I haven't paid a lot of attention to Nikola and was surprised when a friend said they had gone public and saw their valuation.
This one always felt like a fraud when it was private. How was it able to go public? Isn't that supposed to root out these things?
Hearing about their revenue was an eye opener for sure.
Side note, I always wonder about the WeWorks and Nikola's of the world. The founders, who are obvious frauds in retrospect, still probably walk away with hundreds of millions if not a few billion. Sometimes it feels like being a decent human being doesn't pay off. Doesn't help that our current political environment is also rewarding the worst in us too
I would argue that public markets very much DID do their job here. Once you are public, people can go long or short your stock, unlike private companies where the latter is hard. In this case, someone took a large short position and then went public with accusations against the company. Now the stock is down. Assuming that the accusations are at least partially credible, sounds like a functioning market to me.
11 billion for an "idea" isn't sane. The hydrogen tech doesn't exist and possibly never will. Other auto manufacturers are struggling with it. As to the electric truck? Others are far ahead.
Everything in the Hindenburg Report could have been exposed without the Company going public.
Going public via a SPAC they didn’t have to go through all the rigor associated with a traditional IPO. I’m not sure this is the public markets doing their job so much as exposing a new loophole in the market.
> Everything in the Hindenburg Report could have been exposed without the Company going public.
Yes, but it went public and that gave someone the incentive to expose it. The fact that this stuff wasn't exposed earlier is a failure of the private markets, not the public
I watched a youtube video on the subject, and I was easily left with the impression that it's a very shady company. And I am not an investor in startups in any stretch of imagination.
Yet, people still invest millions, if not billions of dollars into this company.
Being a decent human being pays off at least in terms of self respect. I guess for certain people it does not matter how they earn money, be it through fraud or honest work. But I don't think I would be happier if I was a fraudulent multi-millionaire.
With enough money, I'm like 99% sure I could put some fraud to bed in my conscience. From what I can tell, success tends to help people justify their actions in hindsight. So maybe there's something psychological there to help me forget, anyway.
If nothing else, as a billionaire, I could afford to do extremely good works to help people forget about how awful I was in the early days (remember when Bill Gates was the devil? I do).
Thanks for the reply! Yeah, I vividly remember how people were constantly reminding each others about the evils of M$ and Gates. But even his ruthlessness wasn't fraud, right? Usually enterprise software simply stifles software engineering because of the very short-term oriented for-profit approach. Which leads to burnout, but ... still not exactly fraud.
Agreed, I don't think Gates can be descibed as fraudulent. He was like you say a ruthless businessman. But that is different than what this Nikola founder seems to have been.
I guess, to me, fraud and unethical management/business practices are the same thing. If you can live with getting ahead by stepping on the backs of the people beneath you, why not commit a little fraud? Is there a difference, outside of legal differences?
I guess, maybe for me, it's; 'in for a penny, in for a pound' kind of thing. If you're going to be unethical, why not just commit fraud as well?
I have no idea about Gates' early personal beliefs, but at that time they were competing with big corps like IBM. They were the underdog. They played the game on hard mode (even though most of us never had or will have the opportunity to get into Harvard and casually just drop out to start some crazy venture), and when they made it big, they were doing the same aggressive deals and the market eat it up, the whole company was basically built on this aggressiveness (quick and dirty software, that runs anywhere coupled with expensive licenses, strong copyright enforcement campaigns to force you to buy those expensive licenses, cater to enterprises, increase market share at any cost [vertical integration in IE, Office and Windows], dominate the market).
I have some minimal/passing familiarity with the previous cutthroat mindset. And I know that fraud is when you cross a line. When you explicitly promise one thing and deliver something else. The importance of willfully making false statements with the purpose of profiting off the victims' action(s).
I know some people test the ropes/limits so many times that the line disappears for them.
Now, that said, unethical management might be simply working the shit out of your team for some deadline (which regularly happens in game development) or it might be lobbying against workplace safety regulations like a few special asshole coal mine owners do.
