cm11

I’ve struggled following this idea too and wondered if I’m missing something? There’s a (I assumed straightforward) implication that the wise person is often letting problems grow and/or enabling them.

It is resolved personally, which is valuable, but most of these things have a larger footprint than that making it a kind of self-prioritizing mindset. There’s some kind of math to the decision involving how much effort, how much personal or short term benefit, how much communal or long term cost. But the math isn’t neutral. So basically choosing to avoid problems is going to correlate with personally better and communally worse. The clever person might be doing the solving, making sacrifices for broader good, and is sabotaged.

People trying to think of startup ideas aren't doing it accidentally. They don't want ovens or baked goods. They want to be a founder and/or money. I feel like PG is only right halfway (which maybe means he's not right). He's implying it's wrong to do it that way (to try to think of startup ideas), that it won't work, but geez louise has it worked. To get funded, to get rich, to get an exit. He's also helped enable that path quite a bit.

People have different strengths, but I consistently see teams that have people who are decent or better at their non-expert skills and their comments play a very small role in the discourse. Sometimes they speak up more and sometimes not, a lot of them manage to (learn to) just not care. I think there are many teams where the "expert" is not actually better at their role than the other team members.

I mostly see the leaders or the product people telling the engineers or designers that they don't understand business—implying that the latter aren't reasonable people who can advocate for things that balance the various dynamics that have been brought up in a meeting, that their view results from only considering the thing technically or aesthetically. It's a hand-wavey maneuver that's always there, said without specifics. This is particularly so given you've provided specs and designs and they rarely show business or market analysis. I've worked with many PMs to propose our work to stakeholders—they swear to the audience they've done the business work, but in preparing the presentation, they just googled a couple very broad things (one example, "the collaboration market is a $70B market"). I've worked with others, who I've tried to learn from, to show or point me to some basics of that analysis and they didn't know.

Product managers and product people in general have very little background in product management. It's not a degree or anything. Sometimes they come from backgrounds that are helpful, but we oddly have junior and entry level ones. This doesn't make that much sense, given they are formal or informal leaders of teams. What could they be bringing to the table? A (sad) exception is when access to meetings or information is gatekept, so then they're bringing that. Sometimes it's argued that PMs are good at seeing across things, but that has not been my experience. The problem with the each person is an expert in their own field is that in a lot of teams, the expert is frequently not better at their thing. The decision maker is not actually better at business or seeing across things or making decisions.

Oops: "...but just *not the vantage point I see from."

This resonated with me. I'm a bit struck by a theme in the comments around whether it's worth one's time to argue their side. The logic is understandable, but just the vantage point I see from. I think if this means stating your view and then after that deciding how hard to push it, that's one thing and fine. But I think a lot of people just see a potential disagreement and then don't state their view, or not uncommonly even say the opposite and agree with the person (a la "The best way to get someone to shut up is to agree with them"). I think this is fairly bad all around, and disheartening as you've said. Not only because it's self-centering in the mindset and self-defined in value, but it's also just kind of dismissive.

Of course there can be different goals, but I think there's something omitted. It's not quite neutral to put aside some goals for other goals. Reading that your friend wants emotional support rather than truth seeking or to understand their coworkers different values is fine, but also sometimes it's not for the best. The choice of when and when not is a choice, it's fuzzy and reflective of one's values. It's not the sole choice of one person that the other has to then read and adhere to either.

Sometimes friends are wrong to the point of the truth being more important than emotional support. More important for them to hear, or for you to stay aligned to your own values, or for the parties they're mentioning to get fair treatment. It's not so interesting me saying that broadly as I have, it matters where one has chosen that point to be, not that the point exists somewhere.

It's not neutral of me to recognize that the jokey casual conversation I'm having at a bbq is a vibes convo and thus if the jokes start suggesting distorted assertions about different races I should adhere and join (or even just nod politely). Or more mildly, as my friend starts complaining about their boss, who I think might be right, there is some point when I think it might be best for them to know.

