He's not getting that for building fluff. Adam is walking away with 1.7 billion dollars because he fooled whoever is in charge at Softbank into getting into bed with him for WeWork and Softbank decided that that was an appropriate amount to pay in order to get rid of him.
I question the whole premise of this article. The use of "some" in the title also seems incorrect when just one person actually quit. The person also quit to go to an industry where all she has to do is charge rent, in other words, she quit to go do nothing. I think that another perfectly reasonable explanation is that her quitting had nothing to do with the stress of whatever '996' job she had. She quit because she didn't want to work.
Because it's an essay of personal experience, and the author's drug, er, device of choice was an iPhone (“iPhone” and “smartphone” are used interchangeably in the body to refer to the author’s device.)
The fact that other people might share similar experiences with other devices, and that the author even recognizes this, doesn't change the fact that the personal experience being addressed relates specifically to an iPhone.
It looks to me like, in general, the bigger a company gets, the more the "leadership" starts acting like they are running a hedge fund. The money becomes more important than the product. Then when the product is de-emphasized, the employees obviously lose their importance and then the "leadership" start treating them like cattle to be moved from grazing location to grazing location. I put "leadership" in quotes because they somehow tend to be managers, who never actually built anything, who are clueless about the nuances of the product.
IBM has been dead since the 90's. Back when Lou Gerstner supposedly "saved" IBM from death he actually didn't, back then Real IBM the thing we think of as IBM actually died, and instead Zombie IBM took it's place (zIBM). zIBM is run as you say, like a hedge fund. Making products is incidental to zIBM and it doesn't care what it makes as long as somebody will pay (so it doesn't care if it's products are good or even usable). zIBM also implemented this infamous stack ranking system, the executives are terrible, and there are so many layers between management and action on the ground that the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing.
Management is so insulated from whats actually happening by all these layers nobody can effectively steer the organization, there are so many divisions and people that nobody can really track what is happening. The only thing that zIBM is actually really good at is managing its share price, and crafting it's artisinal financial statements so that nobody actually has any idea how bad it's doing. But we all know that zIBM revenue is declining for almost 10 years, so it's going to be a long slow crawl to zIBMs true final fiscal death.
I fired IBM from my life "for cause" a few years ago after 32 years at Research.
This comment is overall correct, though there were some isolated pockets of truly amazing/wonderful (some classified) things to enjoy working on since the mid-2010s.
I agree. Meanwhile, the IBM stock is up 1,320% since 1993. At one point it was nearly 2,000%.
That's the problem with playing the stock market: you've not only got to be right, you've got to be right at the exact right time or you'll get slaughtered.
IBM are really masters at managing their share price, with buybacks and strategic announcements (like Watson), ultimately they still only make mainframes and support legacy products mostly. Nobody really uses their second-rate cloud. So mainframes/services and dragging out government contracts are really where it's at for them.
>>Real IBM the thing we think of as IBM actually died, and instead Zombie IBM took it's place (zIBM).
That would be true for any company once their core set of products go out of trend without replacements.
Lets say tomorrow Google/Alphabet loses its search engine business, there is nothing much they can do but financially engineer the company in a way that is useful to share holders, which might include going into businesses many Google people now consider beneath their station.
>That would be true for any company once their core set of products go out of trend without replacements.
Why would any company allow it's products and services to age out of the market? How would any other company survive such a thing?
If Google "loses" in the search engine space, it loses everything. Everything Google is and does, is financed by ad revenue from search. Without search, Google becomes a pauper.
To take this in the IBM direction: Assume they (GOOG) lose at search, all the devs abandon ship or are layed off, Google could still get business because it could coast on the street-cred it built back when it was successful. So as long as it has mind-share and the google brand does not get destroyed it could still persist on well after death, draining down it's resources and selling off subdivisions (essentially cannibalizing itself, much as IBM has done). Google could aggressively manage it's stock price to hide it's status from the plebs and milk government contracts (that other organizations can't even bid on) and cannibalizing itself and drawing down it's savings for many years. This is the story of IBM. Once the boomer generation is no longer in charge of anything then IBM will fully die, because they don't make anything or do anything that the average person cares about, so they're mindshare dies with the boomer generation.
When companies get large enough, they need to show that they are outperforming the market at large for their shareholders. If the company is only making a 1% return on its product, why not take that money and put it in the stock market instead of employee salaries and asset acquisition? Even startups deal with this issue - why should a VC fund take an enormous risk on your company when they can put it in the stock market and earn middling return that's still much better than a complete loss?
