There are lot of comments here disliking MrBeast and what not, but some of the advice can definitely apply to all organizations.
> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.
Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
> Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve.
Some counterpoints:
- Xerox knowingly didn't fix the problematic gear trains to guarantee periodic part changes, prioritizing money over "best copier possible".
- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".
- Microsoft is did tons of shady things in its OS development history to prioritize domination over "best OS possible", sometimes actively degrading the good features and parts of its OS.
- Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".
- Many more electronic and electromechanical systems are engineered with short lives to prioritize "minimizing costs and maximizing profit" over "building the best X possible".
- Lastly, Boeing's doing all kinds of shady stuff (MCAS, doors, build quality, etc.) since they prioritize "maximize shareholder value" over "building the best planes possible".
- ...and there's Intel, but I think the idea is clear here.
I think this is exactly the point that MrBeast is trying to make.
By being best YOUTUBE videos it means to focus on whatever appeals to the algorithm. It doesn't mean you are better informed, or better entertained, as long as the click-through-rate is great and the minutes people watch the video is maximized.
You could say the same thing is true for Xerox, for them the best doesn't necessary mean that they sell you the best most reliable copier, but the highest grossing product, with a guaranteed post-sale income.
There was a blog post linked on HN a while ago, it was about their start up they ran many years ago. They got traction with clients and were a very "engineering focused" (or similar term) organization. Their code was rock solid.
It was all going great, until suddenly some new company showed up and started taking their customers. Their new competitor's software was a mess with all sorts of incomplete or pure vaporware features.... but they did get features out fast.
They got beat out by Salesforce...
We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
We do generally want nice things, but we can't be experts in all the things. In markets where you have mostly responsible actors, that can work out fine. But absent effective regulation or other feedback mechanisms, in many markets an actor who only cares about short-term cash extraction can beat out the people focused on long-term value by taking advantage of consumer ignorance.
A good example here is food. Before the rise of industrial meat production, you would process meat yourself or buy it from a local butcher. You had a lot of information about the meat because the processing chain was short and local. You knew the people touching your food and could smell how clean they kept the butcher shop.
But scaling that up created a lot of opacity. Suddenly it was much harder to know what went into your sausage. It was tens, hundreds, thousands of people involved, spread over many miles. Some dubious people took advantage, and so we ended up with food standards like the Federal Meat Inspection Act. [1] The system that grew out of that works pretty well; things Boar's Head recently killing 9 people [2] are surprisingly rare.
For things less risky than safety, I think a lot of good is done by people like Consumer Reports and Wirecutter. Less ignorance about which products are really good is less room for bad actors to exploit consumers. If people really didn't want nice things, those would be much less popular. Instead, I think they're a sign that people do want nice things, but just have an awful lot to do, and so can't spend much time on a single purchasing decision unless it's a really big deal for them.
> We do generally want nice things, but we can't be experts in all the things.
Counter-point: People complain a lot about leg-room on airplanes. They say they'll pay more for leg room. However, it's very well known (empirically) that they won't pay. People want the cheapest seat - period.
Leg room is very transparent. Consumers can't be fooled. People may want nice things, but they won't pay for it.
Mr. Beast is just giving people what they empirically want.
I don't think that's a great counterpoint for a few reasons.
One is that leg room isn't particularly transparent. If I search for flights, the price is much more visible than a leg room measure. Two, people can certainly be fooled; for a long time airlines have been playing a game of gradually ratcheting back amenities without being up front about it. This is the same game that consumer packaged goods companies play with apparent package size. Three, people pay for more leg room all the time. Last I booked a flight, about half the plane was first class, business class, economy plus, or exit rows. Personally, I sometimes pay for it and sometimes don't. When I don't, it's sometimes because I resent how grossly extractive airlines have gotten.
I also think "empirically want", however cute it is as a linguistic trick, is not particularly accurate. Is it what gets him paid? I'd believe it. Is it what they watch? Sometimes, for some people! But pretending that short-term behavior is equivalent to what somebody really wants is choosing to ignore a great deal. It's like saying alcoholics "want" to drink themselves to death.
Google Flights shows the leg room in inches, and there's several sites that you can research it on.
However most concretely, back in 2000, American removed a few rows of coach across its entire narrow body fleet to give passengers an extra 3-5 inches of legroom throughout coach. They did not recover the costs and walked it back. jetBlue provides more legroom through all of coach, and even I as a very tall person, don't go out of my way to book them.
Some people will pay more for extra legroom, and I think the current split of seating in planes is likely right around the optimal distribution based on who will and won't pay.
> Two, people can certainly be fooled; for a long time airlines have been playing a game of gradually ratcheting back amenities without being up front about it.
Kind of but not really. Yeah they're not going to put out a press release when they take the olives off your salad. Airlines are an incredibly low margin commodity business. Many years they're negative margins. American's current operating margin is 3.41% [1] This is typical. These aren't B2B SaaS margins we're talking about.
So generally when they take the olives off your salad, instead of putting out a press release they just lower fares on competitive routes. Because most people book on fare or based on corporate contract, which is a second-order effect of fare.
> jetBlue provides more legroom through all of coach, and even I as a very tall person, don't go out of my way to book them.
How tall are you? I will literally skip a family vacation if I can't get a better seat on an airplane, to the point it's caused strain in my personal life.
I agree with your overall assessment that people will (usually) buy the cheapest thing, but I find it utterly bizarre a truly tall person wouldn't even care about being physically uncomfortable for hours on end. I'm curious if we just disagree on what "very tall" means, like 6' is not that tall.
