I think some sort of highly flexible model is long overdue. So, not a complete abandonment of the office, but people will no longer be forced to go in.
There's things that are hard to communicate even over vidconf, and thus it's useful to have at least some human contact. On the other hand, it's very useful for people with families to be able to shift their working hours around, and a fair few jobs would allow that.
I foresee a lot of firms reducing the offices, maybe making what's left a bit nicer, and then letting people take care of their own time. Perhaps something like a day or two in the office for meetings, the rest of the time work from home but be in contact.
Managers will have to let go of the desire to see that everyone is in their seat.
If they did a good job to ensure a sense of safety (making sure everything is cleaned and sanitized all the time etc) yes.
The fear I have going back to the office is people just touching stuff, door handles, glassware in the kitchen, etc. Being on top of every tiny violation is a new concept and a huge lift for any small/random company. So who knows, maybe this could be a good opportunity for wework.
Even if you think WeWork will disproportionately benefit... (And I'm not sure it does; do you want to be mixed in with employees from different companies that may have different rules about travel, behavior, etc.) Commercial real estate is likely to be an overall bloodbath.
Well, investment has a price, and there's always some level where a viable business is not a good investment.
I do think that WeWork offer something useful. I've been in them, they have a good vibe, and I think certain segments will decide it's worth using them.
But the comparables are firms like Regus, which is valued like a ordinary business with a known business model that is quite similar. They even have their own startup-vibe buildings.
Could they ever generate positive cash flow doing it? They are leasing general office space and customizing it to mark it up? If that’s ever profitable to do won’t their biggest competitors be their own landlords?
I think WeWork is one of the biggest losers of the pandemic. They have a massive amount of lease obligations, likely biggest in the world, right at the moment leased office space became far less valuable.
Even as the pandemic eases, do you think being in a shared office environment with strangers is going to be popular? I can’t count on people wearing masks at a restaurant, do I really want to share with a never masker in an open floor plan when I don’t even have a door or a wall?
> Managers will have to let go of the desire to see that everyone is in their seat.
Was it front-line managers who thought this or directors and VPs? Front-line managers have a better pulse on what their team(s) are doing by keeping an eye on Github/GitLab/VSTS checkins, PRs, and kanban boards than by seeing who has a butt in a seat. It's usually the more senior (and disconnected) managers who get nervous when they don't see their domain fully staffed between 9am and 3pm.
It’s been mostly the C-level people in my experience. Before covid, I worked for a company that required everyone to physically be in the office for 8 hours and asked us to set our arrival and departure times with the director of engineering. That was a pretty extreme case, but that all came down from the CEO, who was obsessed with “visibility == productivity”.
Established companies with well-defined processes seem to have adapted to WFH. I wonder how early stage startups are doing with WFH as communication is much more frequent in their case.
There are so many issues at play. However managers is a very narrow and should be expressed as Management. This goes all the way to the top and involves compromises as even a CEO/President is not going to be absolute in authority to declare one way or another. You don't get to that level without compromise.
The fear many have is they already know they have problem people and that the option to work from home will not fix this problem and instead possibly make it worse. This means the lack of action on management's part beforehand is going to brought to the forefront, unless of course they want to continue to kick the can down the road and ignore people they should have dealt with already.
Plus my favorite, for those renting space it comes down to how prestigious the address is. Quite a few in management derive a lot of status from where they work. Then throw in the companies that own their sites, that investment is hard to part with and many have dolled up their interiors to impress both visitors but also employees.
Then comes the majority of people who have jobs which will never work from home. It would be interesting to run the numbers to see how many jobs in a country could even be done remotely.
I bet that number skyrockets once you remove the jobs that only exist to support an "in office" economy.
Food workers for lunches. Clothing workers for suits. Automotive industry +public transit for commute. Construction and maintenance for offices. Furniture (where duplicated from the home). "Office managers"... On and on it goes. Those jobs will disappear and so the denominator shrinks, increasing the percent done from home.