Most of these goals are not strictly opposed to each other. They only look opposed when the thing we want starts to contradict with some of the agreed upon "facts" of the situation, and then we say the facts aren't always what matters. To oversimplify, if you choose to give your friend emotional support over truth then they will get the support and be wrong (or vice versa). This is okay if that's the right tradeoff here, but it shouldn't be distorted into belief that your friend is right. And being willing to do that in circumstances A and not in circumstances B is reflective of one's values.

I never really understood the “Being right is overrated” mindset. It’s easy enough to understand the good of harmony, but that’s not really how I see it used. They’re not really oppositional, a person has to see it that way. And to the extent that cohesion is valuable, that's just built in to a better calculation of right. But saying it this way, I suspect means that the person doing the calculating needs to overstate this cohesion beyond its value. This is a convenient sorta trusim to make a case.

The premise is that there are factors beyond accuracy which are for the greater good. That seems reasonable, but what are they? There are things like peace and happiness, which sound great, but aren’t at odds with accuracy, or more precisely the pursuit of it. This isn’t really a tradeoff. When people frame accuracy as overrated, it seems they’re often obscuring and gliding over that they don’t have a counter argument. There isn’t necessarily one discoverable truth, but there are better hypotheses and more sincere attempts. To the degree, that optimizing for peace and happiness can be a better goal, the measure of those things is typically self-centered. They would be happier. It can be group self-centered too, as in our team would be happier. It’s not a neutral truism, it’s a personal weighing, of the value of the better outcome resulting from right/better/good decision and the desire for (at least surface-level) harmony.

But more important than that, even if the group would be happier, there is the false tradeoff thing. Embedded in “being right isn’t what’s most important” is agreement about what’s right. Why are we unhappy with something more right? Accuracy/truth seems conspired against at a dispositional level in this situation. Disagreement and disharmony are not the same thing. So it’s not even disagreement leading to disharmony. It seems more of a personal desire against either a particular outcome or against disagreement generally. Both questionable. Relatedly, diplomacy is not a bad trait exactly, but I don’t see it as essentially positive. It betrays a lot. It is a kind of tax, which can be worth it up to a point (there is value in the internal functioning of the group), but probably not as often as the truism has it play out. Something should be questioned when a person/team diverges so much from better/accurate/right.

The idea of picking your battles makes a form of self-centered sense, while also making a (I think large) form of nonsense outside it. There are many forms of dissent that occur before cussing or violence, it is much different to (1) disagree, (2) disagree, but go along, (3) disagree, but say you agree, (4) disagree, but convince yourself to agree for harmony (and perhaps eventually forget that you disagree). A phrase I’ve come to dislike is “I wouldn’t die on that hill”. People should defend, if not die on, more hills. It also might recruit others. We have all these hills that have been ceded because we weren’t willing to say we liked them.

Curious if you have any gripes or concerns about using the Apple keychain/passwords setup. Aside from Apple devices, do you mostly also stick with Safari? Was it hard to transition things like TOTP or passkeys?

Awesome! Sometimes a thing conveys it was built with some love or intention. It's not restricted to fun/entertaining content, it can be Saas too. I'm talking more from how it looks and feels than necessarily what's going on in the backend, but I'm not really talking about graphics.

What he does for hyperbole is say that all one needs to become a billionaire is make something people want. It’s that simple. There are of course many non-billionaires who make food or write code that people love. There is more than one path to a billion, but many of them involve employing the people making loved products and services and putting one or many layers in between. The billion is largely not possible from just making it. The layers attract cheating. Some might also argue it's wrong to say the billionaire's path involved the making of the thing people love anyway.

This is not unlike a sibling commenter who hypothesizes earning a $50k margin building a home and all you need to do is do it 20k times. There’s a lot in between doing it once and 20k times. The path has many places where cheating will make things easier and possibly required. If the leader avoids the temptation, their employees may not, society may not. If their competitors cheat and they don't, we should applaud them, but they might not be a billionaire then and we can't count them. I'd guess this is a common way potential billionaires do not become billionaires. It probably catches lots of people getting to a million and then more at ten million and then more.

