Are we going to blame McKinsey in November or is it still Facebook and our racist suburban cousins?
We used to discuss this with Knecht. He would insist that consultants did provide value --
So why pay all that money? Generalizing a bit, it's usually because crucial decision-relevant facts are unknown, or in doubt. How it comes to pass that some 24-year-old Ivy League snots can be better at generating those facts than "the people who do the actual work" is a complicated story, but it's not a myth. I see it every day.
Are you still around, Knecht? Do you still believe this?
My wildly cynical take is that hiring McKinsey, et. al., isn't done for the contracted results, though those can help management or the owners enact some desired, probably inhumane change. The real point is strategic, it's one of the costs executives (have someone else) pay to be invited to the Very Serious People club.
3: You sort of embed what I see as the bigger explainer in the middle there - executives/boards don't do it because they have questions they don't know the answers to, they do it because the consultants are paid to give them the answers they want (and that they might not get from their own knowledgeable staff). I don't think it's in-group performance for its own sake.
4: I was also interested in the points about the decline of the organization man and the ways that centralizing strategy has taken away agency from huge swathes of workers as well. You are no longer expected to need a brain or skill and are completely replaceable.
But this ethos is part of why Buttigieg is my last choice.
I'm sure snot-nosed Ivy League 24 year-olds can sniff out a lot of issues at companies. But it seems like that kind of process would also sniff out a ton of false positives, and is highly sub-optimal for understanding the big picture.
I didn't read the whole article, but what's interesting to me is that large tech companies, so far as I'm exposed to them, seem to have so many layers of management, including very low level (yet still handsomely compensated) people whose whole job is to manage, at least to manage the process of writing software (in the case of tech companies who are in the business of providing a platform for the sale of another kind of service, as the article points out they may no longer have low level management of actually delivering the valued product). But software seems like an 18 layer cake of management. And AFAICT there's definitely a promotional pipeline by which you can start as a lower level engineer and move up ranks. I would like to see an account of that difference woven into the overall narrative.
In matters of McKinsey et al., I first heard the joke about the shepherd from a consultant, who thought it had them bang to rights, and I've seen no reason to change my mind since.
9: This joke?
http://mistupid.com/jokes/page113.htm
I had a friend who got a job at McKinsey right out of school when we all were like "um maybe I'll see if there's a shelving job at the library so I can pay my $350/mo rent." He couldn't really explain to us what he did. He said it involved filling in circles. I think he was going to make $45K which made us all picture the gif of Scrooge McDuck swimming around in his money except gifs didn't exist yet I guess. He is now, though, I think genuinely obscenely wealthy.
p.s. I made a joke of the form involving the phrase "turbulent management consultant" vis a vis Mayo Pete yesterday and had an old friend clutch his pearls at me about how I was calling for the murder of a gay man. Wake me in November. Of 2024.
There are a lot of bad management consultants out there. However, I've met multiple good ones: they know what they are doing, and are good at figuring out what the problems are in a company, and at proposing remedies by no means restricted to the answers their clients "want to hear." Let me add that they weren't 23-year-old recent graduates, which may make a difference.
No one is expecting the 24 year olds to actually come up with anything, right? They gather data they are told to gather, and apply equations that they are told to apply. Then they pass the results up the pyramid.
Having now read the fine article, it's really not about how management consultants suck. It's how the concept of business process (re)engineering is mostly about reducing overhead, and middle management is the easiest overhead to cut. So they get rid of the middle managers, except a few who get 30:1 reports instead of 5:1, work 70 hour weeks, etc., and disconnect the pipeline that in the halcyon days of yore ultimately promoted burger flippers through middle management until they ran McDonald's. I have no particular argument with that Hot Take.
(Speaking of which, I am now middle management as of 3pm yesterday, with a civilized 5:1 reports.)
I found the linked-in-the-middle article about IBM, and in particular about IBM's layoffs in the 1990s, kind of unnervingly familiar in a bunch of ways. I'm glad I don't work in a one-employer town.
I'm still not managing anything. I'm kind of in consulting but I'm not a consultant.
Yesterday, a CEO waved at me. I think because I looked like somebody else.
I will say that I've now been on two search committees for upmost echelons of Heebie University's administration, and the choice of consultants made a huge difference, and in fact this one has been fabulous, and that has tempered my opinion of the little leaches.
Consider using "Leeches".
No idea what you're talking about.
