MadBohr's comments

MadBohr | 8 years ago | on: Amazon Has Considered Buying Some Toys ‘R’ Us Stores

Unfortunately that's the nature of business. Sometimes it's impossible to predict market situations 10, 15 years out. I doubt anybody at Bain could have predicted in 2005 that Amazon would completely dominate the retail market in 10 years. Also, some responsibility falls on the debtors themselves for taking on potentially risky investments, but there are so many loopholes and gotchas here that I really can't comment much on that. While this type of private equity story seems more and more common these days, the opposite happens fairly often as well, and private equity firms like Bain make insane amounts of money from these types of strategies.

Bankruptcy in general is shady though and no matter what, when it happens, somebody is getting screwed out of a lot of money... usually the debtors.

MadBohr | 8 years ago | on: Amazon Has Considered Buying Some Toys ‘R’ Us Stores

NY Times also has a good article on it: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/business/toys-r-us-bankru...

MadBohr | 8 years ago | on: Amazon Has Considered Buying Some Toys ‘R’ Us Stores

People will generally pay a premium for better service, but in the case of retail, it's usually hard to beat the service of "instant purchase with free two day delivery to my doorstep". I for one, very rarely buy something w/o checking if it's cheaper on Amazon (or some other online retailer) first. It's gotta be a tough market that's for sure.

MadBohr | 8 years ago | on: Amazon Has Considered Buying Some Toys ‘R’ Us Stores

It's important to note that a lot of the failure of Toys R Us has to do with private equity buyout rather than a poor business model. Of course, their business model was flawed, but remember that Toys R Us was bought in 2005, and the toy market was MUCH simpler back then. Amazon was hardly the player it is now. The private equity firm then loaded them up with crippling debt. Move forward a few years, and enter Amazon et al, and market situations shifted drastically. Toys R Us, loaded with debt from the private equity buyout, could not invest in their own infrastructure and improvements. Even if they had the perfect business model to capitalize on, they would have no cash to execute, and regardless, they would be forced to bankruptcy. In this case, they had so much debt that they couldn't escape chapter 11 and had to resort to chapter 7. And so it goes.

MadBohr | 8 years ago | on: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

I'm sure plenty of people would but that isn't the point. If you're writing code that potentially costs people their lives, you need to be able to be held accountable otherwise it will lead to negligence. This isn't a new problem... maybe for the software space, but not for industry as a whole.

MadBohr | 8 years ago | on: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

I disagree, you're just passing the buck. Accountability needs to be had at all levels. If an engineer writes a bug into code like this (deliberate or not) and such a bug results in somebody's death, the engineer should be held accountable just as much as the person who approved its release. The executive could just as easily say "my engineers promised me it was fully tested", etc. Engineers could say "yep it was, but that was an edge case we missed" or something like that. In any case, there needs to be shared accountability. Maybe execs take the brunt, but engineers should not be allowed to write code that kills people (inadvertently or otherwise) and face zero consequences.

MadBohr | 8 years ago | on: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

> I'm completely blocked for the last two days because I cannot run the repo, so I cannot run any tests and at the moment I'm doing absolutely nothing.

That is not asking for help. Asking for help would be "Can somebody please help me? ... rest of message here...". Even better is asking an individual (or individuals) directly.

MadBohr | 8 years ago | on: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

OP said slack. DM is as simple as doing "/msg @joe.blow I'm blocked, can you please help me?". If no response, go to @joe.blow's colleagues. If still no response, go to their boss. If still no response, go to their bosses's boss. Repeat until you run out of people to escalate to, at which point you find another job.

MadBohr | 8 years ago | on: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

Yes that's true, which is why I said "why not both?" The manager should do more, but so should the employee. Sitting there and saying "I'm blocked, woe is me" is garbage compared to saying "I'm blocked. Can you please help me Mr/Ms XYZ?"

MadBohr | 8 years ago | on: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

This to me sounds like a complete lack of self-ownership on your part. You literally sat blocked doing nothing for days, without reaching out to an individual to help with this? Instead you just spammed Slack saying you're blocked?

While I agree that it would have been nice if somebody helped you, you are in control of your own destiny. If nobody is helping you, you need to personally escalate it and reach out until you get the job done. If somebody did this on my team, the first question I would ask them was why the hell they let themselves sit blocked for days.

...and of course my team would have been more proactive on helping you because one of our core values is help your co-worker, but that is besides the point here.

MadBohr | 8 years ago | on: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

Why not both? I cringed when I read OP's comment where he spammed "I'm completely blocked" in the chat without asking for specifics. What a complete lack of individual ownership. Even the best manager can't help somebody who is unwilling to help themselves.

Source: am a manager.