The answers to basic questions like that already starts to shape behavior. If you pay zero attention to how people behave, and only look at impact of what was delivered you may promote people who optimize for their own work, but make others miserable. If you don't properly weight quality, especially now with AI code gen, you'll promote people who move fast break more things than is reasonable.

We can easily find examples of suboptimal behavior that arises out of poorly shaped rewards incentives at companies. Empire building is one behavior that is the result of managers getting promoted based on headcount. Stack ranking can and has led to people limiting collaboration with peers because someone has to fail in order for someone else to get a favorable rating. Or people avoid riskier work because failure can put you on the hot seat.

The problem is when the government changes the definition of 'bad actor'.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/03/13/elon-mu...

If you're talking about fear of leakers, the response to that is to tighten the distribution of information and start a counterintelligence investigation.

In any case the simple risk calculus is, what is the risk of adversaries getting a hold of this information and causing grave and lasting damage to national security and death vs the risk of political rivals leaking something. Pretty simple decision there and one that any cabinet member should get right.

To start with, classified information is ONLY supposed to viewed in a SCIF. Secondly, it should never be loaded onto private devices. The private phones of national security leadership would be prime targets for every hostile intelligence agency in the world. It matters little if the information was encrypted in transit if the host device is compromised.

One would have to be a fool to not trust all of the classified tools and safeguards the US government uses only to then use a commercial app on commercial phones to communicate classified data in public while stateside and abroad. Just the fact that someone could accidentally add an unauthorized person to the chat is but one reason it was crazy for them to do this.

The way Microsoft implemented stack ranking was anti math. You're supposed to measure the data then calculate the level of fit to a distribution, not artificially shoehorn the data into buckets to create the curve. If you analyze the data honestly you may find you have a bimodal distribution, or a heavily skewed distribution, who knows.

Stack ranking just clumsily says, I'm gonna give x% a bad score, y% a middle score, and z% the top score.

Things like this were at the heart of what Jim Crow was in America. Selective and capricious enforcement of the law to disenfranchise and disadvantage black people at best, enable unaccountable violence against them at the worst.

I don't think that's a good way to look at things. Some guy in Texas is polluting a lot more than you, ok, but would it be better if that guy keeps polluting and you pollute just as much? We can't get hung up on, 'well some person/company somewhere else is undoing my savings'. That kind of gets into tragedy of the commons thinking.

It is disheartening to see parts of the country going in the opposite direction than we should be going for sure. And well-meaning but not very useful policies can be a pain. But I try not to be disheartened at backward thinking in other locales, I try to look at the places making advances (for example, India is ahead of schedule in the shift to renewables) to be find some optimistic amidst the bleakness.

Yeah you may go through hours of interviews and not end up with an offer in some cases but think of it this way: you could potentially earn tens of thousands to over one hundred thousand extra dollar per year off that time investment in interviewing.

Attempting to line up multiple interviews and balancing offer timelines is hard, but the payoff can be huge. Considering that people spend 4 years or more working in college to get into their career, making a time investment of a few weeks to get a potentially large raise is nothing.

One of the challenges of coordinating a group of people is getting everyone to buy into the same vision. Fact is that other people see the world differently and may have different goals. Here the author is attributing that to narcissism and maliciousness when most of the time it isn't that.

So yes, as you add more people it gets more challenging to get everyone rowing in the same direction. This is why setting a clear direction and clear communication is key, but the increase in communication overhead as the team grows is always going to be difficult. In this case, as others have said, he could've just open-sourced his code so the people who had a different idea were free to run with it.

Google might have made more inroads with enterprises with G suite and GCP if they didn't have that reputation. The gaming industry is a 200 billion/year market that Google could've captured a decent size of if potential customers trusted that they wouldn't quickly give up. All of that represents billions of dollars in lost opportunities.

At the very least, access control systems should've flagged unusual access to more information that this person would've had a need to know. But as big as the US intelligence and defense apparatus is, not every agency, program, and office is gonna have rigorous enough controls to catch people like this. Seems like the lesson should've been learned after Manning and Snowden.

Just look at the difference in outrage between when there's some story of someone on public assistance buying something like smartphone, vs the reaction when we found out about all of the businesses abusing the PPP loan system. Or the fact that many of the PPP loans were forgiven.

It's like as a country we're fine with wealthy people abusing the system. But then we turn around and would rather let 100 deserving people struggle just so maybe one person can't get a free ride.

Even when crime isn't spiking, police can just sit on their hands whenever reforms are pushed and instantly change the narrative. This happened in SF with the AG recall and has happened in numerous municipalities. Local politicians can't afford to anger the police union because all the police has to do is stop enforcing the law aggressively and a local politician is done for.

So New Yorkers may want police reforms but the NYPD union has a lot of leverage to resist it. And voters generally dont' have the stomach to oppose police union backlash.

For starters, there are a lot more federal agencies embracing remote work since the pandemic. From the people in my network working as government employees or contractors, I'd say more than half have more remote work options that they had before, with some going fully remote. There are still stubborn leaders and organizations but remote work has made major inroads in the last few years.

The fact remains that some jobs can't go full remote as a function of security clearance requirements. It's laughable to say, "...so long as the employee has access to a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) in their location," as if SCIF's are readily available around the country, and that somehow it's easy to get a seat in one. If you work for one three letter agency, you can't just sign up for a hotdesk at another three letter agency's SCIF.

The market is shifting in the DC Metro where even cleared jobs are allowing some remote work, but it'll still take some time for organizations to change.

But now with Twitter reportedly losing 40% of its advertisers and taking on $1 billion of annual debt servicing costs, it seems unlikely they'll be able to get back to profitable if things keep going this way.