Ok, I agree that some MBAs can be full of it but can we already stop this MBA hate on HN? I feel like lots of people here think that if you build something then customers will surely come. I've got a huge surprise for you. You will have to sell your product and some of the MBA's are really great at that. In B2B a single sale can make or break your company when you're low on cash.
You do your job and let them do theirs. You code, talk to users, ship, and iterate. They handle sales, operations, marketing, and maybe fundraising. These other things can be done by a technical founder but they are not fun. There is a reason why some companies hire COOs so that CEOs can focus on their job.
Finally, it's not MBAs who decided to focus on growth at all costs. It's the nature of the game. Either you get to the top or your competitors will do that. So don't hate the player, hate the game.
> Finally, it's not MBAs who decided to focus on growth at all costs. It's the nature of the game. Either you get to the top or your competitors will do that. So don't hate the player, hate the game.
Well, I do think it is fair to make a strong connection between the whole concept of maximizing shareholder value being the ultimate corporate goal and MBAs and their education. If the ultimate corporate goal would be maximizing customer value instead, the whole social media landscape would look very different.
And the funniest thing is that nobody has ever been able to explain me why maximizing long term shareholder value would be a better goal than e.g. maximizing long term customer value. I mean, in order to maximize long term shareholder value, you need to pay your taxes and competitive prices to other factors of production like labour and debt holders and your supply chain. There is no rocket science there. And if your goal was to maximize customer value instead, of course you would need to pay competitive rates to equity holders, otherwise you could not run the company and maximize the customer value.
The corporation is an independent legal entity. The whole idea that the stakeholders who get their moneys last in case of bankruptcy and risk only the money they have invested (others are risking their careers, homes, businesses etc) are designated as "owners" of this entity is really weird once you start thinking about it.
Very good observations. And indeed, the whole notion that maximising shareholder value is the goal to pursue stems, I think, from a naive "economism", as James Kwak called it in his excellent book Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality [1], namely the following train of thought:
The whole point of society is to maximise utility. We can't do interpersonal utility comparison, so we're satisfied with a Pareto optimum (where you can't improve anyone's situation without making someone else worse off). By the two main theorems of welfare economics, Pareto optima are basically equivalent (under the "usual" assumptions) to market equilibria. Thus, free market.
Next, there's the agent/principal problem: the principals (owners=shareholders) of a company delegate the actual running of it to agents (managers), and now the problem of value alignment arises - the managers could be tempted to maximise their own utility (empire building etc., or even beneficial things such as employee health insurance) instead of that of the owners. And the theory suggests that the solution is maximising shareholder value, because then the owners can themselves decide how to allocate the proceeds (eg into voluntarily providing employee health insurance) as to maximise utility.
[As an aside, btw, the theoretical case for free trade rests on an Economics 101 argument (comparative advantage), but is predicated on redistribution (free trade creates efficiency gains such that even after compensating losers you still retain a surplus, therefore it's better). However, the funny thing is that the (eg libertarian) figures promoting free trade frequently conveniently forget about that part of the argument.]
And of course the whole pareto optimum/market equilibrium/maximising shareholder value argument is based on assumptions that just don't hold; the world is more complicated than Econ 101, and very often more careful empirical examinations of the evidence support much more progressive/liberal policies than Economism suggests. (That's also the gist of Kwak's book, IIRC.)
TLDR: Growth at all costs is not necessarily the nature of the game, it's contingently so because of flawed policies and flawed economics: the oh-so-rational, yet so limited Econ 101 view that MBA students are typically subjected to.
You're completely ignoring that them doing their job often means promising features that do not exist on a timetable that is nowhere near reasonable, thus forcing me to bail their ass out by working ungodly amounts of overtime, punishing me for no good reason.
"Finally, it's not MBAs who decided to focus on growth at all costs. It's the nature of the game."
It became the "nature of the game" because of them in the first place.
"Either you get to the top or your competitors will do that."
So what? In just about every field out there, there is room for more than one entrant.
Craigslist isn't playing the game and doing fine. The game is all in your head. Feels like even the IDEA that there's a game is MBA hogwash they're trying to sell you.
Craigslist is a benevolent dictator, but it is no saint.
Craigslist is greedy in a strange way. Craigslist is greedy over their the simplicity of their product and desire to hold on to their turf.
The company makes more than enough money to offer all kinds of improvements that need not markedly change how the marketplace behaves.