We had some McKinsey people come and they were confused by the number of direct reports each director in my dept had. The pharmacist has only 2 -another pharmacist and an econometrician. His is a subject matter expertise more than project mgmt. My Senior Director hated them. Those were probably the 24 year olds.
I'd always taken it to be that "consulting" "jobs" were primarily a way of recirculating money among rich people - part grift, part response to the American idea that the very rich must be seen to work for their money. There has to be something for upper class twenty-somethings to do, and of course a bunch of the money goes to the consulting company so it goes to rich older people too.
I mean, people obviously believe that some 24 year old telling them to lay off the people who actually do the work is valuable, but that's just the same old bullshit that we all believe about capitalism, like believing that we'll all die in a ditch if we have national healthcare or believing that drug-testing food stamp recipients is necessary to stamp out an epidemic of drug abuse.
It would probably be better for society to pick out the top, oh, 5% of families and just give their kids $100,000 a year out of the public purse provided that those kids refrained from "consulting" or "disrupting" anything - like farm subsidies.
I've been doing a bit of management consulting now, in response to a move that put me in a much smaller market with few opportunities that made sense. It's been semi interesting so far - I don't think I have any interest in moving to a big (consulting) corp although a couple of them have asked. So far about 1/2 of my contract work has been relatively boring capacity adding (i.e. we need X done quickly, and can't spare anyone) and 1/2 has been specialized in the sense that I clearly knew more about the specifics than anyone in the (sub) organization. I mostly work with execs and senior directors.
I have had a couple of engagements with large orgs where hiring someone at market rates is impractical or impossible for them, but they can get a different budget to pay for consulting, so this is also a factor.
Remember this? I've accepted an offer from the new company and set a start date. Lots of confusing and annoying stuff about this process. My current management hasn't seen the new company's transition plan, and I don't know much yet about what I'd be doing for them. So far they've been very vague on what I'd be doing, other than "directly supporting the transition", and I don't know why they're so insistent on getting me starting to work for them ASAP. In a meeting yesterday I joked that I might have to write their transition plan. I really, really, really, really hope it stays just a joke.
This feels like it's on-topic, because middle management seems least likely to get any job offer from them like I did. It sounds like only a few people other than me have accepted offers from the new company, but there's still a lot of time before the official transition. I do know my immediate manager doesn't expect an offer, though. He says he'll probably keep working for the current company on random contracts, which is nice as long as it lasts.
And of course, this is all in government contracting. I've said for years that the only reason we aren't government employees is so that someone can make a profit off us.
33. Good luck, hope it works out.
On 33.last, federal personnel budgeting is not great when presented with rapid change of pretty much any kind.
I work for a federal contractor. It seems like the amount of time it takes between a person leaving and their replacement starting goes up every year. One more background check, one more thing that HR takes its time on unless you harass them every day (e.g. putting the job listing anywhere in the world that isn't the website of the contractor, a website nobody would ever check unless they already work here because the job is basically just working for the government but technically working for a faceless middleman), one more way that HR limits the number of applicants we can see, leading to us thinking there are no applicants, one more training they have to do before they set foot in the building, etc etc etc. We can't even list the job until after the previous person has left, no matter how much notice they give. And as far as I can tell my group is mandated by God Himself to have exactly 14 employees (effectively 13 given that people do leave and then it takes 4 months to replace them), no matter how much or what type of work there is to do.
In summation, Knyecht's point seems to be that bringing in McKinsey, if nothing else, means a company can actually get something done quickly for once, which is more valuable than it sounds. I hadn't thought about it that way.
I mentioned this in the other thread but I need to vent here. Somehow the Biden campaign got my cell phone number and decided that it's ok to text me. HATE.
||
MAN Energy Solutions Launches MAN Fluid Monitor for Lube Oil|>
MAN fluid? People could take that the wrong way.
The dreams you dream come true
When the one you love loves you
You're in MAN Fluid
the native tech employees work that way, too (the more eager ones, anyway)
You know, there must be somewhere where this is happening but fwiw I don't know who these people are. Everyone I know in tech works very reasonable hours. I know a Facebook employee. In fact, on reflection "tech jobs have a very favorable stress to compensation ratio" is such a truism among people I know that when a programmer friend of mine were both talking about a mutual friendquaintance who was considering the incredible folly of becoming a single parent as a grad student (a depressed grad student, no less) he said 'and they know how to program!' -- our mutual understanding so fully shared that he did not have to say explicitly, "Of course if you want to be a single parent a software job is about the best way to do it."
