1. Niceness - a coworker decided to just randomly not show up for work (not WFH, just disappear occasionally). I took it to management, and was told we don’t want to hurt his feelings.
2. Bureaucracy - I left yahoo to go to Facebook. At Facebook, if you needed a server, you would go to an internal tool, slide a slider and click a button. At Yahoo, you had to take a proposal to a committee led by a cofounder, and then be repeatedly shot down until you finally persevered.
Afterwards I tried to estimate the cost to Yahoo of the time of the dozen or so people, including one of the founders, and I don't remember my estimate, but I do remember it was many times the cost of the server.
[1] yes, Yahoo had multiple billing teams - that's a story in itself; my team existed almost entirely to protect the European businesses against the perceived inability of the US billing team to accept and respect the requirements of the European business. Of course we couldn't admit that to the US team, so my job was basically to repeatedly refuse to surrender an inch in terms of customer requirements whenever the US team tried to convince us to move something over to the US platform.
Aaaand stuff like this is exactly why I say Asians face racism in tech and need to push back against the idea that they are "overrepresented" [1]. I really hope that if I'm in a management position, my reports don't feel like I have "cultural commitment that they should be grateful for their suffering" or some such tripe.
Oh, and never mind that apparently this is the same company that one of the parent comments is saying was "too nice" because it didn't let an employee go even after they stopped showing up. You really have to work hard to explain that one with an Asian cultural commitment to suffering, eh?
I would sincerely suggest to 'killjoywashere that they try saying out the same thing loudly about another minority (say Black people) based on some characteristic they were born with and see how it goes over. Better still, think a little bit about whether you have racist biases if this is your view on things, and maybe try to correct it.
> My usual joke with her is asking if she slept well on her bed of nails.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say your boss probably doesn't actually appreciate being asked stuff like that all the time. She likely just doesn't want to invite trouble by complaining about it.
Oh, and a cursory Wikipedia search reveals that Jerry Yang came to American when he was 10 years old, around 4th grade [2].
------------------
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3415130
how about forums?
https://www.reddit.com/r/taiwan/comments/6aa3x9/what_is_wron...
News reports?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-16834258
> Jerry Yang came to American when he was 10 years old, around 4th grade
So ... his parents dropped their culture at the shoreline?
You know, there really are differences between cultures. That's thing. Italians, on average, really do tend to make better marinara. Find me a black person in America who doesn't know what fatback is (delicious component of certain Southern dishes, by the way). Convince me that the average white person does know what fatback is. Convince me that the average American knows what the Euro is (A night club? A style?).
If I said "I imagine Martin Luther may have liked beer and Weisswurst" is that racist?
> one of the parent comments is saying was "too nice"
Good point, yes, that's completely in line with the "work is next to Godliness" attitude I've observed. In that social norm, being nice is essentially the same as being grateful for the opportunity to take on more work. Nice = more opportunity to work. Now, there's also a bit of "forgive but remember" that goes with that. Those who need niceness all the time, maybe you don't hang out with them as much because you can only handle being so nice, you just can't take on more niceness, you're exhausted! May this dear friend share their opportunities to be nice to them a bit more with their other friends.
If your boss is from Texas and they're overworking you, is your first reaction to pull out survey data about how 50% of Texans believe in suffering as a form of atonement? Or is it just to say “What a jerk”? When people talk about Peter Thiel, how many times do they link his behaviors to elements of German culture and history?
By all means, if Jerry Yang was overworking his employees, call it out on the basis of him overworking his employees! But I don't want to be stereotyped and targeted because of something people in the place I originally came from do. It could very well be that Jerry Yang's parents came to America to escape the overworking culture, and therefore he has a keener sense of not overworking his employees than the average American has. Maybe that's why he didn't fire people that stop showing up to work! You have no way of knowing, and you're idly speculating.
Also – I am Asian, was not born in America, and know perfectly well what fatback and the Euro are. Another data point perhaps for throwing out some notions about what people may or may not know.
The point that culture is useful in thinking through possibilities stands. Half the world's population lives in the Valeriepieris circle (1), and half of that is is water. Without saying Asian, what if I argued that population density seems to incentivize hard work, and one would tend to suspect that folks who originate from high density populations are, on average, more likely to develop a culture that rewards hard work? I could then pile on with the cultural-difference-within-a-culture that cities exhibit. Would that be acceptable?
Applying "racism" as a label to the point I was trying to make is using a label to suppress an idea (2). Can you accept that I didn't have the idea fully formed and needed to argue it out a bit to get this better idea statement worked out?
