I mean, you're clearly not describing a high documentation culture, you're describing a culture that underinvests in intra-organizational communication.
I run a high documentation, low meeting culture by necessity (we operate in five time zones around world). Meetings vs docs is remarkably similar to the decision between paying for office space vs paying for occasional team retreats. If you run a fully remote company retreats are almost always a better use of your money than leasing office space. But you still need to pay for something.
Similarly with meetings vs. process documentation. If you're heavily remote and spread out I'd say you should cut down on meetings and being high documentation is the better choice. But again you still need to "pay" for something - you save time on meetings but you need to reinvest at least part of that time into writing documents.
Another bonus of documents is that they scale better than meetings. McDonald's doesn't deliver the same big Mac in every corner of the world by holding a lot of meetings. They have a book that goes out to all of their thousands of franchisees. When they want to add another thousand franchisees, they print more books.
If the documents are out of date my answer to my team is always "update them!" Anywhere that we're writing documents there are revision and discussion features so it's not like you can irrevocably screw something up, just improve it and let us know what you did. I do struggle with getting people to actually do it though.
It was a smart acquisition for sure, but "ruthless business genius" is a bit of hyperbole imho. FB's market cap was in excess of 200B at the time and they were growing like crazy. 16B on buying what they had failed to build internally and needed as a moat around their core business seems pretty straightforward.
Mere mortals like us just get caught up on all the extra zeroes these guys are playing around with.
If you have different goals competing for your limited time and energy (entrepreneurship, changing the world, building relationships, etc.) and you're not sure which to pursue, consider the values of self-actualization and personal agency and perhaps center yourself on them.
Self-actualization is tricky to define but it's basically the process of identifying whatever comes to you most naturally or has a tendency to emerge organically from your life experiences, and then pursuing it more fully.
The benefit of this approach is that whatever it is you end up doing, you tend to do it better, with more commitment, more creativity, and more satisfaction than if you had done something else.
It might change over time and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Other people may or may not like it. But in the end society's assessment of what you've done with your life is just noise compared to how you feel about it internally.
Listen to your thoughts... your unconscious, internal mental chatter. And if it's telling you to go a certain way, just do it, if it's the right call you'll probably end up doing something great, if it's the wrong one you will confirm that with experience and gain wisdom in the process.
When someone develops a distorted picture of the world and becomes an activist based on it, that's just as bad for society as if they had never activated in the first place. In fact you could make a case that it's worse, mass shooters tend to be highly ideological and have views that are at odds with reality.
The problem we have with social media (and to a degree traditional media as well) is that both the nature of the technology and the profit incentives of the platforms encourage shallow thinking and cognitive bias among users. Going from paper to screens was bad enough in terms of its documented effects on focus and comprehension. Add to that shrinking the screen down to the size of our palms, enforcing 280 character limits, amplifying the most outrageous voices etc. and I sometimes wonder how civilization is still intact!
I agree that people should maintain some form of awareness of social issues and participation in them, democracy doesn't work without this. But an information diet heavy on social media will promote a distorted awareness of the world. And time spent on social media feels significant but it doesn't actually effect change. Things that do include: voting, attending a protest, writing to your congressman, volunteering your time and labor, earning extra income which you can donate to a cause, etc.
There are a lot of ways to get informed, participate & influence society, social media is one of the worst. It's the junk food of activism.
The issue is absolutely bad government policy. The Reason article isn't very good but its premise is correct. I'm surprised to find myself saying this, but Truthout wrote a much better investigative piece almost a month ago: https://truthout.org/articles/company-responsible-for-tainte...
This is why government policy is at fault:
- Around two thirds of all infant formula is purchased through a single government program
- The government requires that there only be a single supplier of formula for this program in each state
- Through the natural tendencies of capitalism this has led to consolidation where one provider, Abbott, enjoys government-mandated monopolies in 34 states and a controlling share of the formula produced in the US
- Through the natural tendencies of monopolies which are unchallenged by competition, they sought to maximize margins above all else, concentrated their production and poisoned their own product, leading to the production shutdown and the shortage.
The government screwed up. Rather than blaming the problem on hoarding moms, Vladimir Putin or whatever next week's appallingly self-serving disinformation will be, they should amend the law which maintains a monopoly in the formula market. If the industry was not so consolidated by the government's addiction to picking winners, Abbott's screwup would have been more disastrous for Abbott and less disastrous for moms.
I wish people would give less medical advice over the Internet, even when it's well meaning. You're sort of right but the reality is that you can't just go find the root cause and "solve" it most of the time.
How do you know a person you're advising over the Internet hasn't already tried?
How do you know they weren't abused as a child, or a veteran suffering from PTSD, or a rape victim or any other number of things where the root cause is probably never going to be fully resolved, just managed.
