He was supposed to know how to play coming out of college, he was a number 1 pick. Granted he can get better, just like any other profession typically gets better with practice. It is easy to blame everything on coaching, line, oc, receivers , etc etc,..... but he didnt do much in college either. Johnny football came in after him and lit it up with the same team.
I guess no player should ever get better once in the NFL, because they should be able to do everything when drafted, proportionately relating to how high they were drafted.
I think there's still some necessary learning for many players that go from college to the NFL. Some obvious reasons would be adjusting to better competition or different scheme. So "graduating" might occur after a few years in the NFL. In Tannehill's case, I think you can excuse him for not being NFL ready when he was drafted (not too uncommon anyway). The problem with Tannehill is that we don't yet know what we have in him after 4 years. First two years I can see an excuse for, and maybe.. year 3. But 4 years is really pushing that patience meter. Year 5 is the absolute last year for me. If he doesn't improve, then the problem is the QB as far as I'm concerned. But yeah, new coach, better protection on OL.. excuses running out this year so I really hope we find out we have our franchise QB this year. Otherwise it's betting on another high draft pick QB.
Amazon doesn't support their young employees leading big projects? Amazon didn't give their young project-leading employees the authority to make decisions on their projects? What exactly do you disagree with?
No, no he wasn't. Not at all. Almost everyone agreed that Tannehill would need to sit for his entire rookie year and be third string, and some thought he would need a full two years on the bench before he started. Four years ago, people were simply hoping that he would live up to what his physical skills and personality projected to be, and that he as a project. Instead, he's started every game of his career. And he and Johnny Reject never had the same HC at A&M. Kevin Sumlin took over in 2012, right after RT left. He got a big new coach bounce up to 11-2, and has now done worse each season since. Sumlin was the head coach at Houston previous to being at A&M, and never coached RT in any respect. The fact that it was the same school is almost meaningless.
Amazon employees get no training, development, or support. They are thrown to the wolves. Employees have very little autonomy or latitude to make decisions.
No, but I have worked with many VCs and executives that have worked for Amazon, and I have done a lot of research on corporate culture, development, strategy, and engagement.
Then those employees aren't leading the project. The person making the decisions is leading the project.
Agreed. And, that's not really a bad thing or a negative about him (b/c that isn't really his fault) - he's just not cut out for a head coaching job. He can probably still be functional as a teacher.
I wouldn't necessarily characterize it as a bad place to work. It has some good selling points. Employees really get nothing from the company in terms of development or autonomy, but they are able to learn a lot from observation, and they usually are working on something that is very innovative. That said, those benefits really can only keep people around for a year or so. That is why Amazon has such a poor retention rate. Ultimately Amazon's model is to comprehensively track everything their employees do, then use data science and machine learning to optimize it. Jeff Bezos makes almost every decision. Everyone else is just a cog. In an ideal organization, there is only one decision maker. There are some instances, such as Google, where you have a few people making decisions, but either way none of the decision makers really qualify as employees.
Sure. But then they're not actually leading a project. To lead a project you need to be making the decisions applying to the project.
So then what are you arguing about? You used Amazon as an example, knowing that they don't operate like a normal company.
My point is that it isn't abnormal. That is what most organizations strive for. The only abnormality with Amazon is their level of success.
From the conversations I have had with many employees there, it is not a good place to work. At least in their technology area. In my few interviews there I am rarely impressed. They have a poor retention rate because they work people to the bone. Work life balance is not good at Amazon.
Hard to come up with a definition of "decision" where that bolded statement is even remotely true. Just take the development of the Kindle. Do you realize how many independent decisions about the technology have to be made before you have the final product? Do you think Bezos was the guy deciding which type of battery, which processor, which type of display, or which algorithm to use for text-to-speech, which manufacturing processes, etc..? He probably couldn't even understand the consequences of most of the options on the tech side (he probably just set overall parameters, but not enough to specify what to do). Oh, and technology development is not a smooth process. Got to test, redesign, retest after more decisions are made, etc.. I bet almost all those decisions were made by employees of Amazon. And that's not even including overall design, branding, marketing issues, etc.. I mean there IS a reason you have employees.
This is the big point. The guys who couldn't coach him up, are the exact guys who wanted him at #8. Now, you can certainly argue you made an independent analysis and think he was worthy of picking at 8.
