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Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success. I think a lot of the advice is applicable to startups.

1. KPIs, for Beast they are CTR, AVD, AVP, will look different if you are a startup. I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than >95% of startup founders. Because he is literally hacking/being judged by an algorithm, his KPIs will matter more and can be closely dissected. Startups aren't that easy in that sense, but KPIs still matter.

2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.

3. Building value > making money

4. Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees.

5. Understanding that some videos only his team can do, and actively exploiting and widening that gap.

The management/communication stuff is mostly about working on set/dealing with physical scale. You need a lot more hands dealing with logistics, which requires hardline communication and management. In startups, the team is usually really lean and technical, so management becomes more straightforward.

I am also getting some bad culture vibes from the PDF and really dislike the writing style. I think it's important not to micromanage to the extent he is--it's necessary, maybe, for his business. Not for startups. Interesting perspective, reminds me of a chef de cuisine in a cutthroat 90s kitchen. The dishes (videos) have to be perfect, they require a lot of prep and a lot of hands, and you have to consistently pump them out.

I’m with you on the management vibes - it doesn’t sound like a culture that I’d enjoy.

That’s one of the things I find so interesting about this document: it does feel very honest and unfiltered, and as such it appears to be quite an accurate insight into their culture.

And that’s a culture that works if you want to create massive successful viral YouTube videos targeting their audience.

How much has that specific chosen culture contributed to their enormous success in that market? There’s no way to know that, but my hunch is it contributed quite a bit.

What I find interesting in reading this is that it's not particularly surprising in content. And I don't mean that I expected some hugely toxic culture from a youtube company and found it. I mean that the whole document is largely pretty standard "how to make it in a competitive industry" advice. The tone might be a little unprofessional for folks who are used to big corporate talk, but if you'd leaked internal Microsoft or Google documents to a bunch of long time IBM folks they would have thought the same things I'm sure. The tone might be different, but most of the points seem identical to stuff anyone should be familiar with. "Follow up when you ask someone for something", "Don't commit to giving X if you can't actually get X", "Have a backup plan", "Try to turn a failure into something useful", "Own your mistakes", "Make sure you've exhausted all the avenues for something before you decide it's impossible", "Do the hard work early so you're not cramming it all in at the end", "You are the subject matter expert on your specific project, assume everyone else doesn't know anything". Even the "A,B,C" employee thing is pretty standard stuff folks know intuitively. Fast food is garbage no matter where you go, yet somehow Chick Fil A has lines around the block at lunch time and if there's 3 cars in a Wendy's drive through, you'll go somewhere else. Why? Because Chick Fil A really tries to not have "C" employees (relative to fast food employees in general), and it shows in the customer experience. Two fast food places can have the same quality of food, and the one with the drive through attendant that acknowledges people and responds to phatic phrases, and marks the diet soda cup is going to have more traffic and customer satisfaction than the one where the attendant barely acknowledges you've arrived at the window and leaves you to figure out which was the diet coke when you get home.

That's the same impression I got. It's odd seeing the discussion veer off into morality, because most of it seems to be standard and non-problematic advice (IE, understanding what your product is and don't get distracted by focusing on what it's not).

And though the advice isn't particularly novel, it was worth reading since a surprisingly large amount of people don't do these simple things.

I read the entire PDF and I felt he was pretty spot on about works and what doesn't in running a business.

This is Hacker News, ostensibly created as a website for hackers and founders.

If you are a hacker and a founder then a ton of this advice is spot on.

For example it's a simple concept but he absolutely nails a key factor by distinguishing between A, B and C employees. A high performing team really can't have more than one or two C's. It moves them out even if they're nice, cool, good people. If the team is run by good humans it does what Mr. Beast does and gives them severance.

I can smell a couple C employees fuming on here and in the Twitter thread. I've had C employees work for me and they were always the ones who lobbied me hardest for being more tolerant of mediocrity. Sorry but you just have to hold the line against the average if you want to succeed, this is dictionary definition level of obvious. To be above average, you have to be above freaking average. Half the world is C's and to win your team needs to not be in that half.

Is this really standard management advice? Half-way through the PDF I already felt like I'm reading some insane drivel of a sweatshop boss / wannabe cult leader. Whatever illusion I had that Mr Beast videos are worth watching, I lost it entirely, having learned that they're just a factory product with Mr Beast brand on it, a corporation pretending to be a person, optimized to waste people time[0], and made by people bullied into extremely unhealthy and antisocial behaviors.

Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street?

This source is pure gold: techniques to manipulate people into consuming your product - which they otherwise wouldn't be. All so you can make money on poisoning their minds (advertising, which is how you convert views to money). You can easily imagine this came out from a drug cartel boss, I'd expect the best and most ruthless one to operate just like that, with same level of cultishness.

And if that's who Mr Beast is, and that's how he thinks of other people - because believe it or not, viewers are other people too, not some cattle to be milked and slaughtered - then I'm glad I don't watch his videos. Not going to, and I'm happy to pass this document around to dissuade others from viewing his channel.

--

[0] - I mean, that's kind of obvious in anything social media, but rarely do you get it spelled out without any qualms.

> Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial.

See I didn’t read it that way at all. I read that as a statement of a concept I’ve always heard about when coordinating between groups. Effectively “pick a person in the other group to be your liaison and your counterpart and coordinate directly, don’t just throw stuff over the wall and hope someone picks it up”. It’s the same basic psychological concept as “in an emergency situation pick one person in the crowd, point them out and tell them personally to go call 911”. Diffusion of responsibility means people will delay or stuff will get dropped. To make things happen you have to make sure things are assigned. Surely this isn’t particularly surprising or controversial right? It’s why large teams often appoint “interrupt” workers who are appointed to specifically answer out of band requests coming in. It’s why you have an on call rotation instead of just paging the entire company if something goes down. It’s why agile appoints a “scrum master” whose singular mission is to clear up blocking issues for the team. It’s why if you don’t assign people to work on maintenance, maintenance won’t get done.

I read that part of the document as saying “if you’re in charge of producing a video due in 45 days, don’t just send a general request for someone to make a script to the writing department, pick a person and get on the same page about what needs to be done and when”

> Like, the part about making your co-workers feel like they're bottlenecking you; can't imagine working in an environment where everyone tries that number on everyone else. It's extremely adversarial. Is that really standard management advice? Maybe on Wall Street?

I think you're misunderstanding that part. The goal isn't to accuse the coworker. The goal is to explain to the coworker that what they need to do for the project is important to the point where any delays is going to cause a delay for the entire project. This isn't intended to be a negative statement; many projects do rely heavily on certain members getting things in by a particular timeline, and if that isn't communicated and followed up on, projects will fail. The dudebro speech in the document lacks tact, but the underlying principal is sound. The excerpt:

> DO NOT just go to them and say “I need creative, let me know when it’s done” and “I need a thumbnail, let me know when it’s done”. This is what most people do and it’s one of the reasons why we fail so much. I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. “Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” Now this person who also has tons of shit going on is aware of how important this discussion is and you guys can prio it accordingly. Now let’s say Tyler and you agree it will be done in 5 days. YOU DON’T GET TO SET A REMINDER FOR 5 DAYS AND NOT TALK TO HIM FOR 5 DAYS! Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date. I want less excuses in this company. Take ownership and don’t give your project a chance to fail. Dumping your bottleneck on someone and then just walking away until it’s done is lazy and it gives room for error and I want you to have a mindset that God himself couldn’t stop you from making this video on time. Check. In. Daily. Leave. No. Room. For. Error.

My uncharitable guess is that a lot of people here talking about the morality of his videos (not the company culture) are mostly parents bitter about their child watching Mr Beast and wanting Feastables.

The company culture is extreme almost culty. I do think that probably what you need to succeed in the creative world because the competition is so insane

> The company culture is extreme almost culty.

Is it? I know one former employee who is currently in open conflict appears to think so, but they're also a single potentially biased source. Beyond that, has there been any specific information about the culture inside? This document hardly reads as "extreme almost culty" to me.

Yeah, it reads as being pretty standard to me.

To be honest I think there's just a bit of a bifurcation between people who do business, like really do business as a competition like an Olympic sport, and people who just sort of like turn up and do their thing for a bit and then go home.

To the former camp all of this is intuitively obvious and doesn't need spelling out although the insights are generally useful.

Reading this post at the same time as a blind post where someone is asking what people do for the resto of the week once they finish their 2 hours of sprint work.

The dichotomy sometimes

The blind poster is obviously more savvy than the "A players".

Can you please share the other post you are referring to?

That’s one of the most interesting parts of this document. Many people will read it and think “I would never work at a place like that,” and many others would think “that’s exactly the environment I want to work in!”

More startups should be this transparent about their stated/desired culture (even if unintentionally).

It clearly biased for young people or those without a family with something to prove, the perfect type of employee to exploit and vampirize.

It’s not about exploiting. Getting work done isn’t inherently a bad thing.

It’s about everyone doing 60-80 hours of work a week though

Lots of people make youtube videos for fun. Work can be fun to the point where it's what you want to do. Not what you have to do.

If you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life. If I wasn't employed as a software dev then I would still be writing code on a daily basis.

Lol. Hustle shops pay less and there are more hours. It is not exploitation, but usually there are better gigs. Finance is probably an exception where you know those long hours will be rewarded one day either in the current gig or another future one.

Some have a passion for their job. I know, it’s unimaginable.

