“the biggest predictor of whether a company will successfully adopt machine intelligence is whether they have a C-Suite executive with an advanced math degree.” —
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Yah - still feel like there are plenty of examples (inc. recent ones) where this isn’t true, not specifically with ML, but someone like Jobs comes to mind.
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People love to find counter examples to this very useful and accurate rule. I don’t know why.
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Well you phrased it (or at least I read it as) without exception and that seemed wrong so I said so heh
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That’s how Twitter works isn’t it.
My point of course is it rarely works, it’s a big problem and everybody knows it. But people keep trying to make it work.
Like people not getting enough sleep and saying they don’t need it
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Now we're talkin ;)
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Actually the I think about the initial bit - deep product people mostly come to mind when I think of successful counter-examples. I'm not sure I can think of ones where "sales" worked out. I'm sure it exists. Also I am obv biased by 20 years of tech & gaming pre-baseball.
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I’ve seen great product and design people — have no clue how to hire serious engineers much less build it. Even great successes like FB struggled — and spent large $$ and time with bad tech leadership early on. Twitter — even more so.
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Contrast that with Stripe. Good technical founders.
Engineering is not enough. Great ideas matter more. But no one ever had too much good engineering.
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Indeed. There are loads of examples that fit. The hiring comment is definitely one I take to heart since I realized long ago the diff between an 85 percentile engineer and a 95th (let alone 99th) one definitely isn’t linear.
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It’s not. And even thinking about percentiles is kind of silly.
The reasons not to hire the best though exist
* you don’t need them
* you can’t motivate them to work on your problem
* they won’t learn the non tech part that’s crucial to the job
many others. But know what’s up
I’m a fan of bad code, akshually. Facebook was built off horrible code. Sometimes that’s what’s for dinner.
They spent years and millions of dollars ripping it all out when it mattered.
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Yah we agree here I suspect. MVP/vertical slice and fix it “in post”. Risky sometimes, but not always outsized.
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You can’t source them reliably, you can’t afford to pay them, you aren’t making something that interests them, the list is long
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Yeah. The “not interesting enough” reason is to best and most common, in my experience.
Non tech people leave over money; tech people leave cause they are bored
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