That's actually kind of scary. This means that if the WFH trend continues after COVID, many of the jobs lost will never recover.
I live in a planned work/shopping/living area, and I've already seen several of the traditional office lunch places close for good. I'm sure the high end suit place is not doing well at all.
It would be such a relief if they went under, I am so tired of pinterest thumbnails (just copies of other images on the net, but low res, appearing first and unusable) polluting my image search results! Just this weekend I installed a plugin called Unpinterested to add -site:pinterest.* to all searches automatically- instant relief.
Great extension, I always search for recipes using google images. Pinterest results show up ALL the time, quite often they either don't have the actual recipe, or the image is way better than the underlying recipe. They are just generally low quality results.
> It would be such a relief if they went under, I am so tired of pinterest thumbnails
That's unlikely to happen as Pinterest is currently booming. Their global usage is growing fast for an already large social network. They have $1.7 billion in cash, with little to worry about financially for the next five plus years. Pinterest is likely to get a lot larger yet given their growth rate, they're up to 416 million monthly actives with zero serious threats in terms of competition. Facebook's attempt at building a competitor failed nearly immediately. As with LinkedIn, they occupy a niche in social media that they entirely own.
Overwhelmingly their target base is women. If you look at their newer markets around the world, uptake is always dominated by that demographic. Pinterest doesn't release very detailed information on their user demograhpics, however I'd be surprised if it's not 2/3 women or greater.
I entirely agree with the annoyance of the Pinterest image mess in Google image search results, which has been going on for many years now. However there is a legitimate place for Pinterest in terms of what it does. The parent should primarily be annoyed with Google (which is intentionally - they're fully aware of what's going on - filling their image results with Pinterest images), not Pinterest.
I would add to this - teachers and education in general have a specific use for Pinterest. My spouse, and all of the teachers in the k-12 system we are associated with use it for classroom ideas ranging from basic bulletin board decorating to science experiments and literature lessons.
You almost certainly have unless you don't interact with women ever.
I can't use it because of it's closed nature, but it has a very good set of image cataloging and sharing features. Add in the valuable network effects and I see why people use it for idea sharing/collaboration.
Purely anecdotal, but pinterest is the only social media network that my mother has ever signed up for. She and her friends use it for recipes and animal photos. I reckon the platform has managed to capture those for whom Facebook is too much of an information barrage, and Instagram is too youth-oriented or "me"-centric. From what I've seen, it's like a more innocuous Tumblr, without all the drama.
I'm a male and occasional user of Pinterest. I used it with my wife to collect and exchange images and ideas about interior design. I have a couple of male friends who have used it in a similar way. It's very good in suggesting visually related images. It is not an image search engine like Google, but rather a tool to organise and share collections of visual references. It seems to work great in areas where Google or DDG image search fail, because it relies on users organizing images, and seems to have a similarity graph for images. There are kinds of images you can easier find on Pinterest than on Google: haircut and fashion ideas, interior and architecture design, gardening and landscaping, some diy items, etc. When you have an idea how something looks, but don't know google keywords to find it.
I understand frustration of Google image search users. But pins in google search results are Google's problem. I switched to DDG myself, and find it more straightforward for keyword based image search.
> And that niche is being a parasite on Google Image Search while offering crap results?
I believe your anger is misplaced, and directed at the wrong target as well. It's Google Images offering the crap results, and I think you already know that. Reddit is also loaded with plenty of low quality content, as is Imgur, as is Facebook, as is Twitter; all large social networks are flooded with epic piles of garbage; Google's search results are clearly the problem re Pinterest images showing up in Google image search.
To answer your 'question,' the 416 million monthly active users very obviously aren't staying with Pinterest just because Google Images has a lot of Pinterest image results.
I don't like TikTok, it doesn't appeal to me. The very short video clips mostly annoy me. I still fully understand why so many people use it. Google indexes their video content - I wouldn't blame TikTok if Google's video search turns to crap over time due to that, I'd blame Google.
