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There are lot of comments here disliking MrBeast and what not, but some of the advice can definitely apply to all organizations. > Your goal here is to make th

by doix 2y ago

There are lot of comments here disliking MrBeast and what not, but some of the advice can definitely apply to all organizations. > Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole. Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.

duxup 2y ago
Your comment reminded me of the old content vs process Steve Jobs commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE But I agree, it's so tempting to get internally focused, or focused on "improvement" that really shifts the focus to something else entirely (hollywood style movies, tv shows, whatever). Personally I'm no fan of the youtube-ism and youtube generally, but it's clear that game is it's own game. It's not making a movie, it's not a TV show, it's not even tiktok. It's its own thing and it is pretty clear that generally you have to play that platform's game. My kids play a lot of roblox, and while there's a lot of copy cat games based on traditional gaming, there's almost a system on roblox as far as what games are popular as far as ease of jumping in goes and so on. And there's a lot of weird creativity you find nowhere else as far as the topics of the games (want to be a bug? you can do that). That's it's own space too.
kspacewalk2 2y ago
>Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Sounds like they're doing their jobs, which is to protect your future selves from your current selves. Sure, finding solutions is great, but faulting them from finding problems and slowing things down until solutions are found is odd. Yes, security or IT does sometime have to act as a reality check in an organization that has over-hired over-zealous but under-experienced go-getters who want to "move fast and break things". They are a vital counterweight that makes ambition productive, instead of allowing it to wreck the organization's reputation.
- duxup 2y ago
  I'm going to interject my own experiences and note that some legal advice seems excessively risk averse and honestly just defaults to "no" and lazy. I suspect that's what the OP might have been referencing. I know we're generally concerned with the folks playing fast and loose with the rules here, and that's 100% true, but. I find in big orgs sometimes it's far more on the other end of the spectrum.
- Ma8ee 2y ago
  And sometimes security or IT just play it excessively, and never allow anything just to make sure they can't be blamed for anything: "No, you can't improve the situation with the Linux servers that hasn't been updated since 2013 because those servers don't exist in our roadmap, and therefore there's no policy document that we can lean on to make any decisions. So the servers stay in their miserable state until we can phase over all customers that use those servers to some other product eventually. In a few years. Hopefully." Note that the above isn't fiction, but exactly what happened a few months ago. Luckily I managed to transfer to a team that didn't have to deal with those servers.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  See this all the time - for example, zealous dev "if I had production DB read/write I could get things done so much faster." Sure, but the production DB has an incredible amount of PII and we are audited out the wazoo, but even if that weren't the case and it was totally fine, all it takes is you being careless with your credentials one time and the company's hosed or we have a massive breach, or some rogue employee encrypts the data with ransomware. So, yes, it would make you faster, and no, you can't have it. It's insane how often I have this type of conversation and insane how often I am the bad guy in it.
  - __turbobrew__ 2y ago
    The solution is replicating the DB and scrubbing the PII. Then the dev can go wild. This is a solution oriented approach instead of a lazy ass covering approach which I think the GP was referring to. The job should be finding risks and then figuring out how to work around those risks. Very rarely are there no solutions, most of the time it is due to general laziness or in aptitude where someone can find risks but they do not find solutions.
bayindirh 2y ago
> Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. Some counterpoints: - Xerox knowingly didn't fix the problematic gear trains to guarantee periodic part changes, prioritizing money over "best copier possible". - Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class". - Microsoft is did tons of shady things in its OS development history to prioritize domination over "best OS possible", sometimes actively degrading the good features and parts of its OS. - Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible". - Many more electronic and electromechanical systems are engineered with short lives to prioritize "minimizing costs and maximizing profit" over "building the best X possible". - Lastly, Boeing's doing all kinds of shady stuff (MCAS, doors, build quality, etc.) since they prioritize "maximize shareholder value" over "building the best planes possible". - ...and there's Intel, but I think the idea is clear here.
- willvarfar 2y ago
  Their definition of "best copier possible" was "most-profitable copier possible", meaning they had to balance getting people to not hate it so much they chose competitors, while not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees and services and parts etc?