My point is that this often works negatively against Asians, especially in management in a way that it doesn't for other racial groups.
Like you're way more likely to see people being okay with casually saying “Jerry Yang is Asian, therefore he overworks his employees” than say “Marvin Ellison is Black, therefore <some other negative characteristic>” in a conversation. That comment was up for more than five hours before I said something about it.
I think this is a problem. It's nowhere on the same scale as some of the problems that other minorities face across America. But in my opinion, it's important enough to call out occasionally.
How many african-americans join the KKK?
Since I can't edit it, the following might explain my position better: Asians get summarily excluded from a lot of minority-focused programs in tech on the basis of being over-represented. This should stop, and Asians should be included in minority-focused programs in tech. This is because (as you said, and as shown by this comment) they can be, and often are a target of casual racism and stereotyping.
It is exactly nationality-based stereotyping, based on a single example.
I did not say Jerry Yang thinks the same way. I said I imagine he could. It's a thought experiment. Can you imagine what kind of life it must be to think that suffering is the mark of success? Open your mind and think about that. What it must be like. How it must affect your kids. How you must have been affected as a kid. Why, what geopolitical factors created that cultural norm? Think. Think. The point of the comment was to think.
And, I would be hard pressed to completely generalize between say China, Taiwan and Japan. While you will find a lot of overtime and overwork in those countries, the way they happen is different and the cultural/social pressure behind that are different. And having worked with Asian Americans (both ABCs and people who came a bit later), I would vehemently disagree that you can easily generalize their behavior solely based on the culture of their country of origin, especially since they have lived in the US, spent time there, gone to school there and will have changed their values and culture over time just from this.
So, I don't think that saying Jerry Yang is taiwanese therefor will overwork his employees is a useful heuristic or likely to be true...
(Aren’t you?)
I personally I believe Hadoop took off at Yahoo because it was a way of getting computing resources that did not need to go through the committees. Big Data? Map Reduce? Less important than simply getting a machine to do things on even if it was just the gateway node (the game of trying gateway nodes till one wasn't at 100% cpu was always fun).
Of course, if the employee was completely MIA for an extended period of time and no effort was made to contact them, that's neither ethical nor productive.
For example, you can take a group of five billionaires. Give the first four a little tax break for something, which totals up to only be a million each. No big deal, right? All these people are the 1% of the 1% of the 1%, the pinnacle of wealth in the world. There's no way that little tax break would prevent the 5th billionaire from buying the private island he always wanted, or whatever.
In practice, though, that 5th billionaire will be pissed he didn't also get the tax break. He will spend a lot of time either angry at the situation, or spending that time also trying to get a tax break. Is that a good use of his time? He would be happier driving around on his 80ft yacht... if he could focus on that instead. But that's not how our brains are wired.
So if only billionaires were human, we could just suggest their semantic categories were wrong. <rimshot>
It is a good financial decision to spend up to "$1M * <odds of success>" to get that tax break, or another better one. (especially if the ~$500K spent on retainered-lawyers sets you up to pay less due to future tax hikes.) Economics gets weird when any of the numbers get really big, or really small.
I don't like this example though, as it doesn't detail why the tax break was so specific. Did 4/5 of them have no taxable income that year? Do all of these billionaires live in a despotic-shithole where the rule of law doesn't apply equally to everyone? (to be fair, most billionaires do. /s)
But this example is not about that. First to answer your last question, it's the despotic shithole kind. The point being, the reason is completely arbitrary.
This is about a billionaire who can already buy whatever they want, regardless of said tax break. It won't make them directly happier because it doesn't allow them to buy anything they couldn't otherwise buy.
The point of the example is that given this is the case, we still have a built in biological desire for "fairness" and if this billionaire would realise and observe this desire having no logical basis, they would not fight it. (assume fighting it is not as enjoyable to spend their limited life time as they could be doing something else with the money they already have)
In an analogous situation, five people go to a fancy restaurant and for some reason four of them get 10 plates of food, and one gets 9 plates of food. Assume the restaurant is so generous one person can't possibly eat more than 2 plates anyway.
Why is it easier to imagine simply not making a big deal out of it and enjoying your meal(s), in this situation?
(Especially considering that the meal example is 100x more unfair)
However, in support of your point, while Bill Gates and Warren Buffett both say billionaires and other "better off" people should pay more taxes, to my knowledge, they haven't been unilaterally sending checks to the government for the difference between current taxes and their ideal amount. They seem to believe that their private foundation can make better use of their excess money than the government can. They're willing to advocate additional taxes for groups, rather than just for themselves.
