chrisyeh

Commitment requires us to make a choice, and to stay committed to that choice even when doing so becomes difficult or unpleasant. Without sufficient practice, we may lose our ability to choose and to commit.

A detailed framework for automating coding via AI, including manager and engineer responsibilities, infrastructure, and practices.

I believe in the general principle that it is dangerous to deny reality. Note that this is different than saying that you have to accept reality as it is. But not only does denying reality damage your psyche, it also prevents you from choosing the best ways to actually change reality for the better.

It's hard to bring something new into the world. If it were easy, it would have already happened.

Nearly all startups fail. They're trying to do something new, and the status quo is one hell of a competitor. Doing nothing is easy and most people's default choice.

Don't jump into entrepreneurship because you're lured in by the potential results; start a company if the process, regardless of the result, is something you enjoy or need.

Back in the early 2000s, after my first failed startup, I tried doing the math.

If only 10% of VC-backed startups succeed (the numbers for bootstrapped startups are even worse) and assuming that I could manage to get VC backing for my idea, and further assuming that each failed attempt to start a company could consume five years of time (you have to account for the time you likely need to spend working for established companies between startups to rebuild your finances after years of below-market pay), and finally assuming that at age 30, I would get four more attempts before I'd be 50 and face increasing ageism that would prevent me from raising money, then the math was simple:

There was a 0.9 X 0.9 x 0.9 x 0.9, or 0.66 chance that I'd spend my entire career chasing this dream and never succeed.

I had to get comfortable with this as a default outcome if I wanted to keep going down the entrepreneurship path.

It's a little better if you're starting out at age 20, but even then, 0.9 to the 6th power is still 0.53. In other words, the majority outcome for entrepreneurship, even if you persevere for 30 years, is that you never succeed.

Yet it may still be worth doing because A) I'm sure you think your odds are better than average and B) It's what you really want to do.

Lambda's marketing is deceptive and should rightly be stopped. But what is so bad about a bootcamp with no up front cost that gets 50% of its graduates a job? https://chrisyeh.com/2020/02/the-cost-of-cynicism.html

For a while, I was writing up bullet-point summaries of the books I liked best. Haven't been able to keep it up, but I think it's the best way to really crystallize the learning. http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/w/page/14422658/FrontPage

As one of the co-creators of blitzscaling, it's important to note that we're careful in the book to say that most businesses shouldn't blitzscale. Basecamp is a great example of how bootstrapping can work. You can also listen to the story of MailChimp on the Masters of Scale podcast.

Instagram reached 100 million users and sold for over $1 billion with a 6-person team (they had just hired a few more people when they sold). Investors don't care how many people you have; they care about how fast the business is growing.

I've also been looking into this as well. But I think the bets are going to be even more appealing than the futures, since I don't need to put any money down to make them!

My co-authors and I have written up a formal response, with quotes from our book to demonstrate how Dan Lyons' interpretation is 100% contradictory with the actual text of the book: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/un-disrupted-what-alliance-ac...

One of the more interesting things I read about is how Salesforce.com reviewed their employees and their salaries, realized that female employees were underpaid, and increased their salaries accordingly, rather than waiting for someone to ask. I'm afraid that's rather rare, though.

I'm going to have to check out Salary for Life. I can see that there are nuanced differences.

Yes, inequality is self-limiting. Either the haves realize that they need to avoid tearing apart the fabric of society, or the have-nots realize that they represent the majority of the people, and rise up in revolution. The former is a lot less bloody than the latter.

I think the realization of this reality is one of the things driving the basic income movement. I will be very curious to see if that experiment works out. I honestly don't know if it will or won't.

We strongly believe that longer-term relationships are generally better; how often is your first 6 months on the job the most productive? And if you look at successful companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook, they tend to have low turnover among their key people.

The issue of what individuals who lack currently marketable skills should do is a tough one. Note that I didn't say unskilled...skills that once were valuable can become less valuable quite rapidly in our fast-changing world.

Since we can't predict the future, we shouldn't blame those individuals who were unlucky enough to have invested in now-worthless skills. As a society, we need to understand that investing in re-training so that someone can find a new job is far better and less expensive than either putting someone on the dole for the rest of their life, or letting people "die in the streets," which is as nonsensical as it is callous.

In this case, I've concluded that the best response is to engage with people on this thread. I've always enjoyed Dan's work as a journalist (especially his Fake Steve Jobs project) and while I'm disappointed that he doesn't get what my book is about, I suspect he hasn't had a chance to actually read it. I'm sure there are many cases in which I've misinterpreted others' books. But I do think it makes sense to try to get my side of the story out to the audience.

Actually, what's happening is subtler. He quotes 6 words, and then makes a series of statements that could be interpreted as reflecting the ideas of our book.

