That being said, this isn't the first time in the last few years there's been a suit against Tesla. Either this isn't been a focus for management, or their remediation has been deficient in preventing this sort of toxicity from flaring up out in the open.
Thanks for this context. I was disinclined to believe the story because it sounded so unusual (especially with the context being "silicon valley company"), which seems like a reasonably good filter for predicting that a news story will turn out to be fake. But from this it seems plausible that there's just a very different culture going on on production floors. This is pretty awful.
I tend to use 50 years as my rough "long term" definition. "Facebook won't be around in 50 years" is not very impressive. "Facebook won't be around in 2020" would be a bold prediction, but doesn't seem very "long term". "Facebook won't be around in 2025" might be starting to get into "long term", but is also definitely starting to feel vacuous if we think of it as "The probability of Facebook being around as a distinct entity in 2025"... well, no duh it's not going to be 100%, but the probabilities get fairly uninteresting quickly. 50/50 is a decent initial guess for that, and it isn't until you get into the 90s on either side that it starts becoming an interesting prediction.
I don't know how to turn "Facebook won't be around in the long term" into an interesting prediction without a time horizon.
Here's a non-vacuous sort of example: There's a proof somewhere that the maximal probability of the expected future lifetime of a given organization like a country or a company is its current lifespan, projected into the future. So the maximal probability of when Facebook will be gone if it is currently 14 years old is 2032. However, I can not seem to Google up the discussion of this; all the search terms I can come up with are flooded by actuarial discussions of human mortality where this most assuredly is not the case.
If you make the naive assumption that you are observing the company at a random point in its overall lifespan, the median of the distribution for how much longer it will survive is how long it has survived already.
More than that, if it has survived N years already, the odds that it will survive at least M more is N/(N+M). If you work out the probability density and then integrate it, you come up with an arithmetic mean that is also N. However the point where it is most likely a priori to die is tomorrow, and that probability steadily decreases.
> There's a proof somewhere that the maximal probability of the expected future lifetime of a given organization like a country or a company is its current lifespan, projected into the future
At Google there is a peer bonus benefit. You can peer bonus someone for doing something awesome. Each peer bonus is $150 before tax. You can list your peer bonuses on your promo packet. You can give as many of these out as you want ... within reason. Sometimes at Google they do something called a peer bomb, where many people will peer bonus a single person.
This podcast was pretty good. ISIS were using a Turkish Dropbox like service to move files ... except the service was actually based in France, something a whois on the domain could have easily detected. Fighters have also geotagged tweets/instagram/Facebook posts, which led to a drone strike:
> So ... they're both more sophisticated than you think when it comes to opsec. And less sophisticated than you think when it comes to opsec.
A lot of their recruits are people in their 20s or even teens from various countries including western ones. They are basically regular users that try to learn opsec as they do. And the youth from most muslim countries also use smartphones and most of the services we use too.
ISIS used to be more sophisticated in terms of opsec when their officers were mostly former officers from Saddam but since then it feels like either the drone strikes managed to decapitate their hierarchy or that there were internal purges to promote the truly ideologically crazies.
Also, when an operation is said to have succeed thanks to opsec, always remember that it can be a way to cover an internal humint source.
I've been using this on Android for weeks. It's super fast, blocks a lot of annoying ads (think jumpy mobile overlays). No bookmarks or tabs, so if you're looking at a recipe for a dish you're making, there's always a chance it gets wiped. Just use Chrome for that. Highly recommend.
What's up with reductionist posts like this every time a company announces layoffs? Scaling out a global business takes a lot more work than it does to run a no-SLA side project. And you hire people to build out businesses that don't yet exist. When you've overreached, or targets are consistently not being met, you re-org, or, if that isn't possible, you scale back.
> What's up with reductionist posts like this every time a company announces layoffs?
I hate people like this. "Oh I could build that in like a weekend with Go and React no need for 100s of devs..." Those statements only come from people who never built something even remotely in this size and have no idea how complex this stuff becomes when done proper.
Well it comes from having been part of companies that were going through this explosive growth phase, and seeing the corrosive effect it can have on productivity if not managed properly. I've seen formerly efficient and productive and happy teams get completely demoralized as truck loads of new people are added but nothing new gets done.
I'm not saying this is exactly what happened there, but as a user of their product I'm disappointed because I simply did not see a growth in features or improvement quality that I would associate with a company that was scaling out like it apparently was?
> It reminds me of Thomas Edison sabotaging Tesla, and yet, here we are, on A/C.
Dangerous position to take. This is pretty much saying that the ends justify the means, given enough time. That because winners write history, that in the moment, doing whatever it takes to win is more important than operating ethically.
This is incorrect. Ask anyone who has had an insider peek of any on-demand company's finances. The largest cost to all of these companies is employee acquisition, which continues to rise.
Take your own advice and do the unscientific thing of talking to the drivers. How many of them are new? How many are old? Surprising how many of those fall into the first category.
Ford: https://www.hometownstations.com/news/ford-employees-say-rac...
GM: https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/16/us/gm-toledo-racism-lawsuit/i...
Toyota: https://auto.hindustantimes.com/auto/news/toyota-says-it-no-...
Honda: https://www.courthousenews.com/honda-plant-accused-of-tolera...
That being said, this isn't the first time in the last few years there's been a suit against Tesla. Either this isn't been a focus for management, or their remediation has been deficient in preventing this sort of toxicity from flaring up out in the open.