There's a certain amount of "in theory you could make a billion", that's different than whether we have billionaires that didn't cheat. I think it’s worth noting that you are engaging with the issue in a way that he didn’t. This was the primary argument I was making.

---

  If you soften your definition of cheating to this level, it's no longer a billionaire thing. It's an everyone thing.

My argument was that he wasn't engaging with the topic. I didn't make a particularly heavy case (as you note) for billionaires as cheaters—part of the reason for that is that there are a few low hanging arguments and examples for it and I'd think a counterargument should address them.

I think you're reframing his argument as something softer. Not whether they cheat or exploit, but whether they're primarily doing it. Is the cheating low enough or outweighed by the tremendous love for the product? I'm not sure he would agree that's what he's trying to say, but I would count that as cheating. At best, there is cheating, but it's worth it (for them and, I don't know, maybe/hopefully even for society).

You're also nudging it towards whether some billionaires are sometimes able to do it without cheating. It's hard to make a strong assertion whether the senator or PG's claims are meant strictly all or nothing. Both have language of this type. I couldn't say which one means it, though I think it's fair to judge hyperbole. I alluded to this in the prior comment, but I think it's fairly easy for CEOs to benefit from cheating happening downstream. Did Dropbox spam users' contact lists to grow? Did their PM or PMMs abuse push notifications for marketing? Again, I can see versions where this doesn't count as cheating for some. Or it does, just low enough level or normalized such that people redefine cheating. I think there's a lot of (often low level) cheating just built into business and it's mostly a matter of whether anyone will take you to task for it.

  The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. 

You don't just make the thing. The founder didn't become a billionaire simply because users loved her product. You market it and you distribute it and you do all the things normally associated with business. Your ability to do those things "well" has lots of room to cheat. Hasn't Uber and Lyft skirted a bunch of laws? Aren't there still a ton of drivers who feel cheated? Aren't there a bunch of share bikes and scooters lying around cities and landfills? Isn't it fairly standard to throw tons of investor money at your CAC to buy "love" and sabotage competitors? He mentioned Facebook, isn't its origin story connoted with theft? I can see angles where these don't count as cheating for some. I can see slivers where there's only so many degrees of separation you hold the billionaire responsible for what happens downstream. Even if not done intentionally, the accumulated wealth still resulted from some cheating though, no?

And there's the stock market. If he means the stock price when he's talking about things people want, then I might agree. You need to manage the thing people love, and by "the thing people love" I mean your product, and by your "product" I mean your stock price. Most of the billionaires became so because of their equity. We're well down normalizing that your product doesn't need to be profitable (where people love it enough to pay more than it costs to make) for the stock price to soar.

It doesn't count as engaging with the argument if he doesn't engage with it. I'm almost surprised he bothered to respond.

Edit: Interesting downvote situation going on throughout the comments.

I'd guess a lot of people here consider this "reality" at this point. Has anyone come up with a response—not a fix for the company or leaders behaving this way, but a response for their own path?

Did you change from a quiet diligent one to manipulating and playing the game (now that you know the game)? Did you go from quiet and diligent to quiet and not diligent (why do good work when meh work does the trick)? Another path?

This feels too soft. Each of these things has truth in it, but isn't some of this self-created? Where are these shit sandwiches coming from? A lot of these problems are the result of overpromising, breaking rules and skirting regulations, underestimating the difficulty of things they have no expertise with, asking people to solve problems with no resources, hiring more chefs rather than more cooks and dishwashers, of mismatches between good profitable product and exec exit. The idea that it makes sense for the CEO's (or really any leader's) core competency to be absorbing drama and pain is something we should think more about. Sometimes you hear that a good manager blocks and shields for their team, you have to wonder why the team always needs so much protection from their own company and processes.