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    > not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees[sic] and services and parts etc? The thing is, nothing is completely maintenance free, esp. if there's something mechanical. Make wearing parts wear, core parts robust. All my laser printers were Samsung/Xerox (hah), and their "core" is made like a tank. Only its rollers, toner and imaging/drum kits wear down, and these are already consumables. The device keeps track the life of every of these replaceable components, and you replace them you hit these marks, because they're already worn down to hinder reliable operation (Imager dies at 9K pages, rollers at 20K pages IIRC). You don't need to make things fail prematurely to make something profitable. First one of these printers didn't have replaceable rollers, so I had to donate it after 11 years of operation. This one is almost 8 years old IIRC, and it's still going strong. I'll be using it as long as I can find spares for it, because it's engineered "correctly", not "for profit". Meantime, its manufacturer can still profit from parts, toner and imaging units.
btbuildem 2y ago
> Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc. I think these are clear signs of a dysfunctional organization. I want to associate that with company size (larger -> more bureaucratic, counter-mission nonsense), but I've also seen large companies that don't get caught in these pitfalls. My best guess to lay blame would be at inadequate, out of touch, need-to-be-fired B.o.D and upper and mid-management deadwood. These are the people that propagate such ineffective culture. I will forever remember the head of IT at my org exclaiming in a meeting, "I'm not here to solve problems". Blew my mind at the time, but it's emblematic and representative of company culture as a whole.
- twojobsoneboss 2y ago
  TBF there are orgs at companies whose sole role is to play DEFENSE - lawyers, CSO etc… if they deem something too risky it IS their job to block it, and then it’s up to upper management to override them if the situation calls for it. Now that said they should still try to advance the mission within that framework, and not be lazy.
  - fishpen0 2y ago
    The most secure company is, of course, the company that doesn't exist. Bankrupting your org is certainly the most effective way to keep it secure. Yes, their role is defense, but not insofar as to remove the profitability of the organization. In several orgs now I've seen the legal team blow contracts and the security team break the product and the IT team break development in the name of performing their role "correctly". Brainless box checking is not part of defense, you must be willing to critically think about how to fit your role to your product or organization's profit motive.
    - Hacktrick 2y ago
      Not disagreeing with you, can you give and explain one of the examples where you have seen this?
agluszak 2y ago
And the "best YOUTUBE videos possible" are... toxic, useless brainrot? (with occasional for-views philanthropy) These videos are certainly the best in terms of what money they can make... but are they any good for their consumers?
- itishappy 2y ago
  Who said anything about consumers? I think viewing "the best YOUTUBE videos possible" in line with "the best CIGARETTES possible" is probably the right framing here.
  - GTP 2y ago
    Yes, best is always wrt some metric, which here is clearly monetary gain.
- javier123454321 2y ago
  What's wrong with making things for others' entertainment? The moralization of this is bizarre. Don't like it, don't consume it. This man has figured out how to create a ridiculous amount of value, whichever way you slice it.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    What's wrong with asking a homeless person to do an embarrassing dance for a $20 bill? That used to be popular content on YouTube. Don't like that, don't watch it. If your most potent defense of Mr. Beast is that he's made a lot of money, then he stands due the same scrutiny Rockefeller and Carnegie got. I've watched his videos, it's not an incorrect conclusion to say that his popularity hinges on the "savior complex" present in most of his videos. His content revolves around exploiting charity as a social phenomenon. He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than he donates. His business relies on the emotional manipulation of a destitute audience.
    - javier123454321 2y ago
      1. I don't think that's an accurate characterization of Mr. Beasts' content 2. > He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than he donates. That's such a weak case. So he doesn't donate everything therefore he's evil or something? 3. > His content revolves around exploiting charity as a social phenomenon. What are you even saying? I'm much more utilitarian about it. Is he doing more good than harm? The answer is a clear and resounding yes. Especially as the 'harm' is labeled: Entertaining kids, helping others and filming it, and making money? I guess this politically correct posturing bothers me because most of the people issuing this criticism have not had as much impact in people's lives as he has. Classic case of armchair thinkers, criticizing people doing stuff, and doing so excellently. At any rate the outrage seems like it would be better directed at Pfizer or other corporatocratic corruption machines, you know, people doing actual harm. Not a kid that figured out how to make money in a new media landscape and is using a huge portion of that to uplift his community.
lenerdenator 2y ago
> Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc. "People who realize the ramifications of the proposed route of action beyond 'it makes the number bigger'" finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. There. Fixed it.
- sanex 2y ago