Sort of still on topic because the more I write about it the more it feels like at least the bigger tech companies are the ones who are maintaining more of that mid century ethos for their engineers and managers.
the incredible folly of becoming a single parent as a grad student
"MAN fluid." Ask for it by name.
If that's an imperative, it doesn't work like that.
43: to me, this is one of the great mysteries about the industry. My colleagues average about thirty-five hours a week in the office. They maintain the polite fiction that they're working thirty-five hours a week, but in reality most people get a single digit number of hours of work in. Some people, myself included, don't bother with the polite fiction and don't spend time at the office pretending to work. The work isn't hard the way hard labor is hard and it's only intellectually challenging if you go out of your way to find intellectually challenging work.
I've been procrastinating on my taxes but I opened up my W-2 and my gross pay for the year was over $700k for work that I think any commenter here could do if they went through a coding bootcamp and spent a few years at a so-called FAANG company.
Colorless Pete ideas tweet furiously.
Meanwhile, I'm not yet in the black this year. Things should pick up soon, though.
I now work in what's more or less a software development and services office within a university and the developers who have worked in tech companies, if not FAANG companies, all see the 40 work week, no expectation of working nights and weekends culture of this part of the university as different from what it's like in for profit industry. It wouldn't surprise me if FAANG companies are more likely to not have the crazy hours of smaller places, for the same reason that small businesses everywhere often can't offer the same level of benefits and balance as larger corporations.
Many years ago, just after the tech crash, a friend of mine in grad school dates someone who was around our age (early 20s) and was in an important position at a startup - maybe a cofounder, I don't know. She described him at one point as the oldest 24 (or whatever) year old person she'd ever met. It sounded like he was basically always working; eventually they broke up.
There are some FAANG jobs with long hours, but I think that FAANG jobs tend to be cushier than small company programming jobs.
There's a group that operates like a startup sitting 200 ft. from my desk. Most of them seem miserable and a couple of them are very angry people. I don't know why they don't move to a group that works 1/4th as hard. They don't even accomplish much, they put in long hours but are just spinning their wheels. Some people do transfer, the group has some of the highest turnover at the company. But they have some lifers who don't seem like they'll ever move.
I'd always taken it to be that "consulting" "jobs" were primarily a way of recirculating money among rich people - part grift, part response to the American idea that the very rich must be seen to work for their money. There has to be something for upper class twenty-somethings to do, and of course a bunch of the money goes to the consulting company so it goes to rich older people too.
I mean, people obviously believe that some 24 year old telling them to lay off the people who actually do the work is valuable, but that's just the same old bullshit that we all believe about capitalism, like believing that we'll all die in a ditch if we have national healthcare or believing that drug-testing food stamp recipients is necessary to stamp out an epidemic of drug abuse.
Serious question: based on what?
Experience working for a consultancy?
Experience in a company which brought consultants in?
Talking to friends or family members who worked for consultancies?
Reading media coverage of the success or failure of high-profile consultancy projects?
Because "large companies are spending billions every year on something that is obviously utterly useless" is a really striking conclusion to reach.
Serious question: based on what? . . . Because "large companies are spending billions every year on something that is obviously utterly useless" is a really striking conclusion to reach.
Really? I'd be shocked to find a large company that's not wasting most of the money it's spending. My current hobby at work is to find wasted infrastructure spend. I have yet to find a team that isn't wasting over 90% of its spend. My friends at other companies who do the same thing have found the same thing at their employers. I usually only cut spend by 2x to 3x since it's usually hard to do more than that with a set of small diffs and teams tend to dislike it when outsiders drop more than 100 line diffs on them, but if I wanted to get into long drawn out code review fights I could cut the spend on most teams by 10x.
Infrastructure spend is something that's trivial to quantify and usually easy to fix and yet every major tech company I know of is wasting almost all of the money it spends on infrastructure. Now you're talking about something that can be difficult or impossible quantify and you're going to argue that there's less waste there? I find that to be patently unbelievable.
Apples and oranges, though. You're talking about inefficiency in buying infrastructure - stuff that they need. I'm talking about deliberately buying things that it is obvious they don't need.
teams tend to dislike it when outsiders drop more than 100 line diffs on them, but if I wanted to get into long drawn out code review fights I could cut the spend on most teams by 10x.