OTOH the same logic would be to blame google when sites are using blackhat SEO. AFAIK pinterest does do greyhat (at best seo): they scrape images, feed them to google image search to get the best tags, and add then to the post.
You're saying that asking Google which terms best describe the pic, and writing that down next to the pic, is unethical SEO? At most it's some kind of theoretical IP infringement on Google's image recog algorithm.
Is it still considered a social network let alone social media? I was under the impression it was more like a shop-by-image these days—I.e. most interactions are with products, not people.
You really want all their staff to lose their jobs just so your image search results experience is better? Seems a bit selfish don't you think? What about all the users that enjoy it?
I don't like pinterest and I get the frustration but come on, there are better solutions than "this thing bothers me so let's get rid of it completely."
This combined with the fact that Google images disables saving images from search results on Firefox mobile has got me angrier than it should a few times.
After two previous times of attempting to switch to DDG from Google I finally made the switch seemingly permanently earlier this year. DDG is really good these days. Very occasionally I'll send a query over to google, which is easy in Firefox with the "@google <search term>" syntax in the url bar. Usually only necessary for local news.
I use DDG too but Google does much better the more specific you get. I probably end up opening Google at least 5 times a day because of annoying DDG results.
FYI, your last three comments were dead. I've vouched for them, but it could be worth contacting HN moderation to see what's up because none of your comments looked hellban-worthy.
I just want to know why Google Images shows Pinterest at all. It is clearly misleading and just ripping images from other sites which should be the real results. Its almost like if Google search has decayed and Images is piggybacking off of Pinterest on purpose.
My guess would be that pinterest has done a much better job of image indexing than your random DIY blog. I'm not sure what all that entails but if anyone has done research to game the system it would be them.
I imagine explicitly excluding images from Pinterest creates some legal issue, if not from Pinterest itself then from how it's functioning as a service to let people steal images. Leaving sites like Pinterest in maybe allows them to say to Getty "it's not our fault if the host isn't taking measures to protect your content"
As a Pinterest and Duck Duck Go user, I don't know what you're talking about, but this comment feels like digital NIMBYism: "please don't exist, so I can recapture a little bit of how the past felt." Glad you found a work-around though.
Pinterest is a nice place for collecting ideas (photos) related to a hobby, in my case architecture from around the world. It's also (more commonly I think) used for coming up with style ideas, at both personal and home scales.
Pinterest is fine if you are looking for its content on its site. But if you want a direct shot to a picture and it happens to be off of Pinterest it can be rather obnoxious.
I expressed this same view on Twitter and I got a DM from a Pinterest software engineer who seemed to be an intelligent and thoughtful person but also seemed to be puzzled by my position, and genuinely unaware that this perception of Pinterest exists. There must be some other side of Pinterest that I've never seen, where it performs a useful function for its users?
Bummer - that engineer is not an intelligent person.
I am yet to find at least a single spamming company whose owners would not be well aware of what they are - because if they are stupid enough to believe their own story they will be quickly taken over by someone who is well aware of their own BS.
70% of pinterest users, and 93% of pinterest usage is female. That's probably highly correlated to your
(and HN userbase's) confusion about how Pinterest is perceived.
Yeah I signed up for Pinterest once and ticked "prefer not to specify" on the gender question. I also opted not to select any favourite/followed categories.
I was immediately inundated with bridal content and very little else.
Both use the mobile app exclusively & basically just use it for moodboarding/inspiration. They interact with it entirely within the app and don't leave the app.
Is it possible this engineer is working on a part of the product that doesn't directly touch the web publishing side and is (relatively) unaware of that side of the business.
I've definitely met engineers who don't dogfood and wouldn't be aware of aspects of their company's product since they haven't used it themselves.