  Ok but the main issue is the stopping things from happening instead of finding solutions.
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    Some things should be stopped. For example, locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce. Or having said dude run a marathon on a treadmill without any training. Or running illegal lotteries. Or fixing the outcomes of game shows. Some of those things "make the best YouTube video possible" but are profoundly abusive at the least and outright illegal at worst. If you can't do the video without doing those things, you shouldn't do the video and should focus on human factors instead of the money you're missing out on, like a person without psycopathy might.
    - withinboredom 2y ago
      > locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce. Or having said dude run a marathon on a treadmill without any training. Or running illegal lotteries. Or fixing the outcomes of game shows. I don't think any of these contestants would be doing it with a gun to their head. ergo, they had a choice on whether to do it. We don't know whether they were informed choices, but I assume they were (giving people the benefit of the doubt here).
      - 2y ago
aredox 2y ago
So your ideal model of a company is the infinite paperclip machine?
xivzgrev 2y ago
I liked how honest the guide was. There wasn’t anything fake noble here and a lot of his frustrations I have also felt as a people manager - the questions employees ask, making excuses when deadlines slip, etc the job is to make YouTube videos that people click and watch What gets them to watch and stick is a few things but notably wow factor, something crazy they haven’t seen before The bar for wow factor keeps rising Therefore you need to keep learning driving better and better results. Otherwise you are out You need to take ownership for results to avoid delays at all costs.
jollyllama 2y ago
While I agree with your general sentiment, that doesn't seem like a particularly insightful quote, but rather a nebulous negative definition. Does the guide mean that "best" is balanced blend of all of those? Based on what sibling comments are saying, the goal is to make the most popular videos, in which case, the guide should say that.
- blackoil 2y ago
  It is pretty honest guide on how to succeed at Mr. Beast productions. They have their own metrics of success which may or may not align with your morals or ideals. It is a collection of all their learnings in making the videos.
dogleash 2y ago
>I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole. I thought it was well understood that this kind of misalignment is the cost of someone afraid to admit outloud what the goal is. Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop." This is hacker news, so take a tech giant (doesn't matter which) and imagine what it would mean for leadership to tell the rank and file what their actual goals were. For starters it would be internally demoralizing, externally scandalous, and include mens rea for many of their legal "whoopsie daisies" over the years.
- tpmoney 2y ago
  > Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop." This feels to me like an intentionally hostile reading of the content. I think all of us have had the experience of working with a co-worker who is either brilliant but extremely prone to going down rabbit holes, or a co-worker who seems to have a completely different idea of what we’re doing than everyone else. “Make the best YouTube videos possible, not the highest quality” is the same sentiment behind “eventually you have to actually ship your software”. It’s the same sentiment behind the derision in the term “architecture astronaut”. It’s the same sentiment behind the “worse is better” axiom. It’s the same sentiment behind “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. In other words you need to know what it is that pays your bills and be laser focused on delivering that. A YouTube channel isn’t the place to make art house silent films. A community theater production isn’t the place to practice your improv comedy skills. If your company sells a database, it’s not the place to be writing memory safe shells in rust to replace bash, no matter how annoying maintaining your startup bash scripts are.
  - dogleash 2y ago
    > intentionally hostile reading of the content. Why? I specifically mentioned Hollywood to try avoid the rose colored glasses and just skip to the matter of fact stage. If it's just churning out content then it's just churning out content. > Liz Lemon (friendly, trying to gain favor): Whatcha guys working on? > Ritchie (Deadpan): Piece for the Today Show about how next month is October.
PedroBatista 2y ago
It's code for: "Your goal is to make this company the most MONEY possible" Given the current landscape of crass hype beasts with all the peacocking vs the "follow your heart" microaggressions crowd it's easy to see those texts were written, but just like today's "tech company's" that "invent" things that existed for decades already, this is nothing new and it's a sign of a culture with very little oversight based on smoke and mirrors. Ironically this is exactly what the distilled core of "Corporate America" is and we all know what "results at all costs" lead to: See Wall Street, Boeing, etc. Personally I never cared for the guy, it always looked tremendously fake and dishonest to me, to to each each own. IMO there is nothing new o special about this case, there are little dramas like these all over millions of organizations around the World.
- Hacktrick 2y ago
