Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "Microsoft Research" channel.

  1. A highly successful person once told me that he simply got lucky and that he didn't know how to repeat that success today. :-)
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  2. That story is the hallmark sign of a sub-par military leader, right there. :-)
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  3. Most people don't have it. An organization will never have as many natural leaders as it wants. That is the power of organizations: they can get good work out of crappy people. That you can get more out of a person than they want to do is a myth. You can pressure them to do more for a short while, then everybody goes into inner emmigration. You can find those employees frequently in the restrooms and rarely visited corners of the building. They will take sick days without being quick and they might even actively sabotage your work if you pressure them too much. Eventually they will leave, which will leave a memory hole in your organization, whether you like it or not. Don't try to treat the real world like the military. It's not. Not even the military is the way you describe it. I have been in the military. Nobody would have died for anybody there. Dying wasn't the mission to begin with. The mission was to hold off the Russian army.
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  4. I never cared about when, where and what the boss was eating. I always had lunch at noon-time and I went home at five. ;-)
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  5. And none of that makes any difference if the child is not interested in learning.
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  6. Asians are, on average, not better at math than the remainder of the world's population. Many Asian kids simply have parents that make them work hard in school. The other ingredients that prosperous societies need are freedom, human rights, legal certainty, healthcare and money. The US has most of those, with exception of proper healthcare.
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  7. Neither Facebook nor Twitter ever had good leadership. They may have cut-throat management. Some employees don't mind that, others don't care, some even thrive, but most just suffer through it for the salary and stock options. That's bad both for those employees and for the company.
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  8. The US has some of the best mathematicians, physicists and engineers in the world. That "we" are bad at anything is total bollocks. Yes, many individuals don't give a damn because they think that they are pretty/athletic/artistically gifted enough to make it without STEM. Others just don't give a damn, period. Those are decisions that individuals are making for themselves. There is no collective "we" in the matter.
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  9. An organization that relies on "teams pulling together" is a crappy organization. Goals have to be achieved without personal or team-level sacrifice. If you can't get the job done with eight hour workdays and no calls on the weekend, then your org chart and management are broken.
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  10. I have been in the military and these stories are not how militaries work. The officers are often people from a certain background. They have other family members in the military, often going back a century or more and they have been raised with "patriotic" ideas that are baked into their psyches. The better ones also understand that the common soldier does not share these ideas. The better militaries in the world teach their officers how to overcome that gap. The not so good ones shoot their soldiers in the back. Neither technique works in the civilian world where an employee can simply walk out and take vital corporate memory with him/her.
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