Thr0wawayDocs

You don't know the half of it: I worked on Dalio's HR system, and what is really "interesting" is how the dots are put together.

First off: All dots are public. You know who is grading you well, who is grading you badly, and who is liked and disliked by each executive and manager you want. Imagine giving Ray Dalio a low score in Critical Thinking, one of the many categories. It's not going to be easy.

The dots are also put together to create a baseball card: An accumulation of what the company thinks of each person. And those scores are basically the review system, as you will be kicked out with a low enough average. You can, and should, look at the baseball card of someone you have to meet with, but you don't work close to, and act accordingly.

But the baseball card score is not just an average: Then two groups of people with different ideas of someone would give a middling score. Instead, scores are weighted with a sigmoid kernel. Said kernel takes, as its other parameter, the rater's score in that category. If the company believes that you are bad at something, your opinion doesn't matter. And since votes are public, you probably want to agree with the majority, as otherwise your lack of skill at evaluating that category could lead to people voting you lower in that category.

This mechanism is, as you might have noticed, pretty unstable. As my personal score changes the value of the dots I provided, every scoring iteration changes scores in ways that might never converge. Some people's scores would change wildly, as the people that rate them high, or low, had scores near the critical point of the sigmoid. Therefore, some determining mechanism was required to decide the final scores. Let's just say it stacks the deck in favor of executives.

So when you look at the Bridgewager version of this system, what you got was all kinds of little mechanisms that pushed really hard towards having the leadership being rated as the best at everything, and then having the leadership's rating be the most powerful force of them all. So every rating is performative, and you better be directionally agreeing with the top forces in the company. Rating honestly is something for only the naive and the politically powerful.

I wonder how far down this road Coinbase is going: Every little bit of the system matters to optimize for toxicity.

Let's not oversell the fact that Amdocs' official HQ is in the US: It's an Israeli company through and through. It did more development in the US back in 2001 than it does now: Today, their US footprint is mostly customer sites. And you will find people brought in from Israel everywhere. It's always been bad enough that managers that don't speak Hebrew knew they were always at a disadvantage. Your best bet for saying it's not an Israeli company is to say that a whole lot of R&D is being done in other countries with cheaper labor.

While it's true that the installations are on-prem (having been to quite a few of those), Amdocs business model isn't about dropping code and going away: They are so embedded with your typical deployment that there's plenty of opportunity to exfiltrate data. Sending every CDR to Haifa? Probably not: The Sysadmins on your typical large telco are iffy, but not that iffy.

And carefully firewalled? The talent was never great, and the security practices were never all that serious: I've been handed production shells that I had no business having, because it was convenient at the time. Once again, I'd say that the best argument to claim that there's no data exfiltration is that the people writing the code aren't good enough to do this under the customer's nose.