I'm 6'5". To be clear I do always try for an extra legroom seat unless it's like 1 or maybe 2 hours tops. I don't go out of my way to pick jetBlue, so the "everyone gets legroom" thing isn't a real competitive advantage. I just consolidate my flying with a carrier and with even the lowest status tiers you generally get free extra legroom seating. Not giving everyone extra legroom seats means they can lower the sticker price and reward frequent fliers. The short people don't get nearly as much benefit from the extra leg room and don't value the seat as much so higher density means lower prices for everyone.
When I didn't have status I just paid for it, but every seat having extra legroom isn't in and of itself enough to move the needle for me.
i think the Jetblue thing is historically true but not anymore.
The Jetblue thing is also not really altruistic, but a nice side effect of an optimization they did; the removal of the seats brought the capacity to their planes to a round number of 50, which happens to be the FAA required ratio of persons per flight attendant.
IMO it's very costly to compare legroom and is often obscured and switched up. Also people might use 'legroom' to also mean more expansive things like shoulder width of their seat, and that is definately not something you can buy with economy plus. Seat width has shrunk several inches and is universally reduced on all airline by now. To get back to 18/19" seat width, you have to pay double or triple, which seems absurd for a 12% to 20% increase in width.
You write this in a tone of contradiction, but as far as I can tell we're describing the exact same thing. I understand why the airlines do it, but it doesn't change what customers experience.
Well the other thing is paying for luggage. No-one wants to pay for luggage. But if luggage is free, it means that everyone with no/small luggage is just subsidizing those with luggage.
Great examples. I think another case, especially in business/it, is that the people doing the purchasing aren't often the people using the products. This means the incentive structure often doesn't prioritize a good product, but instead whatever appeals to the buyer (perhaps lower cost, features, created by a known entity, e.g. no one got fired buying ibm).
But most of the time, we as engineers don't pick the winners. Some C-Suite executive or middle manager, who isn't very technically inclined, picks the winners, and we as engineers are forced to make it work.
As I don't think a engineer has ever had the chance to choose a company's CRM, the CRM with better marketing would always win over the CRM with better engineering.
Question I would pose is, why should engineer have the decision on a new CRM?
They can provide input regarding e.g. maintainability, but majority of input would come from other stakeholders - users and business unit owning the customers whose relationship we want managed, ideally primarily. And it is somebodys job to take these inputs into collective whole.
It was a mind blowing exercise to me 15 years ago when I was telling my boss how horrible our current installation of some ERP software was, and be asked me what's the user perspective. They log in every day, run financial reports they need, and log out. The system was great from their perspective! They had even less concern for my perspective of poor architecture and suboptimal implementation, than I (at that point) had of their perspective and goals. Thank krishna I didn't make the decisions on the CRM :-)
>why should engineer have the decision on a new CRM
well there's the craftsman argument and then there's the broken windows argument.
the craftsman one if obvious: if you're in a devops/IT role and your job is to manage salesforce, then you should have some input in it as it'll affect you efficiency (aka the profitability of your company). A salesman shouldn't be buying tools for the carpenter without the carpenter's input.
the windoww argument is a bit more superficial but still a factor to consider. I may not be working on mainaining saleforce, but I will need to interface with it for logstics purposes. if it's so inefficient that it becomes a chore to track hours or update documentation or etc. it's going to leave a bunch of broken windows. You can still operate with a broken window, but that part of the building will be a place to avoid. You may even try to work around the CRM wherever possible. Which seems to lose the point of a CRM
Upthread, bayindirh posted half a dozen examples of financially-motivated decisions that were actively, deliberately hostile, sometimes fatal, to the customer. We're not just talking about good-enough fiddly details here.
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
What was the price(s) of that start up and what was the prices of Salesforce? What were the features of the start up and that of Salesforce?
Different people think different things are "nice" (correctly or incorrectly). If you're offering things that you think are nice, but the customer does not care about, are you surprised that they go elsewhere?
You also have to understand what customers say they want, and the things that they are actually going to evaluate on: the two may not be the same.
And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually be able to afford them.
The issue is that the customers aren't us engineers, despite us being the ones who will interface with it more than the actual customer (the business owners).
>And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually be able to afford them.
Sure hope that wasn't the case. If they can't afford a proper tool for employees (which is maybe a few tens of thousands a year at worst. a fraction of an employee) how are they going to afford me?
I'm sure it's just penny pinching, but I sure hope a boss never says outright "we can't afford this tool" without very good reason.
The question is, was it rock solid with few features? I don't know if it was this article I saw earlier but seeing how Salesforce has a lot of customizability and a Visual builder and maybe much of it was vaporware initially but maybe they simply scratched the right annoyances the customers had by providing features for that quickly enough.
Seen some ERP's for mid-sized customers and the good ones makes it easy to build views and otherwise customize the software up to a point for non-engineers. The code is shit but they've also produced a lot of things needed internally that we wouldn't have gotten done quickly enough by doing it manually.
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
We? I was IT for a brief period and one day management says "We need this Salesforce Outlook plugin deployed to all the front office users." No one bothered to tell us "Hey, we're evaluating CRM software and would appreciate your technical opinion."
So there's your "we" and I'm sure they weren't looking for quality engineering or rock solid code when deciding. In fact it was picked because the manager heard the name salesforce at some business conference and was told by someone there it was the best CRM out there so you better get on that train or be left in the dust. So we installed the plugins, got paid and moved on with life. And to be honest we didn't care either.