I use Pinterest all the time. It has a truly _phenomenal_ similar image recommendation engine, which I use for finding art and design inspiration pictures. Particularly if I want to find reference images for drawing, I find one that looks roughly like I want and then scroll down to the recommended list and get inundated with an endless amount of similar images in that style. It is _so_ useful!
I agree that Pinterest's practices with Google search are pretty poor. But Pinterest as a standalone product is amazing.
It got so bad that I basically had to stop using Google image search for a while until I found that plugin also. It's made image search useful again.
I get that Pinterest has a dedicated userbase and get utility from it. But it's basically polluting search engines with spam at this point for non-users. I kind of don't get why it doesn't fall into the same problems that experts exchange did with showing google one thing and users a different thing for purposes of indexing. It resulted in them getting deprioritized and the main search working better as a result.
Why does a company that is worth more that 20 billion dollars rent property in the first place? If, as others have said, the total value of the lease was $440 million, surely its better to hire people to buy and run an office building?
Another is laws about employment. Is the guy who empties the trash can an employee of the building or the company who leases the space. That can mean different levels of what has to be offered to that janitor. As the mega corp could be 200k people and need to offer X benefits by law the building owner has it broken out into a REIT and the guy works for a 50 person employee shop and has Y benefits.
The same reason you might use a VPS rather than build your own cloud infrastructure - sure you might save some money, but maintenance is then your problem, scaling down or up is harder and you lose flexibility to move provider.
Also there might be some tax incentive if you can put the building down as an ongoing cost to your company.
Economy of scale in property managment probably meant that just having the whole thing as opex made sense. I don't imagine they'd be much better off now if they owned it and had to sell it off, might even have to take a comparable loss in such a case.
Most likely a prop 13 issue. Property taxes don’t go up in California unless you sell, since 1978, which means a lot of people are still paying what they paid in '78. Goes for commercial too, not just poor grandma eating cat food with all that equity in her Beverly Hills cottage. All the big towers are leased. I heard it’s downright byzantine, with many layers of 99-year subleases. Good deal for the lawyers, and for the landlords! Some professional would lose a license for malpractice if they sold.
By the way, it’s not just SF, it’s also the big chunks of the valley. The Facebook sign still says Sun on the back, and the Googleplex land is on lease from NASA. Question I’d like to know the answer to: who owns the land at Apple Park?
This law is enshrined in that fine document the California constitution, and can only be repealed by a simple majority of voters. Voters who own homes, or live for free in a home someone owns, or pay rent to live in a home someone owns.
The commercial property aspect of Prop 13 is actually up for a vote in Prop 15, to repeal these tax breaks for commercial property over $3M. It’s interesting to see people come out of the woodwork railing against it for all sorts of reasons from how the money is distributed to claiming it will cost the state hundreds of thousands of jobs. Would be nice to see this archaic tax relic go away. It’s like the state has granted feudal land rights to certain property owners.
> Why does a company that is worth more that 20 billion dollars rent property in the first place?
Market cap often isn't a good metric for how large a company is operationally, nor a great indicator of its operational needs. This is especially true right now, given that valuations are often quite inflated.
Pinterest is worth $21 billion, however they only have 2,400 employees.
Shopify is worth $124 billion. They have ~5,000 employees.
Target is worth $75 billion and has 368,000 employees.
3M is worth $94 billion and has 96,000 employees.
IBM is worth $111 billion and has 356,000 employees.
GE is worth $57 billion with 205,000 employees.
And so on.
Then there is Visa, worth $473b, more than the valuation of all the publicly traded banks in the EU. Only 19,500 employees and comical margins (67% operating income margin, extreme to say the least). Versus, say, Wells Fargo with a $101b market cap and 265,000 employees. Obviously very different businesses within the financial world, however that's the point.
Or AMD, worth $100b, with close to 20,000 employees. Intel has 110,000 employees with a $214b market cap. Intel's operating business is ten times larger than AMD (one assumes AMD will enjoy increasing economies of scale from their products as they continue to grow). The market cap just typically doesn't tell you enough about the operations of a business to give you great insight into its office needs.