That sounds like the sort of thing that a consultant would say.
Well, no, the point is that they're buying infrastructure they don't need.
I've submitted diffs that are worth millions of dollars per year per character. Do you really expect me to believe that a corporation that regularly blows tens to hundreds of millions a year on things that could be fixed with trivial changes in their core competency isn't going to waste money elsewhere?
And yes, I have dealt with consultants. Unfortunately for FAANG companies, we've become prestigious enough to be a destination for higher ups at prestigious consulting firms when they're looking for the next thing to do.
Many of us now have a strategy group run by a former McKinsey et al. big dog that's full of other ex consultants. The output of every one of these groups that I've heard of is laughable. For example, one company wanted to know where to target international expansion of a high-bandwidth service. They went to their strategy group, which bought a report on broadband penetration in different countries, put it into a spreadsheet, sorted it, and then presented the sorted order as the order in which they should ramp up marketing.
I cannot emphasize enough how profoundly stupid this was. This company had more accurate information on broadband penetration than can be bought for any amount of money. A programmer who's familiar with the data could have written a query to invalidate their result in ten seconds, a programmer who's not familiar with the data would have had to take a few minutes to figure out the schema. If the consultants doing the presentation were still working for McKinsey and produced that output for a client, the client would have been none the wiser, but there was a programmer in the room when this was presented, who refuted it live.
I can give you fifty more stories like this and I expect that other people who have checked the work of management consultants can as well, but most people who hire consultants don't have people on hand who can check their work.
I think I'm overpaid because anyone could do my job, but I'm at least providing positive value. I can't say the same for the consultants I've worked with. They're people with impeccable pedigrees. HBS to McKinsey to FAANG. Very smart. Can talk a good game. But not productive.
I'm not sure what FAANG is, but I hope the headquarters are in a hollowed out volcano.
OTOH my most recent experience with consultants was when they were brought in to find out why sales had cratered in the last five years and they basically said "because you shut half your local offices. Look at this map, everywhere you still have an office is doing fine; all the bits where you shut offices are doing terribly" - as a result of which we are now reopening them. I mean, sure, not a particularly tough conclusion to reach, but an example of management making a shitty decision and the consultants correctly identifying it as shitty and providing analysis that embarrassed them into reversing it.
58, by contrast, seems to be about how bad your company is at internal decision-making. "We employ a lot of ex-consultants and they're bad" doesn't really speak to how bad actual consultants are.
51: I briefly worked at a startup and the developers there worked an under 40 hour week too. The founders worked long hours but the developers there, of which there were three, including me, the intern, used their position as relatively powerful labor to go home. At one point one of the founders was on the verge of tearing up a little because she wanted the developers to work longer to push through to a release and everyone's attitude was more like, maybe you can have 1 or 2 days where we stay late occasionally, but otherwise, haha, no. My friend was recently working as CTO of a startup and his boss tried to tell him he couldn't take a vacation at some point, and he just said, I will be taking this vacation. He was over that job, but it's still an illustration of skilled tech workers being hard to control.
I thought about it a bit and I think New York versus California may be an important variable. This would explain my "who are these people" perplexity. In New York programmers are much more likely to have lots of friends who don't work in software (this is not mindless chauvinism; I'm in a position to hear a lot of NY vs. California discussions about this) and are more likely to want to exercise their power to leave work and live the rest of their non-software lives. Maybe for developers in California the monoculture means that it feels less possible to leave work and so labor is less likely to try to protect its free time, and even the people who would want to leave are affected by the expectations set by the rest of the culture.
58, by contrast, seems to be about how bad your company is at internal decision-making.
Are there companies that are good at making decisions? Your initial comment is premised on the idea that it's implausible for companies to waste billions of dollars, a kind of efficient markets hypothesis of decision making, but I'm talking about a trillion dollar company here, one of the most successful companies on the planet. I've worked at two trillion dollar companies and they both made profoundly stupid decisions all of the time, though perhaps less frequently than their less successful competitors.
In NYC it's also just logistically easier to get home, or get anywhere else. Large NYC tech offices have nice snacks, but in this context the idea that that's some dystopian scheme to keep people glued to their desk instead of a pointless self-regulation challenge that makes my friends gain weight is sort of ridiculous; no matter how nice the snacks, there will be more varied snacks within a five minute radius from the office with the added benefit of coming with a nice walk. I could see how a formidable commute to other experiences would also wind up posing a disincentive to labor exercising its power to go home.
