> but to attack the core idea as essentially wrong is anti math, science, and rationality
The way Microsoft implemented stack ranking was anti math. You're supposed to measure the data then calculate the level of fit to a distribution, not artificially shoehorn the data into buckets to create the curve. If you analyze the data honestly you may find you have a bimodal distribution, or a heavily skewed distribution, who knows.
Stack ranking just clumsily says, I'm gonna give x% a bad score, y% a middle score, and z% the top score.
>Stack ranking just clumsily says, I'm gonna give x% a bad score, y% a middle score, and z% the top score.
as long as the ordering top/middle/bad is preserved, I don't see a problem. there are entire respected statistic methods based on rank ordering, not raw metrics.
People don't have a right to fall on a normal distribution. Employers do have a right to grow or trim the workforce, and those numbers are driven by factors that are not necessarily normally distributed.
the people who downvote me simply want participation trophys, and "no" is the answer.
You absolutely can argue that Microsoft pursued a system that hurt both Microsoft and its employees, but not by attacking rank ordering.
>Ah, "participation trophies" and "if you disagree you're a snowflake."
actually, my comments have all been about math, and i gave an explanation as to why some people don't like the math. It's your comment that talks about snowflakes.
That's not the point. The test giver has free discretion to say either answer is correct or incorrect. You could argue that if the intent was to underline "word" that it would have quotes around it, but it doesn't matter because the test is not supposed to be fair or consistent.
Things like this were at the heart of what Jim Crow was in America. Selective and capricious enforcement of the law to disenfranchise and disadvantage black people at best, enable unaccountable violence against them at the worst.
It's not cheating administrators, it's ambiguous questions with multiple possible answers.
As the judge of this test, I interpret your answer as incorrect. I expected the phrase, "the last word in this line" to be underlined. Test failed, no cheating required.
(Note that had you underlined the phrase, "the last word in this line", I would have still judged it incorrect, claiming that "word" or "line" should be underlined. Again, this requires no cheating.)
> If it was this, there would be quotes around those 6 words, just like in your comment.
If there were quotes around those 6 words, it would make the question unambiguous, sure. But without the quotes, my interpretation and judgement is still valid.
> The quotes are needed to change this sentence from its clear meaning to these other ones.
Actually, they are optional for that purpose, not required. Without them, the meaning is ambiguous. Just as you claim your interpretation is the "clear meaning", others have exactly as valid a claim to their interpretation being the "clear meaning".
Microsoft pay isn't the best in the industry so if compensation is the only thing that matters to someone, Microsoft shouldn't even be in their top five.
> People refuse to acknowledge that their conservation efforts for a year are undone by some guy in Texas in five minutes
I don't think that's a good way to look at things. Some guy in Texas is polluting a lot more than you, ok, but would it be better if that guy keeps polluting and you pollute just as much? We can't get hung up on, 'well some person/company somewhere else is undoing my savings'. That kind of gets into tragedy of the commons thinking.
It is disheartening to see parts of the country going in the opposite direction than we should be going for sure. And well-meaning but not very useful policies can be a pain. But I try not to be disheartened at backward thinking in other locales, I try to look at the places making advances (for example, India is ahead of schedule in the shift to renewables) to be find some optimistic amidst the bleakness.
It's not "just as much" by any stretch. A more comparable scenario is – you pollute by 10 units, your neighbor pollutes by 1000 units, and people knock on your door and say, well the neighbor is hopeless, but to save the environment you need to stop showering every day and get your usage down to 5 units. Have you made a difference? Technically, sure. But ultimately (1) you have drastically reduced your own quality of life for no measurable gain and (2) the real problem (next door) stays unsolved.
The only way out of the tragedy of the commons is strict regulation, not "ignore the bad actors and do the right thing yourself".
Indeed. Individuals doing their bit is great. But structural problems (such as the undue influence of the fossil fuel lobby) need structural solutions (such as tax and legislation). A change of culture can also work, but that can take a long time.
Typically you're not asking for a price(salary) upfront. Ideally you've done a bit of homework to figure out what positions can pay in the ballpark of what you want. Then you get their offer at the end of the interview process and negotiate as appropriate.
