[loganfrederick]

I really liked Ben Horowitz's new book "What You Do Is Who You Are". However, the only passage that I disliked and stood out to me is when he defended David Drummond for his ability to thrive at Google for a long time despite the corporate culture changing.

This was after Drummond was called out publicly for abandoning his kid he had with a subordinate: https://www.law.com/corpcounsel/2018/10/25/report-alphabet-c...

I am sure he's made a lot of people money, but it's not like Google couldn't find a great legal chief who also wasn't a terrible person.

Edit: First article I linked to was paywalled, so here is the underlying story: https://medium.com/@jennifer.blakely/my-time-at-google-and-a...

[pinewurst]

This is the same Ben Horowitz who defended illegal option price fixing and other ethically dubious behavior in his last book. I'll probably get penalized for this, but achieving success is not equivalent to being a role model.

[loganfrederick]

In Horowitz's defense (on the options pricing matter, hopefully not taking this thread too far off course), I thought he had explained his position on options pricing reasonably: https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/02/06/how-ben-horowitz-avo...

[icelancer]

>> defended illegal option price fixing

That's literally the opposite of what he did in the book, and in subsequent interviews.

[tmpz22]

> "HR told me that Sergey's response to it was, 'Why not? They're my employees,'" Ayers said. "But you don't have employees for f---ing! That's not what the job is."

Ooooof. That shatters the "Early on Google's culture was great!" narrative...

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees...

[nostrademons]

Not really. Eric Schmidt (also a notorious womanizer) had a saying while I was there: "More revenue solves all known problems." When everybody at the company is getting rich, they're all working on exciting problems, Fortune and Time and BusinessWeek and Playboy magazines are featuring employees on the cover, and everyone you meet is impressed at where you work, then employees are willing to overlook a large number of shenanigans and petty injustices. It's only when there's no chance at getting rich that people care about the little things like being treated fairly, not being sexually harassed, and so on.

Lest you think I'm being cynical (I am, but also realistic), note that similar cultural shifts have also played out at other Silicon Valley startups (notably Uber and Zenefits), that the financial and cryptocurrency worlds have even worse cultural problems, and that 49% of America elected a president whose attitude toward women is "grab 'em by the pussy!", usually explicitly citing his promise to bring back jobs, glory, and power to America as the reason why they overlook his personal failings.

[ksec]

I think this sums up not just big cooperate, but large part of our society in general as well. ( May be a bigger problem in US than other parts of the world, but still a problem )

I often wonder why realistic people are called cynical, even when they are facts happening everywhere in a statistically large sums. Do others live in fairy land?

[BurningFrog]

    "The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."

--- George Bernard Shaw

[roenxi]

I can give the cynical answer to that. Being correct is a lousy strategy for social creatures, and making the best decision within the limits of what a person knows is a nearly guaranteed way to lose out to someone who takes risks. In that context, realists are not encouraged by the broader society. Better to be surrounded by and encouraging of irrepressible optimists, they explore more and are more likely to try to change the world for the better because they don't understand the essential futility of it all.

Realists live humble, modest lives. Seek to change themselves themselves and such. Accept the futility of it all. Realistically the difference between comfortable and opulent is not as large as it is made out to be. The optimal strategy is to use an approach that is excessively risk tolerant and then hope that you are in the group of people that are lucky. Almost all the people who are 'winning at life' are using some variant of that, or descendants from someone who was.

[javajosh]

Your risk-taking realist needs at least one more quality -- a high pain tolerance. There are two pains you need to deal with, the pain of fearing failure, and the pain of failure itself.

Failure, as in "that machine is halted, and it's not going to move ever again" kind of failure. (Of course, I guess you can always clear out some entropy and start feeding it input again..)

[ksec]

That to me is optimist are taking the VC route and growing at all cost. Realist are tacking the DHH route and simply just grow.

I dont see how Realist cant succeed. There are lots of Realist winning in life we just dont hear about it. There is also the assumption of realist dont take risk.

I just dont think optimist are the recipes for succeed, but neither are realist destined for failure.

[unapologetic]

Because when you simply accept the world as is, it looks a lot like you're endorsing the status quo. Especially on this site where a lot of people seem to take a weird pseudo-detached outlook. Trying to analyze things in an almost entirely emotionless judgement free manner. I think this is seen by people as enlightened.

Personally I find it genuinely disturbing. It becomes hard to tell where this sort of detached analysis ends and where it becomes just actually not caring about or not seeing the moral issues here.

