So a purely social drink with a non-coworker immediately becomes a workplace event when they ask about the possibility of working at your company? Ok, I can sort of see that... but I hope that situation never arises for me, because there's no way I'd be able to switch from "social" to "work" modes that fast.
In any event, I'm not sure that "a job you control" was the case here: It sounds like he (quite rightly) handed that off to someone else and had nothing to do with the hiring decision. It does seem like he should have been clearer to the applicant about not being part of that decision, though.
We have been inundated by posts like these lately as these creepy dudes have been outed. I have felt as you do on several of them. IMO, this one comes the closest to being a real apology. Doesn't make up for what he did, not by a mile. Doesn't mean he should ever be allowed to be in a position of authority over women again. But for me it was a positive step.
I wouldn't say perfectionism and sales-orientedness are on the same dimension. However, I have noticed that being given the hard-sell is more often than not associated with the product being sub par. A product or project that is doing very good work often doesn't have to sell quite as hard, because the work speaks for itself. (My experience on this issue mostly deals with internal teams. I don't know how much this applies to external teams.)
This is especially true when two products have teams of about equal size, experience, and expertise. Time spent selling is time not spent making a better product. All other things being equal, every hour spent selling is one less hour spent working on making your product better.
> A product or project that is doing very good work often doesn't have to sell quite as hard, because the work speaks for itself.
This doesn't work in general, though.
> All other things being equal, every hour spent selling is one less hour spent working on making your product better.
Which, I believe, is a key to understanding why many (most?) of the things you can buy are utter crap, barely fit for the purpose they were made (if at all). It explains why so many successful SaaS businesses offer barely functional products. Because every hour spent selling is a hour spent not working on a product, and marketing has much better ROI than actually building something useful.
True at theoretical extremes. I think the world would be a better place if the building/selling split was more like 99:1. But in a competitive environment, selling has a much better ROI than building, so here we are.
The purpose of sanctions in a situation like this is to compel the recipient of those sanctions to do the court's bidding. They should just ratchet the sanctions up until he does what has been ordered. If ten thousand dollars won't do it, make it a hundred. If that doesn't do it, multiply it by ten again. Eventually he'll either comply or no longer have any assets. Either way, the problem will be solved.
in my dream-world, these hypothetical fines would be levied on Khosla, collected by the court, and then donated to an account controlled by Surfrider Foundation.
then, in the near future, when the government eminent-domains the land, it would use that same money to make the payment ... not all of it, of course ... maybe 25% of it.
the remaining 75% could go toward building a parking lot and some bathroom facilities for the public.
If not fines, then imprisonment for contempt of court is a remedy judges have at their disposal. I'm sure it would not take very long for Kholsa to get the point.
I would dream of finally seeing those SWAT teams used for the benefit of public good. Please, local police, videotape the scene and underline it with "Nobody is above the law", that will restore a bit of the credit that police has lost...
You think that the women you've worked with have been promoted . . . because you were fantasizing about them instead of engaging with them? Not, for e.g., maybe because they were more capable than average?
IMO, you should seek therapy. You sound like you need it more than most.
Normally people have to do some penance before forgiveness, especially as the crimes grow more heinous. Continuing to live the rich and privileged life you were leading before, more or less untouched by the hand of justice, does not count for much in this dimension.
If nobody knows or nobody's willing to venture a guess, then we should at least acknowledge that complete social ostracism is a massive penalty. Are you sure the punishment fits the crime? It seems more likely that there's a reasonable middle ground, but maybe someone has a persuasive argument to the contrary.
His reputation is in ruins. It remains to be seen whether anybody will do business with him. Both of those combined equals social ostracism, so we should at least be sure it's warranted.
This sounds remarkably like the sort of sky-is-falling rhetoric I heard on this website when Brendan Eich was pushed out of Mozilla. He's now the CEO of a of a two-year-old startup with $7M in funding. I'd love to have my reputation ruined in the way Brendan Eich's was!
It is technically true that it remains to be seen whether anybody will do business with him, but I strongly suspect they will. For the purpose of accurately testing this hypothesis, note that he already retired from both Lowercase Capital and Shark Tank a couple months ago: https://lowercasecapital.com/2017/04/26/hanging-up-my-spurs/
There are a couple of projects listed there (Zach Braff's new ABC show, his new podcast, some different form of investing): we can see if those come to fruition.
Dragging my name into threads about harassment is lazy analogizing. Adding the post hoc, propter hoc fallacy (I got a CEO startup job and funding after being "pushed out", therefore because of that) is just dopey. I founded Brave, it was not just a job offered to me.
Nothing about my exit from Mozilla made fund-raising or building Brave easier than it would have been without my exit. If I had stayed at Mozilla and managed to sell the Brave plan internally (unlikely), I'd have had lots more funding and market power. What I've done has been achieved through careful planning, hard work, and help from the great team I recruited.
You can stop dragging my name into these kinds of HN threads now (two and counting!).
