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.
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.
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 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.
(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.
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.
(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.
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?