There's a tragic amount of hate for doctors in this thread, and I really mean tragic because it's going to result in someone out there not getting the help they need, because they think they and the Internet are smarter than a doctor.
The medical profession has the right answer here, which is that in general for serious psychiatric disorders, you use a combination of drugs and therapy in order to get results. Drugs get you immediate results with a higher degree of reliability. Therapy is less consistent, expensive and slow, but when it works the effects are mostly permanent and side effect-free.
Now does the US system over-prescribe drugs and is it fucked up by cost pressures? The answer is way too often 'yes,' but people are conflating this with "doctors are awful."
There are people who need the drugs now as well as people who will need them forever.
The reason I'm still a bit skeptical about password-less authentication is because the cost savings opportunity is enormous. So enormous that it would be easy to lose sight of everything else.
About a third of Yahoo Japan's customer support requests where password inquiries -- the FIDO Alliance estimates the cost of a single password reset inquiry at $70.
It's hard to look at those numbers as a manager with bottom line responsibility and not want to go full password-less.
But as a startup your main interest should usually be growth, cost reduction is best addressed after you hit a critical mass.
It feels like the jury is still out on whether password-less converts better -- this article says it does, but doesn't go into depth. Anecdotally it seems to frustrate a lot of people (me included).
Password-less may be great, I just know that in enterprise the support cost savings are going to distort or render all other arguments moot. We have a long history of ideas that have come out of FAANG, worked well for them, and been cargo-culted into the rest of the world where they promptly turned out to be a bad choice.
What you're doing doesn't sound like ghosting. Ghosting is cutting off contact without warning or regard for the psychological consequences.
It's very easy to not be a ghost, all you have to do is provide a kind resolution. If someone asks you out on another date but you don't want to see them again, you just say something like "I'm sorry, I've gotten really busy lately, if I do have the chance to get together, I'll reach out."
No further communication is necessary. You've given them a plausible excuse that doesn't shred their ego too much and indicated that you're not interested in continuing.
If you don't do this, some people will speculate that it was their fault, and beat themselves up. They may blame it on their weight, their looks, their personality, over time, it may erode their self esteem. So it's good etiquette to not be a ghost. Unfortunately millions of people don't care enough to bother.
If we legally mandate this what will the consequence be for small businesses that can't afford the cost to comply? (Even if you mandate it for only the big players - what if there end up being only three players who can afford it, they do it well, no one else does and you end up with only three banks?)
I'm super supportive of banks opening up their data for the reasons in my prior post. But the second order effects of regulation are often overlooked--this is exactly what has gone wrong in the US financial industry where we used to have thousands of credit unions across the country and since 2008 most of them have been driven out of business by compliance costs. Naturally the handful of banks that remain are the ones that were the biggest and had the best lobbying effort in Washington...
Can't stress enough how valuable this is for small business. Auto-importing and auto-classifying transactions from financial institutions completely changes the way that bookkeeping functions. It also gives you real-time understanding of your financial situation and lowers cost/time.
Our accounting software auto-imports all of our transactions daily via the Plaid API and our classifying ruleset categorizes 95% of them automatically. All that's left for our bookkeeper is to spend a few hours a month going over the unusual ones and doing some general accuracy/sanity checks. In addition we get dynamically generated reports every week which are ~90% accurate. Prior to these features the model was "bookkeeper manually imports a bunch of transactions from multiple sources and does a ton of work at the end of each month and produces one monthly report." Automation here has been a huge win, lower costs and better results.
As much as I appreciate and prefer FOSS software I would never go back to the old way of doing things, the last thing a founder wants to spend a lot of time or money on is bookkeeping.
I remember feeling in the mid aughts like a bunch of marketing bros who didn't know shit about tech, were flooding into tech. They were what ruined it imo. They were incapable of having any passion for the engineering because they didn't understand it. They were just there to invent buzzwords and optimize monetization and all that junk and we got Web 2.0 and algorithmic feeds and it's all been downhill since.
You just don't engage with them, or engage selectively. If someone wants to engage in bad faith, you politely end the discussion, and introduce distance into the relationship. You're not required to provide any explanation or attempt at rehabilitation, but I find that most people aren't operating in bad faith 100% of the time -- they have trigger topics which are emotionally charged and will put them into that mode. So you can first avoid those topics, and if they keep bringing those topics up, eventually you avoid them.
None of this is a silver bullet fix for the overall problem threatening society, but I doubt there is one, the only solution is for enough people to figure this out and start insisting on a better form of discourse in their own sphere of influence.
The pollution of the public square in recent years has prompted me to put more energy into actively managing my personal network, where I can maintain standards. Participating in social media is like fishing in a polluted river. You might find a good fish, reel them in, and transfer them to your pond. But usually you won't, and overall the ROI of this stuff is pretty low. (In places where it has declined the most, like Facebook, the platform's user engagement is declining too.)