[nostrademons]

This isn't really the site for people who want to create genuine social change in the world, other than through startups. The site guidelines say that what's on-topic is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". Curiosity is more about knowing things than doing things. I think one implicit belief held by the folks who started this site is that if you do want to challenge entrenched power structures, the best way to do that is to be very circumspect about who you tell that you're challenging power structures, because you can expect to have a strong negative reaction from the power structures themselves. (Peter Thiel describes startups as "a conspiracy to change the world".)

There are other sites on the web that are attempting to organize people for large-scale social change, ones that are presumably watched (and cared about) by the FBI, as opposed to just being watched (with idle curiosity) by the FBI.

[unapologetic]

Peter Thiel has an extremely vested interest in preserving the status-quo. Frankly I think the notion that he knows all that much about genuinely creating any sort of movement to be questionable at best.

It's not about changing the world it's about not dehumanizing everything.

[celticmusic]

I love how you defended not trying to make the world better because HN has a ToS.

[tmpz22]

Its telling that the people touting this view most often directly benefited from the situation they are now conveniently apathetic towards.

1. Make millions of dollars doing grey area work

2. Grey area work is now identified as black hat work

3. "Thats just the way it is"

[thu2111]

Because when you simply accept the world as is, it looks a lot like you're endorsing the status quo

It looks that way only to a particular subsection of society (leftists). Given your staunch defence of unions the other day I guess that's very much consistent with your expressed outlook here.

For conservatives accepting the world as it is doesn't automatically imply endorsement or support for the status quo. It only means you accept that the world is big, you are small, and for almost all problems on a social scale there's either nothing you can do or - just as likely - any attempt to fix it via social engineering will make things worse rather than better.

This is because they view most social problems as inherent to human nature and human nature as essentially fixed. If you can't change human nature then many apparent social ills are unfixable, and indeed can't even really be described as problems to begin with, no more than people's inability to fly by flapping their arms is a "problem".

To leftists this conservative acceptance often looks like coldness, lack of compassion or outright support for the existence of problems, a view which unfortunately can often then be used to justify nastiness, no platforming, aggression or even violence against them. But it's not any of those things. It's just acceptance.

[onetimemanytime]

>>It's only when there's no chance at getting rich that people care about the little things like being treated fairly, not being sexually harassed, and so on.

Make me a star Harvey...

[celdon25]

I don't think the 2016 election is a good analogy, as both candidates had their share of skeletons in the closet, with the non-winning party arguably having skeletons that were more of a national security risk than a cultural one. People seem to conveniently forget this fact though.

[okaram]

1. That is unarguably false. 2. There were other candidates. 3. Mr Trump also won the primary.

[celdon25]

We'll have to agree to disagree on point 1, as there's plenty of common knowledge out there that I don't need to muddy the thread with.

The parent comment was referring to the general election of 49%, and the "grab by the pussy" story broke after the primary was over, so point 3 is a straw man argument.

Edit: Sometimes I underestimate how in the dark people really are on the subject so I did a quick search to find this op ed which shows that, yes, there really were issues that voters were concerned about from a national security perspective, namely the contributions to multiple civil wars. https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_co...

[zimpenfish]

> I want the Iranians to know, if I am the president, we will attack Iran if Iran were to attack Israel -- even if there were no Congressional authorization or a clear and present danger to the U.S

I mean, as a "Clinton is the worse option" quote, that hasn't aged well this week, has it? Mind you, the entire article is just the same old "Trump is visibly awful and we can work with that" many idiots ran with and were completely wrong about.

[rconti]

Point 3 is not a straw man argument; he was objectively a horrible person before that quote came to light. It wasn't remotely surprising to anyone.

[orf]

Often bankrupt property tycoon riddled with dubious overseas Russian debt and has historic shady dealings in a number of countries doesn’t have skeletons in his closet that would impact national security?

Right. There was a reason he was Russia’s preferred candidate, and it wasn’t because they had too much kompromat on Hillary to know what to do with.

[roenxi]

The Wiki page for CIA activities in Syria - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Syria#War,_2... - includes the choice quote "CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones" battling each other.

If Russia had a preference, theories of kompromat look pretty weak compared to theories that maybe Trump just looked less likely to topple regimes basically on Russia's southern border. Hillary was probably going to continue in the same vein as either Bush or Obama, at least Trump would have appeared as a new draw from the deck.

Trumps "peace with Russia" pronouncements are one of his best features. It is a good year when the US president isn't flattening countries a la Bush. If there was a path to swapping out the missiles for insulting tweets that is a big win for everyone. Not to say Trump is particularly good, but really the US has an impact on the world and wide-eyed anti-Russia conspiracy theories help nobody. At least his administration has been better than Bush's for the Middle East.