MS treated contractors as second class citizens, they got sued and the contractors won. Plus MS had (has?) a tendency of demanding long hours. Are long hours unethical in software engineering when there are so many opportunities for engineers? Or it's just an option for those who prefer that kind of work-nolife balance? I don't know.
However, what Amazon does seems (is!) very troubling (overworking pickers to the point of causing them permanent joint damage/pain), especially considering that the low-skill labor market segment is words apart from the aforementioned velvet sweatshop problem of long hours for 6 figures.
...
Anyway. I've worked with guys who clearly have a warped sense of ethics (plus entitlement, self-importance, ego), and the line is usually crossed when later the fraudster cannot account for the money. That's a clear breach of fiduciary duties. Because even the shittiest explanation of why and how you had to spend weeks at a 5-star resort to "make deals" might be defendable, but the clear lack of any explanation is not.
I think this whole debacle really brings into focus how poor of a job our bloated financial markets do at allocating capital. Literally their one purpose that justifies their existence, and they are comically bad at.
The US market is eventually correct (which is exactly what you're seeing with Nikola getting properly dismantled), not efficient on every trade or even short-term. I think your premise fundamentally misunderstands how very large, liquid markets with huge numbers of participants like the US stock market actually function.
To paraphrase a famous quote from Ben Graham: short-term the market is a voting machine (prone to trends, mania, over-reactions both directions), long-term it's a weighing machine (value will out). That's still spot on all these decades later.
There is about $36 trillion in value in the public US markets. Can you support your premise that Nikola is somehow relevant as a point of evidence that the broad financial markets do a poor job of allocating capital? Nikola is barely a rounding error in the scheme of the US financial markets.
Financial markets grossly misjudged risk and caused the 2008 financial collapse. The recession previous to that was caused by a tech bubble that saw Pets.com with a greater valuation than GE. These incidents of irrationality have huge long-term effects on the real economy. The middle and lower class never recovered from 2008.
Those were on markets and their irrationality. We are currently in giant asset bubble (enabled by the Fed, but still) in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression. It will crash, and take the economy with it.
As far as allocating capital, the markets have systematically discouraged investment and encouraged stock buybacks and other uses of money that not only don't promote the real economy, but increase risk (necessitating more bailouts). Our finance industry systematically pushes industries into rent-seeking instead of production, as well as increasing financialization.
Sure, Nikola isn't significant in things, but it is a microcosm of how the market as a whole operates.
Why do you say they misjudged the risk? They got bailed out, the regulations that were enacted in 2008 with big fanfare were/are being slowly but surely rolled back, metrics are good, business has been booming for 10+ years until COVID, but even now "the assets are safe".
Since yields/returns are so low, it's no wonder rent seeking is the "new" hot shit. Returns are low because there's no aggregate demand, because the middle class disappears, see above. And so the vicious cycle does what it does.
Agreed on Nikola just being a small symptom. See also WeWork.
It was super obvious the value prop when it was HCL based. YAML based it kind of looks more like 'another CI'. It's still insanely powerful, just not as developer friendly anymore.
That’s disappointing. The original Actions was amazing and much of that was the thoughtful main.workflow file. This feels like a regression. I’m not a yaml hater like many but main.workflow was clean, almost pleasant to use. It felt like it actually came from understanding developers.
These are fun. We have one in a home and the kids absolutely love it. Completely impractical but definitely adds something to the home. Nice party trick for folks too.
We have access to storage space in the roof through a door in the back of a closet (only hidden by the clothes hanging in it) - we call it the "secret passage" - our kids always won at hide-and-seek when their friends came over (well at least the first time)
I have long held that Amazon(.com) has some of the worst UX I've ever seen, and it still is able to sell massive amounts to consumers.
We are left to consider that perhaps UX, particularly to the mass market, really doesn't matter. Or maybe that Amazon has such an entrenched lead, mindshare or other, it can weather some horrible, horrible experiences.
Considering that AWS is almost identical on the cloud front, I'm not sure really what to think here.
