The OP claimed only 2-3 people in each company are "responsible" for the success of said company. You do not need to be the only person in the world who can do a job to have some, or even major, responsibility for the success of an organization.
I think you may be misinterpreting what OP meant (or perhaps I am, that's a real possibility). I read that as "There are only 2-3 specific people whose skills and contributions were so essential to the orgs success that the org would have failed without them specifically." Where you might have a front end developer who is technically "responsible" for facilitating millions of online transaction, there are likely thousands of other devs who could have done the same work. Among the 2-3 OP was referencing, there are very few who could have done what they did.
The case I was making is, it takes many people to turn a startup into a unicorn, and many of them are integral and make massively important contributions that, without them, would not have occurred. The degree to which those people are replaceable is difficult to say precisely, as it varies per person and per company, but I don't think being irreplaceable is the bar for being considered responsible. If a fireman pulls a kid out of a burning building, we don't care that many other fireman could have also done the same thing. The individual who did the critical work is responsible.
I have been at unicorn companies with C-suite executives that are clearly useless, or worse, net detractors playing political games that the people under them have to work around to get shit done. I have been at companies where one engineer is single-handedly keeping parts of the lights on, or conceptualizing and architecting critical systems, having an outsized impact well beyond their title and compensation. There seems to be a false idea here that the way companies run is "top down" - ie. the Collison brothers set out all the goals and strategies and products, and then the employees just execute their vision like pawns. Maybe there are companies like that, but I've never seen one, particularly a fast growing one.
I guess I just disagree that the number of people who would be deemed "responsible" for Stripe's success is 2-3. That seems, frankly, unbelievable to me having worked in companies with hundreds or thousands of employees and seeing how many different people it takes to build something massive, innovative, with multiple product or business lines. Not just taking marching orders but exercising their creativity, judgement, expertise, leadership skills etc.
It's difficult to take that article with more than a grain of salt when there's clear political bias and a lack of proper sourcing from the start. Of course political bias is inevitable, but to claim that our gun laws are the result of a takeover by "a minority of radical extermists" is ridiculous.
Then when referencing hard numbers and talking about the influence the NRA may have had, she doesn't back that up with anything. Her "notes" are mostly other highly opinionated articles. Had she followed any form of standard or proper notation[1] it'd be easier to believe her. But usually when people fail to make their sources easily available it's because they don't have them/they are low quality.
Just to add another comment to this. Typically when someone claims that something which is supported by a large percentage or even the majority of a given population is the result of "extremism", they themselves are like the extremists, for better or for worse.
The fact that the majority of Americans have voted time and time again to get our gun laws to where they are today is my source. It's not "extremism" if it wins by popular vote.
> The fact that the majority of Americans have voted time and time again to get our gun laws to where they are today is my source.
Your gun laws are made by politicians who are elected for a wide variety of reasons, not just their stance on firearms. So I think its rather a stretch to say that you have the gun laws that you have due to them being the will of the majority. In fact, according to Gallup, the majority in the US (over many decades) want stricter gun control [1, particularly the second chart].
(And I'm sure the $190 million [2] that gun-rights lobby groups have spent in over the last 24 years contributed to the laws being the way they are.)
> It's not "extremism" if it wins by popular vote.
That sounds worryingly like the usual justification for the Tyranny of the Majority to me. Not everything that is popular is unextreme or justified - and history is full of instances where societies have ended up in a hole due to this type of reasoning. Democracy isn't just about voting, its about to manage differences.
Nevertheless, a large number of US citizens committed to the defense of their right to keep and bear arms simply isn't "a minority of radical extremists", regardless of the vehemence of your disagreement.
There is not much political will for more gun control right now.
Indeed. Prior to the 1968 Gun Control Act, you could order pretty much any gun through the mail.
The political violence and radicalism of the 60’s drove the legislation. Only automatic weapons were controlled before that.
So seems silly to claim “radicals took over the NRA” when any type of gun control is a very recent phenomenon. Hell, even during the 80’s most of the US had incredibly lax gun control laws compared to what is being suggested today.
I don't understand why "any type of gun control is a very recent phenomenon" means that a claim that "radicals took over the NRA" is "silly". Whats the reasoning?
The claim is that the NRA was "radicalized". However, the same time the NRA was "radicalized", new more restrictive gun control law was pursued.
Why would anyone be surprised the NRA went from "all about recreational shooting" to "aggressive gun rights organization" at the same time restrictive guns laws were introduced? They had no reason to aggressively oppose gun control laws because none were being discussed.
It's like saying a homeowner "suddenly became violent" when someone tried to break into his home. There was nothing "sudden" about it, it was a response to an external trigger.
