[benreesman]

A remarkably astute analysis based on very limited information.

My job was to use information retrieval, machine learning / AI, auction theory, and pragmatic statistical sampling to both accurately model and stably price ads inventory and later dollarized organic inventory to drive specific policy agendas about what got clicked on, dwelled on, commented on, seen in recommender systems in equilibrium to achieve specific policy agendas of various kinds but all ultimately tying out at top-line revenue and engagement metrics.

It did not take me long to work out that PII was useless in this pursuit, there’s no entropy in the off-property like button table as concerns CTR.

It did not take me long to realize that I didn’t want to know what it was useful for.

I easily had the seniority to run queries against Hive tables that I had an explicit personal priority of never querying.

And I left the senior leadership track at the last stop before a directorship.

[1oooqooq]

oh the "monetization wizard" team. driving excel with hundreds of sheets to squeeze regulated products till the last drop. while documenting all the tweaks for the next round of certification with trepidly named forprofit industry self regulatory watch dogs.

all the sexy stuff like Bluetooth beacon, and reverse email targeting etc are all before your team, because they're still not regulated and are profitable. i bet the team just got to turn DOoH knobs last years?

[benreesman]

There’s a new thing happening in Silicon Valley particularly and technology generally: we don’t need people like you anymore.

As with a lot of terms, “brogrammer” is one that initially referred to something progressive but got co-opted by the kind of people whose value add is “shady games”.

There’s a breed of elite hackers now who understand power dynamics, the importance of optics, the value that accrues to which parts of the apparatus, and daydreams while outmaneuvering anyone who ever contemplated an MBA, which is an admission that you can’t hack it when the distributions go non-stationary or the wire-to-wire latency target at 7 nines is below a mike.

I don’t generally like to call attention to this, but my friend and former colleague Antonio Garcia Martinez of Goldman, Cal applied physics, Silicon Valley, and many other kinds of fame was very gracious to me in a NYT best-seller about a great many things but among them how I was a kind of synthesis of the kind of people who (as stereotyping would have it) were either basement-dwelling geeks or glib salesmen with Anglican/Presbyterian-sounding names.

Buy the book if you care. Nick Schrock had found my photograph on the Internet and made it a Facebook cult classic at least a year before I joined in the Palo Alto office. Which is pretty early that I was #336 on the SWE staff.

There is a lot of scope for value-add from the kinds of people who the ignorant and prejudiced stereotype as “nerds”: those people in my experience are generally kind, humane, humble, and brilliant.

I’m just humane and brilliant, and I’m going to personally salt the Earth where people who talk like you do once stood.

And I’ve got no compunctions about leveraging my appearance or height or dress sense or glib vocabulary, or ease in dominating a meeting to do so.

Selective pressures have produced a breed that is simultaneously the prom king and likely to end up with a Turing, and do it all without pillaging the commons or appealing to connections.

And if any of this rubs you the wrong way, we can step outside and handle it there. You don’t want that.

[1oooqooq]

you are a tool. like i was when in ad fueled tech.

you have no grasp of the business, but you made bank thanks to people who made much much more and did understand all the shady deals they had you unknowingly work towards.

[benreesman]

I might be a tool, but I certainly don’t make any mega bucks from anything ad or social at all, I left FB in 2018.

I did have a few extremely high-earning years (I think I broke 7 figures twice). And there’s a meme that I sort of partied it away or something (and in fairness, as a guy who grew up in the kinds of neighborhoods and houses sufficiently marginal that at 100x the legal limit for OSHA on factory workers, pediatric led poisoning probably wiped like, half my IQ off the board. I was lucky, I was just licking my fingers after touching walls, my brothers were young enough to be eating lead paint chips off the floor, so they had like 10x that, with that kind of background I went down one of the two routes poor kids go down after catching some cash and I blew easily a few hundred grand if not half a mill on pure conspicuous consumption. Easier than my kid brother, easily the greater natural talent, he drowned himself in a bathtub a couple years ago).

But most of it went to the 52.2% combined state and federal income tax that I told my CPA not to optimize at all. A modest but non-trivial amount went to a reasonable settlement around a failed marriage, and the lion’s share by far, like north of 75-80% went to misguided “support” of insolvent friends and family. My grandmother (may she rest) was a widow of an active duty US Navy submarine sonar operator in the Korean War, the mother of an active-duty Sidewinder tech on the USS Nimitz who saw action in Gulf One, and the country threw her to the wolves with like, 800 bucks a month in pension in San Diego (where I grew up, hence all the military stuff) that didn’t cover so much as rent: my grandfather’s deathbed request was that she would want for nothing, and she wanted for nothing. And really no one around me did.

Which makes me more than a little annoyed that people I’ve defended and continue to defend on e.g. HN like Bosworth or someone make shit up and spread it around, like that I got fired in 2018, and not quit in disgust at the cost of what would have been in today’s market like 7-12 million in RSUs. I gave 60 days notice and they asked for 90, I have this in writing. I increased Instagram’s revenue in 2017 personally by 10%, so, I don’t know, like well over a hundred billion by now and I’d done bigger launches. Seemed a pretty shitty send off, but this is the NFL, I get it.

I’m a pugnacious late-bloomer who would be at CERN if I had slightly different starting conditions and went into debt last year to KLA after the Nth round of coordinated wage fixing.

I appreciate that’s a bit of a biography, but it was a bit out of line with the Will Hunting thing about stepping outside. I felt I should explain myself.