I think it's private schools in general. Even those from second and third tier ones, which can filter more by means than the elite ones, find themselves atop companies. It's the natural access and the natural ability to socialize with other private school personalities. Their definition of capable leader is a particular type of leader. They can make and take jokes, but particular types of jokes. They hide each other's shortcomings, insecurities, guilt whereas people from other backgrounds, even people they like and think highly of, tend to serve as a mirror.

Getting funding is a value add, but I agree calling it "skill" misses most of what makes someone "good" at it. We've built things to overwhelmingly rely on funding gated by other private school people though. It would be nice if we could have that person with access pitching without them also being in charge of running a company, product development, or managing people. But then it would require the same of the investors. The investors would then need to evaluate products and ideas and markets. And the markets would have to reward that. Things would need to be different.

I'd ground what I say in sharing your assessment of the observations or insight, but with a different takeaway.

  If I need to think about the solution that hard, I may just as well take it all the way, remove the middleman and get some efficiency back.

Leaders (and companies) should be doing less horizontally. It runs the normal risk of stretching to thin, but their tenth and eleventh ideas are also filtered towards worse. Perhaps more fundamentally, the bar for adding a product/project should be higher. When the leader can "just" add another leader to take on the work—particularly one by nature with less power, ability, autonomy, and perhaps accountability—it's getting set up for a lower chance of success. In order: (1) the project probably shouldn't start at all; (2) if "started" at all, it shouldn't really look like starting, it should be a person validating for the leader who will then start it (many product teams pretend this is what they're doing); (3) if started, it makes quite a bit more sense for the higher (and likely more capable, but especially more empowered) leader to take on that project and hand the existing, stable, better trodded project where the team has institutional knowledge and support to the other leader.

In practice, sharing ownership is superficial, whether between leaders at different levels or between project team members. Why share? Own it or have someone else own it. Or if there isn't trust in the other person, cut it. If the leader doesn't have the time/interest and doesn't think they have someone capable of doing it, it should be as much a sign as a low quality idea.

It's not hard to find problems with middle managers—many are with the sorting that picks them, many are with the conditions of the middle. Structures and strategies to remove them, as you suggest, are a great idea. The main way is for the leaders, when faced with the scenario of "if I need to think hard", to not come away with "let's do it, but not me." We should be default no. Green lighting some work to validate it to a Yes works, but these are tasks such that the leader knows what kind of validation is needed—and is assigned to a person with those skills. An engineer, marketer, business analyst, user researcher, data scientist is going to validate things that a PM or a director have less or no training in. Leaders tend to appoint the latter though, sometimes for empire-building reasons, but I think more basically out of fear of control and legibility. Those are counter productive reasons if understandable.

This I believe is lowkey one of the core ways design broke at tech companies. There are other big ones, design (really product) is broke deeply, but once mockups became easy we stopped having discussions about information architecture and UX. We're talking about whether we think this looks nicer in blue or green. Happened before Figma, but Figma really grew it. The designers that tried to hold onto wireframes (or went to mockups, but tried to still have architecture discussions with them) fought an uphill battle—what were these guys even talking about? Even the other designers thought this.

Once mockups became easy, that little bit of vocational gate (as in gate-keeping) that was holding the wall for UX work went away. Execs and PMs could make decent looking rectangles, so designers became the people who could make especially nice looking rectangles. So you got a lot of product/UX designers that were much more visual designers. That matters, but the prior part was bigger in that the product processes and sprints often started to have little design in them at all. What was a two or three phase process was one, designer got requirements and made design—often they didn't even really get requirements before design. The design was the impetus for the requirements not the other way around.

This is what became standard: Leader would give something vague because they didn't have much idea or vision yet. They probably had something blue-sky-ish, meaning they had a bunch of ideas, which in amorphous abstract blue skies come together. Once those things appear side by side on paper/screen, they're off putting and contradicting. There are problems not just with how to fit the pieces, but with the pieces. The visual the designer provides triggers this. Designers being visual people can see a lot of that in their head beforehand, but won't be heard until they show "bad work." It's pretty common though to see the PM or the leader look at it and say it wasn't the vague requirements, it's that the designer didn't get it. Anyways, it's that design that then kicks off some assessment against reality. Then you have a little bit of a shot at real requirements starting to leak out.

