4 ms·

Seems like the big thing everyone is missing: you can hate Alex all you want, but he's not making conjectures. He's giving his advice based on successful experi

• tsycho 10y ago
  His advice falls in the same philosophical category as... 1/ use children as Labor in 3rd world countries since they are cheaper and more pliable 2/ cheat in environmental tests (eg: Volkswagen) 3/ dump toxic waste into poor countries since they don't have environmental protections, and it's cheaper than processing/dispoaing them correctly Basically you can get an edge by doing a lot of ethically wrong things. But should you? And should we celebrate anyone who wins by doing such things?
  • RyanZAG 10y ago
    I don't understand - how does his advice hurt anyone? It seems very benign. He's free to run his business how he wants. 1/ I'm from a 3rd world country. Street children here would give everything they can to get into the work force. They're not allowed to work anymore because companies get too much flak for hiring them. Instead they starve on the street and resort to crime. It's easy to say 'no work for children!' from your comfy home. 2/ Looking after an employee's wife and trying to find Asperger graduates to employ is not illegal. The environmental test cheating is only having a negative effect because it is illegal, dishonest and fraud. None of the things mentioned by Alex are any of those. He's very up front about it - he's giving presentations on it while his employees are present. 3/ Not necessarily evil. A company could pay $100 to dump some waste in their own country with full regulations, or pay a poor country $10 to dump the waste there. If that $10 means better schooling for children there, then I'd say accepting a bit of waste that can be cleaned up later seems satisfactory. It's actually worked out quite well in some countries. Basically - you're applying 'justice' that makes you feel better, and not justice that really solves anything. Making people like Alex stop bringing together teams that create things we use every day isn't helping us.
    • coldtea 10y ago
      >1/ I'm from a 3rd world country. Street children here would give everything they can to get into the work force. So, maybe fix that (being on the streets, hungry, etc), instead of fixing the laws against having children work? Starving children (even as young as 10 or less) also willingly have sex with sex tourists for money, in Asia, Africa and elsewhere -- but those pesky laws also forbid them to do so. Instead of proposing we change the laws to enable them to make money this way without issues, how about we fix their situation?
      • cmdrfred 10y ago
        Why not allow them to sell their organs? They wont live long enough to ever require a 2nd kidney.
      • RyanZAG 10y ago
        Not that easy I'm afraid. There's more of them every year. People living in conditions where they need to fight to survive don't have time to worry about the survival of others, which means those who can't survive on their own or provide some benefit to others generally don't get any help. So sure - fixing their situation would be the best! Please come help! We desperately need more real help here. But barring people jumping on planes to come and help, which from experience doesn't seem to happen terribly often, it's better for these children to be able to survive. My point is: you're doing this the wrong way around. First you fix their situation, and then you make child labour and sex tourism illegal. If you do it the other way around, you're just hurting people. You're just condemning children who had no other choice to survive to having no means of survival. Sorry to say it, but it's reality. EDIT: To put it in a more clear example: a village is eating disgusting looking seaweed that tastes horrible because there is no other food nearby. You think nobody should have to eat this seaweed, so you make eating this seaweed illegal so that they can't eat it and offend you. End result? They starve because you didn't provide them with better food before making seaweed illegal.
        • coldtea 10y ago
          >My point is: you're doing this the wrong way around. First you fix their situation, and then you make child labour and sex tourism illegal. And my point is, it's rather the inverse. Legal child labour and an allowed sex tourism industry creates great private interests and political manipulation (legal, developmental, etc) to ensure things do not change. They're neither "short term problem fixers" not "stepping stones to something better", but part of the reason why the people are held down.
  • nickff 10y ago
    I think 2 and 3 make for strong moral arguments (though there are some valid counterpoints), but 1 is a poor example. Child labor is usually the best of a very poor set of options for both the child and their parents, and not allowing the child to work will probably worsen their situation. It may feel like paying children to do work is 'exploitation', but passively forcing them to starve, or suffer the ravages of preventable diseases conveniently out of sight is much worse. If you end child labor by providing a financial incentive for the kids to go to school, I will appluad your achievement, but banning them from working does not necessarily help them.
    • cmdrfred 10y ago
      Labor is a matter of supply and demand, if companies are using child labor that must mean there is a large demand for labor (adults would likely be more efficient at the same task) by removing the child out of the labor pool you increase the bargaining power of his parents. I believe that is why it was originally banned in the United States.
      • nickff 10y ago
        You may increase the wages of the parents, but not necessarily by as much as the family has lost; in fact, there could be situations where a village is no longer worth operating in because the total amount of labor available is not enough to support a viable factory. Much of this depends on the elasticity of demand for labor, the manufacturer's alternatives, and the ease of automating a task. Remember that this is not a power game played by a group of companies on the one side and a bunch of laborers on the other; there are many other factors including mechanization, productivity, consumer demand, etc.
        • cmdrfred 10y ago
          > You may increase the wages of the parents, but not necessarily by as much as the family has lost; 1 year out, maybe. 10 years out after the children have had the benefit of education? Dead wrong. Remember also that the local economy scales with prevailing wages. They would experience a period of deflation but that's fine as they have virtually no assets to speak of. > Remember that this is not a power game played by a group of companies on the one side and a bunch of laborers on the other; there are many other factors including mechanization, productivity, consumer demand, etc. In sub $10/day situations mechanization is a tiny factor at best. That machine has to be built in a factory in Germany by highly skilled and expensive engineers it's going to have to be amazing efficient to pay for itself. Then you need skilled labor to work on and maintain it. Adults are more productive than children, and consumer demand would likely go up if you did not use them to produce your goods. The western nations didn't get rid of child labor for altruistic reasons. It's a fools errand.