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
I do, and I reject being branded as part of "we" here; most people and orgs just have bad taste. ("Taste" at an organizational level obviously being an emergent property rather than literally the same as the homonymous trait in individuals.)
The devs... man, it's a constant battle. And their dev tool quality is all over the place. It's no wonder they lost the desktop market, and only swing in app devs due to market dominance.
> [They] were a very "engineering focused" (or similar term) organization. Their code was rock solid.
I'll bet it wasn't. You're hearing this from the person who ran the company. Most companies have terrible code, and I'll bet the people running those companies would also say they were "engineering focused" and had "rock solid" code. They're just wrong.
1. that's a pretty horrible interpretation for an engineer to have. Though I feel "code" and "codebases" are different topics to consider. There will always be some bad code as long as multiple people work on a codebase (because you're simply not going to have a principle programmer stuck doing minor bug fixes). I argue most truly bad codebases fail early (or become bad later, when being a "good codebase" is no longer a selling point for them, and as people shuffle in and out).
2. even if it's true that most companies have tereible codebases, I argue good codebases with no traction is worse than bad codebases with traction. Ideally we have good code with traction, but this example shows that even multimillion dollar companies will be sold on promises rather than proper features.
I've been seeing a product we use at my organization roll out incomplete/trash feature fast to have a product, and then fix them after the fact.
We've gotten tons of blow back as other teams use the product and find it next to useless with tons of bugs, and I'm stuck trying to push it. Not a fun place to be.
Learned a lot about the software market and capitalism though.
This is exactly correct. See distinction between “best produced videos” and “best YOUTUBE” videos - it’s not about making the best video, it’s about making the one that minmaxes the metrics
Youtube needs a metric to not promote low quality videos with low intentionality. No one searches for Mr beast videos with intent to watch them. The audience is primarily children who will watch whatever slop the algorithm puts in front of them. We need something like china where algorithms push quality educational content.
> The audience is primarily children who will watch whatever slop the algorithm puts in front of them.
low quality consumption doesn't have an age range. Sometimes you just want to watch a cozy cat video, so I get it.
>We need something like china where algorithms push quality educational content.
that sounds horrible for multiple reasons that could be a post in and of itself. I'll just point out the obvious one from the post itself:
>Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
If the algorithm shifts, they will shift and I'm sure something goodhearted like "make the best educational videos" will find some loophole to slip in clickbait or any other engagement metric.
Ultimately, let me curate my own filters. I can't save everyone else but let me make sure I never see that stuff if I don' want to.
Because of COPPA <=13 year olds aren't allowed on youtube so they lie about their age. These youtubers perpetuate this lie because >=25 is a more valuable ad targeting demographic.
Indeed, and that's why OP wrote its list of counterpoints. In theory, a company can make a lot of money by creating products that are aligned with users' interests. Unfortunately, in today's world this is more difficult to do rather than taking advantage of users in some way. Still, if we don't oppose these practices there will never be a change, so it's worth fighting for our rights as users.
With MrBeast, the "best YOUTUBE video" would be one that causes engagement with the viewer throughout the video:
> The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
You have to both entice the viewer with the thumbnail/title, and meet the expectations of the viewer so they continue watching.
Your counterexamples are a bunch of instances where the company did not meet customer expectations.
Real estate agencies? Most middleman in general have a shakey premise for if they "benefit" their customers.
On a less subjectve level, I feel the "Embrace, extend, extinguish" mentality runs counter to this ideal. the FAANGs did indeed render benefit to its customers early on. You can argue by now almost all of them 20 years later have long shifted towards being gatekeepers that employ dark patterns or outright rent seek these days, rather than acting like a customer-focused company.
Are you suggesting casino and bookmakers' clients derive no utility at all from gambling? In the absence of any enjoyment or other benefit, who forces the clients to participate?
Same argument can be made for tobacco salesmen, drug dealers etc. If people pay money for something then they MUST derive some benefit from it... I find that assumption questionable.
Other things I could mention: multi-level marketing, snake oil sellers e.g. homeopathy astrology etc.
I find the assumption that every casino and gambling company in existence provides no benefit, of any kind, to any of their customers....extremely questionable.
In MrBeast's case, his revenue is directly correlated with customer engagement via YouTube's algorithm. I'm sure that were it legal, gladiatorial combat would be very popular and profitable on YouTube. I suppose one could make an argument that it would therefore "beneficial".
In the other aforementioned cases, in absence of an algorithm, revenue-generating activity wasn't as well correlated with meeting customer expectations. The point is that companies will always optimize for their own revenue, regardless of how well or poorly their activity meets customer expectations.
> No one prospers without rendering benefit to others
Plenty of counterexamples for this as well. Snake oil salesmen, drug dealers, woo peddlers, gurus, politicians, grifters, scammers, thieves, and on and on...
Our lives are made up of and guided by narratives that sound good and just on paper, but are empirically proven wrong time and time again. Yet they persist.
Some come from the zeitgeist, others are eternal, biblical, and worse, unfalsifiable: "everything happens for a reason," "if you're meant to be together, you will be together," "just do a good job and you'll get what you deserve". The latter was voiced by my postdoc advisor, who did not take the time to look at the percentage of researchers who did good work but did not get a tenure-track position. But perhaps those who did not find jobs did not do good enough work, and the charade continues.
Almost all of his examples are/were failures, by all metrics.
Cause and effect requires observation, which means there will be a time delay between when a company does something shady and when the customers realize the rug was pulled out from under them. You can't know a pinto is going to blow up before it blows up. Once people realized, it almost destroyed the company [1]. The time delay between a correction in a company is even longer, because it requires another layer of observation.