These features would not exploit the user or the user's experience. (In the spirit of this thread, "MBA" ideas)
When someone comes along and tries to ship the same thing, improved, and break TOS to get exposure to CL users, CL shuts them down. The big difference between craigslist and other startups is craigslist rarely incorporates competitive ideas into their product.
I support the position craigslist holds, but not the way craigslist holds it. I believe it will be toppled by a group less benevolent or be forced to add features at a date far later than it could have added utility to so many people's lives.
> When someone comes along and tries to ship the same thing, improved, and break TOS to get exposure to CL users
Well, that's an incredibly euphemistic take on it, if nothing else. Let's see someone try to "get exposure to" (scrape) Facebook's user graph for a competing product and see how long that attempt would last. I don't understand how people can feel entitled to data that CL gathers: obviously they'd be protective of it as it's their secret sauce/crown jewels.
But OP is hating the game, the game that is developed collectively by MBA's who dehumanize business from what was a human endeavor into a marketplace of exchangeable values and exploitable externalities.
> You will have to sell your product and some of the MBA's are really great at that.
I'd bet that this is true of any degree. Not saying MBA providers don't teach useful stuff, but the degree is a terrible signal of quality--after all, it is by far the most popular graduate degree. I'd much rather work with someone who can state business options articulately and intelligently than someone with degree X; if this articulate/intelligent person happens to have an MBA that's great for them.
First, go to Disneyland and look at the ticket prices. They're really high, right? On a per-day basis?
So next you price out the season passes. You do the math and you find that if you are going 6 or 7 days in a year or less, you are better off without the season pass. If you are going 8 or more days ( for instance ), the season pass makes more sense.
So you do the math and think about it some more. 7 or 8 days sounds reasonable, my family will enjoy it, right?
The next thing you know, you are happily shelling out $1000 per family member, thinking of all the happy times you will have and all the money you are going to save.
I’m having difficulty understanding you. Is this a scenario where you’re arguing for or against MBAs? It either sounds like you’re arguing a) MBA teaches you grade school reasoning or b) an MBA teaches you to maximize your revenue stream by providing pricing structures that encourage people to spend more than they want. In either case I’d rather work with someone with a wider skill set providing someone people do want and are willing to pay for.
I think the context is vital here. In the ideal situation of 5 people hungry and the only shop in town with exactly 5 sandwiches ready, nobody loses: shop sells, people eat, workers get paid.
But in this world there are more products and services around than people wanting to buy them, so people have to be convinced, and engineers usually are really poor at lying.
A revealing sign that an engineer isn't running that shop would be the production climbing to 50 sandwiches. The same 5 people would be fooled into buying all of them by advertising, special discounts etc, then they would eat 5 each instead of 1 becoming obese, thus helping the medical business, and throw away the rest helping the trash collection and disposal business.
> But in this world there are more products and services around than people wanting to buy them, so people have to be convinced
Or, the products could shut down, or lower their prices. If there’s no demand, why put energy into making demand rather than making something people want? It’s the lowest bar of achievement in this society; while I understand money can be a powerful motivator, this lowers the value of the entire work force.
Capitalism is, and always has been, about reaching a state where supply exceeds demand. One could argue that once a business reaches that stage, they can put up a Mission Accomplished banner and fire most of their workforce. But because of how wealth is distributed, workers always need to be working so they're incentivized to extend the work and market as long as possible.
The same mechanism is responsible for the situation where institutions tasked with solving a certain problem (crime, cancer, etc.) invariably end up perpetuating the problem so they can continue existing.
You think some shmuck MBA setting up a devious pricing structure at Disneyland is bad? Consider that the US has more empty houses than homeless people, and more unsold cars in lots than people who lack reliable transportation.
Right, it's a spectrum. I don't think there are many cogent adults (even "democratic socialists") that wish to do away with the majority of capitalism in our society: the nordic model.
That calculation sounds extremely obvious to someone with no MBA or sales/marketing experience whatsoever. I’m confident that MBAs or experiences people in those roles do a heck of a lot more than calculations like that.
Being an MBA doesn't change whether or not you can sell something though. Anyone can equally be good at selling things, its more of a personality type if anything
I don't see the purpose of MBAs unless you are doing high level management at a mid-large company, and you are supplementing it with other (core) skills such as software development. The other reason you would take an MBA is if you want an equivalent knowledge set of a bachelors business degree without having formal training.
I think the MBA hate is warranted to some degree, because you see far too many people taking an MBA as a "backup" option. I've dealt with way too many people with MBA degrees that have no idea what they are talking about.
