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The man who killed Google Search?

(www.wheresyoured.at)
1884 points elorant | 2 comments | 23 Apr 24 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.614s | source
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fireflash38 ◴[23 Apr 24 17:40 UTC] No.40134737[source]▶
The tech fluff pieces are wild. And that entire paragraph about how the execs for Yahoo failed horribly, hired a new one, and that one lied about his degrees, and they hired another.

People failing with golden parachutes, and others failing upwards into even more lucrative roles. I think that's the thing that is eating away at the core of our society: basic contracts like "fail and you won't get rewarded" or "succeed and you'll get rewarded" are just not there. You see people fail upwards constantly, and it eats away at your incentive to do any sort of good work, because it just doesn't fucking matter.

Edit: WIRED is the worst about these useless tech fluff pieces. It's like they make insane money from just fauning all over whatever tech CEO is the hottest right.

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1. ethbr1 ◴[23 Apr 24 17:51 UTC] No.40134880[source]▶
Imho, the problem is scale.

At certain company sizes, the direct output of entire divisions ceases to be visible to leadership.

What they receive instead are reports that filter up through management.

Consequently, when they promote people, they're doing so on the basis of what they've seen.

Invariably, this selects for shitty business types who can spend the majority of their time ensuring their name is first on successful initiatives and scrubbed off failed ones.

You know what it would take for a technologist to match that?

200% time: 100% to get the job done + 100% to match corporate politicking

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2. autokad ◴[23 Apr 24 18:14 UTC] No.40135195[source]▶
> At certain company sizes, the direct output of entire divisions ceases to be visible to leadership. > What they receive instead are reports that filter up through management.

Yeah but it doesn't have to be this way. I put in these details that are summarized in 1 or 2 easy to read bullet points, but asked to remove them because 'leaders are thinking about things on a strategic level'.

And don't get me started on promotion. If I find/do something that improves the teams performance by 10x, "that is just doing my job, please don't bring up stuff like that to management." "you need to have impact across teams". So every team is trying to make every other team take on their 'product' and no one wants to take on other teams product because even if it improves their quality / productivity, they don't get anything for it.