None of these are proof that the error correction mechanism is broken, or that the quote is somehow untrue/fragile. Most of the egregious examples of broken feedback are those companies that make the red and blue politicians multi millionaires by the time they retire, usually with no-consequences government contracts.
edit: and, this fails miserably if you don't pay any attention to the end goal, which I've seen several times.
nit: you can indeed know a pinto would blow up before it blows up. But you go to your city square and get laughed at because they trust Ford over some car mechanic who looked deeply into the car.
Of course, I'm describing a literal forum here (physical forums! good times). I wonder how many whistleblowers out there highlighted some dark pattern in the past 20 years and were cast off as a conspiracy nut. Both publicly and in internal company channels.
nit2: it's so strange how times have changed. 40-50 years ago his Pinto recall was company ending. Nowadays the Cybertruck has had what? 5 recalls now? And it still has this bizarre cult behind it. What happened to people? what happened to wanting a driveable car (nevermind those truck minded audiences the cybertruck targets who claims to do more than just drive)?
Wiper was fixed with OTA update. Accelerator pedal was fixed on all trucks within the first week after it was discovered.
> And it still has this bizarre cult behind it.
That doesn't mean sales haven't been hurt, but anyone actually interested will see that the above list isn't an issue. Toyota had a similar recall some years ago, and it hurt their sales too [3]. It's a good idea to skip first model years of any car.
You're right about 4 and maybe 2. But #3 is pretty much by biggest one of my top 3 fears in a car. Stuck accelerator or non-working breaks. I was already cast off before hand but I'd never buy a new [car brand] car knowing that kind of issue existed before.
> I'd never buy a new [car brand] car knowing that kind of issue existed before.
There's some severe information bias here. If you actually believe this, then you're basically restricted from buying most vehicles. Toyota is out [1] along with, BMW [2], Ford [3], Chevy [4], Honda [5], Volvo [6], Mercedes [7] and more. The cars affected in those are similar to orders of magnitude more. These were all first results, one vehicle, but I'm sure there are many more examples for each.
The odd tribalism is what I find most interesting about the Cybertruck. And no, I'm not interested in buying a Cybertruck.
Well I did pretty good, because I never owned any of these brands of cars.
But I was talking more about models, not "all teslas are banned". If they can improve on these issues in next year's model, then that's something to be encouraged, not dropped altogether over one fixable issue.
>The odd tribalism is what I find most interesting about the Cybertruck.
I don't particularly care about any car enough to attack/defend it. But A bad pedal is a bad pedal, and I'm lucky if I get more than one time to learn that lesson in person. Of course I'm going to be wary if a recall this serious occurs.
Their definition of "best copier possible" was "most-profitable copier possible", meaning they had to balance getting people to not hate it so much they chose competitors, while not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees and services and parts etc?
> not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees[sic] and services and parts etc?
The thing is, nothing is completely maintenance free, esp. if there's something mechanical. Make wearing parts wear, core parts robust. All my laser printers were Samsung/Xerox (hah), and their "core" is made like a tank. Only its rollers, toner and imaging/drum kits wear down, and these are already consumables.
The device keeps track the life of every of these replaceable components, and you replace them you hit these marks, because they're already worn down to hinder reliable operation (Imager dies at 9K pages, rollers at 20K pages IIRC).
You don't need to make things fail prematurely to make something profitable. First one of these printers didn't have replaceable rollers, so I had to donate it after 11 years of operation. This one is almost 8 years old IIRC, and it's still going strong. I'll be using it as long as I can find spares for it, because it's engineered "correctly", not "for profit". Meantime, its manufacturer can still profit from parts, toner and imaging units.
I think something that companies often miss is that improving the experience in an area where you have a monopoly can still increase profits by encouraging increased usage of that area.
The example I always go to is U-Haul in the US. They have a functional monopoly on quickly getting a pickup truck or small box car. I used to tell people there was no need to own a pickup truck because I could go grab one for $30 once or twice a month when I needed it.
After a year of shitty apps, constantly being sold things I didn't need because they try to secretly upsell you 50 times during checkout. Having to go into the store to get the keys and wait in line for 1 hour behind people screaming about how they were cheated... I bought a truck.
U-Hual still has their monopoly, but they lost my business, not because I went to a competitor, but because I altered my life to no longer need their business.
Maybe instead of buying eink tablets, I would have kept printing things had printers been better products.
U-haul is one of the shittiest experiences possible. Right there with calling comcast and going to the dmv. Compare that to truck rental from Lowe’s or Home Depot that’s actually probably more expensive but way more pleasant.
Only problem is that everyone else also has figured that out so hard to secure one.
Not copiers, but the ice cream machines in mcdonalds resturants were kept unreliable because mcdonalds made money on the constant repairs. It didn't matter to them that the franchisee was losing money. When 3rd party companies jumped in to fix the machines the manufacturer and mcdonalds acted to stop that happening. There was a court case brought by the third party companies, which they recently lost.
Hey, as long as it's readable, I don't care. I just wanted to note that I quoted you verbatim, not judge you because you pressed letter "e" twice instead of once in an internet forum. :)
In my experience, people very rarely use [sic] when quoting on internet forums - readers will assume any quote was copied and pasted; and the quoted text is directly above yours.
Sometimes people edit their comments after they realize their mistakes; grammar, spelling or otherwise. I use [sic] to denote that "it was like that when I copied it". It's probably from my "old internet" days (/., local forums, etc.).
>- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".
