Scholarly article for reference if you want to learn more: https://www.jstor.org/stable/827888

I naively assumed that they would be happy to take in any and all data, but they had a fairly sophisticated algorithm for deciding "we've seen enough, we know what the next page in the sequence is going to look like." They value their bandwidth.

It led to a lot of gaming of how you optimally split content across high-value pages for search terms (the 5 most relevant reviews should go on pages targeting the New York metro, the next 5 most relevant for LA, etc.)

I'm surprised again, honestly. I kind of assumed the AI race meant that Google would go back to hoovering all data at the cost of extra bandwidth, but my assumption clearly doesn't hold. I can't believe I knew all that about Google and still made the same assumption twice.

I will be very impressed and curious if I find a glowing article about C++ from someone who didn’t grow up knowing it as a smaller, simpler language.

The C++ community needs enthusiastic converts who didn’t do it back in the 2000s if it’s going to stay relevant.

Walmart is a U.S. company that historically did well, but I don't see why anyone would care unless you buy their stock or live in Bentonville.

People don't care about macro indicators that lump the 1% and the 99% together.

It’s great at the beginning. We started with a team of mostly self-motivated people and the lack of upward review made technical decision-making easy.

Eventually, you hire someone who is not self motivated. Also, some existing people get wise to the fact that no one will check up on them, and read Reddit for half the day.

About 4 months in, every team had 1 person like that. They had to work around them - one team can’t ever get designs cause the designer is checked out, one team’s backend work takes 1.5x as long as everyone else.

People say things to the underperformers, but there’s no teeth to anything, no one is anyone’s manager, so it’s just suggestions. They get ignored. Resentment builds into each individual team’s culture. Deadlines start slipping.

1 year in, non technical leadership is fed up. They don’t see benefits from the flat structure, and hire a new CTO and new middle management layer.

The new managers come in briefed with “the team is lazy.” The underperformers get pushed out, and have trouble finding work because their skills have absolutely atrophied. Any remaining high performers are permanently tarred with the reputation of the org from the flat structure days, and get micromanaged. To the new managers, they are kids who will misbehave the second they aren’t watched (which, in fairness, is kinda what happened at the organizational level when they weren’t watched.)

Sone good middle management providing timely oversight and feedback could’ve avoided the whole situation.

That’s the first step in fixing the quality issues, not an end state. Reports don’t know what they don’t know, so step 1 is to get their ideas on how to fix quality issues.

What a doozy of a start to this article. How do you even reach this point?

Now you may need to coach the person on how to do that themselves (can we make the ticket making process more lightweight? Can we make a heuristic like just put story points for the time you've already spent on it plus a buffer for after-the-fact work?)

But managers who really want documentation and truly think people are doing underappreciated work can always make it themselves.

I’m writing to let you all know that after careful consideration, we've decided to reduce our global workforce by approximately 20% or 528 Dropboxers.

Should be replaced with

I’m writing to let you all know that after careful consideration, we've decided to reduce our global workforce by approximately 20% or 528 people.

You should never use your pet names for employees in a layoff announcement. It makes an otherwise serious announcement seem tone-deaf.