The main difference is that as a startup, you the CEO know everybody in your startup, you know your sole customers, you know the product intimately. This allows you to focus on the product and "secret sauce" that differentiates your company as an investment from the rest of the market. But when you're a CEO of a large public company, you have too many employees to count, too many products to count, and too many customers to count. Financial instruments become a necessary abstraction to help deal with all that complexity.
This article makes no sense to me. It feels like there is something wrong with this dude and he still hasn't figured out what yet. I guess this article is for soliciting pity. But his real story seems extremely juicy. He should write about the details there. All of the interesting decisions and events that got him to where he is was glossed over in this article.
"My interest in computers and programming was more like an intense obsession. It affected my ability to focus at school." <- this makes no sense. To me, programming is an exercise in formulating a plan, executing the plan, and verifying the outcome. Every step requires focus. How do you "study" and "program" without being able to focus?
"Undiagnosed mental-health problems led to some fairly poor decisions." <- what health problems? what decisions?
"Relationship issues for a now twenty year old developer proved to be too much. Emotionally I was devastated when that relationship ended. It affected me and I had no one to help me through the emotional stresses of the situation. It affected my work. It affected my activism." <- Every sentence here is interesting. If he went into detail and wrote about this, it would fit the title and it would grab my attention.
> "My interest in computers and programming was more like an intense obsession. It affected my ability to focus at school." <- this makes no sense.
It makes perfect sense; an obsession makes it easy for you to focus on the subject of obsession, and hard to focus on other things. As school likely mainly consisted of things other than programming, an obsession with programming would naturally adversely impact overall focus at school.
Maybe that's the issue. For him, programming is an abstract notion. Whereas it's really just a practice. You work on it, figure out where you are being dumb, then go home and take care of other stuff.
It seems like you're making up a definition of "programming" that happens to describe your particular circumstances/abilities.
For example, It doesn't sound like you have ADHD. A classic symptom of ADHD is the ability to hyper-focus on one thing, to the exclusion of anything else. Such as being stuck so deep into a book or project that you'd barely notice if the building was burning down. Any sort of school/life balance would be extremely difficult to achieve.
How do you "study" and "program" without being able to focus?
Because when it's time to study biology, all one thinks about is how to distribute units of work across GPUs for that thing they're working on. Kind of like the two pit bull terriers I have at home. Oh, they can focus like a motherfucker. Too bad that when they're focused on a squirrel they have no bandwidth left for my commands.
I could focus for long hours continuously for days without end, but not on biology. Around the time I was taking biology I was focused on learning Lua and the LÖVE framework (https://love2d.org/).
I am thankful for your response. The longer story would be fairly juicy, I guess. I want to write more on it but it is painful and I am embarrassed by many decisions that I have made. I've been to jail several times for activism and for someone else, for example...but I've never been because I did something considered immoral, I guess is the right way to put it. I want to write on these things and your response motivates me to do that. I will think on it a bit and figure out how to approach this.
"painful and I am embarrassed by many decisions that I have made."
This I get. One of the hardest mental blocks that I had to get around was thinking that it would be deeply embarrassing and triggering if I talked about my decisions and experiences. That I would be "found out" and "be exposed as a fraud".
It is quite the opposite. Talking about your experiences is extremely liberating. You can be who you are, you don't have to make anything up to fill in the gaps, and it is just in general much easier than worrying about conforming to some expectation. AND you will be much more interesting, because you have lessons to pass on that somebody else may find valuable and apply to their own lives.
>I want to write on these things and your response motivates me to do that.
I would caution you not to. What goes on the internet stays there forever. Google will fight your right to be forgotten. Real names are a great way to attract batty twitter haters who want to ruin your life due to some perceived slight from reading your stories. You can easily go from pity story of the day to "ZOMG I hope you never get a job and die in the streets" in just a few words on this board. Be wary.
I'm HFA and I can only focus on what interests me. I got through school because I could just read a textbook the night before an exam and ace it, but when I was in actual classes I pretty much just napped. But I was an admin of my school's computer lab and trained students and teachers, ran a BBS and co-sysoped a multi-line chat system, while holding down a part time job etc. So I totally get the inability to focus on things that are uninteresting or seem not to be useful in a contemporary sense. (This is still the case =)
I assume this is common knowledge