This is a nit-pick, but for the record, The Pinto didn't explode at higher rates than other similar automobiles, also there wasn't an internal Ford Memo, it was an attachment to a letter to the NHTSA --but all people remember is the this so called "memo" Anyhow a myth was born and it seemingly refuses to die. By the numbers:
In 1975-76, the Pinto averaged 310 fatalities a year. But the similar-size Toyota Corolla averaged 313, the VW Beetle 374 and the Datsun 1200/210 came in at 405.
I do not view these as counterpoints. You are making the same point, which is that the metric one optimizes for is extremely important. MrBeast is solely focused on maximizing revenue on the YouTube platform. The examples you cite also demonstrate the same exact metric (i.e., profit) in other domains. I know HP was in the habit of crippling its printers to extract more money, to add to your other examples.
Out of curiosity, what's wrong with Intel? Are you referring to their selling more capable parts for more money? If so, that does not strike me as a shady practice to maximize profits. More like how the best fruit goes for export, where it can fetch the most return.
Well a lot of these aren't counterpoints but rather examples of when companies naively followed KPIs to their own detriment. Boing has fallen from dominance to a distant second, Windows has been steadily losing dominance, Ford's darker years were around the Pinto fiasco.
While Microsoft as a whole is still quite strong, Ford and Boeing lost significant market position and the losses are partially attributed to these very mistakes.
You are not wrong, but I'd suggest that in those cases the company prioritized short and medium term profit over the long term success of the company. Each of the situations you list ended up costing those companies dearly (except maybe Dyson?), and today they serve as cautionary tales. So I think the original point of "keeping the main thing the main thing" stands.
A good example here is Betamax. A lot of people lament that Betamax lost despite being better on a lot of measures: picture quality, etc. But what Betamax wasn't better at than VHS was runtime, and an early application of home VCRs was to time-shift NFL games, which ran longer than Betamax could record. It turns out that the end of NFL games is often the most important part, so people bought VHS instead of Betamax. So best is not some idealized thing, but depends a lot on what exactly you're measuring.
But also... this isn't doing well for Boeing? It's costing the money? I don't think Boeing is a template for success.
> - Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".
Mine doesn't seem to have any problem with batteries. Just "airways blocked" error no matter what I do and the warranty/support service isn't very helpful. So I'm looking for a similar-or-better quality clone (cordless vacuum with the laser thing) but with better service.
Not to stan for Dyson, but they're not a vacuum-cleaner company, they're a fire-prevention company. Every decisionmaking process they undertake is going to have that at the top of the list. They don't want a lot of batteries in the field that are being stretched to the limits of their operating lives.
Of course, the company's best response to that concern would be to make the batteries easily replaceable, including by third-party products. But that's where job #2 comes in: make sure the consumer has to buy a new Dyson sooner rather than later.
Riccar, Miele, SEBO. Brands you may not have heard of (I know I hadn't). Highly recommend a visit to your local vacuum repair store. Talk to the guy who's job is fixing all the shitty stick vacs.
I swapped to Shark and haven't looked back. Current one takes an absolute beating (masses of dog hair, kids mess, countryside dirt walked into the house etc. etc.) and still performs perfectly after 3+ years of almost daily (ab-)use
I went down the vacuum rabbit hole a few years ago. I decided on Sebo. These are more or less big ugly machines with a cord, but you can buy every part online no matter how small (screws, gaskets,etc) or big (motors, control boards, etc).
Advertisers and people seeking behavior modification out of populations are YouTube's customers. MrBeast understands this. The MrBeast goal is to get and stay #1 at whatever YouTube wants, for the purpose of being #1 at whatever YouTube wants. That purpose can be any number of things, MrBeast doesn't care. It's purpose-agnostic.
What? Literally that’s the pint. If your goal is to screw over your costumers to maximize profit then the active still applies. Depends on what your goals are.
I liked how honest the guide was. There wasn’t anything fake noble here and a lot of his frustrations I have also felt as a people manager - the questions employees ask, making excuses when deadlines slip, etc
the job is to make YouTube videos that people click and watch
What gets them to watch and stick is a few things but notably wow factor, something crazy they haven’t seen before
The bar for wow factor keeps rising
Therefore you need to keep learning driving better and better results. Otherwise you are out
You need to take ownership for results to avoid delays at all costs.
>> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
> Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve.
I see a lot of unnecessary negative sentiment towards that quote.
The quote has no hidden meaning and should be taken on face value: I could easily see an up-and-coming producer work for Mr. Beast, and get sidetracked with making sure that pixels are "perfect." Or a set designer making sure that a specific prop is placed "perfectly." That's not the point, and Mr. Beast is very upfront about it.
> Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
I think these are clear signs of a dysfunctional organization. I want to associate that with company size (larger -> more bureaucratic, counter-mission nonsense), but I've also seen large companies that don't get caught in these pitfalls. My best guess to lay blame would be at inadequate, out of touch, need-to-be-fired B.o.D and upper and mid-management deadwood. These are the people that propagate such ineffective culture.
I will forever remember the head of IT at my org exclaiming in a meeting, "I'm not here to solve problems". Blew my mind at the time, but it's emblematic and representative of company culture as a whole.
I see this all the time. Organizations which are solely dedicated to stop things from happening instead of allowing things to happen.
One example is a disaster readiness organization which mandates that teams cannot deploy code in only a single datacenter. What they should really be doing is making it so code automatically runs in multiple datacenters.
TBF there are orgs at companies whose sole role is to play DEFENSE - lawyers, CSO etc… if they deem something too risky it IS their job to block it, and then it’s up to upper management to override them if the situation calls for it.
