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Review of ‘Chaos Monkeys’, Silicon Valley tell-all
- moo_goose 10y agoI have question about the replicating portfolio analogy that the author makes with respect to getting Facebook to match Twitter's offer. Could he have (successfully) bargained for a replicating portfolio on an after-tax basis? In other words, since Twitter was paying with stock options, which are more tax-efficient than Facebook stock grants, he could have argued that Facebook's overall compensation package needed to be much more to really match Twitter's.
- antongm 10y agoAuthor here, for all your trolling needs.
- mathattack 10y agoThank you for joining and opening yourself up to the trolls, gadflies and haters. :-)
- drdoom 10y agoHello, I haven't read the book but I am planning to. I caught the last few minutes of your interview on NPR the other day. You said you built the FB Exchange. I made a mental note to look that up later and now serendipitously, it shows up here. Anyhow, not familiar with it but it sounded like some sort of an interface to Amazon. Would you care to elaborate?
- HillRat 10y agoExchange is/was FB's retargeting/remarketing solution, AKA "we will follow you everywhere you go on the Web and remind you that you once looked at a pair of shoes on our site." Some detail would be cool -- adtech is intrinsically interesting, if ethically somewhat murky.
- antongm 10y agoTrue!
- danso 10y agoBetween physics at Berkeley, derivatives at Goldman Sachs, and analytics at Facebook, could you summarize their pros and cons in terms of intellectual challenge and work/life balance?
- titanoceanus 10y agoI'd love to know about the work life balance. In an industry where burnouts are common, and your work history being some of the most demanding companies in the industry, how did you handle it?
- antongm 10y agoI drank a lot, and did stupid things. It was really self-destructive. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Really.
- NegativeLatency 10y agoAll of them? Or one in particular?
- raziel2701 10y agoWhen did you get the phd at Berkeley? What did you specialize in and did that specialization help you get a job at Goldman Sachs?
- rdl 10y agoHow would you contrast the culture at Facebook vs. Twitter?
- antongm 10y agoFacebook was a bit frat boy, but also had a really cohesive culture. Twitter was a more hipsters and design-y, but they didn't seem to have the balls to ship every day all day.
- fumar 10y agoJust started the book. Out of curiosity, what do you think about FB's decision to shut down FBX? It is hard to see past closed garden approach. Is there a better reason?
- InquilineKea 10y agoAre you optimistic about the future of Silicon Valley? What do you think of Michael O. Church?
- johan_larson 10y agoWho is the target audience of the book? You don't dig all that deep into the tech side of the valley, so it's not the geeks. You don't talk all that much about the details of the deals, so it's not the suits. That, leaves ... tourists?
- antongm 10y agoNo offense, but not the HN crowd. Supposed to be mainstream normals. Sales, yo....
- mturmon 10y agoThe OP mentions that the second half of the book chronicles the author's time at FB. This was excerpted in Vanity Fair, and the HN commentary from early this month is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11830108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11830108 The NYT reviewer in the OP was repelled by the author's pose ("The aphorisms are sometimes lazy, the facts can be sloppy, and the studied cool – all the while insisting that “I am the uncoolest person you will ever meet” – can be grating."), but ultimately able to get past it to the anecdotes and "directionally correct" analysis in the book. You can note that the HN readership also had a similar reaction, with varying degrees of being able to move past the initial impression.
- mathattack 10y agoOne challenge is the most earnest writers usually make the most boring stories. This is also why the imperfect narrator is used so often in great literature.
- antongm 10y agoI'd like to hear that d-bag I-banker's aphorisms and compare. I think he just didn't like the authorial tone, because he's used to boring-ass biz books...which is fine. But that's not how it happened. I didn't embellish. If anything, I downplayed things. Might not appeal to some i-banker in NYC who commutes on a train to Connecticut and wears a suit every day....but this is what that period of life was like, at least to me and the people around me at the time.
- themoonbus 10y agoYou seem very thin-skinned
- antongm 10y agoOK. You're right. My editor told me it's actually positive. I fixate on the negative to much. There it is...
- kmonsen 10y ago
- Varcht 10y agoAt ~$100k, a 40-foot sailboat seems like a reasonably affordable option for housing in SF.
- rando18423 10y agoIf you were building a company, would you recruit your colleagues from Berkeley, GS, or FB, and why?