Agreed though it would be a better illustration to add outstanding debt to market cap to get a sense of the size of the company. Some companies (like GE I assume) are largely financed by debt and not by equity and it makes them look considerably smaller in terms of net assets than they really are.
Office buildings are funded with mountains of cheap debt.
Pinterest is funded mostly with equity. Maybe debt later when the growth is more stable but mostly equity.
Financially, equity is jet fuel. It's expensive and you use it to build startups, movies, and other intangible-heavy things.
Real estate debt is more like gasoline or diesel. There's a lot more of it than jet fuel, it's cheaper, and lower-quality/energy.
If you try to run a gasoline engine (office space) on jet fuel, you'd likely destroy it and would definitely waste money putting something of too high a "grade" into the engine. Likewise, you can't run a jet engine (startup) on diesel. It won't run.
Getting back to the question at hand, it's more efficient to run the offices on cheap real estate funding, and have the Pinterest operating company lease the asset, than have it own the office directly. Sometimes companies will buy offices themselves (like Apple) but it's something investors put up with, not encourage.
Don't know what the US is like, but here in the UK my company could afford to buy property but rents instead because you can deduct all of your rent against profits, whereas if you buy a commercial property the write downs are terrible and spread over too far a horizon.
Owning property ties up capital. All that money is tied up in that land and that building. That money can't then be used to grow the business in other ways.
Owning and managing physical property isn't what a tech company is good at. Some of the really big companies might own some of their buildings completely... but I feel confident in saying that most don't.
Owning and managing a physical property means also having staff that does maintenance, grounds keeping, electrical, plumbing, deals with the accounting on taxes, etc... That isn't party of the core competency of the tech company. If anything, it distracts the company from its revenue.
A company that I worked at in the late '90s and '00s in Sunnyvale bought the land, built the buildings... and then immediately turned around and sold them to a property management company and leased it back from them.
If they had purchased a building years ago now they would be stuck with it as the market turns south and they have no need for it. This scenario is actually a good argument for a company keeping to its core competencies and not letting non-core activities drag them down.
I’m not knowledgeable enough on the current state of VR, but I’m curious as to how it will affect office setups. If VR can replicate the feeling of being in the same room, I imagine some companies will skip the office expense entirely.
I can’t foresee wanting to wear a VR helmet all day, but for an hour-long meeting? Maybe. Presumably projection tech will also progress and we might not even need to wear a helmet. Is this something that can conceivably exist in the next 10-15 years?
I’ve personally spent hours on end in a VR helmet doing vigorous exercise, and that’s with now-obsolete tech. I wouldn’t want to use that set for many more hours of coding, but maybe a different form factor would work. What about those low-fi AR glasses we’ve all been making fun of? Good enough to inspire that “somebody’s looking over your shoulder” feeling?
Latency and I also think it's just harder to read body language and back off of talking over. I was on an online panel a few months ago with people who I've appeared with before. We definitely did more talking over each other and not doing smooth handoffs than would have been the case in person.
I definitely have zero interest in wearing a headset for calls etc. unless the results are really amazing. Assuming the network is behaving (and people have a decent setup), video calls are fine.
I don't think I've ever been that annoyed at a scroll jacking website in my live. You legit scroll multiple wheel rotations for about 20-50pxs of scroll.
And as long as we're being off-topic, the renderings on that page are wonderfully detailed. Someone had a bit of fun making them. On one of them, the artist has replaced Caltrain's rolling stock with something a bit more attractive.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadThere's things that are hard to communicate even over vidconf, and thus it's useful to have at least some human contact. On the other hand, it's very useful for people with families to be able to shift their working hours around, and a fair few jobs would allow that.
I foresee a lot of firms reducing the offices, maybe making what's left a bit nicer, and then letting people take care of their own time. Perhaps something like a day or two in the office for meetings, the rest of the time work from home but be in contact.