I'm a strong believer that business skills need to be won by hard-earned experience.
Can report from the trenches of a major software consulting firm: putting a sharp engineer who's even reasonably good at communicating in front of the C-suite is 5-20x more effective than using someone with an MBA.
My role evolved in that direction, mostly because I was okay with it. Other roles can be designed to be cross-functional from the beginning. Generally it's a useful application of engineering time if it's a high-leverage situation with decision-makers in the room and meaningful potential deal value at stake.
The best use of an engineer’s time is whatever makes the company the most money. If talking to customers C-level people is a weekly requirement for that, then that is what the engineer needs to do.
That's true if the company and the engineers exist in vacuum.
Very often, the engineer would get frustrated with this and look for work which is more interesting. That way, the company will be, increasingly, left with engineers who are there because they have no alternative.
"Either we do this or they will" is a bad argument as justification for doing something unethical. The reason I think it is bad is because it is lazy, and it is lazy because it is circular. You say it is true, and because you say it is true (and you act as if it is), it is true. It's not very interesting to follow and it should also be pretty plain to see why it doesn't work as a justification.
From my perspective, any company that goes public will eventually turn to crap (or go through decades-long crap/good cycles). It's not MBAs that drive for growth at all costs - I would argue it's shareholders. Shareholders are greedy and don't care about anything else besides ROI. Even if that means throwing the consumers under the bus in the long run to achieve that.
A company has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, who bought the stock on the assumption that the company will be run in their best interests. If they do't do that they are open to shareholder lawsuits. (This is the way that activist investors often work.)
Lots of local services in Central Asia depend on it for communication and operations via telegram bots.
We just lost hundreds of orders during lunch rush hour. Users couldn't place orders via bots. The orders that were placed via mobile app or website were still sent to managers via Telegram bots. Of course, restaurant managers didn't see the orders and couriers didn't get anything as a result.
But that's nothing compared to our neighboring bot only taxi service. I think they lost thousands of orders and hundreds of drivers didn't get paid. Lesson learned: don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Hi Jon. Any plans to extract interactions as code from modern prototyping tools (e.g. Principle) to Xcode?
AirBnB recently released Lottie that requires After Effects but when compared to Principle, AE feels like Photoshop compared to Sketch. I have a feeling that not many UX designers on Mac want to go back to Adobe tools. Certainly, I don't want to touch Adobe tools again.
So true. I used to work closely with investigations department during my tenure at Western Union. There have been so many heartbreaking stories of people emptying their retirement accounts and sending all of their money to "lovers" from Nigeria or other non-US countries.
We tried to stop these payments but they would find other ways to send cash directly. Dealing with international wires is tough. When we stopped payments and tried to protect people, the story wouldn't end there. The people would find other means to screw themselves over. That's what loneliness and desperation do to gullible people.
I really would like to see Google penalize websites that force you to login after google showed these websites in the results.
1. Take Linkedin for example: you search for a person on google; google shows a linkedin result; you go to linkedin but you are greeted with giant popup asking you to login to view info. Ridiculous.
2. Same with Quora: they come in results with basic info, but when you go to their page, they forward you to registration/login page.
These practices are not ok in my book. Surely, they can do whatever they want on their websites but if Google indexes you and shows some info in search results, then you better show that info on your page without forcing me to register.
PS: To be clear -- this behavior happens on mobile version of their websites. Not sure how it plays out on desktop.
Pinterest is even worse - in Google Images, images are listed but once you enter the site, you're blocked from accessing whatever you have been looking for.
What's even worse about Pinterest is that almost all the images are derived from an outside source, so you're following this insane route to get at the original content:
source image-> indexed by Pinterest -> Google index of Pinterest index -> Pinterest page -> source image.
I can't believe that Google is incapable of navigating around this, but Pinterest would probably block them from indexing if they did.
Yeah, I would think so too, but if you spend any time with their apps, you can see how user hostile they are. The UI is awful, data is incredibly difficult to export. They really want to lock you into their narrow channels.
Ebay does the same trick… leaves images of old items up and then link is actually a listing of (very loosely) related items, but not the one that was original sought.
There should be one button option to exclude pinterest from search results, a workaround is to add -site:.pinterest.com to the end of the query when searching for images.
Unfortunately the info typically is on that page, just not complete - and you want more and Google knows it's the way to that information, so results are largely correct, no?