I love my job, but I don't do more than 8 hours generally, and am paid very fairly, and it's quite competitive, we aren't slackers.

There's no exploitation, he wants them to get rich, he wants this to be their last career. He's asking who's interested in going on that journey.

The important thing (not mentioned in the document) is how much he pays them. That determines whether "wanting them to get rich" is real or not.

Once I worked in a small software company, and the boss kept telling us "if the company grows, we will get more money, and we will all get rich". Young and naive, we worked hard. When the company grew, he... hired more developers. Well, of course. That is obviously much more profitable than increasing the salary of the existing developers. At the end, he was the only person who got rich. Why did we ever think it would end up differently? I guess, because we were young and naive, and also because he told us so.

Being older and more cynical, if you want me to get rich, pay me. (Or make me a partner in business.) Otherwise, five or ten years later, when the company gets big and I will probably be burned out, you will have no incentive to waste money on the burned out guy, when the alternative is to hire someone fresh.

> Why did we ever think it would end up differently?

Because it has worked, countless times. Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc were all small software companies once, the current hotness is NVIDIA (ok hardware, not software). Obviously it doesn't happen often, or to a high percentage of startups, but hey, he wasn't lying to you, you took the job knowing the deal.

Did the original employees get rich when those companies grew?

How exactly do they get rich? No obvious mention of profit share or any other actual reward expect the growth of the beast media brand

I appreciate it for being honest tbh, 99% of job hunting in the IT field is filtering out the bullshit, or the greenwashing that what a company does is Good, Actually.

Example, I work for an energy company. Their objective is to earn money. They earn money by selling gas and electricity to their customers. Their revenue increases if they have more customers, using more electricity/gas, and if the price goes up. If they were honest, they would be pushing their customers to use more energy; "Hot in summer? Get an AC! Cold in winter? Don't wear a sweater, crank up the thermostat! Have you considered a sauna and jaccuzi? Isn't a long hot bath nice?" that kind of thing.

But all energy companies' marketing talk (both internal and external) is about reducing energy usage, their green energy efforts, tips to customers to reduce power use, apps and websites so they can monitor it, and currently, dynamic contracts so people can optimize their usage to when the price is lowest.

It's just so cynical.

On the surface, it looks like they're prioritizing what the customer (or market) wants - lower usage/expense - over company profits.

What's the thing I'm missing that makes this cynical?

You don’t understand the model. Residential customers pay most of the fees upfront as hook up fees monthly. You could use 0 energy in many areas and you would still pay almost the same amount.

> How much has that specific chosen culture contributed to their enormous success in that market?

You see this across industries. Even Google, in the early days, was people working crazy hours, sweating the details, and just generally grinding. It is something like a law of nature that extraordinary results require extraordinary effort from extraordinary people.

How does that align with Dan Luu’s article “95th percentile isn’t that good”[1] and the general observation so many of us have that the companies we work for and interact with and buy from are executing so badly on so many fronts?

That is, most programmers aren’t good programmers, most managers aren’t good managers, most salaries aren’t good salaries, most salespeople aren’t good salespersons, most workflows aren’t efficient, most team communications aren’t effective.

If Dan Luu is right, it shouldn’t take extraordinary effort to do better (excepting the case where “trying” is extraordinary). If he’s wrong why does it take Herculean effort to outdo a bunch of average companies?

[1] https://danluu.com/p95-skill/

Notice that I gave as an example the early days of Google. In those days, it was stacked with 99th percentilers working full tilt: Sergey and Larry, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Luiz André Barroso, Urs Hölzle, Amit Singhal, etc.

Of course it was eventually taken over by product managers, bureaucratic bloat, and WLB maxxers. I think my observation only applies to a company in its ascendance. As it matures, the 50th percentilers and the MBAs take over. And it slowly declines. Less slowly if it has achieved a monopoly (search, in the Google case).

> "Notice that I gave as an example the early days of Google. In those days, it was stacked with 99th percentilers working full tilt: Sergey and Larry, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Luiz André Barroso, Urs Hölzle, Amit Singhal, etc."

and it was up against Yahoo! one of the most famously directionless bumbling tech companies, and their peers. Yahoo! didn't seem like it was executing on almost all cylinders with almost LASER focus on some goal, so why did it take 99%ilers working full tilt and an innovative idea (PageRank) and an innovative model (off-shelf Intel/Linux clusters instead of 'real' expensive server class hardware like Sun and mainframes) and Silicon Valley funding to beat them?

If you're not at a FAANG or similar, your coworkers are average, maybe disinterested, the processes and procedures seem almost designed to slow and frustrate progress, managers don't know much about the job and hate making decisions or taking risk; shouldn't it be possible to outdo half the companies which exist, and most of the companies which fail, by doing just slightly better work than average?

Where's that discrepancy coming from?

You might be stretching Dan Luu's essay a bit far. It's been a while since I read it, but my recollection of it was him saying the 95th percentile in an arbitrary hobby, say amateurs playing competitive esports (e.g. Overwatch), and that if you put even a small amount of time into deliberate practice, you would be better than 95th percentile player in Overwatch. I didn't get the sense Dan Luu was extrapolating to multi-billion dollar companies, what it would take to take the fight to them, and taking their market share.

Yep, 1,000,000%, yep, can't +1 this enough, saw it at another big tech myself, had friends who saw it happen at Google. The companies that were going from nothing to dominance were so different from the companies that rest today on their monopoly laurels. To go from not successful to successful there were all these insanely smart people pulling 80 hour weeks and all the work life balance stuff came later. Unreasonably hard work doesn't guarantee success but it's always a component of massive success. Mr. Beast is not making this shit up and if you're not down for this you are one of his C employees which is fine, you can be a nice and valuable human in other ways, but those companies who want to go big are not for you. Starting a company, certainly a VC fueled one probably is not either.

"you need to be insanely smart and work 80 hour weeks" ... to pass a bunch of MBAs managing 50-percentilers? How does that make sense?

The goal is achieved. The founders are rich and fulfilled (and probably exhausted), early star employees have mostly cashed out. This is not at all surprising or hard to figure out. Larry Page tried to establish a corporate structure that would sustain innovation (Google -> Alphabet) but they were never able to recreate what they had in search.

It makes sense because regulatory capture has become such a large part of how dominant American firms maintain their position. They don't maintain it through talent. They maintain it by breaking the law. Google's now been found guilty of antitrust violations in two markets and a case about a third just kicked off. And of course this is not just in tech, take a look at the cases against the Kroger/Albertson's merger or Ticketmaster.

The Biden administration is basically the first one to take these violations of antitrust law seriously since Carter.

It aligns, because 95th percentile isn't that good. It's right there in the title.

Exceptional, outsized, market-beating results often only happen once you crack the one-in-a-thousand levels of effort, talent, etc.

The combination of two things both at 95th percentile is one way you can get there, but - obviously - staying at that level at multiple, mutually-reinforcing fronts simultaneously is harder than staying there for just one skill.

Because of switching costs. If you start a new thing this is definitely the case. It’s often said that a new product (startup), can’t be a marginal improvement; it needs to be 10x better. 95 percentile is not 10x

>If he’s wrong why does it take Herculean effort to outdo a bunch of average companies?

Inertia. It's very difficult to outrun someone who has a head start.

I think what you are missing:

- not everything is worth doing extraordinarily as no one will pay for excellence of some services or goods

- being exceptionally good at something doesn’t guarantee someone will buy from you, people might just don’t like you or your branding

- there are bunch of other market forces that you have to overcome and Dan seems like was writing about being 95% on a single thing

a small focused group of tryers is probably a big help

First time entrepreneurs are also learning how to build culture. No excuse, but still.

At face value, this is not a culture that would reward risk taking. It's very operations focused. Get x done on day y or you're fired. Maybe they do value risk taking on the creative side?

Learning why it’s done the way it’s done before bringing up the beginner questions they get answered over and over is reasonable.

If you're hiring junior people then sure. In Mr Beast's interview with Lex Fridman, he says he actually prefers hiring people from outside the entertainment industry because those folks really want to do what they did before, how they did it before, and not the Mr Beast way. Reading between the lines, I think he ends up hiring a lot of junior people because they're not set in their ways. Also probably they'll work long hours because they're just getting their start.

Makes sense. Training juniors is a thing and maybe this document is also speaking to how at least it's working there.

Past film and tv folks I know have a hard time just diving in and doing it because they're so used to the processes they've had before. Not all are like this, and the ones that aren't, have a huge advantage over juniors with the open mind and experience to boot.

Even the digital side of shooting with a high end phone and editing well enough with tools still seems to not convince them.

On the other side, the OBS crowd, and youtubers are year by year improving their production skills and some of it's kind of starting to look pretty high quality.

Youtube will have no problem if it wants becoming the universal cable network with an obscure channel for pretty much everything that is very decent quality.

I've also heard this exact same thing from my employer who hired ke straight out or college. Most of the company was comprised of young people. My boss, who was C level told me young people are easier to mold and now that I'm older I 100% agree with that. It's much easier to learn good habits than to unlearn bad ones.

>It's much easier to learn good habits than to unlearn bad ones.

How do you know they are 'good habits'. I have seen countless years of bad practices lauded internally as amazing/the etalon weight when it comes to code quality. In reality most of them were textbook examples of what should not be done. When you get folks without any previous experience, there's no one to question the status or the authority. If they learn/wisen up, they are likely to leave.