One more story about tech labor in NYC: a graduate of my same bootcamp cohort in NYC got a 90k+ bonus job at [Major Privately Owned Institution That Is Not a Tech Company], worked there for one year, got depressed staying indoors and programming all day (i.e., holding a normal office job) and wanted to travel the world, and rather than having her quit entirely the her bosses let her go to half-time plus remote while she traveled. The expectation that valued employees can negotiate for less than a five-day week is also broadly shared among people I know.
62: ah, ok, I get you. You're arguing that hiring consultants is probably a waste of money simply because most things that companies do are a waste of money.
It's all waste, except for the hollowing out of the volcano.
Even that - much easier to just wait for the volcano to hollow itself out.
That doesn't usually provide usable floor space.
Hollowing out a non-volcano (such as this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Cruachan) would presumably be no harder than hollowing out a volcano and would provide the advantage that you wouldn't have to worry about eruptions.
Here at third-tier U, where the stakes are small, the previous president and his clique of top officers kept hiring a guy for what (in context) was a lot of money. What did the guy do? Largely, when the top brass decided the university needed a new formal policy in some area, they'd ask this guy to create one. He would google some other college's policy, copy it, change it so it said our university's name in the right places, and bill the university for about 80K each year. Far from McKinsey, just some buddy of one of the ruling clique here, but the ingredients were: 1) make things more convenient for the executives than dealing with employees, 2) do something anyone else could have done (assuming google competency and willingness to plagiarize), and 3) charge 100x what any current employee would charge to do it. Harking back to the OP, by taking the work to a consultant instead of a "middle manager" in the university's employ, you do disempower the locals and isolate those at the top from those in the trenches, plus reward your buddies.
69: Isn't there medication for eruption dysfunction these days?
most people who hire consultants don't have people on hand who can check their work.
Implying, ipso facto, that consultants are useful to most people who hire them.
69: Why not just set up in a quonset hut if you've got no style!
Not that competent plagiarism doesn't have value.
The villain in "Zenith", if I remember, had his base in a hollowed-out Schiehallion - a very striking mountain, though also not volcanic.
But when you've hollowed out the non-volcano you find you have to move the whole damn town.
54: any fool with a company credit card can rent an EC2 instance and forget to turn it off/resize it back down, and Amazon Web Services' financial results strongly suggest they have done, but the barriers to hiring (or engaging consultants) are usually much higher.
I'm not saying you can't find the occasional non-volcano that would make a decent lair for a consumer products company or something stupid like that. But if you're in a real business, it's needs to be a volcano.
If all of "President" Louis XVI's coworkers make $700,000 to work ten hours a week as he describes, I think his company may be an outlier and not representative of companies in general in terms of how much money it wastes.
You can't hollow out Schiehallion or all your calculations will be wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiehallion_experiment
79: no, I just can't believe that a highly-paid techbro could make erroneous assertions about the rest of the world based on his assumption that the rest of the world is exactly like Silicon Valley.
"techbro" is a bit harsh. Who among us can say we would not be a "techbro" in the right circumstances? (a: being male / b: working for a tech company)
p.s. I made a joke of the form involving the phrase "turbulent management consultant" vis a vis Mayo Pete yesterday and had an old friend clutch his pearls at me about how I was calling for the murder of a gay man.
I saw this and was shocked! What an overreaction!
"President" Louis XVI's identity is not difficult to discern even from the comments in this very thread, if one has eyes to see (I regret not introducing myself, "P"LXVI, in Seattle last year), and I think dismissing him as just another highly-paid techbro is pretty far off the mark.
Because "large companies are spending billions every year on something that is obviously utterly useless" is a really striking conclusion to reach.
Oh Ajay, you sweet summerchild. The history of all software development in "enterprise I/T" has been one of massive, massive waste. When I worked at IBM I used to joke that if we could double our ROI we'd dominate the industry. From ... 3% to 6%. The vast, vast majority of all R&D spending isn't merely wasted, but burnt in stacks in the backyard. And this is true at all the companies, not just IBM. ORCL, HP, MSFT -- they all have this problem. And the same is true to a lesser extent of the FAANG companies. I know that at Twitter they've spent impressive sums on failed initiatives, for sure.
