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This reminds me of LivingSocial. For years, LivingSocial was like a mini black hole of really good startup-like talent in the DC area. But when you have that m
by atonse 9y ago
This reminds me of LivingSocial. For years, LivingSocial was like a mini black hole of really good startup-like talent in the DC area.
But when you have that many smart people under one roof, you have to keep them busy. So you get these kinds of reinventing-a-beautiful-wheel projects. Not knocking the quality, just knocking the growing distraction and temptation to build in-house rather than use existing tech.
LivingSocial had such good quality output, but they were all over the place. They had to keep all those productive people busy after all. And the best way was to keep churning out new products.
- JPKab 9y agoYeah, as a techie that used to live in DC, LivingSocial people were always at the Meetups. I was always blow away by the talent being used to work on a shitty coupon app.
- hitekker 9y agoI agree. "Keeping them busy" also raises an uncomfortable question: if Uber and other valuable Unicorns can be executed 99.999% with 25% of the engineers they hire, do they need the next 75% of engineers? Even considering crunch-time and potential diversification/expansion, full-time employment of non-critical engineers is obviously inefficient. And, as Uber proved, politically toxic and consequently harmful to the productivity of the business. More pressing is the existential tension underlying this quandary. That our economy will generally and increasingly forgo the skilled and unskilled labor provided by our society. Framed concretely: one day, we may define a "10x engineer" as an engineer who can send ten other engineers to the soup kitchen. I'm still looking for a well-thought-out solution.
- xixi77 9y agoThis is not really new; just think of all the stuff that came out of AT&T labs...