> Disclosure, this comes to mind because of something that happened between me and a colleague of equal rank in a volunteer organization who went directly from "I don't think I can see a movie tonight" to "This situation is making me uncomfortable" with nothing in between.
Did you ask multiple times? This sounds like what could easily happen when someone won't take the initial "no," implicit or not, for an answer. Based on the rest of your comment, I expect so.
A few important points:
1. Repeated asking has been held to be sexual harassment, if repeated for long enough.
2. Here's a simple rule: ask once, and only once. She knows where you work. If she's interested, she'll ask for a rain check and get back to you.
> I just don't think this is suitable verbal behavior for supposedly rational adults
3. Rational adults understand and respond to signalling. They don't demand that all communication happen explicitly and on their terms, because they know that such demands are ineffective for all purposes, will not be heeded, and might make them social pariahs.
3. Rational adults understand and respond to signalling. They don't demand that all communication happen explicitly and on their terms, because they know that such demands are ineffective for all purposes, will not be heeded, and might make them social pariahs.
Which is why people behave that way in airplane cockpits and the bridges of submarines. (Actually, such behavior has gotten people killed in those contexts.)
If someone is insisting on an implicit level of signalling, they can be just as guilty of insisting foolishly as someone insisting on the explicit level. When implicit communications are demanded for 1) a higher stakes situation on the basis of 2) the supposed potential victim status of one party -- something is way out of whack. Not only is the safety of clear communications being abrogated, the danger being borne is skewed to just one party.
Beyond the level of the social white lie, if you're advocating deniability to "be safe" you're probably doing something dishonest on some level. Extending the mechanism of the social white lie to a situation where more is at stake is just foolish.
> Actually, such behavior has gotten people killed in those contexts.
Nobody is going to die if you can't date someone.
Again, I advocate a conservative approach to getting a date with a coworker. One request, declined for any reason, should be treated as a firm no absent explicit signals to the contrary (request for a rain check, some other sort of proactive, explicitly date-seeking behavior from the other party). Your odds of getting into trouble under this rule are so vanishingly small as to be nonexistent. If you choose some less conservative rule, including, apparently, whatever rule you've been following up to this point, your risks are higher.
Of course, there's also the issue of not wanting to make your woman coworkers uncomfortable. I would hope that would be something of intrinsic value to you, and that on this basis alone you might change your behavior after seeing its impact in the past. The fact that you're still arguing about this makes me doubt that you do value their comfort the way that I think you should. But I don't know how to tell you that you should care about other people in a way that's going to stick. :(
I dunno. A 30% code size win is non-trivial. I'm all for filing an issue first and seeing how likely it is that there is uptake from the dev team and desire to fix the problem. However, if no fix is forthcoming . . . code size has fairly well known effects on performance.
A 30% code size reduction in code that does little other than construct and return a value. I have certainly seen individual functions where this is the case, but across an entire program, you will not get anywhere near 30% size reduction.
Having said that, this is certainly something that should be fixed in the compiler.
On a related note, in the final assembly, the compiler could also have optimized the 4 RETs into 1, then optimized away all of the conditionals, turning the sample code into the equivilent of "return objectInfo()"). Of course, in a real example, these optimizations would not be possible; but they do show that these reduced cases are not the best way of benchmarking performance.
Unless it actually impacts the use case of the application, and has been confirmed by a profiler that is indeed the case, it is just cargo cult optimizations.
On some level, this is basically "capitalism 101." If I don't need my resources now, I can put them to work so that I can later benefit from them. This leads to me having productive assets, which pay me some return.
If I could not acquire productive assets, there would be much less reason to save. And it's unclear how one would save, as banks would likely not exist either. You can solve this problem somewhat by having a centrally planned economy. But then you have the problems that hit those.
The problem here isn't that capitalism lets you have productive assets that give you a return. It's that when r > g (when the rate of return of capital is greater than the growth rate of output), inequality increases dramatically. The greater the difference between r and g, the greater the rate of increase in inequality.
This is laid out super bare in his example: he bought a house. That house is in an area that surely is past its prime in terms of growing rate of GDP growth. Which means r > g. And that means his assets give him relatively good returns, which in turn compound, which has the net effect of him getting far, far ahead of everyone else who lives in that area.
The benefit of productive assets is that people who otherwise would not be able to produce high value outputs are stuck making lower value ones. By working with another's assets an individual can create more value than alone, and somehow split the difference with the asset owner. Workers maybe need to start to fight for a better split, but that is beyond the scope of this article.
Yes, yes. Or governments can enforce a more equitable split through taxes. But you still have to give some benefit to those who save, else there will be no reason to do aught but consume all one produces.
He spent half a mil on rent, construction, kitchen equipment, permits, etc. Artwork, furniture, plates etc (= the "fancy" stuff) came in at "only" $100k.
Construction and rent also vary with fanciness. Rent because rent is more expensive in the fancy parts of town. Construction because the quality of finishes is a significant factor in construction costs.