Managers will have to let go of the desire to see that everyone is in their seat.
would you invest in wework if they become the biggest provider of these prefurnished, time-share offices?
The fear I have going back to the office is people just touching stuff, door handles, glassware in the kitchen, etc. Being on top of every tiny violation is a new concept and a huge lift for any small/random company. So who knows, maybe this could be a good opportunity for wework.
I do think that WeWork offer something useful. I've been in them, they have a good vibe, and I think certain segments will decide it's worth using them.
But the comparables are firms like Regus, which is valued like a ordinary business with a known business model that is quite similar. They even have their own startup-vibe buildings.
I think WeWork is one of the biggest losers of the pandemic. They have a massive amount of lease obligations, likely biggest in the world, right at the moment leased office space became far less valuable.
Even as the pandemic eases, do you think being in a shared office environment with strangers is going to be popular? I can’t count on people wearing masks at a restaurant, do I really want to share with a never masker in an open floor plan when I don’t even have a door or a wall?
Was it front-line managers who thought this or directors and VPs? Front-line managers have a better pulse on what their team(s) are doing by keeping an eye on Github/GitLab/VSTS checkins, PRs, and kanban boards than by seeing who has a butt in a seat. It's usually the more senior (and disconnected) managers who get nervous when they don't see their domain fully staffed between 9am and 3pm.
So they cancelled WFH Fridays
I wonder what they think of WFH now
We have an administrator who gets visibly upset if it appears that we are not in our office 8-5 at least.
And the programs I work with (outside of tech) work offsite. If they're here, they're prepping. The real work happens out in the community.
Old timey work mentality = broken.
The fear many have is they already know they have problem people and that the option to work from home will not fix this problem and instead possibly make it worse. This means the lack of action on management's part beforehand is going to brought to the forefront, unless of course they want to continue to kick the can down the road and ignore people they should have dealt with already.
Plus my favorite, for those renting space it comes down to how prestigious the address is. Quite a few in management derive a lot of status from where they work. Then throw in the companies that own their sites, that investment is hard to part with and many have dolled up their interiors to impress both visitors but also employees.
Then comes the majority of people who have jobs which will never work from home. It would be interesting to run the numbers to see how many jobs in a country could even be done remotely.
Around 34%
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/much-us-staying-home-how-man...
Food workers for lunches. Clothing workers for suits. Automotive industry +public transit for commute. Construction and maintenance for offices. Furniture (where duplicated from the home). "Office managers"... On and on it goes. Those jobs will disappear and so the denominator shrinks, increasing the percent done from home.
I live in a planned work/shopping/living area, and I've already seen several of the traditional office lunch places close for good. I'm sure the high end suit place is not doing well at all.
On the last days before covid WFH I was still going into the office (against better judgement) because we had meetings
When I got to the meeting room I found I was the only one there. The other attendees were either in a remote location or WFH
Would you want everyone from the same team going i to the office on the same day during a pandemic? Probably increases contagion risk.
Would a company want everyone from the same team in the same location?
That's unlikely to happen as Pinterest is currently booming. Their global usage is growing fast for an already large social network. They have $1.7 billion in cash, with little to worry about financially for the next five plus years. Pinterest is likely to get a lot larger yet given their growth rate, they're up to 416 million monthly actives with zero serious threats in terms of competition. Facebook's attempt at building a competitor failed nearly immediately. As with LinkedIn, they occupy a niche in social media that they entirely own.
Overwhelmingly their target base is women. If you look at their newer markets around the world, uptake is always dominated by that demographic. Pinterest doesn't release very detailed information on their user demograhpics, however I'd be surprised if it's not 2/3 women or greater.
I entirely agree with the annoyance of the Pinterest image mess in Google image search results, which has been going on for many years now. However there is a legitimate place for Pinterest in terms of what it does. The parent should primarily be annoyed with Google (which is intentionally - they're fully aware of what's going on - filling their image results with Pinterest images), not Pinterest.