Does Youtube Premium track and build profiles and use and sell them? I assume so because Google, but does Premium remove advertising (in the broad sense of the business model and profiling) or remove just ads? YT in general seems "kinder" than others at a few things, like you can remove history and activity and even get a blank homescreen.

Aside: I think it's funny how with an NYT subscription, you still get not only ads, but frequent article-covering ads for NYT subscriptions (asking to upgrade to a family account).

Your satisfaction is your margin is their opportunity.

I'm guessing there's some science or research behind this, but I agree. Similarly, I've had projects where I did everything fairly solo—programmed, designed ux/ui, maybe validated with users, etc. It was significantly harder, particularly in the phase where you're working between the first two and the idea isn't perfectly set. It worked much better to design, then build in explicit steps, but it was so easy to start coding, have the design looking and feeling okay, then start iterating on the design—but iterating in code rather than Figma or wherever. It's fine for a little while, but you realize you've spent a day (maybe more) doing it in this less efficient way.

It's similar to the 80/20 rule. When you're coding and designing from the hip, you'll do pretty well for awhile, but as you near completion, you can't quite tie up all the loose design ends. That's the part where it's probably better to just design fully to 100% first and then build, which is closer to what happens when the roles are separate. At least in my experience. I will say though that that part where you're designing in code (productively or wastefully) is pretty fun. At least until you hit the wall and get frustrated with how often you've deleted and rewrote the same thing ten times.

I feel a bit like some have misconstrued my comment. I reread and can see how it could be read as quality of work being ALL that matters. Indeed, salaries capture many things and many bullshit ones. I don't exactly think what I wrote precludes that racism, sexism, nepotism, or cozying up to your boss factor more than they should, but I can see it. If I had another shot, maybe I'd reframe the provocation as "by and large Senior Xs make more than Junior Xs within the same company within the same geo, why?" Perhaps the existence of senior/junior titling at all is based on some sense of output/pay correlation.

This analysis makes sense to me. I'll add that the little bit of research that's come out suggests individual people are as productive in four day work weeks as five, which doesn't contradict your point.

The other thing is that if leadership is better—they have stronger vision and coordinate the silos (of people or teams) themselves—the communication overhead is less. The more each level needs to communicate, sync, and align with each other, the more it reflects the top not doing it. This is so thoroughly normalized today that it's hard to see otherwise. As you move down the hierarchy, the theory embedded in the chosen org structure that most tech companies have, is that less communicating should be necessary. This is what middle managers (and product managers) are supposed to be for—coordinating and communicating to take that off the plate of their subordinates. The lack of leadership above is why the managers below get hired. Those managers then do the same and eventually ICs need to coordinate amongst themselves.

I don't think this is the reality. It is part of it, but people get paid different salaries, why? Some are more productive than others. Aside from leadership's (and society's) biased ability to determine value, these people theoretically get more because they contribute more.

I think agree with the broad, but disagree with the specifics. I really don't think a lot of people at the product level think about products. I really don't think the investors think that much about companies. I think as you move up, the things that separate are (in no order): ability to solve OR mask problems (one of these requires more skill/effort, but to people above they can look a lot closer), ability to naturally or adaptively (this is a fair, but somewhat positive word for this) socialize with the people in that next level, nepotism or blurrier forms of getting your foot in the door, willingness to look the other way (or just be obtuse), willingness to lie (or just be obtuse).

After the IC-level, each level filters less for the duties of the higher role. Even PMs seem surprisingly par at product ideation, vision, insight amongst their cross functional project team members. So many products fail, so many startups fail, so many projects are late, but those things don't seem to be what dictate promotions or investment even when they are specifically that role's role.

