classic HN, ignoring the Billions of users who find chatGPT, Gemini, Claude not only useful but life changing, including some of the poorest. So that they can fight for Disney, Record Labels and Trust fund Williamsburg friends
If Remote Work is incredible and extremely productive, you can literally arbitrage away and create remote-first companies and crush your competition who insist on WFO. According to the logic of WFH backers, it should be incredibly easy to attract the highest talent and that talent should be working at peak productivity and should have no trouble in beating competition.
The fact that none of the companies can do it, means WFH is a massive productivity failure. The reasons are aplenty
- Self-Reporting Employees or Researchers simply can't measure productivity that matters.
- WFH research is typically done and funded by WFH-friendly entities skewing it's benefits. There are no neutral social science research.
- Startups, which are a better unbiased WFO/WFH study (because all startups have the same starting conditions allowing us to control more variables), clearly show that teams (both technical and sales) sitting in room can crush/outrun Startups that are remote-only.
- Productivity measures done by these studies are almost always individual, but team productivity and firm productivity are emergent properties and hard to measure
It’s not that companies can’t do it; plenty do. Companies are bad at hiring. The whims of managers and middle management decide the best person for a job. These people also frequently get duped by fast talkers and people who use AI. Companies have a hiring issue (sucking at it), so they use WFH as the excuse that they would have made better hires if they were in the office. And yet, Sally has been cruising on payroll for 10 years while barely doing anything and no one batted an eye until Sally wasn’t in the office and people started seeing she wasn’t working. The solution? Bring Sally back to the office because WFH is the problem.
Companies also realized that if all the jobs are WFH, suddenly how well you pay and your benefits become more important than corporate BSing. The major companies were all advised they should end work from because it will lead back to lower wages in the long run. Instead of having options, employees will be sucked back into a down labor market with artificially inflated numbers where there aren’t a lot of jobs in your area so you have to suck it up and take crappy pay and benefits so you don’t end up with even worse pay just to avoid becoming homeless.
For Operating Systems and Ecosystems, Popularity == Quality. The more popular a software is, the more edge cases it encounters and solves issues. More people will write software, plugins, tools for it.
Are you saying that Windows is the most high-quality operating system in the world? This is not even funny. Did you hear about the concepts of walled garden and network effect?
The dot-com was a bubble because investors pulled money and belief at the first sign of trouble.
The landscape has changed dramatically now. Investors and VCs have learnt if we stick with winners and growth companies, the payoffs are massive.
We also have more automatic, retail and foreign money flowing into the market. Buy the dip is a phenomenon that didn't exist at the scale it is now.
Pre-2015 if Big Money pulled out, the market was guaranteed to fail, but now retailers sometimes have longer views and belief (on people like Musk, Altman) than institutions and they continue to prop it.
So, it's foolish to apply 2000 parallels to now. Yes, history repeats, but doesn't with the exact time or price points
Also there are no early IPOs. Very few people can buy stocks in these companies which changes the dynamics significantly. Note sure what's the point of talking about the stock market this much when for almost everyone the only way to get any exposureis through Nvidia or other hardware companies and maybe MS/Google/AWS.
> Investors and VCs have learnt if we stick with winners and growth companies, the payoffs are massive.
Well... yes and no. 2021 wasn't that long ago.
> So, it's foolish to apply 2000 parallels to now
The stock market and other financial stuff is of course different. The fundamental trend not necessarily though. It took awhile for anyone to figure out how to directly build a highly profitable internet based business back then for AI it seems more or less the same so far.
dot-com bubble companies were not good companies. They either built something that was not novel so it could be copied, or had insufficient value to monetize. We'll see the same with current AI.
Similar to the invention of the web, AI is not a bubble. Real value has been created.
Cisco was the quintessential dot-com bubble company. Back then, it was what Nvidia is today: at the very spearhead of investors rallying behind the Internet.
"Good company" is subjective, but to argue that the company that built the backbone of modern web didn't make anything novel or monetizable is a bit short-sighted, don't you find?
And if you'd invested in Cisco then, it would have gone very badly for you. It was _wildly_ overvalued; at peak it had a P/E ratio of ~200 (even Nvidia's only about 50).
how so? Many internet companies that went bust like Webvan and Pets.com have successful equivalents in Instacart and Chewy?
I'm pretty sure many internet companies would be given a longer rope to survive now. E.g OpenAI and Anthropic will probably take years to get profitable but investors are OK with it
lol is a coping mechanism for the poor. If you really think top VCs / investors haven't learnt the long-term importance of staying the course, then you know nothing about the industry and mostly being influenced by popular social media posts shitting on the investor class.
There is a reason Anthropic/OpenAI and many startups are given much much longer ropes to be profitable than in the 2000 era when VCs pulled the rug the first opportunity of trouble
The thing that was most disillusioning for me here was SVB -- failure to apply basic principles of banking (i.e. they never really had a plan for central bank interest rates to change more than +-1%). Not just that the VC types running a bank weren't able to do so, but that such a large number of tech companies held all their cash on hand in a bank account (and didn't deposit anything in another bank, or a money-market fund/t-bills).
I have yet to be pleasantly surprised by the alleged collective wisdom of Wallstreet. I would hope that you are right, and that our corporate masters are smarter than I give them credit for, but I'm not going to hold my breath
It is foolish to compare to the dot com boom and bust. At least when that bubble burst we still had the global broadband internet that it built. When this bubble bursts, we'll have next to nothing to show for it.
I'm starting to think that making a bunch of tech companies the most valuable companies on Earth, and tying their value to everyone's ability to retire so the number must always go up was perhaps not the wisest thing to have done.
Not sure when exactly the Fed accounts for USD printed – i.e. only once distributed to somebody else, or as soon as they're printed and still owned by the Fed – but even in the latter case, asset and liability work out to exactly zero.
So this million USD might or might not have been accounted for, but it definitely does not need to be budgeted for.
So, in your mind, when the Federal Reserve prints a dollar bill - what's happening in accounting terms? I don't think your understanding of the way this works is consistent with the concept of money supply.
Not your parent but in my mind, when the Fed prints $1 million to replace old bills they take out of circulation and give then to people to stuff into a cube then in accounting terms basically nothing happens at all.
To be precise, the treasury prints the bills, not the federal reserve. The federal reserve balances what money is in circulation by selling or buying bonds. When they issue a bond, someone buys it, so money is removed from circulation. When they buy a bond, money is injected into circulation.
I'm not really familiar with accounting in English but is it really a liability in double-entry accounting? Wouldn't generating money basically be income? So if you sell $1000 worth of stuff, you credit the sales account for $1000 and debit your cash/bank account for $1000, and the account's basically a bottomless pit where you can draw as long as you're generating income.
> I'm not really familiar with accounting in English but is it really a liability in double-entry accounting?
Only if you're the central bank, but for them, it really is, yes. For everybody else, money held is an asset, since it's somebody else's (in this case, the central bank's) liability to them.
I mean, that's a very corporate accounting way of looking at it. But countries are not corporations, or even banks, and the abstraction is so leaky it's pretty much never worth using.
Double entry accounting has properties that allow it to track the flow of money, not just its state (current balance), so it useful for countries as well as corporations.
Even for corporations and individuals it works that way. If you write a check to yourself, it represents both an asset and a liability whose effects on your equity exactly cancel out.