Now that said they should still try to advance the mission within that framework, and not be lazy.
The most secure company is, of course, the company that doesn't exist. Bankrupting your org is certainly the most effective way to keep it secure.
Yes, their role is defense, but not insofar as to remove the profitability of the organization. In several orgs now I've seen the legal team blow contracts and the security team break the product and the IT team break development in the name of performing their role "correctly".
Brainless box checking is not part of defense, you must be willing to critically think about how to fit your role to your product or organization's profit motive.
>the IT team break development in the name of performing their role "correctly".
Your daily driver account should not be local admin.
Yes, we need MS Defender/S1/Crowdstrike for EDR, DNS blocking and Mandatory updates etc for security which now is actual money with cyberinsurance that won't pay unless we fulfil certain criteria. This all requires computers to be managed by an MDM.
There is a natural tension between these equally important roles, especially when folks choose to view competing objectives as a zero sum game. I think your point of view is one-sided.
But I agree, it's so tempting to get internally focused, or focused on "improvement" that really shifts the focus to something else entirely (hollywood style movies, tv shows, whatever).
Personally I'm no fan of the youtube-ism and youtube generally, but it's clear that game is it's own game. It's not making a movie, it's not a TV show, it's not even tiktok. It's its own thing and it is pretty clear that generally you have to play that platform's game.
My kids play a lot of roblox, and while there's a lot of copy cat games based on traditional gaming, there's almost a system on roblox as far as what games are popular as far as ease of jumping in goes and so on. And there's a lot of weird creativity you find nowhere else as far as the topics of the games (want to be a bug? you can do that). That's it's own space too.
> Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
"People who realize the ramifications of the proposed route of action beyond 'it makes the number bigger'" finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions.
For example, locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce. Or having said dude run a marathon on a treadmill without any training. Or running illegal lotteries. Or fixing the outcomes of game shows.
Some of those things "make the best YouTube video possible" but are profoundly abusive at the least and outright illegal at worst. If you can't do the video without doing those things, you shouldn't do the video and should focus on human factors instead of the money you're missing out on, like a person without psycopathy might.
>For example, locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce.
I think that changes the ethics a bit. If he decides to potentially psychologically torment himself for his channel, I don't think it's a big deal that he didn't give himself a mental health evaluation beforehand.
(I'm aware he has a similar video with random contestants as well. But either way, I think this particular criticism is a little too hand-wringy. It's not being forced upon anyone and they can leave at any time.)
IMO the biggest issue is the allegation he rigs some of the game shows. That's definitely unethical.
Maybe those sure, but I guess I'm more talking about the corporate IT or legal department setting who are just worried about some micro service having some weird vulnerability or something.
> locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce. Or having said dude run a marathon on a treadmill without any training. Or running illegal lotteries. Or fixing the outcomes of game shows.
I don't think any of these contestants would be doing it with a gun to their head. ergo, they had a choice on whether to do it. We don't know whether they were informed choices, but I assume they were (giving people the benefit of the doubt here).
there is nuance to all things and that nuance is what GP is getting at.
What you say is also valid but in between, is a lot of grey. For example, should the federal government in your country issue standardised IDs to citizens? A lawyer may point to privacy regulations and say no but there are lots of benefits. If a workaround exists, should we simply ignore those benefits?
> teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's
This is the intractable and unavoidable problem with the use of KPIs as a management tool: Goodhart's Law -- any metric used as a target ceases to be a good measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
You are -- literally -- telling the team, "go make this KPI number go up. Your entire job performance will be evaluated on that basis." It is unsurprising that the team therefore focuses on making that number go up.
If you want teams to consider the goals of the company, or anything at all besides their KPIs, don't use KPIs.
Who said anything about consumers? I think viewing "the best YOUTUBE videos possible" in line with "the best CIGARETTES possible" is probably the right framing here.
His competition and giveaway videos are just the modern version of reality TV and game shows, where the draw is the horse race and human drama. You might call that "toxic, useless brainrot," but personally, I feel like such fare is about on the same level as any number of classic novels (including pretty much anything authored by a Bronte sister). Your enjoyment likely hinges on your level of empathy for the people involved, as they're thrown into complex social situations with their livelihood at stake, or whatever.
I assumed that's what all his videos were for years and hadn't ever watched any (given I am not a child, among other reasons), but I gave one a chance out of curiosity and found myself surprisingly enjoying some of the competition videos. The competitions are often well-designed and adeptly narratively structured.
Notably, many of them are similar formats that you'd find in regular TV, except the MrBeast version puts 10 minutes of content into a 12 minute video, while the TV show would put 5 minutes of content into a 45 minute episode.
What's wrong with making things for others' entertainment? The moralization of this is bizarre. Don't like it, don't consume it. This man has figured out how to create a ridiculous amount of value, whichever way you slice it.
What's wrong with asking a homeless person to do an embarrassing dance for a $20 bill? That used to be popular content on YouTube. Don't like that, don't watch it.
If your most potent defense of Mr. Beast is that he's made a lot of money, then he stands due the same scrutiny Rockefeller and Carnegie got. I've watched his videos, it's not an incorrect conclusion to say that his popularity hinges on the "savior complex" present in most of his videos. His content revolves around exploiting charity as a social phenomenon. He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than he donates. His business relies on the emotional manipulation of a destitute audience.
1. I don't think that's an accurate characterization of Mr. Beasts' content
2. > He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than he donates.
That's such a weak case. So he doesn't donate everything therefore he's evil or something?
3. > His content revolves around exploiting charity as a social phenomenon.
