MrTonyD

9 ms·

1.
by MrTonyD 7y ago
Back when I worked at NeXT we created a lights-out factory in Fremont, CA and then closed it. Steve said that we were moving it offshore to be closer to where the parts were manufactured. At the same time, I was told by some employees who w
2.
by MrTonyD 7y ago
I'd prefer that our society classifies it as illegal rather than evil or immoral. We need to have laws which also take away the acquired wealth from those who benefit from such practices.
3.
by MrTonyD 7y ago
I was just reading the book "The House of Morgan" and it describes how companies are purchased when they don't maximize short term profit. The bankers and executives make sure that they make millions in the transfer, and then
4.
by MrTonyD 7y ago
I've worked with lots of Harvard graduates over the years. They all seemed to be cloned with some kind of "group-think" about Economics. Essentially, they were all convinced that markets solved big problems, and anything vagu
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by MrTonyD 7y ago
If I remember correctly Steinbeck's doctor was a friend from his days at Stanford. So we aren't talking about traditional doctor/patient relationships.
6.
by MrTonyD 7y ago
Steinbeck is amazing. He would recite his books as he wrote them - he believed that words were meant to be spoken. He wrote for the spoken word rather than the written word. I also saw a few pages of his revisions on one of his books - he r
7.
by MrTonyD 7y ago
Well, I spent a number of years writing drivers for PC systems. Some years the I/O chips were faster than CPU, and some years the CPU was faster than I/O chips. DMA was usually slower, just because release cycles for CPUs tended t
8.
by MrTonyD 7y ago
And my recollection of the Power Broker is that he got a lot done by aligning with the desires of the rich at the expense of incredible numbers of poor people who had no power to stop him from destroying their lives. I would hope that we ca
9.
by MrTonyD 7y ago
I don't like all the toxic positivity that has been growing in the workplace. This has changed a lot since my early days in Silicon Valley. My impression is that different countries have different "power distance" - a measure
10.
by MrTonyD 7y ago
I wonder if this is just another effect of regulatory capture? Government should set some minimum standards for things which impact quality of life.
11.
by MrTonyD 7y ago
Another aspect is autonomy. It is routine in most companies for a low level incompetent manager to be able to waste all the time and talent of a senior engineer. So the issue is more than just money.
12.
by MrTonyD 7y ago
I ran my own company for a few years just to make money to stop working so I could contribute to open source. By the time I finally made enough to not have to worry about money anymore, I had spent enough years working with open source to r
13.
by MrTonyD 7y ago
There are lots of effective things - enforce a healthy diet, monitor everyone continuously, reduce the population to improve the environment, put criminals to death. The goal of a society should not be "to be effective, efficient, and
14.
by MrTonyD 7y ago
Knowledge can be gain through proven datapoints and unproven datapoints. Insisting on proof reflects a particular type of ignorance -- the ignorance of someone who hasn't deeply reflected on the history of the advancement of knowledge.
15.
by MrTonyD 7y ago
I agree completely. If a director was meeting the company goals and running either a harsh or caring organization - well, at the higher levels of the organization nobody really cared as long as things worked. We would put up with lawsuits,
16.
by MrTonyD 7y ago
I was a PM at Oracle - our team VP reported to Larry. Everybody I worked with was very experienced and very sharp. On the other hand, we regarded most of the company as "sheep" who executed our plans. Completely expendable and gen
17.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
These guys like 3M and Dupont and Monsanto are doing worse things than tech to destroy our society - why aren't we hearing calls to break them up or take them over or stopping their operations in our society? (ie. Are you listening Eli
18.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
I spoke to a manager at a major airline - he told me that their research told them that many of their first class passengers are now renting private jets instead. Just another artifact of our "winner takes all" economic systems.
19.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
I think it varies with the group being managed. I've managed groups where many other groups hoped to benefit from our time, resources, and work products. In such groups a manager really does need to say "no" dozens of times f
20.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
I think of concepts like "barriers to entry" or "differentiators" or "channels" or "positioning". These words all have important meanings and implementations which can impact whether a business succe
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by MrTonyD 8y ago
Bought a KitchenAid stand mixer - the motor made a loud "aircraft landing" sound. When I called the number in the instructions they told me that their warranty doesn't cover sounds, and that they couldn't do anything for
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by MrTonyD 8y ago
What is interesting is that most of Schein's book was based on Steve Jobs (the original draft was almost all Steve, but got rewritten to emphasize Steve much less and other executives much more when Steve complained that the book was j
23.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
As someone who was writing analysis for my CEO when we were involved with the POSIX definition, let me say that POSIX was driven by the complaints of users, who insisted that they would stop buying product if the vendors didn't stop th
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by MrTonyD 8y ago
You know, there are a lot of problems with your logic. I'm a product of a Jesuit University where I was forced to write paper after paper on topics around morality, good, evil, justice, and similar themes. Justice has a lot of differen
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by MrTonyD 8y ago
Is it really unpopular in Sweden? I gave a conference talk there and everybody I spoke with liked their system, and said that all the coverage in the US criticizing it wasn't true. They were all laughing at me (when they weren't f
26.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
I'm kind of confused by your comment. I've heard lots of ideas for ameliorating the "power problem" (distribute, weighted votes, various election strategies for decision teams, feedforward techniques, feedback techniques
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by MrTonyD 8y ago
This may be the best idea I've ever read on Hacker News. It makes it worth putting up with all the small-minded objectionists who downvote anything they don't agree with. If they downvote you, don't let it stop you from comme
28.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
I agree that power is everything. Absolutely everything. Most people forget this when they have a good job where they aren't treated badly. At the same time, it is worthwhile to decouple the problem of power from other problems - so th
29.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
I couldn't agree more. I had the PM title twice before I worked with some senior PMs at a very successful Fortune 50. What a difference experience makes. I cringe when I think about how incompetent I was in my first two PM roles.
30.
by MrTonyD 8y ago
Well, if that is their reason for downvoting then they really haven't thought it through. Pervasive monitoring is pervasive in large part because modern monitoring sensors are produced by the billions and are incredibly tiny (I'm

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