Most companies are like this. Even my n=1 experience at BigTech is that it is well known that you get more coming in at a certain level than you do when you get promoted to that level and it’s best to “boomerang”.
On an unrelated note: it’s also easier to get “promoted” to the next level by changing jobs and then coming back than it is to go through the internal promo process at the same BigTech company.
As someone who has struggled with physical and mental addictions for my entire life: breaking a physical addiction is trivially easy compared to breaking a mental addiction. And breaking a physical addiction is really hard (I'm currently suffering withdrawal effects from a recent decision to quit vaping nicotine and it sucks).
Mileage varies for different people, of course. But dopamine is dopamine and addiction is addiction and it's neither kind nor fair to tell someone else that their addiction isn't real because there's no change in their blood chemistry.
This makes no sense in Zuckerberg's case: he was never hired by the board and they've never had a chance to fire him. Investors can sell the stock if they don't like what he does, but that is not a "professional advisor" relationship.
It's mostly a cult of personality relationship, and you're deep in it with your belief that Zuckerberg is an unusually capable operator.
Independently on what you think of Zuckerberg as a human being, on the basis of acquisitions alone, he can be judged as an insanely effective CEO. The way Meta managed the shift from Facebook to Instagram is impressive from a strategic point of view.
Heck, Meta literally controls the world most popular chat application. I never liked social media, spent most of the past fifteen years avoiding them as much I could while maintaining just enough presence to stay reachable and a Meta application still remain my most used one.
Let's not forget that Google, for all their billions, utterly failed to significantly attack Meta market.
Meta has been effective at being the owner of Instagram, even though that's because they've smartly mostly been staying hands off on it besides integrating it with Facebook wherever makes most sense. And also even though the platform is also getting long in the tooth, becoming a place dominated by brands rather than the hip kids' club it was in the past. Now it just seems like the default social media profile for people to connect with one another, like how FB was before it.
I wonder what if Facebook's attempts to buy Snapchat had gone through. Would they have been an effective steward of that platform as well, or would it have gone the way of Twitter-acquired Vine? Would Snapchat even have been a good acquisition target? Okay, maybe it's not productive to discuss counterfactuals, but it does make one consider if we're self-selecting for big hits here and ignoring all of the duds that never amounted to anything- and the potential duds that didn't go through because the founders didn't want to just take the money.
WhatsApp I'll grant you, hard to think of any alternate chat app that could've gotten as ubiquitous as it did. Though, again, was that also mostly WhatsApp's own success, amplified by Facebook's ubiquity? Not to mention, Google being as incompetent at chat as it is at social, Apple unwilling to entertain servicing other operating systems, and Blackberry, AOL, MSN Messenger, etc. having disappeared long ago.
Interestingly, Meta hasn't seem interested in trying to compete with "channelized" IRC chatroom-style apps in the vein of Slack or Discord. Maybe there's some enterprise Messenger for Businesses that does that, idk.
I already agreed with the correction - he has voting control.
What is still incorrect is imagining that billions of dollars gets you advisors who know how to run a company - and those people aren't just high level executives already running companies.
> you're deep in it with your belief that Zuckerberg is an unusually capable operator.
The burden is on you to show a successful CEO for over a decade is actually an idiot.
> For you (and me), switching browsers is annoying but doable. There was a time when I used Firefox, and then a time when I used Chrome, and someday I'll use something else. But for the vast majority of the world, the idea of switching browsers feels like a big challenge.
Given this paragraph suggests you haven't changed browsers in over 15 years, you should probably give it a try sometime and see if what you think is true still is true.
(If you don't want to do your homework, it is not true. A not-very-technical person could change browsers three times between now and dinner and have no issues)
> A not-very-technical person could change browsers three times between now and dinner and have no issues
Unlikely. Maybe if they have no saved bookmarks, no saved passwords, and no saved cookies (which isn't most users). Let alone usability differences. They might get lucky for certain OSes and certain browser current combos that auto-import, or they might not.
Whenever I watch someone change to a new browser, there are multiple serious issues to deal with.
I love it when my counterparty's breach of contract is my fault because I foolishly trusted that they would do what they said they would in exchange for my money.