[baddox]

> but it's not like Google couldn't find a great legal chief who also wasn't a terrible person.

This is actually an argument I wish would come up more often in cases where prominent people are fired or lose opportunities due to misconduct. Critics invariably react as if there aren't hundreds or thousands of qualified people for the position who didn't conduct themselves inappropriately, but I would argue that there almost always were.

There are hundreds of talented directors who could direct your children's movie and never tweeted about molesting children in a movie theater.

[microtherion]

In general, I agree, and I also agree this is not acknowledged often enough.

I can think of one exception, though: I think Apple would have done significantly worse if they had forced Steve Jobs out in response to the option backdating scandal or the non-poaching collusion scandal.

[barry-cotter]

That’s not an exception; that’s the norm. Talent in every field is wildly unequally distributed. Messi makes the average international player look kind of ok. The average international player makes club players look like a weekend hobby player. The hobby player can run rings around people who don’t care about football.

Satya Nadella has what? Quintupled Microsoft’s market capitalization during his tenure? Steve Ballmer was so bad the stock jumped ~20% on the news he was resigning.

[barry-cotter]

Qualified is not the same as good. Passing the minimum quality bar to be acceptable on some level is very different to having even one success, never mind having multiple, massive successes.

Qualified is what you’re looking for in areas so routinised that everyone is adequate and no one is worth even ten times the average performer.

[joncrane]

Assuming that the story in https://medium.com/@jennifer.blakely is accurate, that man is a monster.

[mellosouls]

David was married and had a son

She's not exactly squeaky clean either.

[koonsolo]

The story of these men is always that they are going to leave their wife, which they obviously won't.

[mellosouls]

Agree - so presumably the author believed what she wanted to believe, or didn't really care.

[orf]

An estranged wife though.

[mellosouls]

He claimed. He was still married to her years later, so not that estranged.

Plenty of decent single men out there, she went for the married one with kids.

Not disputing the guy's behaviour seems appalling; so her due diligence on his character and his actual single status appears to have been poor.

[iandanforth]

That article describes abhorrent behavior, good lord, he should have been fired multiple times over.

[awb]

> it's not like Google couldn't find a great legal chief who also wasn't a terrible person.

Did he commit a fireable offense while on the job?

It's not an employers responsibility or right to dismiss someone for conduct in their personal life.

[vkou]

Fucking your reports is not your personal life. It's your professional life. It opens both you and your employer to professional liability.

Under American law, if my manager, Bill, is having a secret - or not-secret affair/relationship/'friendly' arrangement with Sally, who reports to him, I have grounds to sue both Bill, and my employer, on the allegations that this is a quid-pro-quo relationship. If they break up, Sally also has grounds to sue both Bill, and the employer, on allegations that she was pressured into this relationship. It turns into an incredibly nasty game of he-said-she-said, which is why the professional thing to do is... Not sleeping with your reports. Professionals don't open their employer up for liability, in exchange for personal gain.

If he were sleeping with some rando engineer that worked on Cloud, that would be his personal life - because he is outside that engineer's reporting chain.

[qroshan]

Steve Jobs also abandoned his kid. He created a $1 Trillion company.

[Waterluvian]

Exactly. Success as a business person has nothing to do with success as a moral or ethical person. In fact it's probably easier to be one when not being the others.

Being good at business does not make you a "good person".

[glogla]

Some could argue, that under sufficiently corrupt or inherently unfair regime, business success is mutually exclusive with being moral/ethical person.

[theli0nheart]

I completely disagree.

Power and influence allow one to be a shitty person without having to deal with the consequences that other folks might, so the situations where that happens are outrageous and rightfully get a lot of exposure. However, this is a consequence of the fact that you already need to be powerful. Unless you get lucky, or otherwise hit the jackpot, you generally have to be a nice person to work your way up to that point.

Not going to lie; taking advantage of others can be a great short-term business strategy. Long-term, not so much. People tend to remember shitty behavior.

[barry-cotter]

> Not going to lie; taking advantage of others can be a great short-term business strategy. Long-term, not so much. People tend to remember shitty behavior.

Vinod Khosla. Robert Bolton. Samantha Power. Practically every dictator bar Lee Kuan Yew.

[jessaustin]

Even Lee's dictatorship seems less benign now that we've learned that it's hereditary...

[theli0nheart]

Did you skip reading the second paragraph I wrote?

If you’re already powerful, the same rules don’t quite apply.