Recent grads tend to be more evidence-oriented than people with experience, IME. They'll e.g. benchmark something to see whether it's faster rather than going by reputation alone.

Hmm - that's quite nice/reassuring, although not my experience. Benchmarking, OTOH, is notoriously hard, esp. the microbenchmark type. The old: lies, damn lies, statistics, (micro)benchmarks.

They also don't know better.

It's a lot of work to stay open minded, flexible, free, and not know better.

Still, investing in their development can yield the kinds of people that an organization may be after.

It's the best company I've ever worked at so far. The fact that mostly everyone was in their 20s to early 30s meant we had an awesome cohesive culture.

Note I said mostly. Of course there were older people, but they were in their 40s and early 50s. They were few and far between, and they were the "adults" in the room when needed. It worked really well.

Age doesn’t mean anything.

It’s just mindset and maintaining it.

In our 20s we might not know better, follow others and end up letting the current take us where it may.

Sometimes when I meet an 18 year old I wonder how they are having experiences where they are growing or the rate of growing is slowing much quicker than someone who was on the early internet.

If you can stay young and build discipline in all ages it works as you are saying.

It’s less about being the adult in the room as much as supporting people to grow and become those people they are seeking.

Sure, at an individual level age might not matter much. But taken in aggregate, age means a lot in the context of company culture building. Take any average 24 year old and see how much they have in common with a 34 year old or 40 year old. Let's not pretend life doesn't change over time and hand wave it with a nice platitude.

But how do you know what's good, and what's bad without a diversity of experience under one's belt? You could be working at a cult, or the greatest company ever. What Mr Beast does works for Mr. Beast. Same for your employer.

An example of risk taking in operations is right there in the pdf - “no doesn’t mean no”

They give the example of picking a filming location you aren’t likely to get permission to film in but would produce outstanding content.

A lot of people here (and in tech in general) are conflating "being efficient" with "having success"...

that's clearly because people in tech generally value efficiency

but we have to take a step back collectively and understand that "being efficient at producing addictive video for teens to sell ads for shit they don't need" is BAD, not a "success"

I don't think it has anything to do with efficiency, but with effectivity. You could argue producing addictive videos for teens is Mr beasts goal. And he is very effective at doing that. And actually yes, successful at that goal.

Success doesn't really have a moral component, it's relative to the stated goal. You could argue it's not meaningful or moral or worthwhile or valuable, but you can't deny that he has achieved success.

So the thing you can take away from someone like mr beast is "what made them so effective?". A lot of his strategies could be useful for other, more worthwhile goals than his! So there's something that can be learned. I think that's what people mean, not that "people in tech generally value efficiency".

> is BAD, not a "success"

that is your moral view or value. It is not a universal value.

Economic success is indeed a thing, and it can be discussed separately from moralityl.

No it can't, economic success is completely linked with morality when your success is linked to producing tons of CO2, which is going to put our planet, and in particular poorer people, in the shitters

Yes it can. It's as absurd as claiming you can't talk about a person without mentioning their eventual death.

Not entirely true - bad things can be measured. Harm exists and has a value. The value, in this case if you wanted to derive, would be the amount of money consumers spent on random advertised things.

Sure it would be hard to measure - but you could argue that money is money consumers lost as a result of Mr Beast (or maybe YouTube as a whole).

For example, looking to the tobacco industry: they were incredibly economically successful because they leveraged the weaknesses of the human brain to sell their product, namely nicotine addiction. This is now largely considered immoral, but let's look past that.

We can still measure the badness, or harm, of the tobacco industry objectively. We see how much money was/is spent on cancer treatment, COPD treatment, etc. These analysis have been done before and it's pretty damning, billions of dollars. In some cases, the cost of tobacco straight up exceeds the profit. Meaning, from a communal economic standpoint, they are a net-negative. Yes, it's true, tobacco, while wildly popular, is economically in the red.

Of course, we live in a staunchly capitalistic, individualistic society. Communal economic cost/benefit is almost never looked at. Which is why we had the problems with the tobacco industry, and why the obesity epidemic grows. Mr Beast videos are not of this scale, but I would argue they are of this nature.

> but we have to take a step back collectively and understand that "being efficient at producing addictive video for teens to sell ads for shit they don't need" is BAD, not a "success"

That’s seems like a judgement call and a personal one at that. It certainly isn’t a universal value among humanity.

Which is fine, but a 500+ comment HN post where people argue over personal values doesn’t make for interesting reading.

If 100% of his watchers were YouTube Premium subscribers and none of them ever saw an ad, would you feel differently?

If people were actively paying for the content, and thus "accepting to be endoctrinated" why not, although I think that all kind of entreprise with such a handbook of "how to make people basically addicted to the shit we build" is bad

People are losing communities, people are losing attention span, and this is because we make people addict to shit like this

And then idiot like Trump manage to take power

We need a society with longer pauses, reflexion, empathy

It’s still kind if garbage content

> that's clearly because people in tech generally value efficiency

I think this is you reading this into the comment. They don't mention efficiency.

I always love the "just hire A-players" line.

As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice.

And that 95% of startups don't know their metrics. Pretty sure almost all do but again don't have the skills or resources to meaningfully move them.

It's more about willing to fire below-A players quickly rather than having a perfect hiring filter that only lets A players in.

Looking back at 7 companies I worked at: they all had a tough hiring filter to get in. But most of them also had not that great people that they were not firing.

Firing people is hard even when you know you should do it. You have to be a heartless bastard to not have a problem firing people.

It's even worse when the company gets so big that a game of building empires starts in which case managers have an incentive to grow headcount to grow power, even if that headcount isn't very good.

The document even talks about what MrBeast considers a B-player.

Made a mistake once? That's fine. Fuck ups are a price of ambition.

Made the same mistake twice? Need to be told the same thing multiple times? Not an A player so fired.

Of course now you have a function which isn't non-optimally performed, it's now not being performed at all. Because you're probably "running lean" so actually you have no redundancy for that function.

And then there's the sociological effect of course: are you even any good at identifying poor performers, does the team view it that way? You can be one employee departure away from an exodus since someone being laid off is usually a good sign for everyone else to reconsider how they feel about their position. Bad management is pretty good at generating a never-ending stream of "underperforming employees".

Like let's state the obvious here: you're looking back the 7 prior companies you worked for. Are the people you thought should be fired still there? Are they still turning up every day and doing something? Because in that context, whatever their fault, they are a more reliable resource to the company then you were (this isn't judgment: my resume is long too).

The major problem I see is: focusing on an individual, when it's the team that needs to be A-level. You can't just throw a bunch of A-players together and expect an A-team.

Expecting your workers to never make the same mistake twice is extremely harsh and only works if you are comfortable with a lot of volatility in team structure & in an employer's market.

I’ve seen multiple teams hire mediocre people despite having a choice. Usually it is because either:

- they believe velocity is simply additive (A player + B player > A player)

- they look too much into credentials (big name school / employer) and do not adequately vet ability

- they start with the attitude “let’s give this person a chance and see if they work out” and become too reluctant to fire when they turn out mediocre.

Teams should be more comfortable staying small longer in my opinion.

It does come from a point of privileged. Steve jobs said "A players hire A+ players. A+ players hire A++ players". That was because he saw A players hiring B players. B Players will hire C players - and so on.

That is all well and good when you are the golden goose that is Apple. Most people just do not get the opportunity to hire like that.

Apple wasn’t that at the start. But it had a few a players.

Absolutely. A part of that would have been Steve's legendary ability to convince folks to make the move to Apple even when they had options that looked better at the time. Another part was seeing the potential of those already in the company, another part was just dumb luck.

I believe Job's was providing this perspective more in the late 2000's after he had been through the whole Apple exile/Next thing.

I wouldn’t be one to speculate on steve

Steve Jobs would be non existent in terms of ver getting off the ground without Steve Wozniak.

Another visionary without the ability to execute and deliver.

It’s good they got together.

Startups usually have no choice, they cannot afford A players. There are businesses which do hire A-players such as OpenAI, Jane Street, Netflix, etc. but A players require A compensation.

And a lot of A players are unique snowflakes so they have to be compatible with other unique snowflakes so it can be hard to fill the gaps. You need a few Bs who are moldable to fill gaps

>I always love the "just hire A-players" line. As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice.

If a startup can't attract talent (a sign of bad traction), that startup probably is not that good and more people won't solve the underlying problem. You would also be surprised how many startups outsource dev/marketing/etc. in their initial stages.

If you can't convince smart people to work for you and that your idea is good, good luck trying to convince customers of the same.

>And that 95% of startups don't know their metrics. Pretty sure almost all do but again don't have the skills or resources to meaningfully move them.

I said most don't know them as well as Mr. Beast. Read "Chapter 1: What makes a Youtube video viral?". Most founders have not put the same amount of time into seeing how to track, measure, and impact metrics. He identified key KPIs and then experimented with changes until he found what worked. His whole north star to, minute by minute, structure each video, is informed by the KPIs. His whole strategy is built upon metrics by metrics.

He clearly is obsessed with them to a degree few are. Some startups don't even know how much money they make, how much money they lose, etc.

>trying to hire mediocre people

It should be "always retain A-players". You can hire as many ABC's as you like - some of those C's will become B's and A's, and some of the B's will become A's, and the rest .. you let go with severance.

Thats the free market, baby. Live with it, or perish.

> As though startups are trying to hire mediocre people instead of having no choice.

