What seemed quite common for me was(working in European startups): Company gets investment from american investors, investors either recommend synergy with products or bring some trusted executives, new executives bring in their own crew especially at the director/higher management level, goes on to favor their decisions over others who have either more experience or knowledge about the company/product.
Goals are not met, either due to external circumstances or because executive applied strategies they were familiar with from previous gigs but don't fit the reality of that company, executive steps down "voluntarily", their pawns are let go shortly afterwards, hire new executive in place, back to step 1.
I just worked there, and it made me laugh when the leaving executive got a special puff piece on the parent company's website about his "journey" - a journey that involved buying the company, missing the mark entirely about its profitability, and then failing for 2 years to do anything about it with external contractors by the truckload.
Nitpicking your comment but that's not Olympic archery, olympic archery doesn't include compound bows, only recurve bows(also the Olympics specifically uses 70m distance only).
Recurve and compound archers are also typically shooting up to 90m (for men). FITA distances are 90, 70, 50, 30m. You’d be surprised how well you can do at the shorter distances and then everything falls apart at 70 to 90m. Instinctive shooting won’t get you far at the long distances.
But getting the shots into a keyhole even at a relatively short distance is very impressive still.
Chrome is core to Google's business so it's worth it advertising, they also advertise the Pixel phone a lot in high-end places in global cities because they need to gain market share for mobile browsing and phones against Apple.
Anything else, not that important, even GCP which is their major bet doesn't really get any ads because it's a business product so not much sense in doing so.
They seem to believe word of mouth/viral marketing works because it worked for gmail and chrome, so they didn't double down on Stadia before product market fit, and that caused Stadia to fail(along with Google's short attention span reputation).
Because it's easy money(and as others said, to stay employable).
If someone created a framework yesterday there are few experts, and they won't judge experts by years of experience, if you're a relatively new FE in the job market would you go compete with people with 15+ years of jQuery and 8+ years of React or just take on the next new thing?
If you pickup the latest tooling today by the time it's widespread(like React is now) you're way ahead of the crop and it's quite easy to get some nice pay out of that.
Spain salaries can be ridiculous, there has certainly been a boom and some startups are paying well for senior roles as competition heats up, but I consistently get recruiters pinging me with 30-40k openings for senior positions.
> The people at the end of the line who are flipping NFTs do not fundamentally care about distributed trust models or payment mechanics, but they care about where the money is.
This is ultimately the issue, some people want to grown their own vegetables in their backyard, or chickens, but they do it for their own purposes, the loud majority in crypto space(now pushing the web3 branding because it sounds more revolutionary) is in it for the money, and since they lack the tech knowledge to build stuff around crypto they focus on the marketing/virality side, because that will make money faster.
The irony starts when what these people want is to control the supply and distribution channels for what is supposed to be a decentralized set of systems. I think the comparison to the fediverse is very good, people are in it for the tech, no one is blindly pushing it to increase the value of their virtual assets.
Assuming you can objectively measure someone like this, either by LoC or delivery times, this is the wrong way to approach any project.
Having a 10x engineer(or even worse, a 500x engineer in this alleged case) is a huge risk for the company, should the engineer want to leave or if they are incapacitated in a tragic event, the company is severely handicapped, ideally a so-called 500x engineer should spend less time writing the actual code and instead mentoring/managing others to scale up their knowledge, should the company do this right, they might not deliver on time, but they'll have a much wider array of experts when something breaks or for the next projects, reduces overall company risk and it's more profitable in the long run.
Yet, they in fact delivered and got paid, and (pay attention!) would not have delivered and not got paid, otherwise. Risk is speculation about the future. Here we have full benefit of hindsight, and the choice taken was manifestly correct, despite all counterfactual speculation.
Not OP but I worked in Sweden for about 9 months before moving on, here's my take:
Maybe related to the local culture, AFAICT Swedes in general avoid conflict and whenever I questioned something at a meeting I was acknowledged and then the issue was quietly dismissed, no one wants to change anything, review processes or engage in a discussion to make things better, people will hear you, not argue back, and quietly move on, I much preferred environments where people were respectful but ultimately entered open discussions where it feels like you can learn more from each other.
Similarly, everyone in Sweden is very nice, up to a point where it's way too impolite not to be nice, everyone was very nice to me and I felt very welcomed and integrated and then I saw everyone was playing corporate chess in the background and complaining about me to my managers for reasons I'm yet to comprehend.
Ultimately I left Sweden because I didn't find it the right fit for me for several reasons combined, climate is of course not the best, salaries are not high compared to the cost of living you get in other European cities. The fact that I didn't enjoy my working environment there was just extra.
I only had one short lived working experience in the city so it might have been an odd case.
> then I saw everyone was playing corporate chess in the background and complaining about me to my managers for reasons I'm yet to comprehend.
Exactly! and with safety net they have, they're able to afford to play political games without the risk of losing their job. I put years of effort into building products only to be discredited because I didn't pay attention on politics & just focused on building stuff.
Then there is also favoritism. They tend to stick with each other. They sometimes openly hire their past-colleagues/friends.
reference; I worked at a couple corporations here, some of the biggest ones.