Absolutely. These type of decisions are fundamental to Amazon's business. This is what makes Amazon so successful - Jeff Bezos makes these decisions with a great deal of foresight that only he possesses. This is precisely why Bezos is worth $60B - he understands all the consequences you've outlined. The Kindle is a great example - it costs nearly more to manufacture than Amazon sells it for (at the time of release). Only Jeff Bezos could make a decision to create a device that loses money for the company. Employees provide the input and recommendation. They work with battery manufacturers to find the available options. They present those options to the person making the decision. The fundamental thing to remember is that the best person to make the decision is the person that has the most information. Jeff Bezos' decision on which battery to use in the Kindle is going to be impacted by things such as how many books they need to sell. Someone in supply chain or manufacturing isn't going to have the requisite knowledge of their book business to make such a decision. The value in employees is how much input and recommendations they provide. The better they are at that, the easier the decision making process is. Beyond that, there aren't that many decisions that need to be made. For example, the decision making process for Amazon's marketplace is simple - do whatever leads to the best customer experience. From there it simply comes down to data scientists identifying what things lead to that. But the decisions have already been made, and they just execute. You can boil down Amazon's decision making into three parts: 1. Employees gather and input information 2. Data scientists analyze information 3. Jeff Bezos takes analyzed information and makes decision
Yeah, that's not how technology development works in the real world, at least not when you actually have to solve challenging technological problems. Why do you think it took Amazon 3+ years to put the Kindle together if it was as simple as just asking component manufacturers what the options were? Because there were all kinds of challenging technical issues to overcome. For example, the e-ink display technology at the time would degrade too quickly for commercial use. Various other options were too difficult to manufacture on a large scale. You think Bezos helped solve those problems? Like.. making decisions on how to actually design a working and commercially viable display? No.. Bezos is like Jobs in that he demands certain features in the final product, but otherwise leaves it up to those who have the technical knowhow to figure out how to make it work. And often it never works. In Amazon's case, they decided to actually get in the business of manufacturing hardware when they weren't such a company. I'm sure almost every decision about how to build the facility, which manufacturing processes to use, which materials to use in the product, etc.. were done by people who actually know that stuff, you know.. employees. And even when you just try to piece components together you get all kinds of issues. Components don't always work together (if they even work as advertised). With the Kindle, I bet they had weight issues that someone (probably NOT Bezos) had to make decisions on how to solve. And decisions on the specific types of algorithms or formats used probably all bypassed Bezos. Oh, and just deciding on how you test things, which measures to use, whether to hire outside experts (some prof. in a field) in specific cases or try to do it in-house.. probably all bypassed Bezos (except the larger strategy of doing a lot of it in-house). In general, you can expect Bezos to have the larger vision and make decisions on what the overall features of the product should be, but the vast majority of the decisions that need to be made to create such a product have to be done by experts, i.e employees.
A. Amazon didnt develop or design the display of the Kindle. They bought technology developed by others. B. Almost all the things you outline (testing for example) are all dictated by budgeting, hiring, and planning. Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G920A using Tapatalk
The e-ink technology wasn't mature at the time Amazon started designing the Kindle. Like I said, it degraded after some time (I think several weeks or a month or two is all it lasted). Now.. when something like that happens you don't just say to a company, "we want it to last longer.. go fix it". They would've probably done that already if it was that simple. No, instead you look at the basic technology, sit down with engineers, mathematicians and chemists (in this case) and start going through all kinds of different ways to "fix" the issue. And by "fix" that either means changing the requirements or trying new ways of solving the same problem. There is NO question that if Amazon wanted E Inc (the corporation) to have a working display that Amazon engineers sat down with those of that company and tried out all kinds of different possible solutions. Point is, the people from Amazon that worked on trying to get an acceptable display product were employees, not Bezos. These are all technical details that need to be understood and weighed in importance, meaning it's experts working on the issue. To your second point, in some cases yes it's true budget, the law or accepted standards dictate how you test something (e.g. clinical trials to satisfy FDA requirements). But often that's not true. And the reason is because it often depends on what you're trying to demonstrate (which isn't the same for all products) and which expert(s) you talk to (some are just better than others). So when the FDA puts the onus on individual companies to prove their claims, you'll sometimes see totally standard clinical trials, but other times it's fairly specific to the particular product, and their decisions are often criticized by other experts, necessitating further testing and analysis. Either way, whatever the driving forces behind the decisions, at big companies those types of decisions are generally made by employees.
It's not feasible for a large company to have one person making all the decisions on all the projects of that company. Nothing would get done.
Why would Amazon go through ways to improve technology that is intellectual property of another company, especially one that sells that technology to competitors? Amazon isn't using their resources to enrich someone else's IP. They also don't say "we want it to last longer...go fix it". Again, it comes down to market forces. If you are willing to pay enough, there really aren't any limits to technology. They said they would be willing to pay $60/display that does X, Y, and Z. E Inc either accepts the deal or doesn't. These things are dictated when you define who you are hiring. Beyond that you are just executing.