I'm a programmer. I use cloud services everyday. I have actively stayed away from AWS in the past few years b/c it has such a bad UX/DX and yet....it grows.
Azure is better. GCP is better. AWS, when compared to those two objectively, is downright terrible. Their services are disjoint. Their command lines don't work together. Their web console? Hooooooollllllly mother of god.....
I guess I don't know what to make of Amazon. Developers seem to fawn over things like Heroku, Zeit, GitHub and they are hugely successful in their own right....but still AWS is used by developers and, IMO, it shouldn't be anymore. It's 2018 and AWS is very clearly stuck in the 1970s/80s DX. They just don't get it, or maybe they do? And DX doesn't matter to most developers?
If we are honest with ourselves, AWS should be in third place in 2018. And it shouldn't even be close. Their services are comparable to the point of no real differentiation to their competition, and they have worse billing, worse experience, worse DX, worse support and overall worse nearly everything.
And yet they grow.
So yes, Amazon.com and AWS are terrible. And for some reason it doesn't seem to matter. I would like to live in a world where it does, particularly for developer tools where I hope that developers have more taste and sense than the choice of AWS shows.
Can't speak to AWS, but I know that the e-commerce side of Amazon.com is A/B tested to within an inch of its life. They test absolutely everything, including colors, size, layout, spacing, etc to check for the best conversion rate. They have a huge team of developers and designers working just on this site optimization and they're constantly running experiments.
It may not be good UX as measured by some aesthetic standard or set of best practices, but the site is accomplishing its goal for Amazon and arguably the consumers who use it.
that seems like the google way of building product. you test all these micro changes but miss out on the macro changes the site actually needs, which doesn't really work out. no one can argue that amazon has good ux. from product to product and day to day the website layout changes. each product site has just a ton of data thrown up on it. it has horrible tracking of product purchases. for example, if looking at a paperback book, it gives no indication that you may have purchased the hardcover. it has terrible management of books that may have multiple editions. buying older books takes some time because they'll often have multiple pages for the exact same book. pre-ordering is a mess. i have been sent two video games before because i pre-ordered a game super early which then apparently got a new product page. i thought i had never pre-ordered it some time later and amazon didn't mention it, so i ordered it again since it gave no indication i had ordered that exact product. the search is not great either. comparing products is non-existent. just cycling through various options like color can be a chore just to see a different price.
just because they have a process doesn't mean it works. but yea, like someone said, i guess the general user doesn't care. i know it has lessened my use of the site.
And there might have well reason to change the small things only, but nothing fundamentel. People hate change. If they start to turn the website upside down, their customers would start to whine, and cry, and complain. A lot of wasted time they could spend with buying stuff.
So, it ugly and bad as hell, but everybody is trained and accustomed to it. Why risking confusing customers without need?
1) You can A/B test yourself into a corner. They are definitely doing it right, whether it is the right thing to do is a different question.
2) Having some process insight into the operations / logistics side I can confirm that everything thing is connected to the webside one way or the other. That is what gives Amazon its huge operational advantage. Downside is, with everything developed in-house, this approach can end up as a motely collection of legacy systems. And that makes changing things difficult and had the potential to become a major pain in the ass long term.
Ex amazonian here, all of the internal systems have well defined API interfaces. So long as you don't blow up the API's you can replace any legacy system you want because it doesn't have tendrils that reach into 50 other systems.
Pretty doesn’t necessarily mean effective at converting. I think Amazon’s team is perfectly competent at testing whether one design makes more money than another — and I think they’re competent enough to go with the one that makes more money.
I have a suspicion they A/B test the little things, like is it better to show the price in dollars or the local currency, and is it better to have a 'add to cart' or 'buy it now' button.
They miss the big changes like 'shall we show all the products in a 3d immersive VR gallery' or 'make a site which downloads all data and works entirely offline'.
Those big changes might usually fail, but if you never try any of them, you'll end up with a site that looks and behaves like it's from the 1990's, while the rest of the world has moved on.
