I very much enjoyed Andrew Ng's machine learning class, so much so that I was sad when the class ended. I wish him great success at Baidu.
A little off topic, but: Corporations no longer are loyal to employees (unless they are at the top of their field). Some countries now seem much more interested in the interests of corporations than people. Therefore, I think that it is very smart for individuals to more consider themselves as 'citizens of the world' and be very open to working for whoever pays them the most, provides the best infrastructure, etc.
I don't find this to be universally true. I was at Google for five years. When my first daughter was born, they gave me 2 weeks of paid paternity leave. When they upped the policy to 7 weeks months later, they made it retroactive and gave me another 5 weeks to spend with my new family. When I was dealing with health problems, my managers were extremely understanding and put a number of different options on the table for how they could help me cope. When my wife and I decided we needed to move somewhere without a real Google presence, they bent over backwards to find a way to make it work without my leaving the company.
It's difficult to separate "company X is being nice to employees because it is in their best interests right now" from "company X is showing loyalty to its employees," and in general morally upstanding behavior coincides closely with long-term self-interest. But to my mind the way I was treated constituted loyalty. The clincher to me is that Google has a newer extraordinary suite of benefits for the families of Google employees that die. That is a good, loyal, and _expensive_ thing to do, and I have a hard time seeing how it makes sense as part of some cynical calculation. I don't think a lot of employees are going to be attracted to or retained by Google because of its stellar death benefits.
To be sure, I know this doesn't mean Google would never ever lay devs like me off in a downturn, nor does it mean that I would never quit Google. (In point of fact, I did.) But I definitely don't advocate, as you suggest, that developers simply go to whatever employer is paying the most right now. Go to whatever employer has built a reputation for treating its employees the best.
It has been that way since at least the mid 90's. I am amazed at the number of people who still think they need to show where they work any kind of loyalty.
Corporations are legal entities and don't have qualities like "loyalty", so it doesn't even make sense to anthropomorphize them. The people that work at corporations, including managers and executives, certainly can have those sorts of qualities. Whether or not they do is another story, and that's going to vary widely from one organization to the next. Loyalty is something that's given to and accepted from people, not legal entities. I have absolutely felt degrees of loyalty to some employers and a lack of it to others.
Loyalty from a corporate perspective means things like pensions, health care, not laying off 20k people every fall, etc. Like the days that you could work for GE your entire life and actually retire. There was a mutual loyalty. The company took care of you and you therefore took care of the company. Now someone could offer me a couple thousand dollars extra in pay and I'd be gone in a heart beat. Don't forget that legal entity is made of people who decide how that legal entity will function.
Also if corporations can't show loyalty, a human quality, then how can they be people?
It does not make , but it happens. By middle managers or by endomarketing as away to make people work more for less, classic examples are in company that are going bad
I once had a friend take a low paying dev job just because he needed it. He wouldn't qualify for insurance for 3 months and had recently adopted kids. Then another offer came by that paid more and started insurance day one. The employer had the nerve to tell him that they were upset with his lack of loyalty to the company. If that company had any loyalty to the employee he wouldn't have had to work for 3 months without health insurance.
His success in Baidu and Baidu's success in general means more victims of their advertising business which is simply online fraud (of medicine and medical treatments). And most of the victims are probably less educated, poor people who are new to the internet.
For that I despise him and whoever actively takes part in Baidu's business. And the investors. This is the worst online fraud in the world because it is literally killing people.
Comments
I very much enjoyed Andrew Ng's machine learning class, so much so that I was sad when the class ended. I wish him great success at Baidu.
A little off topic, but: Corporations no longer are loyal to employees (unless they are at the top of their field). Some countries now seem much more interested in the interests of corporations than people. Therefore, I think that it is very smart for individuals to more consider themselves as 'citizens of the world' and be very open to working for whoever pays them the most, provides the best infrastructure, etc.
"Corporations no longer are loyal to employees."
I don't find this to be universally true. I was at Google for five years. When my first daughter was born, they gave me 2 weeks of paid paternity leave. When they upped the policy to 7 weeks months later, they made it retroactive and gave me another 5 weeks to spend with my new family. When I was dealing with health problems, my managers were extremely understanding and put a number of different options on the table for how they could help me cope. When my wife and I decided we needed to move somewhere without a real Google presence, they bent over backwards to find a way to make it work without my leaving the company.
It's difficult to separate "company X is being nice to employees because it is in their best interests right now" from "company X is showing loyalty to its employees," and in general morally upstanding behavior coincides closely with long-term self-interest. But to my mind the way I was treated constituted loyalty. The clincher to me is that Google has a newer extraordinary suite of benefits for the families of Google employees that die. That is a good, loyal, and _expensive_ thing to do, and I have a hard time seeing how it makes sense as part of some cynical calculation. I don't think a lot of employees are going to be attracted to or retained by Google because of its stellar death benefits.
To be sure, I know this doesn't mean Google would never ever lay devs like me off in a downturn, nor does it mean that I would never quit Google. (In point of fact, I did.) But I definitely don't advocate, as you suggest, that developers simply go to whatever employer is paying the most right now. Go to whatever employer has built a reputation for treating its employees the best.
"Corporations no longer are loyal to employees". I very much agree with this. Which is why I have no loyalty to any company I've worked for.
It has been that way since at least the mid 90's. I am amazed at the number of people who still think they need to show where they work any kind of loyalty.
Corporations are legal entities and don't have qualities like "loyalty", so it doesn't even make sense to anthropomorphize them. The people that work at corporations, including managers and executives, certainly can have those sorts of qualities. Whether or not they do is another story, and that's going to vary widely from one organization to the next. Loyalty is something that's given to and accepted from people, not legal entities. I have absolutely felt degrees of loyalty to some employers and a lack of it to others.
Loyalty from a corporate perspective means things like pensions, health care, not laying off 20k people every fall, etc. Like the days that you could work for GE your entire life and actually retire. There was a mutual loyalty. The company took care of you and you therefore took care of the company. Now someone could offer me a couple thousand dollars extra in pay and I'd be gone in a heart beat. Don't forget that legal entity is made of people who decide how that legal entity will function.
Also if corporations can't show loyalty, a human quality, then how can they be people?
I don't think they are people, but the US legal system disagrees with me of late. :(
It does not make , but it happens. By middle managers or by endomarketing as away to make people work more for less, classic examples are in company that are going bad
I once had a friend take a low paying dev job just because he needed it. He wouldn't qualify for insurance for 3 months and had recently adopted kids. Then another offer came by that paid more and started insurance day one. The employer had the nerve to tell him that they were upset with his lack of loyalty to the company. If that company had any loyalty to the employee he wouldn't have had to work for 3 months without health insurance.
His success in Baidu and Baidu's success in general means more victims of their advertising business which is simply online fraud (of medicine and medical treatments). And most of the victims are probably less educated, poor people who are new to the internet.
For that I despise him and whoever actively takes part in Baidu's business. And the investors. This is the worst online fraud in the world because it is literally killing people.