Well one choice you might make is to hire some number of 'mediocre people' instead of one 'A-player'; the ratio of more junior to more senior; etc.

I am hearing this stuff from bigger companies too now. By definition, everyone cannot hire A players.

Yeah most places can’t comp 2 Std deviation candidates. Either in pay or experience. Beast could because he’s got the top company in the market that makes it cheap to hire talent.

Having recently switched jobs, I was again reminded of just how terrible most interviewers are. The more senior the interviewer, the more terrible.

> I think it's important not to micromanage to the extent he is--it's necessary, maybe, for his business

I think it's pretty clear he has figured out how to "master" YouTube better than anyone else ever has by a very wide margin.

So if he doesn't micromanage, how can he teach people how to do something that nobody else has ever figured out how to do?

It's not like people will show up and be good at what he wants. There is no school for this, no "Here's my past experience". None of that matters at his level of success.

> I think it's pretty clear he has figured out how to "master" YouTube better than anyone else ever has by a very wide margin.

content for dumb kids

There’s a difference between writing down that you hire A-players in a document, and hiring the unqualified personal friends that he does in practice for all kinds of production roles

I read the entire document and I don't understand where you saw bad culture or micromanaging.

Some people may not like the fact that they pull all nighters, but that's a matter of opinion. Clearly some people do like the terms of employment, otherwise they wouldn't work there.

> Clearly some people do like the terms of employment, otherwise they wouldn't work there.

This is a deeply naive understanding of employment.

Almost no one has a huge array of job opportunities, and they can select the one they want based on company culture.

Most people have one viable job offer at a time, and they have to work hard for it. This is even more true in entertainment fields. Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid employee at all, and they can't choose between a job that requires all-nighters and one that doesn't.

This is not a foxcon factory, this is the most famous and productive Youtube production company. People here work incredibly hard IN ORDER TO get this particular job, seeking it out specifically.

> Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid employee at all

And this is BY CHOICE.

I fundamentally disagree with your positioning.

Yeah people will do the job for free basically. I don’t think you could have the same culture if your business was cleaning port-a-pottys.

We know this isn't true because of the necessity of unions. Mining coal and many other trades are a lot worse than cleaning toilets, and people still had to do them nearly for free.

While I do see the value in unions in some settings, this is not a job of necessity. This is a job for people that wish to self actualize and not settle for anything less than their dream job. Wouldn't creating a union for Mr. Beast employees is akin to saying something like "I want to have my dream job but I want it to be easy"? I don't think that the analogy to mining coal holds.

Unions are no longer necessary.

That's not a value judgement on my part, just a conclusion from decades of declining union membership, with no correlating uptick in starvation or massive reduction in wages.

(You may argue for wage stagnation, and you may attribute that to declining unionism, but that is not a collapse in wages!)

Well that’s because the alternative is starvation

> bad culture

The let "let boys be childish" part and the overall psuedo-human tone kind of alarmed me. The random "hahas" littered around, seemed like a robot trying to be a human.

> micromanaging

He has a playbook/formula that works and all employees are solely focused on executing that vision. People have little operational ownership. In other words, employees don't have freedom in vision.

I even said it probably is necessary for the success of his business that employees don't have that freedom. I just would not enjoy working in a environment like that and I think employees (especially early ones) need to have that kind of operational freedom in startups (which is the context of my comment).

> where you saw bad culture or micromanaging

Mr. Beast is ultimately the star of the video, so he has to micromanage at some point or another. That's his brand. He can't let his employees plan a video that he won't like.

I did find the comments about all-nighters off-putting... And I personally don't like working on multiple things at the same time. But that's personal preference; I don't particularly like Mr. Beast's videos, so I don't see myself working for his company any time soon.

I'm more concerned about Mr. Beast overextending himself. With Mr. Beast (the person) being the brand and the star, I don't think he can scale himself much more.

> 4. Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees.

That is simple to do but not something many companies want to do. Just give employees equity via mutualisation. (Real ownership not discourse ownership)

Re-read those operational principles out loud. Now imagine them being executed at-scale by a fraudulent enterprise to the net detriment of society.

You don't have to imagine very hard.

So most tech startups?

> Rewarding employees who make value for the business and think like founders/equity owners, not employees.

The best way to get employees to think like equity owners is to give them equity. But I guess the name of the game in our times is to somehow expect people with no equity to work even harder for the company than the equity holders do, right? Let me know how that works out.

I personally think (and I think the prevailing sentiment is) that giving early employees equity is crucial. There is no way I would do any work for an early stage startup (or, in general, if I can help it) with no stake in the company.

In bigger companies, it's a zero sum game. They don't really care about you because their scale makes it hard to identify who cares for them, so everything is just a business transaction.

Pretty well so far

That's gross. IMHO, ofc. A bit like scientology or crusade-age Christianity, you know it's wrong, but you can't argue with the success, so y not?

Just like you can't argue about a lion eating a gazelle keeping the lion alive. Some people think it's gross but the lion is alive and ready to hunt again.

literally everyone says they only hire A-players. Beast hired someone now accused of sexting with teens. is that an A-player hire?

Maybe the subheading “no does not mean no” can be also taken literally.

Unfortunately, the person he'd hired to predict the future was not a A-player.

> Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success.

Presumably the issue is not the result but rather the means and cost. The practice of justifying the means with the ends is famously behavior most people try to avoid sharing a society with and, in fact, behavior people generally try to end once discovering.

EDIT: To be sure, employees could be quite happy there and there's little negativity to discuss—but the tone in the above post raised concerns.

And as all the past 2 months show, you don't get to this level of success without exploiting, if not outright abusing, your labor.

>I am willing to bet he knows his metrics better than >95% of startup founders.

Id bet so too. Becuase he's definitely rich enough even pre-youtbe to just find a YT contact and ask about the metrics, on top of studying his market. Very few startups get such objective data.

> Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.

It really depends on your stage of scale. You don't need 100 A-players once you start expanding the app. And it benefits to train younger workers on your systems as your older ones start to move on, retire, or die.

SBF was very successful too.

I mean, there is also just hardcore survivorship bias at work here.

How much of the ongoing success is algorithmic / network capture?

You see this across all the “old” content networks like YouTube, Instagram and Twitch, that being well-known and putting out aggressively mediocre content trumps being a hidden gem with stellar content.

I dislike TikTok even more than the former, but one thing they do right is having the algorithm weight towards content. A great video by an unknown person is more likely to skyrocket and a mediocre video by a well-known person can easily bomb.

>2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.

I love coming on here and seeing the world's wealthiest and savviest tech magnates breathlessly murmuring in awe amongst themselves about such unprecedented tidbits of genius business acumen as "only hire good workers; don't hire bad workers"

He gives clear and actionable definitions, which is what makes it remarkable and different to everyone else saying or implying what you wrote.

You can't strip out the valuable content from a sentence and then claim it was always identical to valueless sentences.

> can't deny the success

I don’t disagree that there is some value in this knowledge. But success has different definitions.

I do not consider Jimmy successful. In relation to classical virtues, he hasn’t truly lived up to many. That would be success to me.

He is popular and his business is rich. Some people consider that success, but not all. Not even in business and start-up circles.

Edit: some people below (quite remarkably) miss the point despite me having spelled it out — “success has different definitions”. Somehow they have convinced themselves I said that Jimmy has my definition of success, or that he is not successful by his own definition. I think everyone who wants to understand what I am saying does. If not, I repeat one more time — there is more than one way to measure success. Which is correct or not correct — I do not prescribe. That is all :)

In this profile from 2022 Jimmy said his goal was to become the number one YouTube channel: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/mrbeas...

According to this Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTub... he finally achieved that goal on June 2, 2024.

So definitely successful by his own chosen metric.

> I do not consider Jimmy successful. In relation to classical virtues, he hasn’t truly lived up to many. That would be success to me.

He was a tiny YouTuber 6 years ago with under a million subscribers, and has become the biggest despite tens of thousands of competitors who were better placed than him. The difference between just a few short years ago and now is what impresses me and makes me consider him a success, he has gone from a one man show counting numbers in his room to a million to the biggest on the platform with many other ventures.

Cutthroat competition but he cracked the formula. I think that’s success

> But success has different definitions.

Yes, except doesn’t Mr. Beast define the kind of success he’s aiming for in the PDF?

> I do not consider Jimmy successful.

By the definition he set for success or the one you made up?

Probably by more common definitions held by people OP respects...

For example, millions of people would not call him a success because he doesn't have a family with children (although Mr beast has definitely implied he wants one in the future).

Many millions more would say that he's not a success because he doesn't do anything that's a net positive for society, instead he's mostly a drain on people's time and mental capacity.

Uh, ok?

If you're going to debate why this guy is/is not a success we can all make up our own little definitions and go on all day.

But he defined his goals in this PDF and it seems like he's reaching/making progress towards those goals.

People DO make up their definitions, and put together they create a communities standards of success and then eventually a societies.

Would you say a man that spends 40 years working 60 hours a week, alienating all friends and neighbors til he has no friends or anyone that respects him, no kids, no partner, and a group on ex employees that hate him for squeezing them to work under market value? Is he a success just because he accumulated 3x the capital he set out to when he started his business at 20 years old? Then dies suddenly alone, only for everyone that met him to chuckle and move on with their day?

Would that be a success by most people's standards? Does it even matter if it's a success by one person's standards? Are the school shooters a success because they accomplish their goals before death?