Amazon is successful because it has mostly everything in stock and can get most of it to you in 2 days. Amazon is logistics and trust. The trust is eroding and the logistics is worse because they're delivering things themselves, but still that is why it is.
AWS has more than Azure and GCP.
Appearances and experience aren't the whole of a product. Overfocus on them as a producer or consumer is a problem.
That's the thing, it largely _doesn't_ have more than Azure or GCP these days. And for 80%, maybe 90% of all use cases in existence, AWS v Azure v GCP from a pure catalog offering perspective is identical. And when that compounds with other factors, it falls far behind.
Obviously Amazon.com is different and it's mostly about logistics, inventory and reduced buyer friction among some other things.
I would go on a limb and say that Amazon doesn’t invest in better UX because that’s not what most of their customers care about. Someone at that company has already done the math and decided investing in Amazon Go or 1 hour delivery or Whole Foods is a far better return than investing in UI improvement.
I do think people in this discussion are looking at this from a developer or designer point of view. I read some article a while ago about how Amazon saw a increase in sales from millisecond level improvement in page loads. I bet that’s what they optimize for, and less so on how pretty the UX is.
That all being said, I think Amazon is turning into EBay with all the garbage ads I see on the website, just trying to buy replacement toothbrush heads, but that’s an entirely different discussion.
> I would go on a limb and say that Amazon doesn’t invest in better UX because that’s not what most of their customers care about. Someone at that company has already done the math and decided investing in Amazon Go or 1 hour delivery or Whole Foods is a far better return than investing in UI improvement.
I imagine a company like Amazon has the resources to do both.
> I do think people in this discussion are looking at this from a developer or designer point of view. I read some article a while ago about how Amazon saw a increase in sales from millisecond level improvement in page loads. I bet that’s what they optimize for, and less so on how pretty the UX is.
Same point. These features, performance and an attractive user interface, aren't mutually exclusive. I'd argue that in fact both are tightly coupled and are part of what makes the design and user experience.
I’m a developer and I play the resident certified AWS Architect when necessary. For me, the “interface” that I use every day is not the website. It’s either the CLI, Boto3 (Python), or the C# SDK.
One of the reasons Amazon has been able to achieve so much diversity around what you can do with their cloud systems is because they allow the individual teams to build and manage their own services.
I'd argue that if they were building towards one, big, consistent UX (a UX they'd prefer to use the APIs and command-line tools directly anyway, rather than the GUI), that they wouldn't have the amount of functionality, breadth-of-coverage or marketshare they have today.
AWS’s user interface is inconsistent, and as someone who uses most of the different services in a given week - the DevOps, NetOps, and developer portions - I just don’t use the website that often during a given day, I’m almost exclusively either using one of the SDKs or the CLI.
Out of all the things I care about, the user interface is not one.
This was going to be my point. AWS delivers a minimum viable product and heavily iterates on it. Usually features are prioritized over "upgrade the piece of shit angular app we use for the console."
I might run through the console to learn how something works, but in general I'm interacting with AWS through a terminal, and doing so that way is generally quite enjoyable.
I agree that GCP at least is a better experience for me as a developer, but I'm not sure if that translates directly into better anything for a customer of mine.
Can you offer more specifics about what you think is so terrible about its UX?
To me it's rather simple and clean, and I would expect that they have a vast team of UX experts testing their site to make sure it meets their overall product goals.
Besides, what you might find aesthetically pleasing is not necessarily pleasing to a global population of users with varied backgrounds/diverse age groups -- e.g. older generations might prefer the super simple fonts and general design standards that were more prevalent one or two decades ago.
Some product pages have images that zoom when you hover them, some instead have images that pop open in a (terrible) lightbox. No rhyme or reason as far as I can tell why some are one way and some are the other.
Especially for electronics or computer parts, if you don't know _exactly_ what you're looking for down to the part/model number, you're not going to get any help on amazon.com. I get the feeling they don't do any actual categorization (like say newegg seems to do) and instead you're actually getting just full-text search on product descriptions.