Yes, integrity is important no argument. I also agree it distinguishes "networking" and "having a relationship." I do think it can be faked though and I think we see plenty of that.

To be honest, I don't follow. The different stories strike me as telling different/contradicting lessons.

But taking just the first one, the Buffet one. I think maybe that's how we get willing people in the bad companies? Bad companies doesn't even have to mean evil and morally wrong, it can mean bad decision making and poorly run. Companies can still be plenty lucky though and that accounts for a lot. But if the people who hate morally bad jobs or irrational decision making leave and the ones who don't hate them stay that's going to lead somewhere.

Maybe individually a "good" person will be happier (and perhaps poorer, if you have the belief that lower morals is an advantage in business). As a society, you'd probably really like that naysayers remain at companies. As a company leader, I don't know which one you'd like. It depends on your goals I guess. Overall, it strikes me as not capturing enough. The "job you don't hate" is broad. If you have a belief in something that should exist in the world and that company has a way of producing it, it doesn't seem to be wrong to work there trying to make that happen even against a tide of coworkers you hate, existing products you hate, social implications you hate. It's a lot of stress and work though with a low success rate. That's enough for a lot of people to say no, but more curiously it's enough for a lot of people to just change what they hate.

Integrity is important and missing. I think there's a contradiction in what you're writing though. Recognizing the importance of personal and social relationships is what's keeping the no integrity people around and/or getting them promoted. It's the networking for networking sake as well as the more mundane social lubricating they do in contradiction to integrity. It's disagreeing with discussions, projects, companies, leaders and going along with it and expressing agreement. It's smiling, being "enjoyable to be around", being naive or presenting as naive, and being easy to work with. And more specifically being easy for the many liars and sociopaths to work with. Caring for personal and social relationships is not inherently reinforcing of all that is good. I wouldn't know how to count, but I feel there's quite a bit of it reinforcing the bad.

My thought on this was always that micromanaging in this structure is rational and maybe even the best. It's not really a Jobs thing—though he's (right or wrong) probably the picture most people have in their head when they think of visionary CEO—it's just that if the leader has a vision then it is great if they're capable of having everything run through them. It's when there's no vision at the top and no leaders sitting across the silos pulling things together that it helps the company to have people below with increasing autonomy. Whether the autonomous people should be higher or lower depends on which other org structure you've chosen. Silos are fine when leaders have a vision. That said, I haven't seen many groups that placed power in the place where their chosen org structure is meant to place power.

Don't forget that they're also functionally structured. The managers don't own products or features, they manage functions (engineering, sales, design). And in practice, they usually only manage people, with little control over the function. So the managers aren't particularly interested or tied to shipping product features. The PM maybe, but they don't have reports or own much.

I'm struck by the assuredness of the responses. People seem to really dislike their designers—their low in the hierarchy, often junior colleagues who typically aren't in the meetings with the execs, the leaders, or whoever else has chosen the priorities. There's a reason the designers don't know "what's really right." There's a reason they're grasping to find or do research to inform themselves. You know, besides the part, where they're being asked to do that user research, often by their PMs and leaders. There's a weird amount of scapegoating here.

It's been my experience that leaders have rarely had enough of a vision to share, but tell the team to get started anyway. Someone has to suss that out—if not the leaders, then the PM except that the PM can skirt with vague requirements. The designs are the first place where all the ideas (many contradicting, many poorly thought out) hit a little reality. When the ideas that looked good amorphously in the head don't look good on screen, it's the design and not the requirements.

There's an insinuation in some of the comments that the projects (the leaders) are starting with a clear vision and design is muddying it up. I mean there are plenty of bad designers, but most companies have a broken product development process (they mostly all use the same one, despite different products, different team makeups, different leader strengths/weaknesses, etc.). Why are companies still hiring designers? Why is design a step in the process at all? I agree confusing designs keep coming out—there are so many enshittified products. It's design theater, but for who? Design is downstream not upstream.