> Would you say a man that spends 40 years working 60 hours a week, alienating all friends and neighbors til he has no friends or anyone that respects him, no kids, no partner, and a group on ex employees that hate him for squeezing them to work under market value?

If you accept a job that’s your market value. If you think you’re worth more, get a higher paying job. Or don’t and pretend that you were squeezed into working for under market value.

The guy employed people for 40 years. Not the worst thing in the world.

Not everybody values the same stuff. Some people like what other people call work. Some people don’t need friends.

> Is he a success just because he accumulated 3x the capital he set out to when he started his business at 20 years old?

If at 20 years old he said his goal was to accumulate 3x the capital before he dies, then I couldn’t argue that by his definition of success, he succeeded.

Hopefully he doesn’t care if I think he’s a success.

> Then dies suddenly alone

We all die suddenly and alone. We’re alive and then we’re dead. Nobody comes with us.

> Would that be a success by most people's standards?

Who cares what most people think?

If no one cared what other people thought, why are we even talking on here.

Also, how would you apply your logic to the school shooter question?

> If no one cared what other people thought, why are we even talking on here.

We hate ourselves and have nothing better to do?

> Also, how would you apply your logic to the school shooter question?

I wouldn’t pat yourself on the back quite so hard for finding this attempt at a clever gotcha. I thought by ignoring it you’d get the message that it wasn’t as good as you thought it was.

But nevertheless, I would say that they were successful in reaching their goals but that I find their goals and actions abhorrent. I don’t feel the need to add that final qualification to MrBeast’s goals and actions.

It wasn't a clever gotcha, and I wasn't patting myself on the back.

I just found it odd that you went through and systematically addressed every section of my post, but that one.

It was taking what in my opinion is a lame point of view, to an extreme, in hopes of helping someone see that it fails at the extremes... Thus maybe you'll think about it and agree with me that in reality someone's own goals and views of themselves don't matter that much because as a whole we as a society have views on what makes a life worth living and what adds value to society.

And yes I think MrBeast systemizing making mindless brain numbing stupid videos for teenagers and kids to be pretty bad for society. I don't care that be produces revenue doing so.

> as a whole we as a society have views on what makes a life worth living and what adds value to society

Oh, yeah I get what you’re saying now. Give in to peer pressure!

.... I didn't say that.

Just don't be naive and think that societal standards don't exist. And also, possibly give some thought as to why they exist so that you don't go down insane spirals and waste your life only to later understand that the collective had a point.

Yeah I agree that it’s better to live your life how other people want you to live it vs. charting your own path.

No argument here.

You're really dense. I'm not saying you should live your life how others want you to live it.

I'm saying you should examine why people set the standards they do and check if you agree with those values.

If you want to say "hell be with it, I'll be scum til I die because it makes me feel good" then more power to you. But don't go around saying you're successful. You're a rebel and a loser by most people's standards. Not by all. Even school shooters are respected by SOME for their bravery and determination.

Seems like a version of not counting points and giving all the kids a gold medal. It's pink and fluffy.

Literally nobody is denying that MrBeast is successful so what is the point of saying that nobody can deny it?

> 2. Hiring only A-players. Bloated teams kill startups.

"Just hire good employees, why did no one think of this before!"

...seriously?

Good by what measure?

Is anyone seriously denying the success?

What's definitely a valid target of criticism are the methods, though.

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Success, but at what cost is more important, for those who are evaluating success.

A coal power plant may be enormously successful. But its costs to climate are equally important.

We often fail to talk about the other side of the coin.

There are lot of comments here disliking MrBeast and what not, but some of the advice can definitely apply to all organizations.

> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.

Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.

Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.

> Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve.

Some counterpoints:

- Xerox knowingly didn't fix the problematic gear trains to guarantee periodic part changes, prioritizing money over "best copier possible".

- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".

- Microsoft is did tons of shady things in its OS development history to prioritize domination over "best OS possible", sometimes actively degrading the good features and parts of its OS.

- Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".

- Many more electronic and electromechanical systems are engineered with short lives to prioritize "minimizing costs and maximizing profit" over "building the best X possible".

- Lastly, Boeing's doing all kinds of shady stuff (MCAS, doors, build quality, etc.) since they prioritize "maximize shareholder value" over "building the best planes possible".

- ...and there's Intel, but I think the idea is clear here.

I think this is exactly the point that MrBeast is trying to make.

By being best YOUTUBE videos it means to focus on whatever appeals to the algorithm. It doesn't mean you are better informed, or better entertained, as long as the click-through-rate is great and the minutes people watch the video is maximized.

You could say the same thing is true for Xerox, for them the best doesn't necessary mean that they sell you the best most reliable copier, but the highest grossing product, with a guaranteed post-sale income.

And this is why we can't have nice things.

There was a blog post linked on HN a while ago, it was about their start up they ran many years ago. They got traction with clients and were a very "engineering focused" (or similar term) organization. Their code was rock solid.

It was all going great, until suddenly some new company showed up and started taking their customers. Their new competitor's software was a mess with all sorts of incomplete or pure vaporware features.... but they did get features out fast.

They got beat out by Salesforce...

We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.

> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.

We do generally want nice things, but we can't be experts in all the things. In markets where you have mostly responsible actors, that can work out fine. But absent effective regulation or other feedback mechanisms, in many markets an actor who only cares about short-term cash extraction can beat out the people focused on long-term value by taking advantage of consumer ignorance.

A good example here is food. Before the rise of industrial meat production, you would process meat yourself or buy it from a local butcher. You had a lot of information about the meat because the processing chain was short and local. You knew the people touching your food and could smell how clean they kept the butcher shop.

But scaling that up created a lot of opacity. Suddenly it was much harder to know what went into your sausage. It was tens, hundreds, thousands of people involved, spread over many miles. Some dubious people took advantage, and so we ended up with food standards like the Federal Meat Inspection Act. [1] The system that grew out of that works pretty well; things Boar's Head recently killing 9 people [2] are surprisingly rare.

For things less risky than safety, I think a lot of good is done by people like Consumer Reports and Wirecutter. Less ignorance about which products are really good is less room for bad actors to exploit consumers. If people really didn't want nice things, those would be much less popular. Instead, I think they're a sign that people do want nice things, but just have an awful lot to do, and so can't spend much time on a single purchasing decision unless it's a really big deal for them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act, with a nod to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_listeriosis...

> We do generally want nice things, but we can't be experts in all the things.

Counter-point: People complain a lot about leg-room on airplanes. They say they'll pay more for leg room. However, it's very well known (empirically) that they won't pay. People want the cheapest seat - period.

Leg room is very transparent. Consumers can't be fooled. People may want nice things, but they won't pay for it.

Mr. Beast is just giving people what they empirically want.

I don't think that's a great counterpoint for a few reasons.

One is that leg room isn't particularly transparent. If I search for flights, the price is much more visible than a leg room measure. Two, people can certainly be fooled; for a long time airlines have been playing a game of gradually ratcheting back amenities without being up front about it. This is the same game that consumer packaged goods companies play with apparent package size. Three, people pay for more leg room all the time. Last I booked a flight, about half the plane was first class, business class, economy plus, or exit rows. Personally, I sometimes pay for it and sometimes don't. When I don't, it's sometimes because I resent how grossly extractive airlines have gotten.

I also think "empirically want", however cute it is as a linguistic trick, is not particularly accurate. Is it what gets him paid? I'd believe it. Is it what they watch? Sometimes, for some people! But pretending that short-term behavior is equivalent to what somebody really wants is choosing to ignore a great deal. It's like saying alcoholics "want" to drink themselves to death.

Google Flights shows the leg room in inches, and there's several sites that you can research it on.

However most concretely, back in 2000, American removed a few rows of coach across its entire narrow body fleet to give passengers an extra 3-5 inches of legroom throughout coach. They did not recover the costs and walked it back. jetBlue provides more legroom through all of coach, and even I as a very tall person, don't go out of my way to book them.

Some people will pay more for extra legroom, and I think the current split of seating in planes is likely right around the optimal distribution based on who will and won't pay.

> Two, people can certainly be fooled; for a long time airlines have been playing a game of gradually ratcheting back amenities without being up front about it.

Kind of but not really. Yeah they're not going to put out a press release when they take the olives off your salad. Airlines are an incredibly low margin commodity business. Many years they're negative margins. American's current operating margin is 3.41% [1] This is typical. These aren't B2B SaaS margins we're talking about.

So generally when they take the olives off your salad, instead of putting out a press release they just lower fares on competitive routes. Because most people book on fare or based on corporate contract, which is a second-order effect of fare.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAL/american-airli...

> jetBlue provides more legroom through all of coach, and even I as a very tall person, don't go out of my way to book them.

How tall are you? I will literally skip a family vacation if I can't get a better seat on an airplane, to the point it's caused strain in my personal life.

I agree with your overall assessment that people will (usually) buy the cheapest thing, but I find it utterly bizarre a truly tall person wouldn't even care about being physically uncomfortable for hours on end. I'm curious if we just disagree on what "very tall" means, like 6' is not that tall.

I'm 6'5". To be clear I do always try for an extra legroom seat unless it's like 1 or maybe 2 hours tops. I don't go out of my way to pick jetBlue, so the "everyone gets legroom" thing isn't a real competitive advantage. I just consolidate my flying with a carrier and with even the lowest status tiers you generally get free extra legroom seating. Not giving everyone extra legroom seats means they can lower the sticker price and reward frequent fliers. The short people don't get nearly as much benefit from the extra leg room and don't value the seat as much so higher density means lower prices for everyone.