Re: McK and their ilk
Sure, it's possible that what's really going on is that these guys are willing to make things happen, that the CEO can't get his troops to do, fast enough. But two counterpoints:
(1) there is (or was) some solid evidence that even when things improve after a consultant comes thru, they go back down a bit after. And then another consultant comes thru and ... lather/rinse/repeat. There was a study from HBS IIRC that pointed this out: the mere act of bringing in consultants will shake things up, and that's enough for a bit of an improvement. It's not about them being better -- just different. Placebo, in short.
(2) Every McK dude I ever met knew one very, very important thing:
It's all about selling. Always Be Closing. etc.
And one thing I know/know/know: when you meet people whose most important work skill is selling, you can be sure that they don't actually bring anything of value. You. Can. Be. Sure.
85: oh, Chet, my earnest sweaty round-faced chum, it's inherent to the nature of research and development that most of the money doesn't produce a return.
Look at drug development. What percentage of drug candidates actually make it from in vitro trials through to market? 1%? Less? It's only a 10% success rate from the start of Phase 1 trials and that's after all the in vitro and animal trials phase. https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/05/09/the-latest-on-drug-failure-and-approval-rates
But does that mean that 99% of money spent on drug development is wasted? And does it mean that drug companies are stupid organisations that do pointless things? No, it doesn't.
Claiming that hiring consultants is always useless, though, is an assertion of a completely different sort. It's saying that there's this thing that companies do that obviously has no chance of bringing in a return, and they spend billions on it anyway because they're stupid and don't mind wasting money.
Like a sphincter, Always be closed except when it is important to not be.
54. Is this maybe about the transition to cloud computing from dedicated servers and storage? That transition can lead to small changes from outside saving a lot of money. But I don't think that it's a typical situation-- it is hard for groups to work effectively together, also hard to work effectively at all within a big organization.
IMO transition to cloud is kind of a special case, different from large projects that fail completely or yield badly engineered outcomes that barely work, which yes are pretty common. But for instance failed clinical trials are also common.
I may be wrong, but I don't think the analogy between drug development and software development is very close. Certainly, the economic model is entirely different.
[on second thoughts, those models may be converging. If the FAANGs grow more by buying up startups (eg FB with instagram) then that's a bit closer to the drug development pipeline where the research is done in universities, and then private equity funds the early development before the whole thing is sold to big pharma for the really expensive phase of the trials. ]
89.last Hello ajay, I hope that your day is going well.
I liked Drews' "In Quest of Tomorrow's Medicines" a lot for an overview, but it's kind of dated. Does anyone know of more recent descriptions of clinical trials efforts?
Clinical trials are good projects because they are analyzed with SAS.
90. Yes, there are lots of real differences between the processes. Analogy ban.
First idea that came to my mind in looking for a concise summary of a failed software effort.
700k is in the high end for FAANG companies, but it's plausible. Half of it is pretty common. I've turned that down a couple of times because I found most of the projects I knew about less interesting than what I was doing at the time. In retrospect maybe not the best choice but what do you do.
From what I can see levels.fyi is pretty accurate, but there are two widely held false beliefs about it. On one hand you have people who just don't believe it is true that a somewhat randomly picked early career software developer can be making 250k plus. In the other direction though, some people believe it is indicative of the industry as a whole. To the contrary, average salaries at peak mid career for software are much less than entry level FAANG. I know a lot of people in both camps and, as Louis comments above suggest the difference can no way be explained away by talent or productivity.
From what I can see levels.fyi is pretty accurate, but there are two widely held false beliefs about it. On one hand you have people who just don't believe it is true that a somewhat randomly picked early career software developer can be making 250k plus. In the other direction though, some people believe it is indicative of the industry as a whole. To the contrary, average salaries at peak mid career for software are much less than entry level FAANG. I know a lot of people in both camps and, as Louis comments above suggest the difference can no way be explained away by talent or productivity.
*sigh*
I have nothing intelligent (or event informed) to say about this, but that is depressing.
95: I've flipped flopped on this question also.
On the one hand, the disparity is depressing. On the other hand, FAANG (or FAAAM these days) companies represent a very rare thing - modern high revenue companies where a significant amount of that revenue is being captured by the people doing the work, not just the shareholders. If that model can be expanded it's not a terrible thing (although it did attract the "tech-bros" refereced up thread. Note that most people working there are not tech bros).
