Thanks for sharing the second link. It's the first time seeing it an encapsulates my own philosophy on alerting well, while providing examples of what to alert on.
I've been with teams who treat alerts as informational and then quickly get alert fatigue. Then when something actually does happen they don't recognize it because they've trained themselves to ignore all alerts.
At my current company we regularly review our alerts to make sure they are actionable and meaningful still.
No problem! And agreed, the advice on “alert on symptoms users actually experience, and only on things a human actually has to deal with” is great advice. Alerts that don’t fit this should be quickly tweaked or disabled, to avoid alert fatigue.
“Something went wrong, but at acceptable levels/without much user impact” belongs in dashboards, not alerts. Worth being able to monitor, but alerts are for urgency, and that’s not urgent.
Let’s be real, ad tech is a shady business with Facebook leading the charge. This shouldn’t be surprising to any ad executive whose performance isn’t measured by actual dollars generated, but by impressions, money spent, cost per click, and various other dubious metrics which are conveniently provided by the ad network.
Not to saying the ad network isn’t valueable (it is and the largest tech companies are ad networks), but that the numbers are juiced shouldn’t be surprising. It’s in every decision makers interest that it is.
You should probably be talking about ad tech apart from Facebook, as very few ad-tech companies have large teams dedicated to help advertisers run experiments on Facebook.
Up till very recently, said teams had a separate reporting line from sales to ensure that they were telling advertisers the truth.
In this case political tension has very little to do with China and very much with India. India is one of the largest markets Apple has yet to penetrate, primarily due to excessive import tax as the Indian government (much like the Chinese) requires manufacturing within the country.
Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking China is not a reliable partner, or that Apple cares much about worker rights here (see wage fixing between FAANG as one example that likely affects many here at HN) or abroad. This was purely about expanding into a new market.
Serious question: does McKinsey have a track record of success and what we see in the news is a small number of failures; or are they just really good at selling the C-Suite?
Mayor de Blasio's deputy, part of the group that decided to hire McKinsey in the first place, is now a senior advisor there... Maybe hiring decisions like that have something to do with it?
> The mayor’s office denied that McKinsey was hired partly to provide political or legal cover, as did Shorris, who is now a senior adviser to McKinsey and teaches at Princeton University.
Even if you're not a fan of management consulting I think giving The Lords of Strategy by Walter Kiechel a read is worthwhile to understanding why they are such a big part of our world. It gives a good modern history of the profession and how they made such a profound impact on the business world.
I think ultimately what happened was most of what made them famous in the 60s, 70s, and 80s has largely become standard business practice. With the low hanging fruit gone they've moved onto laundering accountability and/or very expensive side-steps of corporate bureaucracy.
There is definitely a level of networking effects and downright cronyism.
However one thing that is less talked about is that external consultants are extremely useful to implement unpopular decisions or to 'settle' disputed decisions.
If investors appoint a new CEO and he needs to implement something unpopular like fire people, it is much easier to get the whole board behind the decision if an external consultancy "analizes" the issue and proposes measures (usually aligned with the CEO's direction).
The same thing happens with 'factions' of the board if some people are behind a proposal but are being blocked be another 'faction', an external consultancy can act as a arbiter (usually in the direction of those who hired them).
A useful consequence is that in terms of accountability you can always take cover behind the recommendation of the subject matter expert consultants.
All that said there are definitely a lot of bright people with insightful knowledge in that field. My point is that consultancy as a business also ends up serving a less glamorous purpose.
I work for BCG. It’s like McKinsey but nerdier (and maybe with more scruples).
Most of the time, we’re explicitly hired to keep things quiet. We rarely advertise clients, much less engagement outcomes.
But be sure most revenues come from long lasting relationships. In some cases, decades old relationships. And unlike what some commenter said, revenues are growing double digits % YoY, despite BCG being over 50yo (McKinsey is almost 100yo)
So I guess MC delivers at least for those singing the check.
Excellent question, and I'll offer you a frustrating answer that splits the difference.
Because McKinsey works in so many areas, it has a huge portfolio of outcomes. There's not a lot of public visibility into what each exact outcome might be. So the firm (and others like it) are able to benefit from this opacity.
To wit: top consulting firms are able to present prospective clients with a recap of their best engagements and wins. Is that representative? Cherry picked? No one ever knows.
I know Bain consulting has an internal “benchmark”. It tracks the stock performance of the companies that they consult for and compare that to eg sp500.
I don’t think this is possible. Even large corporations have code leaked (Microsoft and Google) as well as secret government entities that take extreme measures.
Probably the most effective way is to hire people who are professionals and treat them like so at all stages of them being with you.
I don’t have much experience with other video editing software, but when I had to make some walkthroughs of new product features DaVinci got the job done and the result was fantastic—even on the free version.
My anecdotal experience (and I'm not remotely close to Marc Andreessen in wealth and power) is that there is a lot of benefits in structure and schedule.
Knowing how big part of your day will play out is a very powerful thing. It removes so much stress and uncertainty.
In the end of the day it's a question of balance. It's probably unhealthy to plan every single hour of your life in advance (which Marc does not do), and the same goes with allowing too much spontaneity.
Interesting. In the article it mentions Fortune 500 CEOs having highly regulated schedules without downtime (because they are meeting with different stakeholders all the time). It seems they have the wealth but maybe not the power?
Where as a nun perhaps doesn’t have wealth but has power over their time.
My wife and I have noted, that in our area, nuns tend to live well into their 90s based on our personal observation and reading tombstones. It's pretty remarkable.
I've been with teams who treat alerts as informational and then quickly get alert fatigue. Then when something actually does happen they don't recognize it because they've trained themselves to ignore all alerts.
At my current company we regularly review our alerts to make sure they are actionable and meaningful still.