When I didn't have status I just paid for it, but every seat having extra legroom isn't in and of itself enough to move the needle for me.

> Kind of but not really.

You write this in a tone of contradiction, but as far as I can tell we're describing the exact same thing. I understand why the airlines do it, but it doesn't change what customers experience.

IMO it's very costly to compare legroom and is often obscured and switched up. Also people might use 'legroom' to also mean more expansive things like shoulder width of their seat, and that is definately not something you can buy with economy plus. Seat width has shrunk several inches and is universally reduced on all airline by now. To get back to 18/19" seat width, you have to pay double or triple, which seems absurd for a 12% to 20% increase in width.

i think the Jetblue thing is historically true but not anymore.

The Jetblue thing is also not really altruistic, but a nice side effect of an optimization they did; the removal of the seats brought the capacity to their planes to a round number of 50, which happens to be the FAA required ratio of persons per flight attendant.

Well the other thing is paying for luggage. No-one wants to pay for luggage. But if luggage is free, it means that everyone with no/small luggage is just subsidizing those with luggage.

Charging for luggage is fine.

The problem is when luggage costs the same or more as ticket without luggage.

I don't think I've ever seen the legroom listed on a flight comparison site. Is that a thing?

Google flights lists legroom for most flights. Although it doesn't seem like you can filter on legroom.

Great examples. I think another case, especially in business/it, is that the people doing the purchasing aren't often the people using the products. This means the incentive structure often doesn't prioritize a good product, but instead whatever appeals to the buyer (perhaps lower cost, features, created by a known entity, e.g. no one got fired buying ibm).

But most of the time, we as engineers don't pick the winners. Some C-Suite executive or middle manager, who isn't very technically inclined, picks the winners, and we as engineers are forced to make it work.

As I don't think a engineer has ever had the chance to choose a company's CRM, the CRM with better marketing would always win over the CRM with better engineering.

Question I would pose is, why should engineer have the decision on a new CRM?

They can provide input regarding e.g. maintainability, but majority of input would come from other stakeholders - users and business unit owning the customers whose relationship we want managed, ideally primarily. And it is somebodys job to take these inputs into collective whole.

It was a mind blowing exercise to me 15 years ago when I was telling my boss how horrible our current installation of some ERP software was, and be asked me what's the user perspective. They log in every day, run financial reports they need, and log out. The system was great from their perspective! They had even less concern for my perspective of poor architecture and suboptimal implementation, than I (at that point) had of their perspective and goals. Thank krishna I didn't make the decisions on the CRM :-)

>why should engineer have the decision on a new CRM

well there's the craftsman argument and then there's the broken windows argument.

the craftsman one if obvious: if you're in a devops/IT role and your job is to manage salesforce, then you should have some input in it as it'll affect you efficiency (aka the profitability of your company). A salesman shouldn't be buying tools for the carpenter without the carpenter's input.

the windoww argument is a bit more superficial but still a factor to consider. I may not be working on mainaining saleforce, but I will need to interface with it for logstics purposes. if it's so inefficient that it becomes a chore to track hours or update documentation or etc. it's going to leave a bunch of broken windows. You can still operate with a broken window, but that part of the building will be a place to avoid. You may even try to work around the CRM wherever possible. Which seems to lose the point of a CRM

Upthread, bayindirh posted half a dozen examples of financially-motivated decisions that were actively, deliberately hostile, sometimes fatal, to the customer. We're not just talking about good-enough fiddly details here.

> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.

What was the price(s) of that start up and what was the prices of Salesforce? What were the features of the start up and that of Salesforce?

Different people think different things are "nice" (correctly or incorrectly). If you're offering things that you think are nice, but the customer does not care about, are you surprised that they go elsewhere?

You also have to understand what customers say they want, and the things that they are actually going to evaluate on: the two may not be the same.

And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually be able to afford them.

The issue is that the customers aren't us engineers, despite us being the ones who will interface with it more than the actual customer (the business owners).

>And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually be able to afford them.

Sure hope that wasn't the case. If they can't afford a proper tool for employees (which is maybe a few tens of thousands a year at worst. a fraction of an employee) how are they going to afford me?

I'm sure it's just penny pinching, but I sure hope a boss never says outright "we can't afford this tool" without very good reason.

> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.

We? I was IT for a brief period and one day management says "We need this Salesforce Outlook plugin deployed to all the front office users." No one bothered to tell us "Hey, we're evaluating CRM software and would appreciate your technical opinion."

So there's your "we" and I'm sure they weren't looking for quality engineering or rock solid code when deciding. In fact it was picked because the manager heard the name salesforce at some business conference and was told by someone there it was the best CRM out there so you better get on that train or be left in the dust. So we installed the plugins, got paid and moved on with life. And to be honest we didn't care either.

The question is, was it rock solid with few features? I don't know if it was this article I saw earlier but seeing how Salesforce has a lot of customizability and a Visual builder and maybe much of it was vaporware initially but maybe they simply scratched the right annoyances the customers had by providing features for that quickly enough.

Seen some ERP's for mid-sized customers and the good ones makes it easy to build views and otherwise customize the software up to a point for non-engineers. The code is shit but they've also produced a lot of things needed internally that we wouldn't have gotten done quickly enough by doing it manually.

https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers

IIRC the start up was beaten out by volume of features, granted some didn't work on Salesforce, but people buy software based on features for sure.

The market is always looking to be seen, understood and helped.

Even a little help in the mix of those 3 can be overlooked more than it ought to be.

Perfect really is the enemy of Great/Good.

> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.

I do, and I reject being branded as part of "we" here; most people and orgs just have bad taste. ("Taste" at an organizational level obviously being an emergent property rather than literally the same as the homonymous trait in individuals.)

I like to think I do too.

However, I think we can recognize a collective we that even if the individual might not do a thing ... we're all in the same boat in the end.

I think part of Apple’s success is because they give people nice things.

They do indeed treat customers well.

The devs... man, it's a constant battle. And their dev tool quality is all over the place. It's no wonder they lost the desktop market, and only swing in app devs due to market dominance.

> [They] were a very "engineering focused" (or similar term) organization. Their code was rock solid.

I'll bet it wasn't. You're hearing this from the person who ran the company. Most companies have terrible code, and I'll bet the people running those companies would also say they were "engineering focused" and had "rock solid" code. They're just wrong.

>Most companies have terrible code

1. that's a pretty horrible interpretation for an engineer to have. Though I feel "code" and "codebases" are different topics to consider. There will always be some bad code as long as multiple people work on a codebase (because you're simply not going to have a principle programmer stuck doing minor bug fixes). I argue most truly bad codebases fail early (or become bad later, when being a "good codebase" is no longer a selling point for them, and as people shuffle in and out).

2. even if it's true that most companies have tereible codebases, I argue good codebases with no traction is worse than bad codebases with traction. Ideally we have good code with traction, but this example shows that even multimillion dollar companies will be sold on promises rather than proper features.

I've been seeing a product we use at my organization roll out incomplete/trash feature fast to have a product, and then fix them after the fact.

We've gotten tons of blow back as other teams use the product and find it next to useless with tons of bugs, and I'm stuck trying to push it. Not a fun place to be.

Learned a lot about the software market and capitalism though.

This is exactly correct. See distinction between “best produced videos” and “best YOUTUBE” videos - it’s not about making the best video, it’s about making the one that minmaxes the metrics

Youtube needs a metric to not promote low quality videos with low intentionality. No one searches for Mr beast videos with intent to watch them. The audience is primarily children who will watch whatever slop the algorithm puts in front of them. We need something like china where algorithms push quality educational content.

> The audience is primarily children who will watch whatever slop the algorithm puts in front of them.

low quality consumption doesn't have an age range. Sometimes you just want to watch a cozy cat video, so I get it.

>We need something like china where algorithms push quality educational content.

that sounds horrible for multiple reasons that could be a post in and of itself. I'll just point out the obvious one from the post itself:

>Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.

If the algorithm shifts, they will shift and I'm sure something goodhearted like "make the best educational videos" will find some loophole to slip in clickbait or any other engagement metric.

Ultimately, let me curate my own filters. I can't save everyone else but let me make sure I never see that stuff if I don' want to.

> The audience is primarily children

Ask me how I know you didn’t read the handbook! Over 50% of the audience is >=25

Because of COPPA <=13 year olds aren't allowed on youtube so they lie about their age. These youtubers perpetuate this lie because >=25 is a more valuable ad targeting demographic.

The brain isn't full developed until 25-30 years old. I changed a lot, mentally, in my late 20's to early 30's. 25 is still a borderline child.

Sure, but a lot of people are besides brain-dead slop-consumers.

That doesn't really challenge the proposal about regulating content.

(I personally recoil at the proposition of China-like content moderation but whatever.)

Algorithm moderation is not content moderation. A recent court case found that algorithmic recommendations don't fall under section 230 protection.

Mr. Beast is FAR from the most pathological content on YouTube.

> And this is why we can't have nice things.

Indeed, and that's why OP wrote its list of counterpoints. In theory, a company can make a lot of money by creating products that are aligned with users' interests. Unfortunately, in today's world this is more difficult to do rather than taking advantage of users in some way. Still, if we don't oppose these practices there will never be a change, so it's worth fighting for our rights as users.