However it's only working for now because there really is a global shortage of talent/experience relative to the perceived need. This is confounded by the fact that, all these years after Fred Brooks book, we still aren't all that much better at doing software. These big companies with money to throw around are playing a statistical game - what they really mean by "we only hire the best" is that they have some proxies for individuals that they use so that, at least on average, they end up with reasonably capable teams who can muddle their way through problems they run into. They solve institutional memory problems to a degree by making people comfortable staying, and everyone just gets on with it.
Apparently, I suck at selling out.
That was disappointingly uninteresting.
I wasn't aware that Netflix had been demoted out of FAANG and replaced by M. Microsoft?
Nerds suck at naming. How about Big Nosey?
100: Netflix was always sort of an odd duck int this group, but they were early adopters of aggressively competitive comp packages. So some people now use FAAAM, where google -> alpha, and Netflix -> Microsoft. Not consistently though.
97: if it helps, I suck at it too. I occasionally regret it for a hot minute when ex-colleagues retire at 45 but mostly don't.
So I need to "Just For Men" the gray at my temples?
On the other hand, FAANG (or FAAAM these days) companies represent a very rare thing - modern high revenue companies where a significant amount of that revenue is being captured by the people doing the work, not just the shareholders.
AND the shares still go up so much that they account for a large fraction of the boom in stock market indexes on their own!
93.2. This example immediately occurred to me.
Major SNAFU. Chief exec lost his job. But nearly 30 years ago. So how often does this sort of thing actually happen, as against routine disappointing underperformance and pissed off plebs complaining to each other because nobody else will listen to them?
106 is a good point. Part of the reason this works at all is the shareholders are also getting a lot of return at least nominally.
Cable and internet is down in a huge portion of New Hampshire right now, and has been all afternoon. Things will be interesting if it's not back up in time for the New Hampshire debate. Clearly, Pete and the DNC are trying to silence Bernie again.
Cable and internet is down in a huge portion of New Hampshire right now, and has been all afternoon. Things will be interesting if it's not back up in time for the New Hampshire debate. Clearly, Pete and the DNC are trying to silence Bernie again.
Spike - Any thoughts on why it's Bernie v Pete and Warren has fallen so far in NH polls?
A lot of people here remember voting for Bernie in 2016 and I think that's helped him consolidating the left. Meanwhile, Pete is absorbing Biden votes and it seems like Amy may have stalled out after showing some strength in January. Warren should be seen as a compromise candidate who can unite the wings of the party but I don't think that's a message that's getting through. Either that or nobody is in a mood to compromise.
Warren is counting on a high-quality ground game but I tend to think ground game-based strategies are overrated. She's over-invested in getting people to knock on doors and under-invested in media. I've tried a couple times to alert the campaign that they should be running ads on the radio - its the weirdest thing, no one is doing any radio advertising this round, so she could have that channel all to herself.
Pete's ground game seems strong too, although Bernie's doesn't.
Bernie really pissed me off in the run-up to our Mayoral election last year. Bernie scheduled a rally for the same time, and a few doors away, as the Mayoral debate. So all the Republican Mayoral candidate's people showed up at the debate, while a large part of the Dem's crowd peeled off and went to see Bernie. So, without the crowd on his side, the Dem didn't have a great debate and, perhaps as a result, lost the election.
" I thought about it a bit and I think New York versus California may be an important variable. This would explain my "who are these people" perplexity. In New York programmers are much more likely to have lots of friends who don't work in software (this is not mindless chauvinism; I'm in a position to hear a lot of NY vs. California discussions about this) and are more likely to want to exercise their power to leave work and live the rest of their non-software lives. Maybe for developers in California the monoculture means that it feels less possible to leave work and so labor is less likely to try to protect its free time, and even the people who would want to leave are affected by the expectations set by the rest of the culture."
FWIW, my anecdotes are the other way around, though no Bay Area experience. Jobs in LA and Austin generally 35 to 40 working hours a week with a lot of not very stressful hours. My NYC job has been minimum 45 hours / week of time relentlessly scrutinized by a delivery manager. No work from from home. Lunch at desk. Internet usage monitored closely and external internet largely locked down anyway. The worse part is that the team really has been like 2 to 3x more productive than my old teams. It's just been fundamentally exhausting and unpleasant. Likely the problem is that my company consults for big banks / hedge funds, so this heartens me at least that it's not a general NYC problem, and I can just quit and find a saner job.