Yeah you may go through hours of interviews and not end up with an offer in some cases but think of it this way: you could potentially earn tens of thousands to over one hundred thousand extra dollar per year off that time investment in interviewing.
Attempting to line up multiple interviews and balancing offer timelines is hard, but the payoff can be huge. Considering that people spend 4 years or more working in college to get into their career, making a time investment of a few weeks to get a potentially large raise is nothing.
I think the author is taking a bit of the wrong lesson from his experience.
One of the challenges of coordinating a group of people is getting everyone to buy into the same vision. Fact is that other people see the world differently and may have different goals. Here the author is attributing that to narcissism and maliciousness when most of the time it isn't that.
So yes, as you add more people it gets more challenging to get everyone rowing in the same direction. This is why setting a clear direction and clear communication is key, but the increase in communication overhead as the team grows is always going to be difficult. In this case, as others have said, he could've just open-sourced his code so the people who had a different idea were free to run with it.
Reputation may not affect Google's ad based revenue, but it absolutely affects their ability to profit in lines of business outside of ads.
Google might have made more inroads with enterprises with G suite and GCP if they didn't have that reputation. The gaming industry is a 200 billion/year market that Google could've captured a decent size of if potential customers trusted that they wouldn't quickly give up. All of that represents billions of dollars in lost opportunities.
Since 9/11 there's been a shift towards not siloing information as aggressively as before in order to make intelligence failures less likely. Don't know if that was at play in this case though.
At the very least, access control systems should've flagged unusual access to more information that this person would've had a need to know. But as big as the US intelligence and defense apparatus is, not every agency, program, and office is gonna have rigorous enough controls to catch people like this. Seems like the lesson should've been learned after Manning and Snowden.
I would argue that the red tape is not so bureaucrats can make more money, it's that Americans have a very, very strong aversion to seeing people benefit from social programs that they think are undeserving. So we put all of these hurdles up to make things 'fair'.
Just look at the difference in outrage between when there's some story of someone on public assistance buying something like smartphone, vs the reaction when we found out about all of the businesses abusing the PPP loan system. Or the fact that many of the PPP loans were forgiven.
It's like as a country we're fine with wealthy people abusing the system. But then we turn around and would rather let 100 deserving people struggle just so maybe one person can't get a free ride.
Americans seem to have a special aversion to weakness. Being poor is a facet of that:
On public assistance and buying a smartphone? “That’s irresponsible and abusing the system!”
Wealthy and taking PPP loans or dodging taxes? “That’s smart and opportunistic thinking!”
In other words, the rationalizations exist to justify beliefs that were conceived long before these examples were discussed: namely, the wealthy are inherently more virtuous and better people all around.
We are unable to think differently on this because digging into it too much risks tearing down most people’s fragile motivational structures around their own striving.
Wasn't the entire point of the PPP scheme to give away money to be used for payroll? I didn't use it, but it seemed to me like from the outset that it was designed to give away money, notionally documented as a loan, but one which would be forgiven if used to provide payroll continuity to employees. (In other words, documented as a loan so they could claw it back legally if you didn't use it for payroll or other approved purpose, but if used for payroll, it was a loan in fictional name only.)
I don't think that was a mis-use of the system, but rather the intended use of it. (We can argue whether it was a good or bad idea, but it plainly seems within the bounds of the program as designed/intended.)
This is why police reform is so hard to achieve. When crime spikes, people are far less committed to police reform.
Even when crime isn't spiking, police can just sit on their hands whenever reforms are pushed and instantly change the narrative. This happened in SF with the AG recall and has happened in numerous municipalities. Local politicians can't afford to anger the police union because all the police has to do is stop enforcing the law aggressively and a local politician is done for.
So New Yorkers may want police reforms but the NYPD union has a lot of leverage to resist it. And voters generally dont' have the stomach to oppose police union backlash.
The way Microsoft implemented stack ranking was anti math. You're supposed to measure the data then calculate the level of fit to a distribution, not artificially shoehorn the data into buckets to create the curve. If you analyze the data honestly you may find you have a bimodal distribution, or a heavily skewed distribution, who knows.
Stack ranking just clumsily says, I'm gonna give x% a bad score, y% a middle score, and z% the top score.