Let’s consider a toy model where you’re hiring for two things and that those are equally valuable. It’s not very important what those are, so let’s just call them “thing A” and “thing B” for now. For one set of abilities, the scatter plot looks like this:
I recently finished the excellent book Kochland. This isn’t my first interest in Koch—I read The Science of Success by Charles Koch himself a couple of years ago.
Charles Koch inherited a tiny company in 1967 and turned it into one of the world’s largest ones. That’s impressive! Just a quick disclaimer just to get it out of the way. You may know the Koch brothers as the climate deniers who funded the Tea Party. I don’t understand this disconnect between being so brilliant in one field, and extremely ignorant in another. But my curiosity tells me there’s something worth learning from most notable people, despite what I may think of their opinions and Koch Industries turns out ot be a particularly interesting case study.
I get bored reading management books very easily and lately I’ve been reading about a wide range of almost arbitrary topics. One of the lenses I tend to read through is to see different management styles in different environments.
A funny thing about being a foreigner is how you realize people take broken things for granted. I’m going to go out on a limb here claiming that the US has a pretty dumb banking system. I could talk about it all day, but right now I want to focus on a very particular piece of it: how to verify your identity online.
I joined Spotify in 2008 to focus on machine learning and music recommendations. It’s easy to forget, but Spotify’s key differentiator back then was the low-latency playback. People would say that it felt like they had the music on their own hard drive. (The other key differentiator was licensing – until early 2009 Spotify basically just had all kinds of weird stuff that employees had uploaded. In 2009 after a crazy amount of negotiation the music labels agreed to try it out as an experiment. But I’m getting off topic now.)
(I accidentally published an unfinished draft of this post a few days ago – sorry about that).
There’s a lot of sources preaching the benefits of dollar cost averaging, or the practice of investing a fixed amount of money regularly. The alleged benefit is that when the price goes up, well, then your stake is worth more, but if the price goes down, then you get more shares for the same amount of money. According to Wikipedia, it “minimises downside risk”, about.com says it “drastically reduces market risk”, and an article on Nasdaq.com claims that it’s a “smart investment strategy”.
One of my favorite business hobbies is to reduce some nasty decision down to its absolute core objective, decide the most basic strategy, and then add more and more modifications as you have to confront the complexity of reality (yes I have very lame hobbies thanks I know).
Here’s a conclusion I’ve made building consumer products for many years: the speed at which a company innovates is limited by its iteration speed.
I don’t even mean throughput here. I just mean the cycle time. Invoking Little’s law this is also related to the total inventory of features not being deployed yet.
(Warning: super speculative, feel free to ignore)
As Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”. Unfortunately predicting is hard, and unsurprisingly people look for the Magic Trick™ that can resolve all the uncertainty. Whether it’s recruiting, investing, system design, finding your soulmate, or anything else, there’s always an alleged shortcut.
Every once in a while when talking to smart people the topic of automation comes up. Technology has made lots of occupations redundant, so what’s next?
Switchboard operator, a long time ago
What about software engineers? Every year technology replaces parts of what they do. Eventually surely everything must be replaced? I just ran into another one of these arguments: Software Engineers will be obsolete by 2060.