sna1l

seriously wtf ... it rains all the time there :)

is this satire?

What if they keep losing more money every month?

I think one of the major things missing from this post is that if you are going to drop a ball, you should communicate you are dropping it to the relevant stakeholders / family / friends / etc. That generally lessens the blow of dropping it significantly in my experience.

Gotta love the regulatory capture that will come with this for that one single news collective. They'll extract a nice little rent for not really providing a ton of benefit

> In 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported on the difficulties faced by the firm. At that point, Voleon had an annualized return since inception of 10.5%, below the S&P 500 index return of 10.7% over the same period. One of the problems encountered was that financial markets were chaotic, and machine learning systems were best applied where patterns were more repeating in nature. In addition, patterns that are found can be easily made redundant after investors notice them and take advantage on them. Gary Smith writes that patterns discovered by the algorithms are often simply coincidences rather than actual correlations.[2][3][7]

> In 2018, Voleon had a return of 14% during a market turndown where the S&P 500 index dropped 6.2%. However, in 2019, its returns dropped to 7%, below the returns of its hedge fund peers of 9.2%. In 2020, Voleon's flagship fund lost 9%.[6][8]

Given their returns, how do they have 7.6 billion AUM?

I don't understand why this is causation vs correlation?

I think the problem with the promotion culture is that you can't demote someone after they've been promoted. If you just focus on showing impact and cross team projects, your engineers will naturally build more complex projects than needed to hit those targets. The key is to track the long term maintainability and quality of the systems built. E.g. time to land diffs, incidents, performance metrics, etc. If a system starts to quickly fail these things or don't last then it is a pretty good sign that the project wasn't actually built well. Things aren't always under a single person's control but a lot of people will work on a big complex (seemingly good) project and then bounce after they've gotten their promo.

I do think there is a balance though because at a lot of startups the incentive is to just crank out a lot of product code but not really think about multiplier type work.

I think the main point this article is missing is that having to work extremely hard (10-12 hrs+) usually implies there is something structurally wrong with the team. Your team is criminally understaffed, you aren't getting enough time to fix tech debt, etc. While understaffed, there are times that you just have to work hard to keep things together, but if you don't surface these issues up the chain then you will for sure burn out.

Where are these numbers coming from??