I don't know why some people seem to expect that of billionaires. It's not rational behavior for them or anyone else, so why do you think they should be behaving that way.
I've seen this more than a couple times in HN comments and it always befuddled me.
But Gates and Buffett both say that they SHOULD be paying more in taxes - but they don't. So what they're really saying is, all those other guys (the "well off") should pay more, and then they'd pay more, too.
This supports the original poster's contention that the billionaires would seek that tax break (for "fairness") even if they didn't need it.
The well off don't pay much tax, and they will probably pay none at the top end (they'll donate to charity, for example, which they work at, and the charity will fly them around to their meetings, pay for accommodation, etc). Generally it's the middle class who end up paying tax until it's not worth working any harder.
Are you asserting that the government (and the public) will get more utility (benefit) from the extra 1 dollar on its $2.7 billion budget (increase of .000 000 04 percent), than I would from the extra dollar in my net annual income (on the order of a thousandth of a percent)?
That's a pretty incredible contention.
But on a percentage basis (in a progressive taxation scheme, and especially in the higher tax brackets) the government gets more marginal utility from a 1% tax increase than you would from a 1% tax break.
In any bracket and at any percentage, the government will be adding $x to it's huge budget by taking $x from an individual or organization's much smaller budget.
(* Note that it really isn't valid to compare marginal utility between entities. It's an individual, relative measure, rather than an absolute quantity.)
Just allowing employees to disappear with no notice or trace is an environment where I won’t want to work.
There are obviously situations where I have to not be at work suddenly (eg, medical emergency where I don’t want to share details) but I can just send a text to a boss or corworker and have them do the rest.
If HR said they didn’t want to act to not hurt feelings that seems like there was no additional info, unless they thought that was a proper way to protect medical info (it isn’t).
Sounds like a bad place to work and seems like a negative factor for companies wanting to do well or me awesome.
I think it’s better to just assume nothing unless you have direct knowledge that the employee is doing something blatantly unethical like working at another job (has happened before).
It would be very strange if they had no idea and didn’t care that an employee wasn’t showing up. That kind of culture would get swamped fast.
I did have someone in my team at Yahoo I had to go to HR to get approval for special considerations due to a family member with cancer, and it was approved literally in minutes.
But it's also well known that they were for a while very lax about handling unauthorised absence.
Is this based on direct knowledge or are you just listing possible examples? Because these examples are very different from what the ex-yahoo person mentioned in a follow-up comment: stuff like personal hobbies.
https://www.radicalcandor.com/radical-candor-not-brutal-hone...
out of the context provided, this sounds likes like none of your business?
Digg was originally modelled on the "popular" section of Delicious, an example of building a product out of a feature. Then Reddit saw a huge boost from the eventual Digg community exodus, after a time when Digg itself was the cultural nerve centre.
I wonder what happened to that guy. I would gladly trade a drunk Kevin for a Zuckerberg.
Revision3 had some other great shows also on their list. Too bad there is nothing like that anymore on the internet, at least to my knowledge.
Delicious was about 10x-15x the size of Digg.
it's cleaner, nicer, and no comments. Refreshing.
Delicious turning into Twitter or Reddit would have been a real loss.
"But it doesn't scale!" is practically a mantra for HN, but scalability is fairly low on the list of values for me. I'd rather have interesting websites than big websites, and I'd rather see websites go bankrupt than compromise their values. The reason I care that Delicious might come back is that it was still interesting when it went down last. Digg and Slashdot still exist, but frankly I care so little that I actually had to look up that fact, and after verifying that they existed, I clicked away.
I don't mean to suggest it would have been similar to them culturally, or that it would have evolved into a copy of reddit or twitter. It would have still been delicious, in the sense that it would always be a booking service (as long as they never went all in with Delicious Stacks, which I think nobody remembers except me). I also don't doubt that, at some point, it probably would sell it's soul and lose whatever signature personality it had according to the main users. But it would have remained useful, grown, and been one of the main places everybody goes.
Even with the loses you identify, it was an invaluable asset that could have kept Yahoo relevant.
And in this alternative future, if del.icio.us had kept its core as a social bookmark sharing service, it could even have kept the Web relevant.
I also remember this as a time when Google didn't yet have a reputation for abandoning everything they touched, so you could get inspired by, say, Google Knol or Google Wave. I had hope that Google Reader might grow into something, and the was a fraction of a second where we all wanted to believe in Google Plus.
So ahead of its time! I have never understood why that got the axe, it took everything they where doing great at that time (chat, video, email, and the newish At the time G suite apps (called something else then) and just meshed them together in a surprisingly useful and pleasant way. Also the whiteboard features were really good particularly for it’s time.