What are you even saying? I'm much more utilitarian about it. Is he doing more good than harm? The answer is a clear and resounding yes. Especially as the 'harm' is labeled: Entertaining kids, helping others and filming it, and making money?
I guess this politically correct posturing bothers me because most of the people issuing this criticism have not had as much impact in people's lives as he has. Classic case of armchair thinkers, criticizing people doing stuff, and doing so excellently.
At any rate the outrage seems like it would be better directed at Pfizer or other corporatocratic corruption machines, you know, people doing actual harm. Not a kid that figured out how to make money in a new media landscape and is using a huge portion of that to uplift his community.
> I guess this politically correct posturing bothers me because most of the people issuing this criticism have not had as much impact in people's lives as he has.
Cram it. You can say the same thing about Pfizer, anyone criticizing a dictator, or terrible philosophers trying to publish self help books for profit. By that logic, you're not qualified to defend Mr. Beast either because you don't actually understand the causal relationship between success and charity. It's nonsense criticism, a thought-terminating argument intended to obviate good-faith discussion.
Mr. Beast's problem is obvious, if you're willing to look past his marketing. Because at the end of the day, he's a business. He uses the same playbook as the most abusive monopolies like Apple and Google, laundering his reputation as a healthy net positive on society. Scratching beneath the surface, people know that he lied about how much money he makes, he lied about the cars he drives and the house he lives in, and probably lies to his employees to prevent them from presenting serious competition. Assuming Mr. Beast is, well, smart, assigning him as a happy-go-lucky charity cause is exactly the sort of outcome he wants. If he was serious about charity or altruism, he'd have some grander plan than sponsoring game shows and leeching off his popularity for profit.
By sincerely believing the image he presents, you yourself have been manipulated into thinking he's inert. Give him... I dunno, 3 more months? I've forgotten the average half-life of lifestyle influencers being ousted as racketeers or groomers on YouTube.
Not disclosing that the beneficiaries are friends and family under the guise of charity to get more views seems pretty scummy to me. In general I'm sick of the fake charity we see with influencers, including the classic "show up to a volunteer event, take pictures, and promptly leave" bit that influencers occasionally get caught doing.
>Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions.
Sounds like they're doing their jobs, which is to protect your future selves from your current selves. Sure, finding solutions is great, but faulting them from finding problems and slowing things down until solutions are found is odd.
Yes, security or IT does sometime have to act as a reality check in an organization that has over-hired over-zealous but under-experienced go-getters who want to "move fast and break things". They are a vital counterweight that makes ambition productive, instead of allowing it to wreck the organization's reputation.
I'm going to interject my own experiences and note that some legal advice seems excessively risk averse and honestly just defaults to "no" and lazy. I suspect that's what the OP might have been referencing.
I know we're generally concerned with the folks playing fast and loose with the rules here, and that's 100% true, but. I find in big orgs sometimes it's far more on the other end of the spectrum.
And sometimes security or IT just play it excessively, and never allow anything just to make sure they can't be blamed for anything:
"No, you can't improve the situation with the Linux servers that hasn't been updated since 2013 because those servers don't exist in our roadmap, and therefore there's no policy document that we can lean on to make any decisions. So the servers stay in their miserable state until we can phase over all customers that use those servers to some other product eventually. In a few years. Hopefully."
Note that the above isn't fiction, but exactly what happened a few months ago. Luckily I managed to transfer to a team that didn't have to deal with those servers.
See this all the time - for example, zealous dev "if I had production DB read/write I could get things done so much faster."
Sure, but the production DB has an incredible amount of PII and we are audited out the wazoo, but even if that weren't the case and it was totally fine, all it takes is you being careless with your credentials one time and the company's hosed or we have a massive breach, or some rogue employee encrypts the data with ransomware. So, yes, it would make you faster, and no, you can't have it. It's insane how often I have this type of conversation and insane how often I am the bad guy in it.
The solution is replicating the DB and scrubbing the PII. Then the dev can go wild.
This is a solution oriented approach instead of a lazy ass covering approach which I think the GP was referring to. The job should be finding risks and then figuring out how to work around those risks. Very rarely are there no solutions, most of the time it is due to general laziness or in aptitude where someone can find risks but they do not find solutions.
> The solution is replicating the DB and scrubbing the PII. Then the dev can go wild.
In this particular example, often this isn't remotely feasible, either from a business logic standpoint (I can think of plenty of fintech examples), lack of qualified DBA/sysadmins, network admins, cloud cost constraints, methods and controls to ensure to auditors that devs cannot access production data - none of this is trivial, and often to the dev it seems "silly" they may need to wait a few hours for something they could technically access in a few minutes, but acting like these solutions have no tradeoffs or are always worth doing suggests a lack of knowledge as to how these things actually work in a business and on a development team. It certainly isn't always laziness, and I'd even say it's not laziness that often at all.
In your example, I am not saying you need to give the dev access to prod. But you should be working with the dev to figure out why he needs access to prod and figuring out what needs to happen to make the end goal happen. Getting read/write access to prod isn't the end goal, the dev is trying to accomplish something and they see direct access to prod as the solution.
My point wasn't that lawyers/security/IT/whatever shouldn't do their job. It's that their perspective should be focused on helping the company achieve whatever it's trying to do.
I was glad to see such a clear, actionable mission statement. At companies I've worked for, the mission statements have been either absurdly broad or completely incomprehensible, and as a result most employees (quite rightly) ignore them.
>Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.
