“this is a company for grown ups.”
That’s too bad. I was thinking of getting their phone when I needed a new one, I guess I’ll just add them to my mental list of companies to avoid.
goddamn i read parts of the article trying to figure out which company… Im not a marketing guy, but nobody can tell me that “nothing” is marketable brand.
Allow me to introduce you to their main competitor, elon musk.
Oh, I don’t mean competitor in the business market. I mean their main competitor for worlds least marketable brand identity.
He took twitter, which had it’s own global brand awareness, and blundered it so bad that every media company refers to it as “X (formerly twitter)” because they know that if they had just put X, nobody would know what the hell they were talking about.
And his other company is literally named “The Boring Company”. Where I assume they make disease, and murderous robots that are somehow racist.
It’s still unbelievable considering Twitter had made its way into other languages’ lexicon other than English. In Spanish, for example, the word “tuit” had been added officially in the dictionary. It had no competitors in brand awareness and all it took was a manchild with money to burn to take it all down.
I’m a grown up. I’ve been remote for a decade. I’m pretty successful too.
Right? Imagine thinking that working in a cubicle is something to aspire to as a “grown up.” Fuck that. I’ll continue working from home, like an adult, thanks.
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Clearly it’s not a company for grown ups because you think they’re all children that won’t play together unless you cram them into a classroom and tell them, “Make nice.”
Right? Grown ups can be trusted to get their work done without someone watching them all the time. It’s small children who need constant supervision.
“this is a company for grown ups.”
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. – C.S. Lewis
If only most CEO’s knew how to read. smh
Part of it is literally named teenage engineering! The division working on the earbuds.
Teenage engineering partnered with Nothing. That isn’t the same thing.
Teenage Engineering is a hardware design firm that Nothing contracts with for hardware design. They aren’t a division of Nothing and they don’t work on just earbuds.
Don’t I have one and it’s the only Android device I’ve owned that crashes and reboots almost daily. I can’t recall any other device ever doing it actually.
This company’s all about the next gimmick and couldn’t care less about actually making decent phones.
It baffles me because in many of the quotes they are clearly trying to be understanding and respectful toward those who disagree with this, but then they come out and call them children
Ironically, that’s a really childish thing to do.
This just means they’re a struggling company who needs to cut headcount and want to do it without paying severance
Considering this company was founded as a remote work company from the beginning, you’re absolutely right.
In addition, this tactic will result in the best employees leaving first, because they’ll get employed somewhere else.
Cue the pivot to some ridiculous buzz tech like AI in the near future, then being acquired and promptly abandoned by some big corp.
The thing with AI is, what the term today refers to most often is neural networks, which are really advanced statistics. And the thing is, to get more precise statistics, you need exponentially more data. And of course the marginal utility decays exponentially. So exponentially increasing marginal expenses meet exponentially decaying marginal utility.
Just to be clear, I am in love with statistics and especially generative algos, and have written papers on it before ChatGPT was a thing.
I just hate that one company made a chatbot with it and now the whole world is cargo culting around it.
Friend, your brain is also just a neural network. “Advanced statistics” are happening in your head every second. There is nothing exceptional about humans, save for the immense complexity of our neural network.
AI is a very broad term that also includes expert systems (such as Computational Fluid Dynamics, Finite Element Analysis, etc approaches.). Traditional machine learning approaches (like support vector machines, etc.) too. But yes, I agree—most commonly associated with deep learning/neural network approaches.
That said, it’s misleading and inaccurate to state that neural networks are just statistics. In fact they are substantially more than just advanced statistics. Certainly statistics is a component—but so too is probability, calculus, network/graph theory, linear algebra, not to mention computer science to program, tune, and train and infer them. Information theory (hello, entropy) plays a part sometimes.
The amount of mathematical background it takes to really understand and practice the theory of both a forward pass and backpropagation is an entire undergraduate STEM curriculum’s worth. I usually advocate for new engineers in my org to learn it top down (by doing) and pull the theory as needed, but that’s not how I did it and I regularly see gaps in their decisions because of it.
And to get actually good at it? One does not simply become a AI systems engineer/technologist. It’s years of tinkering with computers and operating systems, sourcing/scraping/querying/curating data, building data pipelines, cleaning data, engineering types of modeling approaches for various data types and desired outcomes against constraints (data, compute, economic, social/political), implementing POCs, finetuning models, mastering accelerated computing (aka GPUs, TPUs), distributed computation—and many others I’m sure I’m forgetting some here. The number of adjacent fields I’ve had to deeply scratch on to make any of this happen is stressful just thinking about it.
They’re fascinating machines, and they’ve been democratized/abstracted to an extent where it’s now as simple as import torch, torch.fit, model.predict. But to be dismissive of the amazing mathematics and engineering under the hood to make them actually usable is disingenuous.
I admit I have a bias here—I’ve spent the majority of my career building and deploying NN models.