This Mashable article does a good job explaining it in more detail[0]
I can’t believe it to this day they couldn’t figure it out. It was very ahead of its time
I never really tried out Wave but Knol suffered from the problem you'd expect if everyone gets to write their own self-promotional competing article on a topic.
I'm perfectly aware of this and have used RSS feeds on a daily basis for more than a decade, so I'm not sure what's being suggested here.
Now we have Quora, of course.
The barrier to entry for making money is a different thing.
It's mostly due to this principle actually that Facebook usurped Myspace despite having far fewer features.
One exception to the rule lately is Roam Research, which looks like dog shit but is apparently popular.
> There are still PHPBB forums which "look like dog shit" but host vibrant communities
There are small communities that predate modern web/Facebook, which is irrelevant. There is also craigslist, and its shitty design is remarked upon constantly. It's frequented by the elderly so falls outside the scope of discussion.
You're married to the idea that design standards haven't changed, or that the web as a platform hasn't become much more sophisticated over the last ~decade.
Users mostly didn't want directories of web sites and portals (which couldn't really scale anyway), they wanted search.
Microblogging (and individual blogging sites generally) fell out of favor. I consider it a minor miracle that Blogger is still around and Google even did a minor and only somewhat regressive update recently.
Most people didn't really want "serious" photo sites like Flickr. They wanted free social sites dominated by "influencers" like Instagram. (We'll see how long Flickr holds on under a small owner like Smugmug.)
I'm curious what those moves/announcements are; I haven't been keeping up with Flickr, but I was actually rather happy SmugMug bought them as opposed to most other possible outcomes. SmugMug has always been a subscription-supported service with no free plans, so they were always "doomed" to be much smaller than competitors -- but they've also been around since 2002, are apparently profitable, and remain pretty laser-focused on their niche.
Digg is still around, too, but not in a recognizable form. (At least, if there's a way for mere mortals to submit links, I haven't found it.)
Delicious was pretty much perfect as it was. Morphing into something like a Twitter or Reddit would not have been a move in a positive direction.
Take from that what you will. Google made money, and then Facebook learned how to make money by trumping Google - by harvesting the "digital surplus" of its users to power an advertising juggernaut.
The rise of advertising everywhere, and the loss of privacy, and the glut of trivia, hatred, and anti-science in the form of Facebook content, have resulted in a world that employs less than half the number of journalists than 20 years ago, and is governed by incompetent personalities.
The return of del.icio.us might just be one small step back in the right direction.
> resulted in a world that employs less than half the number of journalists than 20 years ago
This is a direct result of the internet in general. With lower publication costs you get more publishers which means more supply of ad space which means ad spend that used to go to journalism now goes to Instagram "influencers" and lolcats. Which would be just as true without any of the tracking.
Verizon was and still is very scary. Whether or not they are incompetent, companies that came from the mother bell, att, Verizon, CenturyLink, ... And all major ISPs are scary.
Verizon's supercookie thing was revealed shortly before it's acquisition of Yahoo! And Aol. If Oath/Verizon Media succeeds as a major online destination, they could have more data than Google, no? I mean it is a data hoarders dream. Own the pipe end to end?
» This is a direct result of the internet in general. With lower publication costs you get more publishers which means more supply of ad space which means ad spend that used to go to journalism now goes to Instagram "influencers" and lolcats. Which would be just as true without any of the tracking.
I read something either published by Google or about Google that basically said that publishers in average can expect to see twice the revenue with targeting than without which made me think if that's all then we should get rid of tracking and figure out how to live on half the money.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/veriz...
> I read something either published by Google or about Google that basically said that publishers in average can expect to see twice the revenue with targeting than without which made me think if that's all then we should get rid of tracking and figure out how to live on half the money.
I have an apparently minority ("conspiracy") view on telecommunication systems and security services (regardless of the country). Advertising is a convenient pretext: for both state surveillance and advertising, we need to track users, read their email, and end privacy as we know it.
quote:
“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”
― Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/162691-the-technotronic-era...
In case you don't know who this person is, I suggest reviewing his career. He is, as Donald Rumsfeld would have it, a known known.
In fact, in some ways, the incompetence makes them less scary. Imagine the reach that Verizon would have with content delivery that was better than Netflix and webmail that was better than Gmail; and the resulting potential privacy concerns.
Verizon FiOS is excellent as far as connectivity, but as a corporation, they suck.
But just look at the difference between the Google homepage and that of Yahoo from 1999. Google was a simple "search" box, Yahoo was cluttered with tons of stuff, including ads.