If he had simply said something along the lines of, "I believe that The Alliance calls for employees to show loyalty to companies, but for companies not to show loyalty to employees" (completely not true, by the way) it would be clear that he was providing his interpretation of our work. As it is, those who don't read the book will take away an impression that is exactly the opposite of what was originally intended. While words are always subject to interpretation by their audience, I object to my words by misinterpreted by another in a major publication.

Sadly, this is true around the world. Job protections tend to help incumbents, and result in an "underclass" of "temporary" workers. This even affects public sector jobs in the United States.

It's like squeezing a tube of toothpaste; squeeze in one place, and the laws of economics cause the paste to come out in another.

While I have sworn a vow not to write specifically about the US election, it is clear that one of the things buoying certain insurgent candidates is the feeling of less-educated working class white Americans that their position in society has been declining.

The thing is, they are right; their relatively unskilled labor is no longer valuable to the system (especially when equivalent labor is available at a fraction of the price in other countries). Where they are wrong is the belief that isolationist and anti-immigrant policies will restore a happy time when blue collar workers without a college education or special training could have secure, well-paid jobs that would allow them to live a comfortable middle-class existence.

Sadly, many (thought not all) corporate executives see their sole responsibility as maximizing shareholder value. Coordinated government action would likely be more effective than relying on the goodness of people's hearts. The problem is that those who behave responsibly handicap their own financial performance; it's hard to ask people to voluntarily act against their own economic interests.

One of the big challenges we face as a society is managing these kinds of transitions. In 1900, the majority of Americans worked on farms. We managed that transition, but we had decades to do so. If self-driving cars eliminate all driving jobs in a single decade, the dislocation will be immense.

This is where government action will be required; this is a society-wide problem that needs a society-wide solution.

I think there are still plenty of people who would be willing to sign up for a lifelong job with a single organization, but it's nearly impossible for any organization to actually fulfill their end of the bargain. How many companies are likely to last the 40-50 years of a person's career?

You're absolutely right that too many corporate employers take a "check the box" approach to being good employers. They strive to do well in rankings and to develop a good reputation, rather than focusing on treating people well.

But the bigger issue is that people have ended up in a position where they are powerless. And that is because the system doesn't see them as valuable. In an economic sense, unskilled labor isn't that valuable. But in a philosophical sense, those human beings are part of a society that should be looking out for them.

The best instrument of change in this case is government action (which I suppose means that holding this opinion also makes me a little bit socialist).

The root cause of the problem, at least in the United States, is that our educational system (aided and abetted by institutional discrimination and/or neglect) has failed to give many of its citizens the skills and knowledge they need. Furthermore, the social safety net is both inconsistent and insufficient.

As a mere business book author, I have a hard time tackling such problems, though I've certainly offered my opinions.

I have to admit that I'm primarily familiar with the US economy, where nearly all workers are "at will" employees. This means that anyone can be terminated at any time, without a reason being given.

I do think that greater liquidity is beneficial to employers and employees. But one of the interesting things about The Alliance is that we believe that being open and honest about what each side is getting from the relationship should lead to longer job tenures, rather than shorter ones.

I'd love for you to read the book and provide an Australian perspective. I do think it's interesting that preventing employees from being fired resulted in an uptick in bullying. I've read about similar things happening in Japan. One senior employee was forced to work on an assembly line in an attempt to convince him to quit. It sounds like the anti-bullying legislation has been helpful in this regard.

The one major point in your latest comment I'd disagree with is that companies will never have a problem recruiting new talent regardless of what they did to previous employees. Here in the US, most employees check services like Glassdoor where employees and former employees rate company behavior; the companies with bad reputations suffer certain consequences. (Of course, some companies offer so much potential wealth that employees ignore the poor working conditions, but that doesn't mean people are unaware of those working conditions.) How do people in Australia learn more about what it's like to work at a potential employer?

The hope is that as talent mobility increases, the power imbalance will ebb. But it is rare for the power to be perfectly balanced.

Two clarifications:

When I say "lifetime employment at a single company," I refer to spending one's entire career at a single firm.

When I say that employment is a voluntary relationship, I mean that the employer cannot compel an employee to accept a job offer, and that an employee cannot compel an employer to extend one.

I didn't criticize Dan's book, or say that his statements about HubSpot were inaccurate. (Note that I'm not saying they're accurate either; I haven't worked there!) What I did do was to point out that his op ed does not accurately reflect what I wrote on my book. I don't believe this constitutes mischaracterization on my part.

HubSpot fired two senior managers because they tried (foolishly) to use deception to obtain copies of Dan Lyons' book before it came out. You seem to be implying that our book promotes such unethical behavior. Again, I'm unconvinced that describing a program for allowing employees to expense networking lunches constitutes encouraging an abusive culture.