I'm sure you also believe that she was asking for it because she was wearing a short skirt and your dad was right to hit you because you wouldn't shut up.
If you aren't prepared for the contingency where your counterparty bails, then yes, strategically you are failing to commoditize your product for the specific market. I think that's the basis of competition and free market economics.
lol in what world is breaking paid user contracts and flagrantly getting away with it democratic? What does free market even mean in this context? That the big trillion dollar corporation can bury you in legal fees or remove your means of making money with no way to question the decision to prove it was done in error?
This is insane. In no free society would this be just.
They need to rightfully be broken up to ensure a free society for everyone, not just the cohort of people that own alphabet stocks.
> This is the same thing as "you won't walk around all day with a calculator in your pocket so you need to learn math"
People who can't do simple addition and multiplication without a calculator (12*30 or 23 + 49) are absolutely at a disadvantage in many circumstances in real life and I don't see how you could think this isn't true. You can't work as a cashier without this skill. You can't play board games. You can't calculate tips or figure out how much you're about to spend at the grocery store. You could pull out your phone and use a calculator in all these situations, but people don't.
This makes no sense at all. The business needs to make money to pay you. Your time is the development cost of the software. It is completely reasonable and rational for a company to say, "This is valuable to us if it can be built in three weeks, but if it takes longer, we don't want it." Because three weeks of paying your team costs a certain amount of money, and a cost higher than that puts the value of the work underwater.
If you cannot forecast whether it can be built in three weeks and then deliver against that forecast, you aren't doing your job.
> Wasn't agile created to solve this BS?
Agile sets regular deadlines for shipping to customers, that is literally the core idea. Instead of one big deadline 6 months from now, you have a small deadline every two weeks for the next 6 months. It's still a deadline.
You want milestones and progress over estimates and deadlines.
The value equation of a software development team isn't a product of their time and salary compared to the code/features/whatever-unit they produce. It's the theories and knowledge they build in their heads and share through the process of understanding problems and developing solutions. You can't optimize that process in a Taylorist fashion.
If there is a process called Agile that's still useful, it's built on this manifesto that eschews management in the Taylorist sense. The principles are built on a preference for organizations driven by the workers rather than the managers. It was perhaps too radical and too naive.
"It gets done when it gets done," is a glib way of saying that progress is more important than deadlines. The idea that systems take time and what's important is that people know where we're at and where we're heading more than threatening punishment for not delivering what we estimated at an agreed upon time.
> The value equation of a software development team isn't a product of their time and salary compared to the code/features/whatever-unit they produce. It's the theories and knowledge they build in their heads and share through the process of understanding problems and developing solutions. You can't optimize that process in a Taylorist fashion.
There is no value equation for "the theories and knowledge" that developers build in their heads. Value in software happens when customers pay for software. That's how business works. It happens to be true that developers need to build theories and knowledge in their heads, but that isn't unique to software engineering and doesn't prevent deadlines from being effective.
> "It gets done when it gets done," is a glib way of saying that progress is more important than deadlines. The idea that systems take time and what's important is that people know where we're at and where we're heading more than threatening punishment for not delivering what we estimated at an agreed upon time.
I understand the argument, having heard it from teammates ten thousand times in my career. I'm somewhat sympathetic to it, but it is not a full picture of the software business. A business that fully adopts such a strategy has no long-term plan and can't make promises to customers. That can work if you lucked into all the money in the world (Google), but most of us are not so lucky and need to deliver to customers within reasonable timeframes or the customers go to someone else who can.
I get that estimation can be hard, conversations about scope can be hard, and managing expectations can be hard. I don't care. If you still have a job in this industry you are extremely well compensated to overcome those difficulties.
I took a small company that was living contract to contract into a world where they started making millions in annual recurring revenue.
There's no secret, magic bullet. All I did was make sure we were delivering progress at a regular cadence. Kept communication channels open. And tried to, but ultimately failed at, training the sales team to stop with the secret deadline negotiation.
I understand the sales cycle at the enterprise SaaS level is a long song-and-dance of promises and and punishments. I understand that money only changes hands when the customer feels like they will get their money's worth or else your business will go out of existence. It's a difficult game to play.
