Especially here. If there ever was such a thing as an expected norm in how a multibillion dollar company handles its finance and taxes (a pretty complicated topic that’s quite far removed from normal life), it’s probably exactly what FB is doing.
You are the CFO of Meta and you have have a choice to make in your tax reporting: option A and option B. Both are esoteric and don’t relate much to how a normal person pays tax or thinks about finance, both are legal, but option B leads to billions of dollars less in your bill. Would HN posters really choose option A?
If there’s a problem it’s that there is so much complexity and so many legal but complicated choices you can make that change how much tax you pay, and only the very rich, and very large corporations, have the ability to explore those options (of course the law is also skewed towards giving them loopholes and tax breaks that don’t apply to a normal person)
There's also selection bias at play here: the press isn't in the business of publishing "everything is boring and normal" stories - the very existence of a headline mentioning some person or org doing something, already implies they are doing something wrong and violating established social norms.
Which they probably aren't, half the time, but news services wants you to think they might, because your rage is their ad revenue.
I think introducing hierarchy is slightly helpful, but does not solve the core problem.
The core problem is that everyone in the company have an opinion on what should go into the backlog and their personal proposal should be the highest priority/hierarchy/urgency. The proposer frequently does not want to do the extra effort to research what is the deeper problem we can provide value for customers but still insists that their idea is immediately worked on. In the past, I would say 95% of the backlog dies in the status of “further research required”. Without the deeper research, the priority/hierarchy/urgency is just who is screaming louder…
I am not sure if it is recency bias but it feels like with AI, this problem is much bigger than before.
There is a misguided belief in early stage AI startups that, if the company is not growing, it is because the employees are not trying hard enough, working harder or not using AI enough. What really happens is that everyone is working harder, trying hard, using more AI… towards the wrong direction… against giving the proper scale up structure companies at these stages could benefit from to grow.
AI (compared to other technology) allowed people to play busy, play working hard, towards things that does not truly grow the startup at all, or worse, towards things that is working against a company’s ability to scale up and grow.
I would say, the ‘ability to appear busy’ is what’s different this time compared to before.
I think that every person or company in group 1 thinks they are in group 2 because they see ‘speed’ in ‘completing work’ as a signal in better performance. Especially since VCs are pushing for speed (https://x.com/Alfred_Lin/article/2084636778791858256), a lot of misguided person and company who is moving fast thinks they are in group 2, when the speed they have only doubles them down group 1
> I'd say he didn't get the job because they would have asked him to pressure customers day in day out, he would refuse, never get promoted and be otherwise miserable in an aggressive culture.
But how do you differentiate between if it is just this one interviewer or if it is the team or the whole company? I had interviewed at places that my friend referred me to, and after the fact, my friend told me it is just this one interviewer with their weird preference that screwed the whole process…
If the frontier labs are indeed facing threats from open weight models, we would first see this in pricing pressure from the base model (like Luna) first.
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