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We had to drag them kicking and screaming, but we got them to do it. Good job internet. I wonder where they keep the voices of common sense at most companies-

• nicoburns 7y ago
  They get kicked out because they're not making as much money. Ultimately it goes to the top. CEO's are appointed by shareholders who generally care only about the bottom line. And have shown themselves to be quite short-termist in this more often than not. If we want to change this, then we need to change how control of companies is determined in our economy.
  • lettergram 7y ago
    I think there is a perceived need to be short term. Mainly, because most CEOs are appointed. In the case of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. the founders had enough equity to think long term. Apple is an interesting one, in that it fired Job’s. Only to rehire and let the vision go to work. Even if it takes a few years.I think that’s the exception though, not the rule.
    • ashtonkem 7y ago
      And once they rehired Jobs, they let him stop paying dividends and build up an unbelievable war chest worth of cash, which nominally was against the short term interests of the shareholders.
    • coldpie 7y ago
      > Job’s You just gave me an aneurysm.
      • vikramkr 7y ago
        I would assume autocorrect is to blam'e
• duxup 7y ago
  By the time the decision is made and the reasoning is something like money it's got momentum. I was in a meeting once where some new support / warranty policies were announced. Now this wasn't a decision making meeting so I've no idea what happened there. The policy change was a straight up violation of some contracts we had with some customers. You didn't have to understand law or anything, it was pretty obvious. I spoke up if only out of curiosity to see what would happen. Everyone with any level of power in the room seemed convinced that it couldn't be illegal, because the folks higher up the chain made that decision.... Everyone had delegated common sense to the folks upstairs. Often when I hear of these decision I think "Someone had to say something at a meeting right?" but actually, I suspect that isn't the case. Epilogue: Company got sued by customers first, then a state AG got in on the action, then the feds came after them. The law firm hired by the company actually quit on them before they finally settled.
  • DonHopkins 7y ago
    Wow. Love how you buried the lede in the epilogue! ;) Womp, womp.
  • HeadsUpHigh 7y ago
    That sounds so beautiful
• the8472 7y ago
  The voices with common sense are removed vertically and horizontally in the organizational structure. Concrete example: The compliance department in a different country mandates that all passwords must be salted (great) and use modern hash algorithms from a whitelist. That whitelist consisted mostly they sha2 and ripemd family. We were using bcrypt to hash passwords, which is an actual password hashing algorithm instead of a general-purpose hashing algorithm. Since we were organizationally so far removed from the compliance department even escalating the issue several management levels had no effect other than being told "compliance is important, don't waste time on meetings about this, just change it" and "this is not a hill to die on". So we worked around this by using scrypt instead (which is not in the whitelist but based on a hash in the whitelist) but the asinine policy is still in place because it was considered too much effort to get them to change it. Of course the next team that wants to implement a web service with passwords will face the very same issue and may take them by their word and use SHA2 directly. Great success.
• tracker1 7y ago
  Of course given the premium of their Red Pro line, I probably won't be buying from them... It does make me curious what this will mean for shuckers on the externals... as I would expect SMR to actually be a good use case for most external drives.