I believe the HN guidelines actually say something about this, but either way: I think there is tremendous value in interpreting other people's statements as charitably as possible.
Why take offense when none may have been intended?
They built Gutenberg because a significant and growing percentage of the user base was resorting to page builder plugins like Divi, Elementor etc. to create richer layouts than what the classic editor could handle. These plugins have a lot of drawbacks: non-portability of content, they break the WP theming model, they cost money, they've historically had performance/security/stability issues, etc.
Basically WP did not want to cede control over something as essential as the editing experience to a bunch of third parties, but it was happening because of the limitations of the classic editor.
I have issues with some elements of how they approached the problem but doing nothing would have been a worse choice. I can't say that I've seen a simple, blog-like project where using Gutenberg was a big negative. The classic editor will probably always be around, it's just a wrapper around TinyMCE and there's tons of community interest in keeping it alive.
Honestly, an AGPL'ed, fully transparent, shareable, forkable and self hostable algorithm to do this is a whole new ball game. Where it will land us remains to be seen but compared to the current state of affairs I want to find out.
This is like saying we should blame the smoker, the junkie, or the gambling addict. The latter is an especially accurate comparison because these companies turn their games into gambling machines.
Sure, personal responsibility is important. In the end the only person who can free an addict from the quagmire of addiction is them. But that doesn't stop us from regulating the fuck out of tobacco companies, heroin dealers or casinos to reduce the harm they do to their victims.
The elephant in the room is that we as an industry hold the power to alter people's psychology on a greater scale than any drug. But people stay silent because it delivers the paychecks and the shareholder returns...
These have helped reduce my social anxiety (I used to have a lot, now I have almost none) :
1. Exposure, simply spend more time in public and around other people, the only way to develop comfort and social skills is time and practice.
2. Get good at making small talk, there are plenty of resources for this online but it's really quite simple, a good rule of thumb is to start with asking people inoffensive questions and giving them occasional small compliments. The goal is not to have meaningful conversations (yet) it's just to establish mutual comfort ("ok, this person doesn't seem like a serial killer").
3. Mindset, if you're worried about your voice and posture you're making the common mistake of believing that other people give a fuck, when really they don't. Most of them are never going to notice stuff like this about you or if they do they'll forget it the next day. Heck, they'll probably forget their entire interaction with you, no matter how it goes. You're just not that important unless you're famous or something. Their world is centered around them, not you, so don't overthink things.
Once you get the hang of everything above (spend more time with people, get good at inoffensive small talk, don't overthink) then you'll find you can leave a decent impression on just about anyone. From there you naturally start to notice that you have more in common with some people than others and if you keep in touch with those people it becomes easy to build deeper friendships.
Elementary's problem is it has two inexperienced founders who aren't negotiating with each other very well, I'd hardly call it a meltdown, nor particularly relevant to the examples in this article.
The entrepreneur in me will never understand this problem: "programmer creates world famous software used by Microsoft and NASA and doesn't make any money and is burning out from all the work."
Here are your solutions:
1) If the users want support, charge them for it. Split the proceeds with someone who will actually do the support. If it's still too much work, raise the price.
2) If the users want features, charge them money to put those features on your roadmap. If they're asking for features you don't want to add, just raise the price or say no until they go away.
Here is what will happen when you ask for money: people you don't want to deal with will disappear. Also you'll have more money, and you will work less.
Do you need to think about business a bit somewhere in there, sure, but probably a lot less than most people think. The "business side" for the Grunt guy could probably be "register an LLC online then get an Upwork account and let them handle the other shit like your payments and tax forms for 5%." Yes, fucking Upwork.
I mean, you're clearly not describing a high documentation culture, you're describing a culture that underinvests in intra-organizational communication.
I run a high documentation, low meeting culture by necessity (we operate in five time zones around world). Meetings vs docs is remarkably similar to the decision between paying for office space vs paying for occasional team retreats. If you run a fully remote company retreats are almost always a better use of your money than leasing office space. But you still need to pay for something.
Similarly with meetings vs. process documentation. If you're heavily remote and spread out I'd say you should cut down on meetings and being high documentation is the better choice. But again you still need to "pay" for something - you save time on meetings but you need to reinvest at least part of that time into writing documents.
Another bonus of documents is that they scale better than meetings. McDonald's doesn't deliver the same big Mac in every corner of the world by holding a lot of meetings. They have a book that goes out to all of their thousands of franchisees. When they want to add another thousand franchisees, they print more books.
If the documents are out of date my answer to my team is always "update them!" Anywhere that we're writing documents there are revision and discussion features so it's not like you can irrevocably screw something up, just improve it and let us know what you did. I do struggle with getting people to actually do it though.