) and to gain business intelligence on a scale no startup can dream of (see: Amazon Basics).
You might—might—out-compete them in some niche they're overlooking, just picking up their crumbs, but you'd need stupid-high amounts of capital to take a real shot at them, high enough that there'd be no hope of a break-even exit if things don't go perfectly.
So you seem to agree that Jeff Bezos is doing some things right, since it's easy to get vertical integration wrong - looks at Japanese or South Korean conglomerates for plenty of evidence. Doesn't that handily disprove the "you didn't build that" POV?
Well, Amazon is actually too young to tell, Japanese conglomerates, while not being all dominating anymore, are doimg quite well. As do the Korean ones, e.g. Samsung.
Is the thing keeping some other person from building Not-Amazon (or a dozen companies that effectively, together, fill its entire role—potentially better, even) that Bezos is uniquely capable, or that the existence of Amazon makes trying to do it way, way riskier than when Bezos got started, no matter how good you are?
Other businesses get started and are very successful, somewhat often. Are all those successful business people just not going after Bezos because he's so much better at business than them that they cannot hope to succeed, or is it because the market is transformed by the existence of Amazon such that trying to take Amazon on is a bad use of capital?
>It's not like they even have a real anti-competitive "moat", and yet no one is building a competitor.
They absolutely do. Their market share means that you must sell on them or lose a massive amount of sales. To sell on them you must agree to their anticompetitive price controls - must give them a cut, can't sell cheaper elsewhere. To get good product placement you have to agree to cominglinging and allow your legitimate product to be mixed with counterfeits.
I do. In my career, the choice has always been working hard at a company where the founders are trying to become billionaires, or going to a company where the drive for success has atrophied and sitting on my hands for 80% of my working hours.
I remember one job where I did literally nothing for the first 2 weeks because maintenance didn’t connect the Internet in my cube and my manager couldn’t find the external drive with the training videos on it. There’s no law of nature which says all the Googlers couldn’t be working there.
They're necessary but not sufficient conditions for google to exist. There are countless other contributors who are also necessary but not sufficient conditions for google too.
What's the incentive for other necessary people to work at these companies?
Assuming that they are necessary and sufficient for making new businesses that hire lots of people, aren't we disincentivizing them by paying so handsomely for their first such business. If we realigned the incentives, we could have 200 google equivalents made by Sergey and brinn, not just the one
But the employees of AltaVista and other search engines Google ran out of business (or ran into the arms of Compaq, who cut their losses on it) might still work for a much larger AltaVista that expanded beyond search.
> > These 500K Google jobs wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for Larry Page / Sergey Brin
Stop believing in fairy tales, they were just the lucky winners in a winner-take-all market. Those 500k people would sill be employed by say a company called Poogle, founded by Parry Lage and Bergey Srin.
It's like all common sense and statistics goes out of the window when people discuss the Forbes 400, it takes people meeting them to realize they are just dudes winging it like anybody else.
So? Just because some competitor could have possibly formed in an alternate universe doesn't make the company or Page / Brin's contribution any less valuable.
In order for something to be valuable it needs to be rare and irreplaceable.
And the true test is the subtraction, if Brin/Page were never born we'd still have something like Google, much like we'd know relativity if Einstein was never born or the 3 principles if Newton was never born.
Humanity advances as a whole, while individual humans play dice and games to get to be the one guy (or girl although it's mostly guys) who get the privilege to be the person signing off the advancement. But in the end there is nothing special about the person doing the signing off, much like there is nothing special about the person who wins the lottery among the many who play.
Videos of Strang himself covering the material are all up on Youtube[1]. Jump over and spend some time watching the first session or whatever, should give you a good feel for how accessible it is.
There's also a web-page[2] with lots (and I do mean lots!) of historical problem sets and exams from this class in previous years. It goes back to sometime in the mid 1990's. So again, you could skim around some of that stuff and see how intimidating it appears.
FWIW, I never took Linear Algebra in school, or anything beyond Calc I. And I've watched the first three or four lectures in this sequence and so far it seems accessible enough. YMMV.