Their image related grouping works way better for the things I'm interested in (art/illustrations) than other sites.
I can't use it because of it's closed nature, but it has a very good set of image cataloging and sharing features. Add in the valuable network effects and I see why people use it for idea sharing/collaboration.
I understand frustration of Google image search users. But pins in google search results are Google's problem. I switched to DDG myself, and find it more straightforward for keyword based image search.
I believe your anger is misplaced, and directed at the wrong target as well. It's Google Images offering the crap results, and I think you already know that. Reddit is also loaded with plenty of low quality content, as is Imgur, as is Facebook, as is Twitter; all large social networks are flooded with epic piles of garbage; Google's search results are clearly the problem re Pinterest images showing up in Google image search.
To answer your 'question,' the 416 million monthly active users very obviously aren't staying with Pinterest just because Google Images has a lot of Pinterest image results.
I don't like TikTok, it doesn't appeal to me. The very short video clips mostly annoy me. I still fully understand why so many people use it. Google indexes their video content - I wouldn't blame TikTok if Google's video search turns to crap over time due to that, I'd blame Google.
When I find an image on Google search and I want to go to the source site, I want to see that exact image there.
Not scummy paywalled "I show Google something else than you" images.
Plus it's pretty obvious that in many cases they scraped the original, which then they outrank in SEO.
Go enable 'uBlock Annoyances' in the filter lists. Enable 'Fanboys annoyances' too.
Or if you just want to remove the results, add this to the filters - https://pastebin.com/MHbiNK9N
https://i.imgur.com/POboA3n.png
Too many filter lists will slow down your machine.
Is there some particular reason not to enable the Adguard list over the uBlock one?
The uBO one is maintained by the devs themselves. Easier to report if something breaks.
It can also remove Instagram and Quora login-walls.
I don't like pinterest and I get the frustration but come on, there are better solutions than "this thing bothers me so let's get rid of it completely."
So, no. They are comparing "getting rid of" and "getting rid of".
So you want to ruin image search results experience for some people so that you can keep your job? That also selfish don't you think ?
Selfish goes both way.
1. Pinterest images appear much less frequently in image search results
2. When they do, they can still be directly linked to
Either way, "Oh, $bigco is in the title? Let me just react to that!" is one of the worst parts of the HN comments section.
Pinterest is a nice place for collecting ideas (photos) related to a hobby, in my case architecture from around the world. It's also (more commonly I think) used for coming up with style ideas, at both personal and home scales.
I am yet to find at least a single spamming company whose owners would not be well aware of what they are - because if they are stupid enough to believe their own story they will be quickly taken over by someone who is well aware of their own BS.
I was immediately inundated with bridal content and very little else.
Lots of female users use Pinterest for organizing pins for a wedding. Essentially, they are great as a wedding checklist planner.
Both use the mobile app exclusively & basically just use it for moodboarding/inspiration. They interact with it entirely within the app and don't leave the app.
Is it possible this engineer is working on a part of the product that doesn't directly touch the web publishing side and is (relatively) unaware of that side of the business.
I've definitely met engineers who don't dogfood and wouldn't be aware of aspects of their company's product since they haven't used it themselves.
I agree that Pinterest's practices with Google search are pretty poor. But Pinterest as a standalone product is amazing.
I get that Pinterest has a dedicated userbase and get utility from it. But it's basically polluting search engines with spam at this point for non-users. I kind of don't get why it doesn't fall into the same problems that experts exchange did with showing google one thing and users a different thing for purposes of indexing. It resulted in them getting deprioritized and the main search working better as a result.
> Pinterest, ..., said its lease obligations for the Bluxome project would have been at least $440 million.
Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Pinterest-cance...
Also there might be some tax incentive if you can put the building down as an ongoing cost to your company.