If you really want the part soon, you'd be fine with either "Prime" or "Prime FREE One-Day", right? But you can't search for both at the same time, for some reason they are mutually exclusive. So you duplicate the browser tab and search for "Prime" options in one and "Free One-Day" options in the other, like a caveman banging two tabs^W rocks together. I just noticed there's yet another option, a checkbox under "Delivery day" reading "Get It by Tomorrow".
If you _do_ know exactly what you want, good luck getting it because of the whole similar products from different sources getting intermingled in inventory.
I'm frankly blown away by how user-hostile the whole thing is. Prime shipping buys a lot of goodwill, it seems.
Up until two or three ywars ago Amazon did a tremendous job on catalogue data. Then the catalogue started to show the first issues of bad master data. It is hard work to maintain such large set of product master data, sure. But in the end I had the feeling that quality decreased. Add marketplace and third parties to the mix and it is a complex problem that needs constant maintenance directly impacting CX.
I think it mattered originally, when they were one of many. But once you are on the website the reliability of shipping, and simply the fact they already have my credit card is a major factor in repeat business.
It was probably much more important in the early days than it is now.
AWS's biggest customers are and always have been enterprises who have existing ops teams and existing data-centres, and are trying to "add cloud" or "migrate to cloud" the services that are running on those data centres, without either breaking SLAs with customers, or disrupting the workflows of those existing enterprise ops staff.
There is no reason to use AWS for green-field software development. But who's even doing that, these days, anyway?
> There is no reason to use AWS for green-field software development. But who's even doing that, these days, anyway?
I mean, lots of people are, right? I'm not myself, so I guess I don't really know, but surely lots of people are still making green-field software (if not, I think our industry is in some trouble...) and presumably a reasonably high proportion of those people are using the current #1 cloud hosting provider. Which part of this is wrong?
By definition if you are doing stuff on prem and then you start using AWS’s products like lambda, SQS, Fargate, etc you are doing green field projects.
IMO using the web console for your cloud development sounds like your a tiny shop. Your infrastructure and all that configuration should be in code and version control.
I think CloudFormation is difficult to use and could be much easier, but ops rant about the AWS UI being unfriendly makes it sound like he’s not really the kind of customer AWS is really after.
We are a tiny shop and I use ansible whenever possible. Even managing two or three ec2 instances with the UI is a nightmare. IMO that's a feature - you should start with a cms when small. Not bolt it on when it is too late. I'm looking into terraform though. Ansible's aws support is fairly limited.
The reason that you should use CloudFormation is that if you are working for a business, they most likely have a business support agreement with AWS. If you ever come across an issue, you have an easy button - AWS’s excellent support.
I had an issue with a CF template caused by property not being the correct case and the error message made no sense.
I started a chat with AWS after giving them the ARN of the template. He looked through my CloudTrail logs and the documentation and couldn’t figure it out either. He said he would get back to me....
He created a simplified CF template that reproduced the problem, talked to an CF developer, he said the developer looked through the code of the API call that CF was attempting and they found that the property was case sensitive. The guys at Hashicorp couldnt do that.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Hashicorp fanboy when it comes to onpremise implementations. I developed a system around Consul, Nomad, and Vault with a helping of Fabio.
I don't think you really get why enterprises buy managed cloud services, or why consumers buy in general. Your purchasing criteria seems out of tune with what consumers care the most about: selection, price, service.
That still doesn't explain AWS v Azure or GCP which have similar (or better) services, more than competitive pricing and in Azure's case, waaaaay better support.
In fact, everything about AWS is typically worse. Perhaps AWS entered the 'no one ever got fired for buying AWS territory' even when there are a ton of better options out there. If that's the case, kinda sucks for devs who are stuck using their crappy services when so many others exist.
It would be hard for me to imagine better support than we get from AWS support. Yes, we're paying for enterprise support and that's not inexpensive, but the support itself is phenomenal.
We literally have AWS technical generalists on-site once a week and they bring in subject matter experts on specific topics/services as-needed, sometimes on-site, sometimes via video.