Hi - yes. Very beginner friendly. Most people so far are beginners and or saw the book decades ago. No learner left behind! Since it's on discord we can all help clarify things as well :). Sebgnotes@gmail.com and let me know!
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you think Google is gonna be any better in terms of the "random censoring" for content that their SJW overlords deem "harmful", I have a bridge to sell you.
The behavior described in the article (licking the utensils, putting saliva on the sushi, etc) is seriously antisocial and psychopathic. Especially in our era of heightened public health awareness. People have been charged with terrorism for coughing on each other, I think it's only fair that this person gets charged with terrorism as well.
How is online advertising not useful? It's directly greasing the gears of the economy, matching up potential customers with businesses in a reasonably intelligent way. Yeah, sure, it's not saving the world from climate change or something, but it's clearly facilitating economic activity, and also helps keep a number of very useful products free. Seems pretty useful to our society to me.
Don’t you think a catalog would do a better job of matching up consumers to products?
Given our environmental situation, is it really ethical to “convince” people that they need some new thing that they previously didn’t know about or want?
Re: keeping stuff free, that’s still pretty convincing and it’s mostly what keeps me going as I work on the great google ad machine. It seems like a massive social good for sites to be free to users of an economic class worldwide, both large tools and tiny blogs. Any alternative I can think of (e.g. government buys everyone google drive subscriptions, sites run off donations, micropayments) have some pretty obvious issues
It's not like we DON'T have a catalog though. Amazon exists. The problem is that there is such a deluge of products that it becomes difficult to choose. That's where advertising can help.
As for the environmental situation, it is unfortunate. But I do believe that the only realistic way out of the climate crisis without a collapse-level drop in standard of living (read: starvation) is technological innovation, a process that seems to be aided a lot by a healthy economy (which results in stable livelihoods, etc). So I'd say if anything there's a moral imperative to keep the economy as healthy and productive as possible.
"ethical" is very hard to prove or disprove. For example, is it ethical for me to pay 400USD for a camera, since there is a 350 alternative that I didn't even know existed?
A complete and fair catalog is very hard (if not impossible ) to implement. But even if you did, that would NOT be enough. You might not know you "need" a good mattress unless an ad would sell it to you. Btw, if you think a global catalog would solve all these issues why not build it yourself? It can't be that hard... There are probably only a few billion products on earth, with a few variants each. Why not just do it?
Speaking of "ethical", there are many concept in the modern world that can be seen as "un-ethical", but at the same time they make the world run much better than the medieval (or communist) world they replace: interest, inflation, income taxes to name a few.
IMO there's a big difference between university level SQL and the ability to competently write SQL in a professional setting. In university, at least at my school, you are getting maybe at most 3 tables overall, with 3-5 columns each. Professionally, you're dealing with hundreds, maybe thousands of tables, each with between 10-1000 columns, and usually not even in 1NF either. It really takes a lot of practice writing queries professionally to get to a level of competence here.
I mean honestly, you can't possibly think that just adding people of other gender / skin colors just magically improves profitability. There's clearly some lurking variables here that McKinsey purposefully ignored in order to draw this specific conclusion.
It does not necessarily follow that diversity of immutable characteristics creates viewpoint diversity. Ironically, most companies seem to actively stamp out viewpoint diversity as part of their corporate culture (both as part of and distinct from any DEI initiatives they may have).
To play devil's advocate, in the case of a company like Google, it's unclear whether or not execution actually gets much slower. From what I hear the amount of people coasting or even distracting teammates with negativity is pretty high, cutting such people might even speed up execution in the net.
As for Fuchsia as a product I'm not really sure what exactly it is so if possible I'd love a 411 from any HNers with know-how.
From my contacts at Google, the cuts don't appear to be strongly correlated to poor performance, rest & vest attitude, negativity, etc. It has been messaged by company leaders as "role eliminations", not as "dropping underperformers", so it doesn't give anyone a reason to work harder.
- Donald J. Trump