- antongm 10y agoPreferably all three. But I definitely think Berkeley grads are relatively underrated to Stanford ones.
- stillworks 10y agoI have access to a job market where the major employers are Investment Banks and that's where I have been employed for some part of my career. I am thinking of moving to technology-first employers... will it make any change to my life or is it a futile dream ?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dsugarman 10y agoI came here to say that this line "Underneath the braggadocio and evisceration of professional nemeses in Antonio García Martinez’s book lies the beating heart of a formidable teacher." is everything that is wrong with journalism. It is hard to read a single sentence after that, your brain just shuts off. ...but to copy that line I couldn't just select and paste because of the NYT's weird website, so I viewed the source. And then it hit even harder... <meta itemprop="description" name="description" content="Underneath the braggadocio and evisceration of professional nemeses in Antonio García Martinez’s book lies the beating heart of a formidable teacher." />
- Asooka 10y agoThe word you're looking for is "purple prose".
- pmille5 10y agoI couldn't get through the first paragraph of that review. I'll try a sample of the book, but that NYT piece was utterly unpleasant.
- protomyth 10y agoAudible has a sample from the audiobook http://www.audible.com/pd/Business/Chaos-Monkeys-Audiobook/B01EM3NTQ2 http://www.audible.com/pd/Business/Chaos-Monkeys-Audiobook/B...
- antongm 10y agoWell, we agree on that one! I think he just didn't like the voice, but couldn't admit it wasn't enlightening.
- gmarx 10y agoMost hilarious item is where the author states that we should have a conversation about whether startups are society's best use of our brightest graduates, i.e. Harvard Business School grads. Somehow after years of complaining about financial services hiring all our promising mathematicians and physicist, this comment tickles me and puts me in my place at the same time. Sadly, I fear this was not intended as a joke
- coderdude 10y agoYour response to that is a complaint followed by no discussion. "Somehow funny."
- jacobolus 10y agoA significant proportion of Harvard Business School graduates (though by no means all of them) are people who are “ambitious” in a way primarily defined around money, social status, and power, rather than curiosity or societal contribution. They’re going to inevitably be drawn to whatever field looks most promising for a lucrative and influential career. It would be nice if we could economically rearrange society to amply reward careers in research, teaching, government, public-interest law, community organizing and development, providing social services, and so on (not to mention just regular jobs in factories, agriculture, retail, food preparation, etc.), so that doing work that benefited society was more attractive vis-à-vis zero-sum financial hocus pocus, predatory legal engineering, aggressive marketing/propaganda, internet surveillance, quasi-legal fraud, etc. [My recommendation would be to dramatically increase taxes on land, inheritances, long-term capital gains, and carbon emissions, and redistribute the proceeds evenly to all citizens. And also to return anti-trust law to its roots and aggressively break apart monopolies and monopsonies, separate different types of financial activities to reduce conflicts of interest, and to dramatically increase funding for government regulatory agencies which are currently infinitely outclassed by industry.] But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards, in our current society. I’m not sure what can be done to help e.g. the kind of business school grads who have already decided that personal success is more important than general social welfare.
- hiou 10y ago
- cafard 10y ago"Even where Mr. García completely mangles the facts – as he does for instance in describing the mechanics of the Facebook initial public offering – he manages to draw multiple fresh insights that somehow feel directionally correct." I find it hard to read this other than as "It's bullshit, but but bullshit that reinforces my prejudices."
- ionised 10y ago"Beyond the author’s personal story, what connects the two distinct halves of the book is his area of actual domain expertise: advertising. Mr. García was a Ph.D. student in physics at Berkeley before joining Goldman Sachs to model prices for credit derivatives." That's so fucking depressing.
- smoorman1024 10y agoNot sure if anyone else has noticed this pattern but I've seen it in a number of NYT articles that I would like to aggregate. There are seemingly offhanded paragraphs that ignore the issue at hand and insert something pro-NSA/pro-weak crypto. From this article take the second to last paragraph. At the least, readers of “Chaos Monkeys” will think twice before taking at face value tech leaders’ high-minded arguments for refusing to assist our national security apparatus in fighting terrorist threats. Even in the area of advertising, important social and public policy questions are implicated. This comment hardly fits into the theme and flow of the rest of the review.
- vancouverwill 10y agoYep, I noticed that. A completely biased view to a very important matter. Completely overlooking the dangers of weak crypto, government invasion of privacy and safe control of access to information.