  While I agree with you, his goal is probably to make the most money. But I understand why he might not have phrased it that way. For any company their final goal is obviously to make the most money possible. But this goal is kind of unclear. It's better to approximate it like Mr. Beast does through saying that he makes the best YOUTUBE videos.
gwbas1c 2y ago
>> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. > Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see a lot of unnecessary negative sentiment towards that quote. The quote has no hidden meaning and should be taken on face value: I could easily see an up-and-coming producer work for Mr. Beast, and get sidetracked with making sure that pixels are "perfect." Or a set designer making sure that a specific prop is placed "perfectly." That's not the point, and Mr. Beast is very upfront about it. I actually admire that quote.
- talldayo 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - nl 2y ago
    > "the best" video you can make is probably porn that's softcore enough to not trip the monetization or age restriction gates Since Mr Beast has some of the highest repeatable viewerships on YouTube I think there's some evidence that is wrong.
  - Wolfenstein98k 2y ago
    The "best YouTube" video is not whatever you think it is, but rather what it is. You can go see what are the most watched videos. How many are softcore porn? (Let's exclude music videos because they have always included that at times, and popularity tends to run with the audio first)
rwmj 2y ago
I was glad to see such a clear, actionable mission statement. At companies I've worked for, the mission statements have been either absurdly broad or completely incomprehensible, and as a result most employees (quite rightly) ignore them.
pjlegato 2y ago
> teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's This is the intractable and unavoidable problem with the use of KPIs as a management tool: Goodhart's Law -- any metric used as a target ceases to be a good measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law You are -- literally -- telling the team, "go make this KPI number go up. Your entire job performance will be evaluated on that basis." It is unsurprising that the team therefore focuses on making that number go up. If you want teams to consider the goals of the company, or anything at all besides their KPIs, don't use KPIs.
anigbrowl 2y ago
Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc. Legit, but you're not thinking this all the way through. As an organization grows you'll have people whose primary duty is risk mitigation, without the executive authority to pick up the phone and spend resources on implementing, identifying, or seeking a solution. Indeed, if they spend too much time solutioneering, it will limit their ability to do the job they were hired for. Then they get punished for going too far. The sort of initiative-taking and ownership that works great in a startup can get someone fired in a larger org.
morgango 2y ago
Hey! Have you been reading my email? This is a perfect analogy of the medium-to-large business that I work for.
motbus3 2y ago
Calling average professionals average is an old trick in the book. If everyone is an excellent professional comparing to outside, they'll be average inside. And then you need to keep pushing extra miles on top of each other and sacrificing your personal life. This is the kind of mentality that got us all with anxiety crisis and panic attacks depending on medications.
SkyBelow 2y ago
>Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole. Even if you want to take this sort of Machiavellian approach (if that's the right sort of description), it still isn't the employee's real goal. A person's goal is to make consistent money. That is a combination of not getting fired and working towards raises. If someone owns a significant share of company stock (significant in terms of their own wealth, not in relation to the company's total shares), then it will also include increasing stock price, but even that is only short term until they can diversify. So if you have a KPI that is actually hurting the business to achieve, but hurts your career to not achieve it, then the right approach is to maximize achieving that KPI, assuming you have no input on the KPI. If you do have input, it involves a much more complex question of how does it impact your career to try to correct the KPI. Admitting this openly is not recommended and is comparable to the company admitting openly what its real goal is (or the executives admitting openly what their goals are, which following the above logic, is not the same as what the company's goals are). This does get into a interesting idea of a company having a true goal that doesn't match the true goals of any single member of the company, which has some interesting implications.
cudgy 2y ago
This seems extremely idealistic. How many companies even know what the goal of the company is? Very few employees know this as many companies don’t know it either. Furthermore, there are many times when forgetting about the overarching goal and focusing on the goal that is right in front of you is the right decision. In fact, a strategy that many companies use to avoid this is to split the company up into smaller start up operations that are designed to specifically ignore the overarching goals of the company so that they can on their own perform at the best within their channel.
heraldgeezer 2y ago
>IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc. Then you come crying to us when things aren't updated or servers get breached. Also, for DNS/Website blocks it is often management that decides but a baseline of malware/p0rn blocking is good. Besides, account in general are not admin any more in the enterprise. Just how it is :) Cyberinsurance is a bigger and bigger deal now.