However... they were never unhappy. Steady, reliable, and consistent beat out guessing, promising, and hoping to deliver every time. The dollars proved it.
> I took a small company that was living contract to contract into a world where they started making millions in annual recurring revenue.
> There's no secret, magic bullet. All I did was make sure we were delivering progress at a regular cadence. Kept communication channels open. And tried to, but ultimately failed at, training the sales team to stop with the secret deadline negotiation
Perhaps. I'm not saying that deadlines don't exist or shouldn't. I am saying that they're often unnecessary and most software teams can deliver value without them.
If you're in the embedded space there's no dodging deadlines. If you need to flash ROMs it could be months before you can do a release if you miss your deadline. You might not have enough money to survive until then.
If you're shipping boring, line-of-business enterprise SaaS you don't need deadlines. Customers want software that solves their problems and are happy with something that works for 80% and a steady rate of improvements over time. They want progress and milestones. There's nothing wrong with taking an extra week or month to reach the next milestone.
Where you get the "deadlines equal dollars," mentality in enterprise software is from the long sales cycle with the big price tags. A business is going to have reservations about dropping a few hundred thousand on a new software product. And so you end up with these negotiations between sales, management, and the software teams where you're lying about the deadlines to different parties in order to keep everything in line. I don't think that's a good way to go about it.
Especially when most of the time it's not even necessary. This was the finer point I was often finding myself in opposition to the sales folks with. Their reality was that deadlines are a negotiating chip they can't ignore. The software developers' reality was that any estimate about a deadline is completely made up of hopes, dreams, and unicorns. The easiest way to get people to work together, in my opinion and experience, is to cut out the lying and just be honest.
Some organizations like that, some don't. I went back into being an IC because I just can't operate at that level and keep my sanity/energy.
While I agree with your framing of the discussion, the fact still remains that in business there are many areas where deadlines are required both because (a) time is literally money - if you believed it would take X days to release a feature, but it ends up taking 3X, it could have been the case that, in retrospect, we never would have then implemented that feature in the first place, and (b) there are often many other people working on a project that need to be coordinated - try managing that process if every team just gets to say "it takes as long as it takes".
The industry is littered with software development teams that guessed when they could deliver something and failed.
If business can only depend on "this happens first, then that," well... they're either going to get lucky or fail.
It's just not how software development works. Knowledge work isn't a line in a Toyota factory. Scrum and agile all you want.
As someone else in another thread put it, you don't throw out your work just because it was delivered late. Knowledge is valuable regardless of how long it takes to acquire it.
I think the person you replied to would consider your description of agile to be === "it gets done when it gets done." Despite the term "deadline" used to describe "expected completion date" in agile they're not actually deadlines--you don't throw the work away because it's useless if it's not completed in time.
That's exactly what happened – I called the OpenAI API, using custom application code running on a server, a few hundred million times.
It is trivial for a server to send/receive 150 requests per second to the API.
This is what I mean by instincts...we're used to thinking of developers-pressing-keys as a fundamental bottleneck, and it still is to a point. But as soon as the tracks are laid for the AI to "work", things go from speed-of-human-thought to speed-of-light.
A lot of people are feeding all the email and slack messages for entire companies through AI to classify sentiment (positive, negative, neutral etc), or summarize it for natural language search using a specific dictionary. You can process each message multiple ways for all sorts of things, or classify images. There's a lot of uses for the smaller cheaper faster llms
In general terms, we had to call the OpenAI API X00,000,000 times for a large-scale data processing task. We ended up with about 2,000,000 records in a database, using data created, classified, and cleaned by the AI.
There were multiple steps involved, so each individual record was the result of many round trips between the AI and the server, and not all calls are 1-to-1 with a record.
None of this is rocket science, and I think any average developer could pull off a similar task given enough time...but I was the only developer involved in the process.
The end product is being sold to companies who benefit from the data we produced, hence "value for me and the team."
The real point is that generative AI can, under the right circumstances, create absurd amounts of "productivity" that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.
If you work for a company like this, you should jump ship.