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They have been. But in the old times such behavior would quickly get you labelled as a village slut and become avoided by most people.

But in the social media age companies need such people to generate content that drives engagement, and serves a a conduit for ads. This creates incentives for such destructive behavior, and forces such people into others' attention spans, reinforcing the loop.


I think it was also just harder to do at scale.

In the aftermath of his death, we discovered that one of my great grandfathers had a whole other family a few villages over, and neither family knew of the other. Being logistically limited to just two groups probably helped make it "work".


BOOM! Now anyone doing due background checks on her and googling her name will find that post and flag her as a huge liability and a complete no-hire. Brilliant.


>I know some of the folks involved and they are working on 50 years to launch.

I.e. far enough in the future to safely assume all current employees will happily retire. Isn't that brilliant?


Is it any different from building a cathedral?


High interest rates. If Fed dropped them to 0 overnight, everyone on the list would have happily hired everyone back. But then the grocery prices would start growing faster than SPX.


The timing is surprising if this was the main motivation. Rates have been flat for nearly a half year and are projected to come down later in 2024 -- https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/interest-rates/cme-fedwatch...


Rough guess is that these companies saw the need to downsize in Q3, but didn't want the optics of doing it directly before the holiday season.


Loans and bonds are typically at fixed rates and have months or years-long terms. As you reissue bonds and take out new loans, your overall interest rate on debt approaches the much higher market rate. It doesn't happen immediately.

Expecting interest rates to drop later this year is big for the stock market, which runs on expectations, but doesn't matter to people borrowing money and issuing debt before then, since you cannot attract lenders at rates below the US treasury yield.


rates market only somewhat accurately prices the next fed meeting, after that it's anyone's guess and the far out rates are priced to basically fed inflation target anyway. that doesn't mean the price isn't accurate now, it's just not necessarily what it'll be when the fed meets.


People fundamentally misunderstand how this works.

For a large enough product company there's always a years-long queue of feature requests, fixes, optimizations, and other things to do. All of it will never get done! The doable amount of highest-priority items will get picked through a combination of pressures from different people and departments, and will get more or less implemented.

If you cut the workforce by 50%, instead of doing 30% of the infinitely growing backlog, you'll do 15%. Since most of the completed work gets obsoleted or thrown away due to various inefficiencies, there will be some effect, but it will be far from dramatic.

As for the individual workload, you'll carry as much as you let the company put on your back. And that mostly depends on your negotiating skill, and somewhat on the supply/demand dynamics of the current labour market. The latter will tough for the couple of years, but the former is up to you to level up.


That is true for some teams, not true for others.

I've never seen a layoff actually care about what team they're removing from when it comes to ENG.

In this case it's probably 500 across twitch, which for some teams is going to be devastating.


The problem is people misunderstand how this works, so none of that happens. Instead the competition goes to 11 while work is cut by upper managers, leading to "non-business decisions" made by lower managers to cling to their bit, leading to less productivity both in absolute & unit terms.

Also, I think A) is a little bit of red herring designed to create agency and opportunity where there is none. If we mean "negotiate" in an airy high-minded vague sense of "negotiate but don't", sure. At the end of the day these moves, whether intended to or not, leave less room for negotiation.


This comment is pretty hard to understand, but it's disagreeing with a comment that I think is 100% spot on about how layoffs actually work.


There's also the coordination overhead of trying to do all this, without stepping on each others toes, which is substantial.


MBAs can only pull this off when there is no competition and they are in bed with the regulators. You can very easily get Boeing back on track by splitting them into multiple competing businesses, but we all know this won't happen.


They’re already broken up. They consider themselves to be a system integrator. They design the planes, hire contractors to build most of the parts, and then assemble the parts. The fact that this gives Boeing most of the risk and the contractors most of the profit doesn’t seem to bother them.


Vertical integration is not competition. A decision maker at any level within the vertical of power is facing internal competition from political rivals, but no results-based competition from his peers in other companies. So this promotes political shenanigans, and applies negative selection pressure on the actual product quality.


This is some kind of vertical dis–integration. They literally sold their factories and tools to their contractors because owning land and buildings and machinery was dragging down their metrics! (Specifically assets to earnings or something along those lines.)

But regardless of that, breaking up a large company because it has some problem doesn’t fix the problem. It just makes all the smaller companies you created easier to purchase. Just look at AT&T. NorTel bought every single one of the baby bells within a decade of their creation, resulting in just as much of a monopoly except now in a foreign corporation.


Interested in the Nortel acquisitions, do you have a reference? I don’t see that in the Wikipedia narrative, but maybe I’m misunderstanding.


The biggest trouble is that a lithium battery that will last 8 years, and the one that will puff up in a year and lose 80% of capacity, all look the same when you buy them. It's all about the purity of materials, quality control, and other things you don't see without a microscope.

Big players like Ford play it very safe with their own cell manufacturers, but a random smaller-scale startup might be forced to buy the cells from the lowest bidder on Aliexpress, and that won't fare well.


The guys making this kit are working to launch a full diesel/electric hybrid transport truck for heavy haul applications. They plan to use cells from the same supplier as they are going to use for the heavy trucks, and hope to increase volume on their purchases.


They're using LFP batteries here which generally don't puff up and go foom.


> a lithium battery that will last 8 years

All of the 2010 Toyota Hybrids on original battery packs would like a word.


No doubt. The last sentence in my post is doing a lot of heavy lifting.


>Imagine I win the lottery and hire really smart architects and tell them to make a revolutionary new building.

Each one will end up pulling in their own direction, fighting with others over minor things, and nothing will ever get done.

Managing smart people, resolving conflicts, and making sure stuff gets done is a rare and underappreciated skill.


Sounds like something is interfering with the CAN bus and causing multiple corrupt packets from different modules.

That said, the article leaves a weird impression of being written by AI, or SEOed. Something about the repetitive sentence structure centered around the EV model name.


If you want to understand recursion, you need to understand recursion first.


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