Even if you want to take this sort of Machiavellian approach (if that's the right sort of description), it still isn't the employee's real goal. A person's goal is to make consistent money. That is a combination of not getting fired and working towards raises. If someone owns a significant share of company stock (significant in terms of their own wealth, not in relation to the company's total shares), then it will also include increasing stock price, but even that is only short term until they can diversify.
So if you have a KPI that is actually hurting the business to achieve, but hurts your career to not achieve it, then the right approach is to maximize achieving that KPI, assuming you have no input on the KPI. If you do have input, it involves a much more complex question of how does it impact your career to try to correct the KPI.
Admitting this openly is not recommended and is comparable to the company admitting openly what its real goal is (or the executives admitting openly what their goals are, which following the above logic, is not the same as what the company's goals are). This does get into a interesting idea of a company having a true goal that doesn't match the true goals of any single member of the company, which has some interesting implications.
Calling average professionals average is an old trick in the book. If everyone is an excellent professional comparing to outside, they'll be average inside. And then you need to keep pushing extra miles on top of each other and sacrificing your personal life.
This is the kind of mentality that got us all with anxiety crisis and panic attacks depending on medications.
While I agree with your general sentiment, that doesn't seem like a particularly insightful quote, but rather a nebulous negative definition. Does the guide mean that "best" is balanced blend of all of those? Based on what sibling comments are saying, the goal is to make the most popular videos, in which case, the guide should say that.
It is pretty honest guide on how to succeed at Mr. Beast productions. They have their own metrics of success which may or may not align with your morals or ideals. It is a collection of all their learnings in making the videos.
Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
Legit, but you're not thinking this all the way through. As an organization grows you'll have people whose primary duty is risk mitigation, without the executive authority to pick up the phone and spend resources on implementing, identifying, or seeking a solution. Indeed, if they spend too much time solutioneering, it will limit their ability to do the job they were hired for. Then they get punished for going too far. The sort of initiative-taking and ownership that works great in a startup can get someone fired in a larger org.
This seems extremely idealistic. How many companies even know what the goal of the company is? Very few employees know this as many companies don’t know it either. Furthermore, there are many times when forgetting about the overarching goal and focusing on the goal that is right in front of you is the right decision. In fact, a strategy that many companies use to avoid this is to split the company up into smaller start up operations that are designed to specifically ignore the overarching goals of the company so that they can on their own perform at the best within their channel.
>IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.
Then you come crying to us when things aren't updated or servers get breached. Also, for DNS/Website blocks it is often management that decides but a baseline of malware/p0rn blocking is good. Besides, account in general are not admin any more in the enterprise. Just how it is :)
It's code for: "Your goal is to make this company the most MONEY possible"
Given the current landscape of crass hype beasts with all the peacocking vs the "follow your heart" microaggressions crowd it's easy to see those texts were written, but just like today's "tech company's" that "invent" things that existed for decades already, this is nothing new and it's a sign of a culture with very little oversight based on smoke and mirrors. Ironically this is exactly what the distilled core of "Corporate America" is and we all know what "results at all costs" lead to: See Wall Street, Boeing, etc.
Personally I never cared for the guy, it always looked tremendously fake and dishonest to me, to to each each own. IMO there is nothing new o special about this case, there are little dramas like these all over millions of organizations around the World.
While I agree with you, his goal is probably to make the most money. But I understand why he might not have phrased it that way. For any company their final goal is obviously to make the most money possible. But this goal is kind of unclear. It's better to approximate it like Mr. Beast does through saying that he makes the best YOUTUBE videos.
>I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.
I thought it was well understood that this kind of misalignment is the cost of someone afraid to admit outloud what the goal is.
Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop."
This is hacker news, so take a tech giant (doesn't matter which) and imagine what it would mean for leadership to tell the rank and file what their actual goals were. For starters it would be internally demoralizing, externally scandalous, and include mens rea for many of their legal "whoopsie daisies" over the years.
> Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop."
This feels to me like an intentionally hostile reading of the content. I think all of us have had the experience of working with a co-worker who is either brilliant but extremely prone to going down rabbit holes, or a co-worker who seems to have a completely different idea of what we’re doing than everyone else. “Make the best YouTube videos possible, not the highest quality” is the same sentiment behind “eventually you have to actually ship your software”. It’s the same sentiment behind the derision in the term “architecture astronaut”. It’s the same sentiment behind the “worse is better” axiom. It’s the same sentiment behind “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. In other words you need to know what it is that pays your bills and be laser focused on delivering that. A YouTube channel isn’t the place to make art house silent films. A community theater production isn’t the place to practice your improv comedy skills. If your company sells a database, it’s not the place to be writing memory safe shells in rust to replace bash, no matter how annoying maintaining your startup bash scripts are.
Why? I specifically mentioned Hollywood to try avoid the rose colored glasses and just skip to the matter of fact stage. If it's just churning out content then it's just churning out content.
> Liz Lemon (friendly, trying to gain favor): Whatcha guys working on?
> Ritchie (Deadpan): Piece for the Today Show about how next month is October.
Because "lowest common denominator slop" is a culturally contextual judgement of media, and varies from place to place, time to time and culture to culture. Fine French Dining fans would call a pizza parlor "lowest common denominator slop", but no one would be offended if the employee handbook for a pizza place said "You're here to make the BEST TASTING PIZZA. Not the best looking pizza. Not a pizza made from the most expensive artesian ingredients. Not the fanciest pizza. Not a pizza lovingly hand crafted with dough that was hand massaged by virgins under the light of a full moon. If it's not making the BEST TASTING PIZZA, it's not your job."
> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.
Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.
Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.