Warren is counting on a high-quality ground game but I tend to think ground game-based strategies are overrated. She's over-invested in getting people to knock on doors and under-invested in media.
Isn't this kind of the strategy you're stuck with if you're behind on fundraising?
I don't like people knocking on my door trying to get me to vote for them. I don't mind the people asking to sign petitions.
If I don't vote in the morning, people call me. I used to vote in the morning, but they moved my polling place so I can't.
I just had some Bernie door-knockers, and we don't vote until Super Tuesday (March 3rd). They almost woke up the napping baby—just like America's sheeple need to wake up amirite.
Isn't this kind of the strategy you're stuck with if you're behind on fundraising?
I don't think that is related to fundraising in this case, I think its been her strategy from the start.... to spend money on staff instead of media and swag.
Which sounds good - and she has a great people working for her, but unfortunately, great staff eventually hits diminishing returns, and what it ends up being is a great infrastructure for organizing people to knock on doors. So they are better at knocking on doors than any other campaign but, again, diminishing returns.
Somebody just came to my door to ask me to sign a petition.
Radio can be pretty effective. Too bad she's not using it.
Is there like a list "Will sign candidate petitions" or does it happen so often just because my street is a nice place to reach a bunch of Democrats easily on foot?
Radio can be pretty effective. Too bad she's not using it.
Nobody's using it. My friend who works at the radio station says they were budgeting for a whole bunch of political ads to come in, and it hasn't happened. They figure all the money is going to Facebook instead.
My theory is that its because all the campaigns are being run by Millennials who think of radio as that thing that grampa used to listen to. Which is true, but grampa votes.
Are there political ads on podcasts? I mostly get SquareSpace ads when I listen to podcasts.*
*really the only podcast is Reply All. On repeat.
I don't know, but it seems like podcasts don't get you the geographic targeting you need.
I've yet to listen to one and I vote.
I don't know how to play music on my phone, except by going to YouTube or something.
115: I was only meaning to refer to the Bay Area with my comparison. It also doesn't surprise me that anything finance-adjacent has a different culture. I definitely know who the people are who are spending their entire waking lives working at finance jobs. And the woman I knew who got a job at Chase or somewhere like that didn't manage to change her schedule to accommodate her to volunteer to spend programming in NYC schools, but I emphasize, everyone else's narrative around this was, "What a drag that your workplace hates fun and won't let you volunteer" not, "it would be unusual for your work to flexibly schedule around your volunteering." My work was flexibly scheduling around my volunteering in the same program when I was an *intern*. So go out there and get a chill job!
Podcasts might be geographic enough. Several of the podcast platforms customize the downloads per-user, and that definitely includes at least geo-IP targeting. I'm getting Boston-area ads in a podcast consisting entirely of people in the UK talking to each other.
Sounds like I'm behind in my podcast technology. I'll need to look into that.
132: I miss when the British soccer podcasts had nothing but ads for British stuff totally irrelevant to me. Now as soon as the Brits are done bantering I hear an American woman telling me to post my federal contractor job openings on Indeed.com.
134: First experienced this a few years ago when an Irish podcast opened with an ad for Sheetz's newest sandwich. Was briefly concerned with my ability to perceive reality until I thought about it for a few seconds.
Sheetz sandwiches aren't very good. The breakfast ones are just awful.
No wonder they need to advertise on podcasts.
Sheetz is sooooo much shittier than WaWa.
I've heard Bloomberg ads on news radio here in the DC area. I've also heard some PAC ads. Virgina's primary is on Super Tuesday. There are a bunch of big states voting that day.
Bloomberg ads are all over the TV here. They are pretty explicit about calling Trump a piece of shit, so at least there's that.
Speaking of the TV, I can't believe Laura Dern gets her Oscar for some bullshit with Darth Emo instead of the movie where she was pursued by dinosaurs and Jeff Goldblum.
That's funny. I haven't heard any Bloomberg radio ads here in New Hampshire, on account of the fact that he's not on the ballot.
Skipping primaries in purple states strikes me as a questionable strategy for someone hoping to win them in the fall.
Until I actually saw one (in PA) I thought Wawa was an inside joke. I've never been in one, so I still can't be sure it's not a more elaborate joke.
Laura Dern really got her Oscar for the one about young women raised in a cult. Then the cult leader leaves for a while and they all escape and blossom. (Except the one who dies.)
Parasite sweeping the Oscars was wonderful