by doix 2y ago

duxup 2y ago

Your comment reminded me of the old content vs process Steve Jobs commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE But I agree, it's so tempting to get internally focused, or focused on "improvement" that really shifts the focus to something else entirely (hollywood style movies, tv shows, whatever). Personally I'm no fan of the youtube-ism and youtube generally, but it's clear that game is it's own game. It's not making a movie, it's not a TV show, it's not even tiktok. It's its own thing and it is pretty clear that generally you have to play that platform's game. My kids play a lot of roblox, and while there's a lot of copy cat games based on traditional gaming, there's almost a system on roblox as far as what games are popular as far as ease of jumping in goes and so on. And there's a lot of weird creativity you find nowhere else as far as the topics of the games (want to be a bug? you can do that). That's it's own space too.

kspacewalk2 2y ago

>Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Sounds like they're doing their jobs, which is to protect your future selves from your current selves. Sure, finding solutions is great, but faulting them from finding problems and slowing things down until solutions are found is odd. Yes, security or IT does sometime have to act as a reality check in an organization that has over-hired over-zealous but under-experienced go-getters who want to "move fast and break things". They are a vital counterweight that makes ambition productive, instead of allowing it to wreck the organization's reputation.

duxup 2y ago
I'm going to interject my own experiences and note that some legal advice seems excessively risk averse and honestly just defaults to "no" and lazy. I suspect that's what the OP might have been referencing. I know we're generally concerned with the folks playing fast and loose with the rules here, and that's 100% true, but. I find in big orgs sometimes it's far more on the other end of the spectrum.
Ma8ee 2y ago
And sometimes security or IT just play it excessively, and never allow anything just to make sure they can't be blamed for anything: "No, you can't improve the situation with the Linux servers that hasn't been updated since 2013 because those servers don't exist in our roadmap, and therefore there's no policy document that we can lean on to make any decisions. So the servers stay in their miserable state until we can phase over all customers that use those servers to some other product eventually. In a few years. Hopefully." Note that the above isn't fiction, but exactly what happened a few months ago. Luckily I managed to transfer to a team that didn't have to deal with those servers.
JohnMakin 2y ago
See this all the time - for example, zealous dev "if I had production DB read/write I could get things done so much faster." Sure, but the production DB has an incredible amount of PII and we are audited out the wazoo, but even if that weren't the case and it was totally fine, all it takes is you being careless with your credentials one time and the company's hosed or we have a massive breach, or some rogue employee encrypts the data with ransomware. So, yes, it would make you faster, and no, you can't have it. It's insane how often I have this type of conversation and insane how often I am the bad guy in it.
- __turbobrew__ 2y ago
  The solution is replicating the DB and scrubbing the PII. Then the dev can go wild. This is a solution oriented approach instead of a lazy ass covering approach which I think the GP was referring to. The job should be finding risks and then figuring out how to work around those risks. Very rarely are there no solutions, most of the time it is due to general laziness or in aptitude where someone can find risks but they do not find solutions.

bayindirh 2y ago

> Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. Some counterpoints: - Xerox knowingly didn't fix the problematic gear trains to guarantee periodic part changes, prioritizing money over "best copier possible". - Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class". - Microsoft is did tons of shady things in its OS development history to prioritize domination over "best OS possible", sometimes actively degrading the good features and parts of its OS. - Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible". - Many more electronic and electromechanical systems are engineered with short lives to prioritize "minimizing costs and maximizing profit" over "building the best X possible". - Lastly, Boeing's doing all kinds of shady stuff (MCAS, doors, build quality, etc.) since they prioritize "maximize shareholder value" over "building the best planes possible". - ...and there's Intel, but I think the idea is clear here.

