If you have both of these, you could conceivably use your existing staff to build at least a limited-functionality version 1, and backfill the jobs they used to do with new people. If not, you have the harder problem of needing to hire people to do something you don't know how to do at all.

Here's a Cornell law school prof saying just this. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

"There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and 'shareholder value' — even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: 'Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.'"

"Serving shareholders’ 'best interests' is not the same thing as either maximizing profits, or maximizing shareholder value. 'Shareholder value,' for one thing, is a vague objective: No single 'shareholder value' can exist, because different shareholders have different values. Some are long-term investors planning to hold stock for years or decades; others are short-term speculators."

"More to the point, corporate directors are protected from most interference when it comes to running their business by a doctrine known as the business judgment rule. It says, in brief, that so long as a board of directors is not tainted by personal conflicts of interest and makes a reasonable effort to stay informed, courts will not second-guess the board’s decisions about what is best for the company — even when those decisions predictably reduce profits or share price."

By whom? I used to work at Snowflake, and from what I remember people on the inside were far more excited about the founders than they were about the CEO.

I got the impression that he was meeting expectations for the CEO job, but no more. Though that's a pretty high bar, given position of the company and the industry.

Netflix is the #6 internet company by market cap. Probably no problems there.

eBay is #30.

Digital Ocean is #91.

It's tempting to believe that the Chinese government just doesn't give a damn what people think, and are therefore willing to say anything at all. But if they really don't care, why lie in the first place?

The only interpretation that I can come up with that makes sense is that a) the government of China is reluctant to admit to any fault at all, b) the actual number of deaths is low but not impressively low, and c) the Chinese press (including social media) is very tightly controlled, and d) by b and c the government can get away with saying there are no deaths without looking like idiots.

The best I can come up with is the notion of a double contingency plan. Engineering agrees to a set of functionality to be delivered and a delivery date. This is inevitably going to be a bit optimistic, because people consistently overestimate themselves.

To deal with that, the first contingency plan addresses the question of what should be done if things are not converging to the ship date. The plan here is to keep the ship date, but ask hard questions about what bits of functionality actually need to be kept. What are the actual P0 - MUST HAVE features?

The second contingency plan addresses what is to be done if the first one fails. At this point engineering has already done all they can. They have pushed as hard as they can, and they have deferred every feature that is deferrable. They are down to the actual MUST HAVEs. Now the rest of the organization has to figure out what to do with a product that is inevitably going to be late. What is the alternate ship date? What customers are going to be really unhappy. And so on.

It seems to me any large engineering project should think out these contingency plans in advance. What will they do if making the deadline starts to look daunting? And what will they do if making the deadline turns out to be impossible?

For example, teams running Agile are very reluctant to give both a delivery date and a fixed set of features. They're willing to promise one or the other, but not both. And that's a problem, because the whole rest of the organization really wants to know when they can announce the release to customers. Planning for releases tends to be a really big deal, the pressure to make promises of both functionality and delivery dates is very strong.

Also, Agile methodologies tend to assume you are in close contact with the customer, who can tell you what they actually want and decide how things should work. But this is rarely the case; typically you have a PM or something like that who is in touch with the customers, and is supposed to understand what they want. But this person is rarely senior enough to actually make decisions; important decisions are made by a dev manager or a project lead or someone like that, with the PM just providing input and perspective.

Finally, Agile has this notion that everything is supposed to be handled informally, verbally, person to person. And that's fine for small tweaks to the product. But as soon as you start building something big enough that it takes months and crosses team boundaries, it gets really useful to have an actual document explaining how something is supposed to work. Such a document is an invaluable record on what has actually been decided, and anyone joining the project or wanting to contribute to it absolutely should read it. But Agile tends to discourage creating such documents in the first place.

Given that Agile clashes so hard with how actual organizations get things done, it rarely gets adopted in anything approaching a pure form. The practices that tend to get picked up might be called Agile-light: sprints, daily meetings, and task estimation in points.

Japan - 119

Canada - 696

Germany - 1,093

France - 1,704

US - 1,876

UK - 1,886

Italy - 2,118

Judged by this metric, Canada came second among the major first-world democracies. We did well. To be sure, there were missteps. We should have done better. But we could also have done a whole lot worse.

Of course I was only there for a short time, so I could be mistaken, but I did note that 75% of the employees in the lab (in Canada) were Chinese, as were seven of the eight first-level managers. That said, I never felt badly treated because of my ethnicity, and I never saw anyone else treated badly either. While it is possible things could have ended up this way for innocuous reasons, I would bet against it. I'm guessing some informal "good fit" discrimination is going on.

There is also an awful lot of Chinese spoken at the company. They try to run their foreign operations in English, and I have to give them credit for putting some real effort into it. But given the distribution of their staff in Canada and even more so over in China, in practice things switch over to Chinese quite frequently. It makes sense that they do this, since some of the engineers in China struggle to communicate in English, but when it happens the non-Chinese are excluded. And it's hard to object when one is the only blue-eye among a dozen Chinese.

Given what I saw, I would advise any non-Chinese engineer considering taking a job at Huawei to consider alternatives carefully, and absolutely not take the job if they do not speak Chinese and do not plan to learn it.

https://www.datasecretslox.com/

The old link will continue to work for a while.

Data Secrets Lox is set up as a replacement for the SSC open threads, and is run on actual forum software, which means there are topic-specific threads for easier navigation. As membership increases, I expect we'll add subforums, also.

https://www.navalgazing.net/

https://datasecretslox.obormot.net/

My position, strictly speaking, is that anonymity is generally permissible. If you want to try to remain anonymous, that is in many cases fine. But it is also quite difficult, particularly in the face of determined investigation, and is therefore rather unrealistic. Unless you really know what you are doing, your attempts will fail as soon as someone really cares about finding out. This makes combining anonymity with any sort of public prominence or celebrity status a particularly bad fit, because plenty of people care about knowing all sorts of details about celebrities, so there is plenty of reason for both amateur snoops and professional investigators to go looking.

I don't find your example of celebrity pseudonyms particularly convincing. These are simply terms of convenience, part of crafting a public image. They are not true attempts to hide anyone's identity. Pull up the wiki page of most any celebrity that goes by a stage name, and you'll find their real or original name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elton_John

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne

That said, this decision to shut down the blog looks like an overreaction to me. Scott seems to think that he should be able to be both a prominent online pundit, on the one hand, and completely anonymous, on the other. That just isn't realistic. If you're someone who matters, people are going to want to know who you are. And there are people who make it their business to uncover such information.

A part of being famous is a certain level of unwelcome attention. It's not just the good and kind that pay attention to you. It's the weird and threatening too. This should not be news to anybody. It seems to me Scott got his first brush with real fame (in the form of an article by a top newspaper), and discovered that even a modest helping of it was was more than he was willing to deal with.

Goodbye SSC. It was good while it lasted.