If those sites show something else to you than they show to Google Bot, that's against Google's policy and they should be penalized, so I'm assuming they aren't.
If energy required to get to the information you need through that path is too much (i.e. lots of people bounce on that page), that will again, generally, result in putting it lower in search results.
So either most people agree on putting up with the login page (or are logged in already), or some other factors which I assume you'd like to discount keep those pages so high.
Let's take a look at Quora's case. Please do the following:
1. Open your mobile browser.
2. Ask a question on Google and add "quora" so you get some results.
3. Open Quora's result link
4. See that result for a brief second and
5. Be forwarded to registration page, which doesn't have any close or cancel out buttons.
6. Try tapping back and you are back to Google results
7. Curse at Quora and never tap on their results again.
That last point is only for me. There is a choice to register. You are free to choose.
PS: You are right, the information that Google showed/indexed is there on Quora. But for regular people (not Google bots), it's there for a second. IDK about you but I'd place this behavior into dark pattern UX book.
For a short(?) but wonderful period of time it was possible to blacklist sites from your Google search results. As I recall Google moved this functionality into the Chrome browser several years ago.
When it was still available as an account setting I used it to filter out the awful "resources" like expertsexchange and that one Oracle consultant site with the hilarious pictures. When I see Quora results I long for that feature to be returned.
I remember that one because of the offer to learn Oracle during a cruise, complete with the important part "Convince the boss" : http://www.dba-oracle.com/BC_cruise.htm
Theoretically 6 & 7 should be a big red flag (the biggest possible UX red flag) to Google regarding the specific Quora page visited - I know that I almost never see Quora results in search, for example.
Following Bartosz Goralewicz's post about how well botting works to manipulate Google in...2014 I think? there's a small black hat industry that's sprung up around imitating this kind of user reaction, and it does reportedly work to remove pages from Google. I've had my suspicions that it's been used against sites I've worked on a few times (2 or 3).
TL:DR; Quora should generally not be ranking so well (but Google's complex enough to be unpredictable on a page-by-page basis these days).
I'm not seeing that behaviour at all direct from Google. I do get the registration overlay if I subsequently click another Quora article page from the original Quora article. The behaviour I'm seeing is reasonable, if slightly annoying.
I do not see steps 4-7. After 3, I stay on that page. Sometimes in the past I would see an overlay on that page. I don't get redirected anywhere, and I'm 100% sure I never was (there was only popup). I wonder where's the discrepancy coming from.
Also, google bot would be redirected too, unless of course it's simply logged in :)
I could make lots of guesses why you don't experience Quora the same way I do. None of that would change the fact that I can't see the information I am being promised to see on Google.
Here is a screenshot of the page I am being forwarded to automatically: http://pho.to/Aatuj
It is a disguised register page because after you make 10 selections, you are forced to sign up.
That's because you got fooled into making an account. It's trying to get you to complete the registration process so they can pick questions to show you.
If you clear your cookies and go from a Google search result to Quora, you can read the answers on the page that you're on. If you navigate to any other question, say via the links at the bottom of the page for similar / related questions, the answers will be blocked by the signup popup.
If, instead of signing, you go back to Google and search for the same "<question> quora" it'll work again. The thing to remember is only the first page you navigate to from Google will display properly.
That's because you seem to be halfway through making an account and they want you to finish.
The actual behavior of Quora, if you aren't midway through account signup is:
if you go through Google search it shows you the page promised.
If, from that page, you click on another question it will open the second question but give you the sign up modal. You can bypass a signup modal and get the normal page by appending ?share=1 to the end of the URL.
I don't even have a Quora account but I read the ?share=1 trick a while ago on hacker news.
I saw your video. It looks like you are in the middle of a, probably accidental, new account signup. Maybe you let your kid use your phone weeks ago and she did it. If you clear your cookies then you should get the behavior above.
I don't "expect" users to do anything, I was sharing a known workaround in case anyone was interested.
EDIT: I just created an account to see what happens. You are logged into a new account. Maybe you accidentally logged in with Google?
I created a new account with a fake name and email. No email verification. After the fake name and email is entered they ask you to follow topics (which is the screenshot you are seeing) and once you pick 10 your account is "complete" and they will let you look at the answer.
When I made that quora complain before, HN readers are kind enough to show me how to avoid it. Without the ?share=1 trick, I probably don't even know how Quora looks like.
I frequently have to delete these kinds of HTML nodes off the page just to see if it actually has something I want. I debated rolling my own extension for the common sites where I run into this, but ended up just throwing up my hands at the absurdity of the situation.
