MrTonyD

Back when I worked at NeXT we created a lights-out factory in Fremont, CA and then closed it. Steve said that we were moving it offshore to be closer to where the parts were manufactured. At the same time, I was told by some employees who worked on creating the automated factory that the real reason for moving it was completely different. They told me that the goal was to sell it to a group of Executives who could then charge the company for manufacturing the machines and avoid US taxes by sending the money offshore as a business expense. It was sold to a group of Executives so that they could avoid any one Executive being technically in "control" of the offshore. I was also told that the group of Executives included theoretical "competitors", and they traded "favors" for shared ownership.

I can't confirm any of this - but it is consistent with other things done to avoid taxes. (Steve was once successfully prosecuted for avoiding taxes using an offshore. After that, he got better accountants to make sure his tax dodges could withstand legal scrutiny.)

I'd prefer that our society classifies it as illegal rather than evil or immoral. We need to have laws which also take away the acquired wealth from those who benefit from such practices.

I was just reading the book "The House of Morgan" and it describes how companies are purchased when they don't maximize short term profit. The bankers and executives make sure that they make millions in the transfer, and then the brand is cheapened to get more profit, usually at the expense of the customers and employees, and then the company is sold again to get more millions for the executives and bankers. They don't really care if the company goes under or they destroy society as a side effect - it is all about making more millions for the already rich principals.

I've worked with lots of Harvard graduates over the years. They all seemed to be cloned with some kind of "group-think" about Economics. Essentially, they were all convinced that markets solved big problems, and anything vaguely Keynesian or Socialist or Marxist was doomed to failure.

So I guess I view Harvard Economics as a tool of those with power, and probably something which has contributed to creating a worse world. (Hey, I believe markets have benefits too, but not to the point of dismissing moderating policies.)

If I remember correctly Steinbeck's doctor was a friend from his days at Stanford. So we aren't talking about traditional doctor/patient relationships.

Steinbeck is amazing. He would recite his books as he wrote them - he believed that words were meant to be spoken. He wrote for the spoken word rather than the written word. I also saw a few pages of his revisions on one of his books - he revised his "standard" sentences into "colorful" sentences. So his writing was definitely a result of hard work and creativity - and in my mind moves his writings into the realm of true art.

Well, I spent a number of years writing drivers for PC systems. Some years the I/O chips were faster than CPU, and some years the CPU was faster than I/O chips. DMA was usually slower, just because release cycles for CPUs tended to be faster than release cycles for I/O controllers. Eventually, most driver writers decided that it was usually better to use CPU, even if the I/O controller was faster. That way, when the CPU got upgraded, you would automatically get a speed boost. While programming an I/O controller was both more arcane and more more likely to require a complete reimplementation in a couple of years (as well as customer complaints and market share losses.)

I'm not saying that things are the same today - but it kind of sounds to me like they are. Back in the days, people were always claiming that we should switch to the newest and fastest I/O controller since CPUs were more general purpose and would therefore always be slower. It just didn't work out that way in practice.

And my recollection of the Power Broker is that he got a lot done by aligning with the desires of the rich at the expense of incredible numbers of poor people who had no power to stop him from destroying their lives. I would hope that we can figure out better ways to justify building bridges, freeways, buildings, and parks.

I don't like all the toxic positivity that has been growing in the workplace. This has changed a lot since my early days in Silicon Valley. My impression is that different countries have different "power distance" - a measure of submission to authority.

As the workforce has changed, with more hiring from "high power distance" countries, there are more "yes men" enthusiastically agreeing to anything that any incompetent executive wants.

Of course, the executives like this, and promote those who are "easy to get along with" and who are happy to "implement their vision". But I think history will show that this is one of the things which has contributed to the culture decline in Silicon Valley - from producing useful products to producing maximum profit regardless of any contribution to society. Right now, for example, I'm at yet another company with several incompetent managers who are supported by technical "yes men". They know that we are making idiotic technical decisions, but they would never openly disagree.