By the way, it’s not just SF, it’s also the big chunks of the valley. The Facebook sign still says Sun on the back, and the Googleplex land is on lease from NASA. Question I’d like to know the answer to: who owns the land at Apple Park?
This law is enshrined in that fine document the California constitution, and can only be repealed by a simple majority of voters. Voters who own homes, or live for free in a home someone owns, or pay rent to live in a home someone owns.
Market cap often isn't a good metric for how large a company is operationally, nor a great indicator of its operational needs. This is especially true right now, given that valuations are often quite inflated.
Pinterest is worth $21 billion, however they only have 2,400 employees.
Shopify is worth $124 billion. They have ~5,000 employees.
Target is worth $75 billion and has 368,000 employees.
3M is worth $94 billion and has 96,000 employees.
IBM is worth $111 billion and has 356,000 employees.
GE is worth $57 billion with 205,000 employees.
And so on.
Then there is Visa, worth $473b, more than the valuation of all the publicly traded banks in the EU. Only 19,500 employees and comical margins (67% operating income margin, extreme to say the least). Versus, say, Wells Fargo with a $101b market cap and 265,000 employees. Obviously very different businesses within the financial world, however that's the point.
Or AMD, worth $100b, with close to 20,000 employees. Intel has 110,000 employees with a $214b market cap. Intel's operating business is ten times larger than AMD (one assumes AMD will enjoy increasing economies of scale from their products as they continue to grow). The market cap just typically doesn't tell you enough about the operations of a business to give you great insight into its office needs.
Office buildings are funded with mountains of cheap debt.
Pinterest is funded mostly with equity. Maybe debt later when the growth is more stable but mostly equity.
Financially, equity is jet fuel. It's expensive and you use it to build startups, movies, and other intangible-heavy things.
Real estate debt is more like gasoline or diesel. There's a lot more of it than jet fuel, it's cheaper, and lower-quality/energy.
If you try to run a gasoline engine (office space) on jet fuel, you'd likely destroy it and would definitely waste money putting something of too high a "grade" into the engine. Likewise, you can't run a jet engine (startup) on diesel. It won't run.
Getting back to the question at hand, it's more efficient to run the offices on cheap real estate funding, and have the Pinterest operating company lease the asset, than have it own the office directly. Sometimes companies will buy offices themselves (like Apple) but it's something investors put up with, not encourage.
"Zynga to Make $369 Million on Sale of Headquarters. That's far more than the company has ever made selling mobile games."
https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/05/29/zynga-to-make-369-...
Owning and managing physical property isn't what a tech company is good at. Some of the really big companies might own some of their buildings completely... but I feel confident in saying that most don't.
Owning and managing a physical property means also having staff that does maintenance, grounds keeping, electrical, plumbing, deals with the accounting on taxes, etc... That isn't party of the core competency of the tech company. If anything, it distracts the company from its revenue.
A company that I worked at in the late '90s and '00s in Sunnyvale bought the land, built the buildings... and then immediately turned around and sold them to a property management company and leased it back from them.
I can’t foresee wanting to wear a VR helmet all day, but for an hour-long meeting? Maybe. Presumably projection tech will also progress and we might not even need to wear a helmet. Is this something that can conceivably exist in the next 10-15 years?
For me when I'm working remote the existing video chat stuff would be great if they could fix the latency.
Anything over a few hundred milliseconds means you end up talking over people accidentally, it's hard to have a naturally flowing conversation.
Honestly a big 4K screen on the wall with a good webcam on both ends and low latency would be great.
I definitely have zero interest in wearing a headset for calls etc. unless the results are really amazing. Assuming the network is behaving (and people have a decent setup), video calls are fine.
Every other site that employed the same SEO and funnel tactics as Pinterest would be banned within a month.
https://iwamotoscott.com/projects/bluxome
I don't think I've ever been that annoyed at a scroll jacking website in my live. You legit scroll multiple wheel rotations for about 20-50pxs of scroll.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24312478