willvarfar 2y ago
Their definition of "best copier possible" was "most-profitable copier possible", meaning they had to balance getting people to not hate it so much they chose competitors, while not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees and services and parts etc?
- bayindirh 2y ago
  > not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees[sic] and services and parts etc? The thing is, nothing is completely maintenance free, esp. if there's something mechanical. Make wearing parts wear, core parts robust. All my laser printers were Samsung/Xerox (hah), and their "core" is made like a tank. Only its rollers, toner and imaging/drum kits wear down, and these are already consumables. The device keeps track the life of every of these replaceable components, and you replace them you hit these marks, because they're already worn down to hinder reliable operation (Imager dies at 9K pages, rollers at 20K pages IIRC). You don't need to make things fail prematurely to make something profitable. First one of these printers didn't have replaceable rollers, so I had to donate it after 11 years of operation. This one is almost 8 years old IIRC, and it's still going strong. I'll be using it as long as I can find spares for it, because it's engineered "correctly", not "for profit". Meantime, its manufacturer can still profit from parts, toner and imaging units.

btbuildem 2y ago

> Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc. I think these are clear signs of a dysfunctional organization. I want to associate that with company size (larger -> more bureaucratic, counter-mission nonsense), but I've also seen large companies that don't get caught in these pitfalls. My best guess to lay blame would be at inadequate, out of touch, need-to-be-fired B.o.D and upper and mid-management deadwood. These are the people that propagate such ineffective culture. I will forever remember the head of IT at my org exclaiming in a meeting, "I'm not here to solve problems". Blew my mind at the time, but it's emblematic and representative of company culture as a whole.

twojobsoneboss 2y ago
TBF there are orgs at companies whose sole role is to play DEFENSE - lawyers, CSO etc… if they deem something too risky it IS their job to block it, and then it’s up to upper management to override them if the situation calls for it. Now that said they should still try to advance the mission within that framework, and not be lazy.
- fishpen0 2y ago
  The most secure company is, of course, the company that doesn't exist. Bankrupting your org is certainly the most effective way to keep it secure. Yes, their role is defense, but not insofar as to remove the profitability of the organization. In several orgs now I've seen the legal team blow contracts and the security team break the product and the IT team break development in the name of performing their role "correctly". Brainless box checking is not part of defense, you must be willing to critically think about how to fit your role to your product or organization's profit motive.
  - Hacktrick 2y ago
    Not disagreeing with you, can you give and explain one of the examples where you have seen this?

agluszak 2y ago

And the "best YOUTUBE videos possible" are... toxic, useless brainrot? (with occasional for-views philanthropy) These videos are certainly the best in terms of what money they can make... but are they any good for their consumers?

itishappy 2y ago
Who said anything about consumers? I think viewing "the best YOUTUBE videos possible" in line with "the best CIGARETTES possible" is probably the right framing here.
- GTP 2y ago
  Yes, best is always wrt some metric, which here is clearly monetary gain.
javier123454321 2y ago
What's wrong with making things for others' entertainment? The moralization of this is bizarre. Don't like it, don't consume it. This man has figured out how to create a ridiculous amount of value, whichever way you slice it.
- talldayo 2y ago
  What's wrong with asking a homeless person to do an embarrassing dance for a $20 bill? That used to be popular content on YouTube. Don't like that, don't watch it. If your most potent defense of Mr. Beast is that he's made a lot of money, then he stands due the same scrutiny Rockefeller and Carnegie got. I've watched his videos, it's not an incorrect conclusion to say that his popularity hinges on the "savior complex" present in most of his videos. His content revolves around exploiting charity as a social phenomenon. He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than he donates. His business relies on the emotional manipulation of a destitute audience.
  - javier123454321 2y ago
    1. I don't think that's an accurate characterization of Mr. Beasts' content 2. > He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than he donates. That's such a weak case. So he doesn't donate everything therefore he's evil or something? 3. > His content revolves around exploiting charity as a social phenomenon. What are you even saying? I'm much more utilitarian about it. Is he doing more good than harm? The answer is a clear and resounding yes. Especially as the 'harm' is labeled: Entertaining kids, helping others and filming it, and making money? I guess this politically correct posturing bothers me because most of the people issuing this criticism have not had as much impact in people's lives as he has. Classic case of armchair thinkers, criticizing people doing stuff, and doing so excellently. At any rate the outrage seems like it would be better directed at Pfizer or other corporatocratic corruption machines, you know, people doing actual harm. Not a kid that figured out how to make money in a new media landscape and is using a huge portion of that to uplift his community.

lenerdenator 2y ago

> Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc. "People who realize the ramifications of the proposed route of action beyond 'it makes the number bigger'" finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. There. Fixed it.