I wonder if this is just another effect of regulatory capture? Government should set some minimum standards for things which impact quality of life.

Another aspect is autonomy. It is routine in most companies for a low level incompetent manager to be able to waste all the time and talent of a senior engineer. So the issue is more than just money.

I ran my own company for a few years just to make money to stop working so I could contribute to open source. By the time I finally made enough to not have to worry about money anymore, I had spent enough years working with open source to realize that big companies get great benefits (I was in meetings with HP, IBM, and Oracle VPs where open source was being supported to transfer responsibility and costs away from those companies.) At the same time, it is Software Developers and associated staffs which lose income. There is also less profit to invest in high quality documentation, training, support, and research (ever notice how most open source companies didn't actually develop the technology - they are just monetizing it through support or consulting?)

So I had the chance to live my dream - supporting our community through open source - but realized that it was ultimately the wrong dream for our society.

There are lots of effective things - enforce a healthy diet, monitor everyone continuously, reduce the population to improve the environment, put criminals to death.

The goal of a society should not be "to be effective, efficient, and cost-justified". Other values must be considered.

Knowledge can be gain through proven datapoints and unproven datapoints. Insisting on proof reflects a particular type of ignorance -- the ignorance of someone who hasn't deeply reflected on the history of the advancement of knowledge.

I agree completely. If a director was meeting the company goals and running either a harsh or caring organization - well, at the higher levels of the organization nobody really cared as long as things worked. We would put up with lawsuits, employee complaints, and customer complaints all day if the business was going in the right direction. We spent insane amounts on lawsuits in exchange for getting non-disclosures signed. Like I said before - Oracle didn't grow to its size by being stupid. (I should add that I didn't like the environment. When Larry offered me control of a big organization I left. I was tired of the horrible values and what I would be expected to do. I walked away from a transition to an Executive position to go back to simple technical work. No regrets.)

I was a PM at Oracle - our team VP reported to Larry. Everybody I worked with was very experienced and very sharp. On the other hand, we regarded most of the company as "sheep" who executed our plans. Completely expendable and generally unenlightened. Obviously there were other bright people around the company, but by and large they had no clue about our strategy or direction or the way that real decisions were made (and we kept a lot of the real reasons for things secret - we didn't want competitors to know what we were really doing or why.) You don't become a business the size of Oracle by being completely stupid.

One example - since then I've worked for about 5 or 6 companies who boast about how they hired Oracle salespeople, so now they are energizing their sales. But at Oracle we spent a lot of time and effort at HQ doing things to make Sales and the Salespeople effective. So at company after company they can't figure out why hiring the "right" Salespeople isn't solving their problem. But they aren't doing any of the things that we did to support Salespeople (things throughout the rest of the company and outside the company.) We kept most of it secret from Sales, so even they didn't really know what we were doing. So are the Sales people smart? Yes. And are they sheep? Yes.

Similar arguments apply to most of the other PMs outside of core database (who companies also mistakenly hire to "turbocharge" their products), most of the Engineering groups, most of the support teams, and generally everybody outside a relatively small group of people.

These guys like 3M and Dupont and Monsanto are doing worse things than tech to destroy our society - why aren't we hearing calls to break them up or take them over or stopping their operations in our society? (ie. Are you listening Elizabeth Warren?)

I spoke to a manager at a major airline - he told me that their research told them that many of their first class passengers are now renting private jets instead. Just another artifact of our "winner takes all" economic systems.

I think it varies with the group being managed. I've managed groups where many other groups hoped to benefit from our time, resources, and work products. In such groups a manager really does need to say "no" dozens of times for every "yes".

I think of concepts like "barriers to entry" or "differentiators" or "channels" or "positioning". These words all have important meanings and implementations which can impact whether a business succeeds or fails. They can all drive strategy. These aren't things one learns by studying philosophy. And, yes, understanding those things can lead to "out of the box" thinking relative to others who lack such insight.