[glogla]

> Long-term, not so much. People tend to remember shitty behavior.

People remember Amazon workers have to piss in bottles to not get fired, but they don't stop shopping there. People know of Chinese factories with anti-suicide nets but they keep buying iPhones.

[theli0nheart]

> People remember Amazon workers have to piss in bottles to not get fired, but they don't stop shopping there.

Sorry, but this has nothing to do with the point I was making.

If someone screws you over in business, you're going to try to avoid working with that person in the future. That's just common-sense.

[LordFast]

Agreed. And it's up to the citizens to make choices that reflect what they wish to reward or not reward as citizenry.

[ksec]

Oh Come on, the two story is entirely different. One was having an affair for a long time, knowingly had a child, and abandoned the child.

One had a complex relationship at the time that he refuse to believe the kid was his. And he didn't "abandoned" her, he reconciled.

[LordFast]

Ehh, that might be giving Jobs too much credit. He tried, and failed, quite a lot. But he did try.

I don't think Jobs was diddling his employees though. Big difference.

[Aqua]

That's not how business works.

[IfOnlyYouKnew]

The idea that business cares only about profit is just plain wrong. The law people think of is almost never relevant. Each year, millions of business decisions are made knowing full well that it will cost a bit of money, not bring in any (or even good PR), but is the decent thing to do.

As but one example: Google once gave us money for a non-profit event, in no way related to their business, with explicit instructions not to mention them.

[minikites]

And then the shareholders punish them:

https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/29/15471634/american-ai...

>American Airlines agreed this week to do something nice for its employees and arguably foresighted for its business by giving flight attendants and pilots a preemptive raise, in order to close a gap that had opened up between their compensation and the compensation paid by rival airlines Delta and United.

>Wall Street freaked out, sending American shares plummeting. After all, this is capitalism and the capital owners are supposed to reap the rewards of business success.

>“This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again,” wrote Citi analyst Kevin Crissey in a widely circulated note. “Shareholders get leftovers.”

[toiletfuneral]

Can anyone explain why they're downvoting this?

I know anecdotally My employer constantly gets in trouble during earnings calls from shareholders for doing anything remotely environmentally responsible because it impacts margins. It's pretty clear capital has no intention of being ethical at the cost of profit

[big_chungus]

Because it's being phrased as "punishment", which implies some kind of punitive action. "Oh the greenies are putting trees over green, we'll show them! Watch your share price tank!" That's not what happens. It's a bunch of quants sitting and running the numbers forward a few years to estimate numbers and price accordingly, not a conscious decision to punish. The big traders don't really have a particular attachment to a given company and just buy and sell accordingly. A big chunk of it's algorithmic anyways. If it decreases profit, a company can expect to see a decrease in share price because the company will likely be worth less in a few years. The phrasing of the parent implies it's an intended or targeted action, but that's not how markets work.

[goliatone]

I understand your reasoning and appreciate you explaining the downvotes. I still think it could be argued that GP’s comment could be better understood in terms of “what” rather than “how”. It’s easy for humans to interpret the outcome of the algorithmic pressure as punitive. And I would say is also understandable that is interpreted that way generally and specifically in GP context with that quote about leftovers. As to the how, would it be possible NY hat humans/quants make algos that encode that believe?

[Iolaum]

It is how markets work. Your description just makes it an emergent property of how the markets function.

[seibelj]

If your anecdote is true then how do you know that?

[IfOnlyYouKnew]

I called them and asked for money. See my use of the word "us".

So, yes, maybe they did it because they knew I'd be going around using them as an example of altruism in business, 12 years later.

[shawnz]

I think it's more likely the rationale was to support a local business, thus building a stronger community for their employees to live in, thus allowing them to be more attractive to prospective employees. Maybe they also thought it'd increase the chance that you'd apply there.

[CydeWeys]

Because they were involved in it??

[loganfrederick]

You're correct, that's not how companies usually make their personnel decisions. But one would think more companies would factor in PR-risk as a real financial risk. But Google being Google economically-speaking, this still probably isn't a material event.

[shawnz]

There's also the risk of employees not being able to work effectively if they don't feel safe/comfortable in their work environment.

[dmix]

So it is in fact very much how business works... between bad PR and company cultural issues. This stuff matters.

Not to mention businesses have customers and investors who care about these things.

[KingMachiavelli]

I would assume there is extensive child support that would more then compensate? (Article is paywaled, so I don't know the details).

[rayiner]

I’m pretty sure money doesn’t compensate someone for growing up without a father.