I think part of it is AWS still has the broadest feature set. Also, the "dev ex" part gets easier especially if you are using AWS services through its CLI, and not through the console.
Agreed that the console's UX violates almost every UX principle in terms of its use of signifiers, etc.
I can’t speak to Azure, but GCP is backed by Google, and Google has a long history of killing off products. That’s not something I’d like to base my business on.
In India, we have Flipkart which is bigger than Amazon. I recently went back to using it and realized that their UX is so much cleaner and better looking than Amazon. Images are uniform, the text is well formatted, the colors aren't just a jumble of grays and the odd orange
If DX mattered to developers then we'd all still be using Rails. But generally the reaction I get when I highlight DX as a reason to pick technology is a misguided and masochistic "pick the right tool for the job" mentality.
I would love to see developers prioritizing themselves better. But they don't, themselves, do this.
I find amazon.com functional in a lot of ways, but it's definitely ugly and inconsistent and sometimes quite difficult to use. That aside though can you imagine if they did a significant reskin? Better or worse they would get torn to shreds. I bet that's at least a factor in what they decide to do.
I think in the case of amazon.com, the people who go there usually know what they want, they go, they search and the results they get are good enough.
It's actually a terrible site to "browse" if you're looking for something but not really sure what, but if you know roughly what you want it works fine.
I don’t use Amazon for the website, I use it because it brings shit to my house in a day or two. Companies with tremendous market power often have shitty customer experiences.
This....this makes no sense. An integration doesn't mean something else is going away. That's not how platforms work.
FWIW, gitlab is going to get acquired...it has to. Probably by google, or oracle, or salesforce, or ibm, or hp (or whatever name they have these days), or redhat. And depending on which one it is, will be how ruined gitlab becomes, because all of those seem like terrible options, but I digress now.
Does nutritionfacts.org pay for studies? Nope. (Exxon does)
Sorry, bad comparison. But I understand what you mean: Greger eats a plant based diet himself so he must be biased and the probably goes about cherry picking studies to match his beliefs. After a lot of research I've come to the conclusion he's honest and works in the interest of people's health.
How is Fog Creek allowed to do this after the sale of Trello to Atlassian? I would have expected some provision related to not releasing product/project management software for some period of time?
We don't see Trello as a competitor at all, that's why we integrate with it, just like we do with GitHub or Slack. And we use them both together every day at Fog Creek.
That's not really what I meant. What I really meant was that Manuscript very clearly does project management (it's even in the title of the site), which Trello did. I imagine that would be a 'no-no' in the Trello sale to Atlassian.
Manuscript is basically FogBugz, which is a Fog Creek product that predates Trello, so there must have been some kind of allowance for Fog Creek to continue to sell it. It's possible I'm wrong, but I'd be extremely surprised if that was the case.
I'm no longer deeply involved in this area so my information might be dated, though years ago it was pretty well understood based on the evidence that fat cells were created _and_ grew bigger as person got heavier, however, fat cells (once created) were never eliminated from the body, meaning they would shrink though they would be around forever once created.
It was also understood (if I recall correctly) that the faster someone gained fat, the easier it was for fat cells to be created. Meaning rapid weight gain was more likely to create new fat cells. (not sure if I'm remembering that one right)
It was surmised from these that this is why rebound weight gain (aside from rebound lifestyle factors) was quite easy for many, particularly the incredibly obese. It was also why it was strongly recommended to take fat gain incredibly seriously as the creation of fat cells was deemed potentially lifelong damaging.
This one always felt like a fraud when it was private. How was it able to go public? Isn't that supposed to root out these things?
Hearing about their revenue was an eye opener for sure.
Side note, I always wonder about the WeWorks and Nikola's of the world. The founders, who are obvious frauds in retrospect, still probably walk away with hundreds of millions if not a few billion. Sometimes it feels like being a decent human being doesn't pay off. Doesn't help that our current political environment is also rewarding the worst in us too