Bought a KitchenAid stand mixer - the motor made a loud "aircraft landing" sound. When I called the number in the instructions they told me that their warranty doesn't cover sounds, and that they couldn't do anything for me. I tried to explain that I had worked with motors a lot, and this wasn't a normal sound, and asked to speak with a supervisor. The supervisor told me the same thing - no warranty for that type of problem. I haven't bought anything from KitchenAid since then.

What is interesting is that most of Schein's book was based on Steve Jobs (the original draft was almost all Steve, but got rewritten to emphasize Steve much less and other executives much more when Steve complained that the book was just about him. But even when using other executives for his examples, Schein was usually talking about Steve.) And at the time of that book we did none of the things in the article. Really, the book is excellent, but hard to interpret well. If I hadn't been working there at the time I would probably be misinterpreting it too.

As someone who was writing analysis for my CEO when we were involved with the POSIX definition, let me say that POSIX was driven by the complaints of users, who insisted that they would stop buying product if the vendors didn't stop the arbitrary fragmentation. So POSIX was forced on vendors who then had to identify areas with mature features to standardize - so that every UNIX admin and UNIX programmer wasn't using a completely different environment. We need to do the same for Linux, the same for Kubernetes, and the same for any mature technology. The vendors are striving for lock-in, and we need to fight it.

You know, there are a lot of problems with your logic. I'm a product of a Jesuit University where I was forced to write paper after paper on topics around morality, good, evil, justice, and similar themes. Justice has a lot of different potential definitions - many (most) of which wouldn't define "adding value" as a "just" way to get rich. A different definition of "just" might more likely define a massive distribution of wealth to some individuals as morally unjust based on outcomes. With such a logic targeting the rich would be morally justified - even if illegal and involving killing or death.

The Jesuits are a very serious bunch of guys - many have died for their beliefs. And just because they are Catholic doesn't mean that they agree with Catholic policy - though they recognize that it has the weight of established policy (as Pope Francis has said more than once as he defended things I know he disagrees with.)

Is it really unpopular in Sweden? I gave a conference talk there and everybody I spoke with liked their system, and said that all the coverage in the US criticizing it wasn't true. They were all laughing at me (when they weren't feeling sorry for me - since by their standards I live in a primitive pre-Renaissance society.)

I'm kind of confused by your comment. I've heard lots of ideas for ameliorating the "power problem" (distribute, weighted votes, various election strategies for decision teams, feedforward techniques, feedback techniques, and lots of ways to choose best decisions.) Many say that Communism and Marxism are fundamentally ways to shift power away from the wealthy.

If power can be made to represent community values, then it becomes possible to use Machine Learning and Robotics to provide all the basics for everyone. And it becomes possible to work on fixing the sustainability problem. So each of these needs to be examined and potential solutions to one impact the other. Things don't have to be the way that they currently are - we live in a time when extensive automation is possible for providing "basics".

This may be the best idea I've ever read on Hacker News. It makes it worth putting up with all the small-minded objectionists who downvote anything they don't agree with. If they downvote you, don't let it stop you from commenting. Thanks for your comment.

I agree that power is everything. Absolutely everything. Most people forget this when they have a good job where they aren't treated badly.

At the same time, it is worthwhile to decouple the problem of power from other problems - so that we can think clearly about how we might go about controlling power. This opens the possibility for solutions which would involve funding the arts and sciences. If we don't think clearly about both problems, we'll never be able to solve either.

I couldn't agree more. I had the PM title twice before I worked with some senior PMs at a very successful Fortune 50. What a difference experience makes. I cringe when I think about how incompetent I was in my first two PM roles.

Well, if that is their reason for downvoting then they really haven't thought it through. Pervasive monitoring is pervasive in large part because modern monitoring sensors are produced by the billions and are incredibly tiny (I'm talking about custom military stuff - not "spy-warehouse" stuff.) These are distributed systems and even today they spread their data all over the world to many huge secret underground bunkers (I know NSA guys who've describe these to me.) So even today there is a lot more monitoring than people realize. And this is analogous to the old nuclear first strike logic - if somebody strikes first then they have won. Once you get full control, your monitoring can't be fought.