> Some counterpoints:

The goal would be to be more customer-focused in those cases.

"No one prospers without rendering benefit to others." — Tadao Yoshida, founder of YKK zippers, https://ykkamericas.com/our-philosophy/

With MrBeast, the "best YOUTUBE video" would be one that causes engagement with the viewer throughout the video:

> The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.

You have to both entice the viewer with the thumbnail/title, and meet the expectations of the viewer so they continue watching.

Your counterexamples are a bunch of instances where the company did not meet customer expectations.

> "No one prospers without rendering benefit to others." — Tadao Yoshida

This quote describes how things should be, not how things actually are.

In the long run it is true.

Name a company which has prospered, over many years, without rendering benefit to its customers.

Real estate agencies? Most middleman in general have a shakey premise for if they "benefit" their customers.

On a less subjectve level, I feel the "Embrace, extend, extinguish" mentality runs counter to this ideal. the FAANGs did indeed render benefit to its customers early on. You can argue by now almost all of them 20 years later have long shifted towards being gatekeepers that employ dark patterns or outright rent seek these days, rather than acting like a customer-focused company.

Virtually every casino and gambling company in existence.

Are you suggesting casino and bookmakers' clients derive no utility at all from gambling? In the absence of any enjoyment or other benefit, who forces the clients to participate?

Same argument can be made for tobacco salesmen, drug dealers etc. If people pay money for something then they MUST derive some benefit from it... I find that assumption questionable.

Other things I could mention: multi-level marketing, snake oil sellers e.g. homeopathy astrology etc.

I find the assumption that every casino and gambling company in existence provides no benefit, of any kind, to any of their customers....extremely questionable.

In MrBeast's case, his revenue is directly correlated with customer engagement via YouTube's algorithm. I'm sure that were it legal, gladiatorial combat would be very popular and profitable on YouTube. I suppose one could make an argument that it would therefore "beneficial".

In the other aforementioned cases, in absence of an algorithm, revenue-generating activity wasn't as well correlated with meeting customer expectations. The point is that companies will always optimize for their own revenue, regardless of how well or poorly their activity meets customer expectations.

> No one prospers without rendering benefit to others

Plenty of counterexamples for this as well. Snake oil salesmen, drug dealers, woo peddlers, gurus, politicians, grifters, scammers, thieves, and on and on...

I hate that so many people live by “wisdom” that falls apart at the slightest scrutiny…

Our lives are made up of and guided by narratives that sound good and just on paper, but are empirically proven wrong time and time again. Yet they persist.

Some come from the zeitgeist, others are eternal, biblical, and worse, unfalsifiable: "everything happens for a reason," "if you're meant to be together, you will be together," "just do a good job and you'll get what you deserve". The latter was voiced by my postdoc advisor, who did not take the time to look at the percentage of researchers who did good work but did not get a tenure-track position. But perhaps those who did not find jobs did not do good enough work, and the charade continues.

Almost all of his examples are/were failures, by all metrics.

Cause and effect requires observation, which means there will be a time delay between when a company does something shady and when the customers realize the rug was pulled out from under them. You can't know a pinto is going to blow up before it blows up. Once people realized, it almost destroyed the company [1]. The time delay between a correction in a company is even longer, because it requires another layer of observation.

None of these are proof that the error correction mechanism is broken, or that the quote is somehow untrue/fragile. Most of the egregious examples of broken feedback are those companies that make the red and blue politicians multi millionaires by the time they retire, usually with no-consequences government contracts.

edit: and, this fails miserably if you don't pay any attention to the end goal, which I've seen several times.

[1] https://www.autoweek.com/news/a2099001/ford-100-defective-pi...

nit: you can indeed know a pinto would blow up before it blows up. But you go to your city square and get laughed at because they trust Ford over some car mechanic who looked deeply into the car.

Of course, I'm describing a literal forum here (physical forums! good times). I wonder how many whistleblowers out there highlighted some dark pattern in the past 20 years and were cast off as a conspiracy nut. Both publicly and in internal company channels.

nit2: it's so strange how times have changed. 40-50 years ago his Pinto recall was company ending. Nowadays the Cybertruck has had what? 5 recalls now? And it still has this bizarre cult behind it. What happened to people? what happened to wanting a driveable car (nevermind those truck minded audiences the cybertruck targets who claims to do more than just drive)?

nit2, here are the four Cybertruck recalls [1].

1. Windshield wiper motor failure.

2. Loose trim from the bed.

3. Accelerator pedal can stick.

4. Wrong sized font used for the warning lights.

Wiper was fixed with OTA update. Accelerator pedal was fixed on all trucks within the first week after it was discovered.

> And it still has this bizarre cult behind it.

That doesn't mean sales haven't been hurt, but anyone actually interested will see that the above list isn't an issue. Toyota had a similar recall some years ago, and it hurt their sales too [3]. It's a good idea to skip first model years of any car.

[1] https://www.cars.com/research/tesla-cybertruck/recalls/

[3] https://www.npr.org/2010/02/02/123283959/gas-pedal-woes-put-...

You're right about 4 and maybe 2. But #3 is pretty much by biggest one of my top 3 fears in a car. Stuck accelerator or non-working breaks. I was already cast off before hand but I'd never buy a new [car brand] car knowing that kind of issue existed before.

#1 is a big issue but not for my area.

Their definition of "best copier possible" was "most-profitable copier possible", meaning they had to balance getting people to not hate it so much they chose competitors, while not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees and services and parts etc?

> not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees[sic] and services and parts etc?

The thing is, nothing is completely maintenance free, esp. if there's something mechanical. Make wearing parts wear, core parts robust. All my laser printers were Samsung/Xerox (hah), and their "core" is made like a tank. Only its rollers, toner and imaging/drum kits wear down, and these are already consumables.

The device keeps track the life of every of these replaceable components, and you replace them you hit these marks, because they're already worn down to hinder reliable operation (Imager dies at 9K pages, rollers at 20K pages IIRC).

You don't need to make things fail prematurely to make something profitable. First one of these printers didn't have replaceable rollers, so I had to donate it after 11 years of operation. This one is almost 8 years old IIRC, and it's still going strong. I'll be using it as long as I can find spares for it, because it's engineered "correctly", not "for profit". Meantime, its manufacturer can still profit from parts, toner and imaging units.

I think something that companies often miss is that improving the experience in an area where you have a monopoly can still increase profits by encouraging increased usage of that area.

The example I always go to is U-Haul in the US. They have a functional monopoly on quickly getting a pickup truck or small box car. I used to tell people there was no need to own a pickup truck because I could go grab one for $30 once or twice a month when I needed it.

After a year of shitty apps, constantly being sold things I didn't need because they try to secretly upsell you 50 times during checkout. Having to go into the store to get the keys and wait in line for 1 hour behind people screaming about how they were cheated... I bought a truck.

U-Hual still has their monopoly, but they lost my business, not because I went to a competitor, but because I altered my life to no longer need their business.

Maybe instead of buying eink tablets, I would have kept printing things had printers been better products.

U-haul is one of the shittiest experiences possible. Right there with calling comcast and going to the dmv. Compare that to truck rental from Lowe’s or Home Depot that’s actually probably more expensive but way more pleasant.

Only problem is that everyone else also has figured that out so hard to secure one.

Not copiers, but the ice cream machines in mcdonalds resturants were kept unreliable because mcdonalds made money on the constant repairs. It didn't matter to them that the franchisee was losing money. When 3rd party companies jumped in to fix the machines the manufacturer and mcdonalds acted to stop that happening. There was a court case brought by the third party companies, which they recently lost.

Actually, it looks like the feds have sided with the 3rd parties?

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/14/24101023/ftc-doj-comment-...

> ...they recently lost.

Who is "they"?

They being the third party repair companies. Johnny Harris did a long piece on the whole story [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4

Why did you write sic after you quoted “warrantees”?

The correct spelling is "warranties" (since singular y becomes i when it gets plural).

[sic] means "I copied the word as written in its original, and it was already written that way" [0].

[0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sic

I probably meant warranties but warrantees works in the sentence just fine too :)

Hey, as long as it's readable, I don't care. I just wanted to note that I quoted you verbatim, not judge you because you pressed letter "e" twice instead of once in an internet forum. :)

In my experience, people very rarely use [sic] when quoting on internet forums - readers will assume any quote was copied and pasted; and the quoted text is directly above yours.

Sometimes people edit their comments after they realize their mistakes; grammar, spelling or otherwise. I use [sic] to denote that "it was like that when I copied it". It's probably from my "old internet" days (/., local forums, etc.).

>- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".

This is a nit-pick, but for the record, The Pinto didn't explode at higher rates than other similar automobiles, also there wasn't an internal Ford Memo, it was an attachment to a letter to the NHTSA --but all people remember is the this so called "memo" Anyhow a myth was born and it seemingly refuses to die. By the numbers:

In 1975-76, the Pinto averaged 310 fatalities a year. But the similar-size Toyota Corolla averaged 313, the VW Beetle 374 and the Datsun 1200/210 came in at 405.

Additional info: https://newmarksdoor.typepad.com/mainblog/2005/07/the_pinto_...

That's not a counterpoint, that's a list of examples of exactly what they're saying.

They're not saying make the best product possible, they're saying make the product that sells the most despite quality.