That said, it’s misleading and inaccurate to state that neural networks are just statistics. In fact they are substantially more than just advanced statistics. Certainly statistics is a component—but so too is probability, calculus, network/graph theory, linear algebra, not to mention computer science to program, tune, and train and infer them. Information theory (hello, entropy) plays a part sometimes.
What I meant when I said that they are advanced statistics is that that is what they do. I know that a lot of disciplines play a part in creating them. I know it’s incredible complicated, it took me quite a while to wrap my head around what the back-propagation algorithm.
I also know that neural networks can do some really cool stuff. Recognizing tumors, for example. But it’s equally dangerous to overestimate them, so we have to be aware of their limitations.
Edit: All that being said, I do recognize that you have spent much more time learning about and working with neural networks than I have.
Cool cool, we’re cool. I get a little triggered when I hear people say that NN/DL models are “fancy statistics”—it’s not the first time.
In what seems like another lifetime ago, my first engineering job was as a process engineer for an refinery-scale continuous chromatography unit in hydrocarbon refining. Fuck that industry, but there’s some really cool tech there nevertheless. Anyway when I was first learning the process, the technician I was learning from called it a series of “fancy filters” and that triggered me too—adsorption is a really fascinating chemical process that uses a lot of math and physics to finely-tune for desired purity, flowrate, etc. and to diminish it as “fancy filtration”!!!
He wasn’t wrong, you’re not either; but it’s definitely more nuanced than that. :)
Engineers are gonna nerd out about stuff. It’s a natural law, I think.
It’s such bullshit too because drastically changing someone’s working conditions is clearly a constructive dismissal and should lead to severance payments.
"Remote work is not compatible with a high ambition level plus high speed,” Pei said in the email, telling employees who are worried about flexibility that “this is a company for grown ups.”
Sounds like he actually means it’s a company for exploitable young people and socopathic assholes. Grown-ups have other responsibilities and don’t want work to commandeer their whole lives.
“This company is for grown ups. Now sit over there where I can check on you constantly and do what I tell you like a child that can’t be trusted alone.”
The actual sentence, according to a Verge website comment, was: “This is a company for grown ups, so if you need to be out of office to deal with some issues, we trust you to make the right decision.” If true, this doesn’t reflect well on Verge journalism.
I need to be out of the physical office all the time to deal with my actual life. How about that? WFH 4eva
I don’t care about Verge. I care about the person who cons others into toiling underpaid so that they can Lambo and talk shit to magazines.
Guarantee this is a ploy to chase off the ‘less committed’ employees (read: less desperate), while not having to announce mass layoffs.
The real problem is that Nothing brings… nothing to the table. Oh look, another startup making another Android phone in a sea of companies making Android phones, with yet another skin.
What do you mean? Their phone has lights on the back.
Ngl, that’s a genius headline
Yeah I was expecting this to be a thought piece in general about companies requiring them be back in office.
I did a double take when I first read it. Then I realized it was, Nothing, the phone company.
I did not even realize until reading this comment that Nothing was a company.
Fuck me.
Nothing will.
Who’s on first?
Unnecessary RTO mandates need to be outlawed
Guess I won’t be buying the CMF Phone after all.
The grown ups comment makes the CEO sound like a condescending prick. Yeah I’d be looking for another job after that.
Carl is well known to be a smug, condescending, prick
Could you share more on this?
Just have read numerous articles talking with him, or about him, he is always this way, and when I come across articles talking about him with his workers, or from their perspective, they say they don’t like him, or dance around calling him and asshole. I have also seen screenshots of his social media showing him acting like an ass, and the general discussion accompanying them is that he is arrogant, egotistical, etc.
I couldn’t point you to a specific place at this point, as I don’t remember the news specifically, just the general information. However I don’t imagine that it would take hours of digging to find it.
Gotcha. Thanks!
Here’s an instance - lol ‘instance’
I can see what folks mean by smug.
At the same time, I think he genuinely wants to provide the best experience and value for phone users.
As a OnePlus user before and after his involvement, and setting aside hardware differences, it’s small but notable steps backward in Oxygen OS since his departure. OP now literally copys iOS for many parts of it’s UI and I’m not a fan.
Either way, it’s not like this is aberrent behavior or speech from any CEO.
“Tim Cook tells 16h day Chinese laborers to ‘lick his balls.’” -is not a headline that would surprise anyone.
I already hate their name so much and now this makes me hate them even more. Fuck them.
It’s shame they already turn into the dark side
Every other company:
“Hey, we’re hiring…”
I read the title to mean that nobody NEEDS to come into the office lol
I have no intention of buying anything but a fairphone, at least until right-to-repair comes to GrapheneOS pixels
I’m sure Carl Pei will always be in office. /s
He’s not going to exploit himself, silly!
So Carl Pei sounds like a real douchebag
There’s nothing requiring people to work 5 days a week, or 40 hours, or 52 weeks a year. If we worked together we could have way better conditions.
Some companies care about your output rather than how many hours you work. It’s common in ‘big tech’.
Read the article
r/titlegore the fault of the original article
Holy fucking shit what an awful title.
It’s aggressively bad.
It’s a pun, mildly amusing.
they knew