What made Google successful, besides being very effective as a search engine, is that it didn't have annoying ads, trivia and dubious content. Times have changed, but while you may want 1999 Google back, you probably don't want 1999 Yahoo back.
I mean, it was. But encryption was a joke (and still is, to great degree) and we all just lived with plaintext over TCP everywhere. IRC, email, web, etc. In fact, during '93-97 the thing I remember most about the internet was just how paranoid everyone really was at the time. It was still a mostly technical user base and there was this general intuition that the potential for this to all go sideways is right there. But we were all on local BBSes and local ISPs and looking at personal web pages and logging on our friend's IRC server. It was sharing bootlegs with Grateful Dead fans, with a cautious eye towards the Feds and the AT&T and IBMs of the world. After 2003 or so, this world ceased to exist. Tracking, spam, privacy invasion became normalized.
> Google was a simple "search" box, Yahoo was cluttered with tons of stuff
I remember people on Slashdot begging Google to not clutter their front page. There were a few times that I believe Google introduced new features and there was a serious backlash. I want to say Google was paying attention (Slashdot was huge at the time), but who knows.
> while you may want 1999 Google back
What strikes me nowadays is just how much Google has always sucked. I don't mean the company (they suck too). I mean PageRank. The thing we always held in unquestioned high regard. This thing we used to think is really clever turns out to just be a thing people could game to improve their visibility. Then Google realized this and now it's a tool Google uses to control the internet. I've spent a good portion of my career on this cargo cult nonsense we call "Search Engine Optimization." The rules change all the time, and only Google knows what those changes are. The biases are ever-shifting, in order to keep people on their toes and to reinforce Google's control.
But the part of PageRank that sucks is that if you do any sort of search that isn't a Wikipedia page, a Stackoverflow or Quora question, or a Pinterest image, you will quickly land into the mire of shady Russian Twitter/Instagram rehosting sites and scam pages. And this is all within the first page or at best the 2nd page of results. That is godawful results if you really stop to think about it. Google can't tell you anything that Wikipedia doesn't already know.
What we didn't know then is that Google would achieve exponential growth to reach trillion dollar status by surreptitiously harvesting each user's search queery history, tracking their browsing histories by IP address, scanning their gmail, surveilling their movements via android, and putting it all together to achieve an advertising monopoly the likes of which Hearst, Pulitzer, Beaverbrook, Ogilvie and Murdoch could only ever dream about.
All without the cost of employing a single journalist.
Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism | VPRO Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw
Privacy has always been a concern, but it used to be something more physical that involved sealed packages, curtains and cash payment. Privacy-minded people simply didn't share sensitive information on the internet, they treated everything on the internet as public.
Privacy on the internet wasn't that much of a thing not because privacy has changed, but because the internet has changed. It is now everywhere and used for things that used to be unthinkable back then: banking, official documents,... An internet connected coffee pot (not a teapot) used to be a joke, they are now in every (online!) shop.
Yahoo failed by trying to be Where Everyone Comes For Everything and monetize that through traditional big buck ad campaigns.
There's a ton I don't like about Google, and whether true or not it feels like they were 'better' in the past. A huge step up from the multiple AltaVista searches or the clicking around on Yahoo that I had to do pre-google.
Maybe there are better alternatives these days, but DDG still isn't fully there for most of my searches, and I use Bing for very specific types of searches that I wouldn't bring up in polite society...
This may come as a shock to some, but it's quite logical when you think about it.
With print advertising, it makes sense. You pay for the space you take up. How do you calculate that? Well, at minimum, the cost of a classified ad for similar space, plus additional fees for processing, graphics, and color.
Online, advertising pricing really doesn't make much sense. The space you have is freely available, there are no printing costs, no special processing requirements, and the readers aren't even likely to be local, unlike the limited distribution networks of most newspapers. It should come as no surprise that online advertising revenue for newspapers is nowhere near its peak of print advertising revenue [1]. Even when a newspaper stops printing and can cut out all the expenses that come with it, there simply isn't enough money to support their existing levels of operation.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/this-is...
Slot-machine of the internet. rage, outrage, xenophobia, name-calling, name-dropping, celebrity, manufactured 140 chars at a time. It's a culture killer.
For me I avoid Twitter and ignore all news media(minus some local news).
I like to think there was an alternate reality where Yahoo didn't run itself into the ground, and took its properties: delicious, flickr, tumblr, its massive userbase across fantasy sports, groups, news, messenger, geocities and answers, its email service, and a better-executed alliance with Mozilla and rode them into prominence and relevance.
All the pieces were there, just the management vision appears not to have been.