You deal with intellectual property (IP) issues up front. First of all, by law anyone that materially helps create an invention must be named on the patent, and secondly you write out in the contract ahead of time what share of profits etc.. each party gets. Also, just because it's a single "company" doesn't mean that all parts of the company have access to the same IP. Some Apple product components are made in factories owned by their competitors. In some cases, the engineers of those competitors are still trying to reinvent the same technology Apple is having that company making. That is, those engineers could theoretically just walk down to their company's factory floor to see the very solution they are trying to come up with!! But more generally, when you work on developing new technology you don't simply contract everything out without having input on how things should go. Otherwise nothing gets done (at least often that's the case). Companies have their own priorities which may not match up with yours so you have be engaged throughout the process. Let me illustrate how technology development works on a small scale with something I was involved in (mostly I work on developing new math and applying it to certain areas of medical science, but occasionally people ask me to help on one or another component of emerging technology). So let's just say (true story) there's some rich investor out in California that got a retired electrical engineering professor from a university over there to work on developing an improved device for low vision patients that leverages head mounted display (HMD) technology (you know, like the Oculus VR that some gamers use, or where they can put a smartphone in a HMD). The idea is to allow the patient to dynamically change levels of magnification, size and shape of magnification region, etc.. Not a new idea but the technology is finally just about ready to allow that. So, they needed a software company to develop the software, but the problem of mathematically defining the localized region of magnification so that there was minimal distortion but no occlusion (no loss of information even if only a selected portion of the image is magnified) was given to me, and the algorithm had to work in real time. Separately they hired a prof at a medical university out in the East Coast to test stuff on patients. So first of all, there was a lot of brainstorming on what features the device should have. Trust me, the guy with the money knew almost nothing about any of these decisions, just regular reports on where we were in the project were sent to him, so it was "employees" that did more than 99% of the whole thing. In one case, we decided to try putting eyetracking in the device because some features would be enhanced if the magnified region followed eye movements. OK.. eyetracking isn't an easy thing. The software company came up with one version, I suggested going in another direction, an engineer (low level employee) from that "software" company actually had a great suggestion using a different kind of lighting fixing a problem that we all thought was a software issue. Then they moved towards using both eyes to track, while I pursued a different approach. In the end, none of our approaches were as easy as just sending the Oculus ($700) to Germany to a company called SMI and have them implement their optics and software for 15k!! (each unit = 15k). Then guess what happened? That eyetracking stuff was tested on patients who didn't like it and the whole concept was ditched. NONE of these decisions went to the investor LOL. My algorithm is in use in the prototype of that product (still being tested), but in general decisions were made collectively and anyone that had a good idea was listened to. Oh, and in the end that software company just turned out to not be up to the task so they decided to go with a different one out in California because the idea turned into creating a specialized app instead of new hardware, etc.. Also, to illustrate an IP issue, when the eyetracking thing came up I took advantage of testing stuff in a virtual reality environment created by that software company. I could NOT get access to certain individual functions they wrote in their code, but I did have access to certain parts of their system that uses those individual functions, and I modified that. So because we had certain agreements in place, they never had to show me certain details of their algorithms. Either way, I had to constantly consult with software engineers in their company to make sure certain assumptions I was making about what their code did were correct. That was all done directly between me and some employees of that company. Point is, decisions in tech development are made collectively and at all different levels even when you "contract stuff out". No way you can develop technology through a military-style command structure. That works for them, but the weapons they use they'd never get with the type of structure you're describing. Oh, and you can see in this example why you can in no way predict how different employees will make different decisions, even in their areas of expertise. So no NONE of this is dictated by who you hire. As many as you need to, but they won't be well-informed decisions because no one has the level of expertise necessary to even understand the details of what need to be decided.
This certainly isn't the case for anything Amazon does, the Kindle display included. They are not collaborating with other companies on IP. Every company has the same priority (employees usually have much different priorities). Again, it comes down to market forces. You've presumably described an organization that is nowhere near as successful as Amazon. As I mentioned previously, the more you centralize decision making, the better the results. You've proven my point here - your investor lost money. I'm assuming you did not. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the investor got what he deserved. Jeff Bezos doesn't agree. Amazon has literally been described as an organization that is simply "scaffolding around the brain of Bezos". The fundamental job of his employees is provide him the inputs and recommendations. The example you provided above illlustrates the danger is having employees make decisions. You certainly wouldn't expect an engineer or scientist to make a decision that impacts user experience. Do you really believe someone in a technical role decided that a $60 display in a Kindle would be justified? Also, FWIW the average human makes over 30k decisions daily. One of the things I do when I work with management teams is try to eliminate trivial decision making from their lives to reduce decision fatigue. One great example of this is eliminating wardrobe choices. This is why people like Mark Zuckerberg wears the same thing almost every day.
Well.. Stringer Bell, I can't do more than try and explain to you how tech development works in general. It doesn't matter if it's a large or small corporation, you need to make a lot of decisions collectively and at multiple different levels because of all the different kinds of expertise necessary. And your assertion that there aren't any limits to technology if you are just willing to pay enough is about as absurd as it gets. You think we don't have a commercial nuclear fusion reactor because people aren't willing to pay enough? Or a cheap and reliable way of getting to low Earth orbit because there isn't enough money? Or a cure for cancer because of lack of money? No.. it's because the problem is too difficult. Oh, and I'm willing to bet Bezos has almost no say in the design of the rocket his Blue Origin company uses. That's far more technologically challenging than the Kindle. Anyway, whatever you've read or think you know about tech development, it is NOT the case that the kind of centralized decision-making you're describing is a hallmark of successful tech companies, Amazon included. I think when people talk about Amazon the way you're describing it they are looking more at the retail side of the business where tons of employees could really be described as "cogs in a machine". But it doesn't work for tech development. Anyway, you can believe what you want, but what you describe doesn't apply to tech.
WADR - I work in VC and the majority of my time is spent working with the largest technology companies in the world, specifically on some of the things (and some of the people) we have discussed here. We will have to agree to disagree.