sanex 2y ago
Ok but the main issue is the stopping things from happening instead of finding solutions.
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  Some things should be stopped. For example, locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce. Or having said dude run a marathon on a treadmill without any training. Or running illegal lotteries. Or fixing the outcomes of game shows. Some of those things "make the best YouTube video possible" but are profoundly abusive at the least and outright illegal at worst. If you can't do the video without doing those things, you shouldn't do the video and should focus on human factors instead of the money you're missing out on, like a person without psycopathy might.
  - withinboredom 2y ago
    > locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce. Or having said dude run a marathon on a treadmill without any training. Or running illegal lotteries. Or fixing the outcomes of game shows. I don't think any of these contestants would be doing it with a gun to their head. ergo, they had a choice on whether to do it. We don't know whether they were informed choices, but I assume they were (giving people the benefit of the doubt here).
    - 2y ago

aredox 2y ago

So your ideal model of a company is the infinite paperclip machine?

xivzgrev 2y ago

I liked how honest the guide was. There wasn’t anything fake noble here and a lot of his frustrations I have also felt as a people manager - the questions employees ask, making excuses when deadlines slip, etc the job is to make YouTube videos that people click and watch What gets them to watch and stick is a few things but notably wow factor, something crazy they haven’t seen before The bar for wow factor keeps rising Therefore you need to keep learning driving better and better results. Otherwise you are out You need to take ownership for results to avoid delays at all costs.

jollyllama 2y ago

While I agree with your general sentiment, that doesn't seem like a particularly insightful quote, but rather a nebulous negative definition. Does the guide mean that "best" is balanced blend of all of those? Based on what sibling comments are saying, the goal is to make the most popular videos, in which case, the guide should say that.

blackoil 2y ago
It is pretty honest guide on how to succeed at Mr. Beast productions. They have their own metrics of success which may or may not align with your morals or ideals. It is a collection of all their learnings in making the videos.

dogleash 2y ago

>I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole. I thought it was well understood that this kind of misalignment is the cost of someone afraid to admit outloud what the goal is. Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop." This is hacker news, so take a tech giant (doesn't matter which) and imagine what it would mean for leadership to tell the rank and file what their actual goals were. For starters it would be internally demoralizing, externally scandalous, and include mens rea for many of their legal "whoopsie daisies" over the years.

tpmoney 2y ago
> Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop." This feels to me like an intentionally hostile reading of the content. I think all of us have had the experience of working with a co-worker who is either brilliant but extremely prone to going down rabbit holes, or a co-worker who seems to have a completely different idea of what we’re doing than everyone else. “Make the best YouTube videos possible, not the highest quality” is the same sentiment behind “eventually you have to actually ship your software”. It’s the same sentiment behind the derision in the term “architecture astronaut”. It’s the same sentiment behind the “worse is better” axiom. It’s the same sentiment behind “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. In other words you need to know what it is that pays your bills and be laser focused on delivering that. A YouTube channel isn’t the place to make art house silent films. A community theater production isn’t the place to practice your improv comedy skills. If your company sells a database, it’s not the place to be writing memory safe shells in rust to replace bash, no matter how annoying maintaining your startup bash scripts are.
- dogleash 2y ago
  > intentionally hostile reading of the content. Why? I specifically mentioned Hollywood to try avoid the rose colored glasses and just skip to the matter of fact stage. If it's just churning out content then it's just churning out content. > Liz Lemon (friendly, trying to gain favor): Whatcha guys working on? > Ritchie (Deadpan): Piece for the Today Show about how next month is October.

PedroBatista 2y ago

It's code for: "Your goal is to make this company the most MONEY possible" Given the current landscape of crass hype beasts with all the peacocking vs the "follow your heart" microaggressions crowd it's easy to see those texts were written, but just like today's "tech company's" that "invent" things that existed for decades already, this is nothing new and it's a sign of a culture with very little oversight based on smoke and mirrors. Ironically this is exactly what the distilled core of "Corporate America" is and we all know what "results at all costs" lead to: See Wall Street, Boeing, etc. Personally I never cared for the guy, it always looked tremendously fake and dishonest to me, to to each each own. IMO there is nothing new o special about this case, there are little dramas like these all over millions of organizations around the World.