Same here. uBlock Origin works nice to remove the nags, but some sites just recreate them automatically using random identifiers so that they keep throwing the nagscreens at you at each page reload.
Maybe it's time to put those recent AI wonders to some real useful work, say an embedded hardware proxy or an extension that recognizes and deletes nagware on the fly.
I just hit CTRL-U to read the pages source which contains the text content. Now that I think about it I wonder if reader mode would work. Hey, maybe you can just set your user agent to Google Bot.
Reader Mode is invaluable for sites that use Javascript to throw up paywalls when you're in the middle of reading something (Wired does this, last I checked). Sometimes you have to refresh the page for it to fully work, but once you do, the full text is right there, in a format that's much nicer than the original could ever strive to be.
Totally agree! Those kinds of behavior waste time of visitors - when the info is protected by a login, it shouldn't be indexed by search engines in the first place.
Like someone below said bots are more complicated than just clicking on what brings them money.
In order to be not detected as bots, they need to behave like humans. Hence, they like and visit websites that they have no special interest in. Think of it this way: 50% of what they click is just something random, other 50% is what their masters programmed them to do.
This really doesn't have to do anything with Facebook. There are companies in Russia and India that sell likes, follows, etc. These bots then have to fake their identity and as a result they like stuff that you pay for as Facebook advertiser. I am sure Facebook does something to mitigate this and block the bots but it's a never-ending game for them and those who sell fake like/follows/etc.
I really wish there was a prototyping tool that could serve as a learning tool to jump from being a designer to a programmer.
The problem with tools like Origami (and Framer.js) is that you need to know coding and many designers just don't know it. Thus, they stick with easier solutions like Principle. It would be great if a tool could start off looking like Sketch and slowly become Xcode as I learn more features and become more experienced.
It is essentially a bridge from designs into Xcode and Android Studio. There's a Sketch import plugin too that preserves elements: https://neonto.com/sketch
Anecdotally, I have a friend who is a designer who did a lot of Quartz Composer prototyping and eventually learned ObjC to implement some of his designs. Seems like once you get the idea of building out gestures and animations it transfers across the specifics of Patches / textual code / etc. Now he writes c++, swift, etc :D
Flash was this for me. Started with the animation tools and slowly started writing action script to make it interactive. Try Interface Builder in XCode it allows you to do all of the layout side, but you quickly need to start writing snippets of code to do things like round corners and change border colours.
Face Control is about your face and it does differ from Dress Code.
Clubs that only enforce Dress Code will prohibit you from entering only if your clothes don't match the requirements.
Those clubs with Face Control will prohibit your entrance for whatever reason they want. Usually it's just an extortion (левак) and you have to bribe your way in (дать на лапу). Although sometimes, it's about the gender ratio or your sexual preferences. Clubs have to make sure that the party doesn't turn into a sausage party and keep away people who can cause problems.
Левак = money made on the left (on the side). Most likely illegal or against company's policy
Дать на лапу = to give (money) to someone's paw (hand)
Extortion makes no sense. Clubs are commercial venues. Everything that personnel extortions comes straight from owners' pocket. So they have huge incentive to figure it out, and I personally haven't experienced that kind of thing.
ЛEBAK, -а, м. (разговорное неодобр.). 1. Политический деятель крайне левых взглядов. 2. Работник, незаконно использующий рабочее время, орудия или продукты общественного труда для личной наживы. Купить! у левака, и прилагательное левацкий, -ая, -ое и лева-ческий, -ая.-ое.
Every guest who chooses to not participate won't spend money at the club. Every guest who chooses to participate will now spend less money at the club. If you're the club owner you'll definitely make sure that paying customers' entrance to the venue is unobstructed.
It's not only pics of people staring into a screen.
There was a case about 5-6 years ago when a guy recorded and streamed his secretly gay roomate having sex in the dorm. The gay roomate committed suicide later.
Work computers can be taken home or to business trips where things can happen in the hotel after the deal is struck.
You do your job and let them do theirs. You code, talk to users, ship, and iterate. They handle sales, operations, marketing, and maybe fundraising. These other things can be done by a technical founder but they are not fun. There is a reason why some companies hire COOs so that CEOs can focus on their job.
Finally, it's not MBAs who decided to focus on growth at all costs. It's the nature of the game. Either you get to the top or your competitors will do that. So don't hate the player, hate the game.