Anecdote of course but I'm in the states and I love grocery delivery. It's far better, imo, than food delivery ever was. I can order my groceries a few minutes before I get off work and by the time I get home I have everything I need to cook supper.
I'm generally not a huge fan of hyper-convience and often take the mentality of "I can just do it myself" but in this case I very much embrace the delivery of groceries.
We have found the quality of groceries delivered to often be lackluster. Worse than curb delivery even, where unrelated substitutes, messed up produce, and expired food are fairly common.
I've seen boilerplate applications for <insert tech stack> but the open-source ones tend not to be great, and the closed source ones could be great - but I'm not willing to pay $XXX for code I haven't seen.
I very rarely see a bad faith argument gain any traction and not get immediately shot down here. Not to say it doesn't happen, but IME it's more common that a bad faith argument gets called out and flagged than it is that the bad faith argument gets support and stands.
Not really comparable. In my current office I have my own desk, multiple monitors, comfortable chair, a fridge, microwave, coffee machine, bathrooms that are rarely occupied, I can step away from my computer without fearing it'll get stolen, etc. I enjoy working from libraries and cafes on occasion, but it's definitely a worse UX than working from an office.
Comments like your express an unfortunately common, yet incredibly reductive, sentiment. Execution of course matters. But the innate value of an idea is also extremely important. A poorly executed good idea can easily out perform a well executed bad idea.
> A poorly executed good idea can easily out perform a well executed bad idea.
One of the maxims I adopted from a mentor was that good execution of a mediocre idea will beat poor execution of a great idea. So far, it's been true everywhere I look.
We're surrounded with decent execution of horrible ideas.
Meant with all due respect, but.. I think you've got it backwards? Great ideas have no innate value, they're easy to come up with.
> But the innate value of an idea is also extremely important.
Disputable. Many people have many ideas. Just the mass alone diminishes the general value of ideas.
> A poorly executed good idea can easily out perform a well executed bad idea.
Also disputable. For the evaluation, result matters most. And a bad idea which still solves a problem, is better than a good idea which just exists in its own isolated bubble, doing nothing worthful.
The tech-world is full of fancy oversmart ideas and their implementations. Yet many of them fail because neither a good idea, nor some half decent implementation alone have enough worth to survive.
There’s nothing reductive in my comment. I didn’t mention the quality of execution, yet you have to build something to learn from it, even if it’s a bad idea. Having just ideas bring nothing to the table, no matter how good they are. Here we come to another interesting fact: companies will pivot many times after building the initial idea.
I appreciate your sentiment but this does nothing to define the word. Anybody who identifies as what? That's like saying "An apple is any fruit which looks like an apple." It does nothing to define "apple".
In this case though the "other sides" definition still is ephemeral. In the context of gender, what is a woman? It's easy to say "woman is a gender identity" but thats a categorization, not a definition. There's no official or formal definition (that I can find) which defines the "other sides" usage of woman.
Side note:
I dislike using "other side" or making it too partisan an issue. I know 99% of people make it a political issue but I'm really hoping that here on hackernews we can discuss this civilly from a more neutral position.
That’s a problem I’ve noticed too. There doesn’t seem to be any good definition of what constitutes either gender without referring back to the sex that it is most commonly tied to (e.g. “feminine gender is composed of those behaviors that women stereotypically do”), which seems to make it somewhat of a useless concept standing alone.
Also: I was merely using “other side” to refer to my friends who hold a differing opinion. It’s an interesting debate, not a war.
> There doesn’t seem to be any good definition of what constitutes either gender
Gender can refer to two different things:
“Ascribed gender”: what bucket (or buckets) of the set labelled “genders” by society does society at large (or, in certain contexts, some defined subset of society other than you yourself) put you in.
“Gender identity”: what bucket (or buckets) of the set labelled “gender” do you yourself feel you belong in.
There is no objective set of traits defining boundaries of gender buckets, no objectively correct number of gender buckets, and no objective need for their to be any set of buckets labelled “gender”. It is all path-dependent social construction that varies by social context and individual.
Does race work the same as gender here? I get that it's often still very arbitrary, but it's certainly less fluid (or rather, fluidity in this area is less acceptable). I can't love Mexican food, learn Spanish, and then decide that I identify as Hispanic. Inversely, if I found that I enjoyed wearing women's clothing and partaking in feminine activities then I could identify as a woman if it suited me.
In the sense that “‘race’ can be substituted for ‘gender’ without loss of accuracy in the description in GP”, not “the dynamics of the degree of social acceptance of divergence between ascribed race and racial identity are identical to those for gender.”