  • sremani 10y ago
    Thats what the winners at the table did, Walmarts, Nikes, Foxconns etc. have done. The only thing they do is have some nominal QC team and outsource all the stinky stuff to sub-contractors. In US that is how you hire "illegals/undocumented" by Big Ag or Big Logistic. The #4/ to you list, have an structure for "plausible deniability". If you go deep in the supply chain if you will find all the above. I am not condoning his advice, nor do I practice these. But reality is not that pretty.
    • RyanZAG 10y ago
      Spot on! Agree completely. Americans have this strange idea lately that all of their companies are squeaky clean when it's really people like Alex that put America on the map. Most of them hide it behind shell companies and lengthy contractor lists. In fact, all of the big name American companies all started out with terrible practices until they earned enough money and enough ire to hide those practices away from the public eye. And judging by my downvotes, far too many people really believe the world is a much nicer place than it is, and where you can really compete without getting a bit dirty yourself.
      • jsprogrammer 10y ago
        What terrible practices did Google, or even Apple, start with?
        • RyanZAG 10y ago
          Steve Jobs had HR policies very very similar to Alex's.
        • benjohnson 10y ago
          Apple: Running a business in a residential area. Shipping electrical products that were not UL tested for fire hazard. Paying owners in stock rather than taxable income. No diversity in hiring practices. Lead in products without a product recycling program in place. The gist is that you generally have to cut corners somewhere to start up any business unless you already have lots of money.
• JamilD 10y ago
  He's seen certain results, and been through certain circumstances. Unless he has proof that those circumstances -> results, making conjectures is exactly what he's doing. This is ignoring the fact that effectiveness is not the only metric for a company. In Tim Cook's words, "if you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock".
  • drumdance 10y ago
    only for ROI reasons. Tim Cook was all about ROI when he implemented Apple's global supply chain.
• bmurphy1976 10y ago
  Works great until the tide changes and you find yourself suddenly on the other side. That's exactly what is happening and some people are really upset. Screw them, this change is long overdue.
  • neffy 10y ago
    Exactly, it's short term vs. long term thinking. I remember listening to a German Businessman once talking about the new eastern (former USSR) countries - and he said, "What these people need to learn is that you can cheat somebody once, or you can do business with them for the rest of your life". Not just the easterners, methinks.
• st3v3r 10y ago
  His "successful experience in reality" is running a spyware company.
  • RyanZAG 10y ago
    DirectX? Come on, you're free to hate him, but putting DirectX together - which is the foundation for so much - is just holding a grudge against someone who says things you don't like.
    • DonHopkins 10y ago
      No, he means WildTangent. And he didn't "make" DirectX or "put it together". He just advertised it. He's an "evangelist" not a "designer" or "developer" or "programmer". That's marketing, not engineering. And it was successful marketing because it was dishonest, heavy handed, well funded marketing, with no hint of self awareness or irony, which he kicked off by throwing a party that cast Microsoft as the Empire, and developers as slaves to be auctioned off and fed to the lions. The early version of DirectX he was evangelizing was a piece of crap. Look up "Direct3D Retained Mode" some time. [1] [1] Direct3D Retained Mode removed from Windows Vista: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/969150 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/969150 The alternative to "Retained Mode", "Execute Buffers", were just as bad if not worse in their own way [2]: >Direct3D initially implemented "retained mode" and "immediate mode" 3D APIs. Like other DirectX APIs, such as DirectDraw, both were based on COM. The retained mode was a scene graph API that attained little adoption. Game developers clamored for more direct control of the hardware's activities than the Direct3D retained mode could provide. Only two games that sold a significant volume, Lego Island and Lego Rock Raiders, were based on the Direct3D retained mode, so Microsoft did not update the retained mode after DirectX 3.0. >For DirectX 2.0 and 3.0, the Direct3D immediate mode used an "execute buffer" programming model that Microsoft hoped hardware vendors would support directly. Execute buffers were intended to be allocated in hardware memory and parsed by the hardware to perform the 3D rendering. They were extremely awkward to program, however, hindering adoption of the new API and prompting calls for Microsoft to adopt OpenGL as the official 3D rendering API for games as well as workstation applications. (see OpenGL vs. Direct3D) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D#Direct3D_2.0_and_3.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D#Direct3D_2.0_and_3.0
• ssmoot 10y ago
  I thought his posts on the subject were a mix of pragmatism and satire? A "this is how the world works, you've got this, here's what you'll face". Was it not meant to be satirical? Was he genuinely advocating squeezing what you can out of people until they burn out and then tossing them aside? I guess from the tone I thought he was trying to poke fun at the POV he was espousing? But the only thing I know about him was that he went around evangelizing DirectX at Microsoft Developer conference a long time ago so I could've completely misread.
  • RyanZAG 10y ago
    Definitely not satirical! His own daughter is criticizing him after all. > Was he genuinely advocating squeezing what you can out of people until they burn out and then tossing them aside? I don't see this in the presentation at all. Do you mean where he says to churn through employees until you find the ones which fit? Seems like what all companies do, they just don't word it like that. Why else do we have trial periods? He's saying that you get in some employees, give them too much work, get rid of the ones that don't cope and reward the ones that do. Sounds like standard practice in every company I've ever been at.
    • ssmoot 10y ago
      > Definitely not satirical! His own daughter is criticizing him after all. I guess that should be obvious at this point. I thought there might still be a discussion until you pointed it out. That does pretty much settle it. Thanks. As far as the rest, maybe I didn't read closely enough; it's just one of the impressions I walked away with with the "wage slave" language.
  • ericflo 10y ago
    It was apparently not meant to be satirical.
  • jsprogrammer 10y ago
    Does this[0] look like satire? [0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CgP-xKKUkAIxXph.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CgP-xKKUkAIxXph.jpg:large