Hacktrick 2y ago
While I agree with you, his goal is probably to make the most money. But I understand why he might not have phrased it that way. For any company their final goal is obviously to make the most money possible. But this goal is kind of unclear. It's better to approximate it like Mr. Beast does through saying that he makes the best YOUTUBE videos.

gwbas1c 2y ago

>> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. > Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see a lot of unnecessary negative sentiment towards that quote. The quote has no hidden meaning and should be taken on face value: I could easily see an up-and-coming producer work for Mr. Beast, and get sidetracked with making sure that pixels are "perfect." Or a set designer making sure that a specific prop is placed "perfectly." That's not the point, and Mr. Beast is very upfront about it. I actually admire that quote.

talldayo 2y ago
[flagged]
- nl 2y ago
  > "the best" video you can make is probably porn that's softcore enough to not trip the monetization or age restriction gates Since Mr Beast has some of the highest repeatable viewerships on YouTube I think there's some evidence that is wrong.
- Wolfenstein98k 2y ago
  The "best YouTube" video is not whatever you think it is, but rather what it is. You can go see what are the most watched videos. How many are softcore porn? (Let's exclude music videos because they have always included that at times, and popularity tends to run with the audio first)

rwmj 2y ago

I was glad to see such a clear, actionable mission statement. At companies I've worked for, the mission statements have been either absurdly broad or completely incomprehensible, and as a result most employees (quite rightly) ignore them.

pjlegato 2y ago

> teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's This is the intractable and unavoidable problem with the use of KPIs as a management tool: Goodhart's Law -- any metric used as a target ceases to be a good measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law You are -- literally -- telling the team, "go make this KPI number go up. Your entire job performance will be evaluated on that basis." It is unsurprising that the team therefore focuses on making that number go up. If you want teams to consider the goals of the company, or anything at all besides their KPIs, don't use KPIs.

anigbrowl 2y ago

Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc. Legit, but you're not thinking this all the way through. As an organization grows you'll have people whose primary duty is risk mitigation, without the executive authority to pick up the phone and spend resources on implementing, identifying, or seeking a solution. Indeed, if they spend too much time solutioneering, it will limit their ability to do the job they were hired for. Then they get punished for going too far. The sort of initiative-taking and ownership that works great in a startup can get someone fired in a larger org.

morgango 2y ago

Hey! Have you been reading my email? This is a perfect analogy of the medium-to-large business that I work for.

motbus3 2y ago

Calling average professionals average is an old trick in the book. If everyone is an excellent professional comparing to outside, they'll be average inside. And then you need to keep pushing extra miles on top of each other and sacrificing your personal life. This is the kind of mentality that got us all with anxiety crisis and panic attacks depending on medications.

SkyBelow 2y ago

>Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole. Even if you want to take this sort of Machiavellian approach (if that's the right sort of description), it still isn't the employee's real goal. A person's goal is to make consistent money. That is a combination of not getting fired and working towards raises. If someone owns a significant share of company stock (significant in terms of their own wealth, not in relation to the company's total shares), then it will also include increasing stock price, but even that is only short term until they can diversify. So if you have a KPI that is actually hurting the business to achieve, but hurts your career to not achieve it, then the right approach is to maximize achieving that KPI, assuming you have no input on the KPI. If you do have input, it involves a much more complex question of how does it impact your career to try to correct the KPI. Admitting this openly is not recommended and is comparable to the company admitting openly what its real goal is (or the executives admitting openly what their goals are, which following the above logic, is not the same as what the company's goals are). This does get into a interesting idea of a company having a true goal that doesn't match the true goals of any single member of the company, which has some interesting implications.

cudgy 2y ago

This seems extremely idealistic. How many companies even know what the goal of the company is? Very few employees know this as many companies don’t know it either. Furthermore, there are many times when forgetting about the overarching goal and focusing on the goal that is right in front of you is the right decision. In fact, a strategy that many companies use to avoid this is to split the company up into smaller start up operations that are designed to specifically ignore the overarching goals of the company so that they can on their own perform at the best within their channel.

heraldgeezer 2y ago

>IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc. Then you come crying to us when things aren't updated or servers get breached. Also, for DNS/Website blocks it is often management that decides but a baseline of malware/p0rn blocking is good. Besides, account in general are not admin any more in the enterprise. Just how it is :) Cyberinsurance is a bigger and bigger deal now.