I do not view these as counterpoints. You are making the same point, which is that the metric one optimizes for is extremely important. MrBeast is solely focused on maximizing revenue on the YouTube platform. The examples you cite also demonstrate the same exact metric (i.e., profit) in other domains. I know HP was in the habit of crippling its printers to extract more money, to add to your other examples.

Out of curiosity, what's wrong with Intel? Are you referring to their selling more capable parts for more money? If so, that does not strike me as a shady practice to maximize profits. More like how the best fruit goes for export, where it can fetch the most return.

Well a lot of these aren't counterpoints but rather examples of when companies naively followed KPIs to their own detriment. Boing has fallen from dominance to a distant second, Windows has been steadily losing dominance, Ford's darker years were around the Pinto fiasco.

While Microsoft as a whole is still quite strong, Ford and Boeing lost significant market position and the losses are partially attributed to these very mistakes.

Those are problematic business goals, right? I think that's very different to aligning team goals to company goals.

You are not wrong, but I'd suggest that in those cases the company prioritized short and medium term profit over the long term success of the company. Each of the situations you list ended up costing those companies dearly (except maybe Dyson?), and today they serve as cautionary tales. So I think the original point of "keeping the main thing the main thing" stands.

A good example here is Betamax. A lot of people lament that Betamax lost despite being better on a lot of measures: picture quality, etc. But what Betamax wasn't better at than VHS was runtime, and an early application of home VCRs was to time-shift NFL games, which ran longer than Betamax could record. It turns out that the end of NFL games is often the most important part, so people bought VHS instead of Betamax. So best is not some idealized thing, but depends a lot on what exactly you're measuring.

But also... this isn't doing well for Boeing? It's costing the money? I don't think Boeing is a template for success.

Those still seem like examples of “whatever the company is trying to achieve”, be it profitability, domination, cost minimisation etc.

> - Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".

Any good alternatives?

If you really want a Dyson, a better firmware: https://github.com/tinfever/FU-Dyson-BMS

If you are OK on alternatives, YouTube channel ProjectFarm has some vacuum reviews.

Mine doesn't seem to have any problem with batteries. Just "airways blocked" error no matter what I do and the warranty/support service isn't very helpful. So I'm looking for a similar-or-better quality clone (cordless vacuum with the laser thing) but with better service.

Not to stan for Dyson, but they're not a vacuum-cleaner company, they're a fire-prevention company. Every decisionmaking process they undertake is going to have that at the top of the list. They don't want a lot of batteries in the field that are being stretched to the limits of their operating lives.

Of course, the company's best response to that concern would be to make the batteries easily replaceable, including by third-party products. But that's where job #2 comes in: make sure the consumer has to buy a new Dyson sooner rather than later.

Then why design batteries with built-in cell balancing support, and remove the resistors to disable the feature in the last moment?

You can safely say that if the battery pack's total capacity drops under 75%, disable it, or detect dead cells and take action.

Disabling life prolonging features while having a full MCU and a nice battery IC on board smells fishy to me.

Riccar, Miele, SEBO. Brands you may not have heard of (I know I hadn't). Highly recommend a visit to your local vacuum repair store. Talk to the guy who's job is fixing all the shitty stick vacs.

DeWalt, or any other power tool battery adapter like this: https://www.amazon.com/HICOPEET-Compatible-Motorhead-v7-v8/d...

Power tool batteries have BMS, better chargers, and if you have multiple batteries, you get infinite vacuuming powers.

I swapped to Shark and haven't looked back. Current one takes an absolute beating (masses of dog hair, kids mess, countryside dirt walked into the house etc. etc.) and still performs perfectly after 3+ years of almost daily (ab-)use

I went down the vacuum rabbit hole a few years ago. I decided on Sebo. These are more or less big ugly machines with a cord, but you can buy every part online no matter how small (screws, gaskets,etc) or big (motors, control boards, etc).

> Some counterpoints:

Maybe all of these companies succeeded _despite_ these?

I suspect the intent was the best for the customer. Like it or not, YouTube is the customer here. The viewers are YouTube's customers.

I'd say the viewers are YouTube's quatloos.

Advertisers and people seeking behavior modification out of populations are YouTube's customers. MrBeast understands this. The MrBeast goal is to get and stay #1 at whatever YouTube wants, for the purpose of being #1 at whatever YouTube wants. That purpose can be any number of things, MrBeast doesn't care. It's purpose-agnostic.

What? Literally that’s the pint. If your goal is to screw over your costumers to maximize profit then the active still applies. Depends on what your goals are.

I liked how honest the guide was. There wasn’t anything fake noble here and a lot of his frustrations I have also felt as a people manager - the questions employees ask, making excuses when deadlines slip, etc

the job is to make YouTube videos that people click and watch

What gets them to watch and stick is a few things but notably wow factor, something crazy they haven’t seen before

The bar for wow factor keeps rising

Therefore you need to keep learning driving better and better results. Otherwise you are out

You need to take ownership for results to avoid delays at all costs.

>> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.

> Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve.

I see a lot of unnecessary negative sentiment towards that quote.

The quote has no hidden meaning and should be taken on face value: I could easily see an up-and-coming producer work for Mr. Beast, and get sidetracked with making sure that pixels are "perfect." Or a set designer making sure that a specific prop is placed "perfectly." That's not the point, and Mr. Beast is very upfront about it.

I actually admire that quote.

[flagged]

The "best YouTube" video is not whatever you think it is, but rather what it is.

You can go see what are the most watched videos. How many are softcore porn?

(Let's exclude music videos because they have always included that at times, and popularity tends to run with the audio first)

> "the best" video you can make is probably porn that's softcore enough to not trip the monetization or age restriction gates

Since Mr Beast has some of the highest repeatable viewerships on YouTube I think there's some evidence that is wrong.

> Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.

I think these are clear signs of a dysfunctional organization. I want to associate that with company size (larger -> more bureaucratic, counter-mission nonsense), but I've also seen large companies that don't get caught in these pitfalls. My best guess to lay blame would be at inadequate, out of touch, need-to-be-fired B.o.D and upper and mid-management deadwood. These are the people that propagate such ineffective culture.

I will forever remember the head of IT at my org exclaiming in a meeting, "I'm not here to solve problems". Blew my mind at the time, but it's emblematic and representative of company culture as a whole.

I see this all the time. Organizations which are solely dedicated to stop things from happening instead of allowing things to happen.

One example is a disaster readiness organization which mandates that teams cannot deploy code in only a single datacenter. What they should really be doing is making it so code automatically runs in multiple datacenters.

Facilitate instead of forbid.

TBF there are orgs at companies whose sole role is to play DEFENSE - lawyers, CSO etc… if they deem something too risky it IS their job to block it, and then it’s up to upper management to override them if the situation calls for it.

Now that said they should still try to advance the mission within that framework, and not be lazy.

The most secure company is, of course, the company that doesn't exist. Bankrupting your org is certainly the most effective way to keep it secure.

Yes, their role is defense, but not insofar as to remove the profitability of the organization. In several orgs now I've seen the legal team blow contracts and the security team break the product and the IT team break development in the name of performing their role "correctly".

Brainless box checking is not part of defense, you must be willing to critically think about how to fit your role to your product or organization's profit motive.

There is a natural tension between these equally important roles, especially when folks choose to view competing objectives as a zero sum game. I think your point of view is one-sided.

Reminds me of the "most secure computer is the one encased in a block of concrete at the bottom of the ocean".

Not disagreeing with you, can you give and explain one of the examples where you have seen this?

Your comment reminded me of the old content vs process Steve Jobs commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE

But I agree, it's so tempting to get internally focused, or focused on "improvement" that really shifts the focus to something else entirely (hollywood style movies, tv shows, whatever).

Personally I'm no fan of the youtube-ism and youtube generally, but it's clear that game is it's own game. It's not making a movie, it's not a TV show, it's not even tiktok. It's its own thing and it is pretty clear that generally you have to play that platform's game.

My kids play a lot of roblox, and while there's a lot of copy cat games based on traditional gaming, there's almost a system on roblox as far as what games are popular as far as ease of jumping in goes and so on. And there's a lot of weird creativity you find nowhere else as far as the topics of the games (want to be a bug? you can do that). That's it's own space too.

> teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's

This is the intractable and unavoidable problem with the use of KPIs as a management tool: Goodhart's Law -- any metric used as a target ceases to be a good measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

You are -- literally -- telling the team, "go make this KPI number go up. Your entire job performance will be evaluated on that basis." It is unsurprising that the team therefore focuses on making that number go up.

If you want teams to consider the goals of the company, or anything at all besides their KPIs, don't use KPIs.

> Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.

"People who realize the ramifications of the proposed route of action beyond 'it makes the number bigger'" finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions.

There. Fixed it.

Ok but the main issue is the stopping things from happening instead of finding solutions.

Some things should be stopped.

For example, locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce. Or having said dude run a marathon on a treadmill without any training. Or running illegal lotteries. Or fixing the outcomes of game shows.

Some of those things "make the best YouTube video possible" but are profoundly abusive at the least and outright illegal at worst. If you can't do the video without doing those things, you shouldn't do the video and should focus on human factors instead of the money you're missing out on, like a person without psycopathy might.

>For example, locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce.

Note this is MrBeast doing it to himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_CbgLpvH9E

I think that changes the ethics a bit. If he decides to potentially psychologically torment himself for his channel, I don't think it's a big deal that he didn't give himself a mental health evaluation beforehand.

(I'm aware he has a similar video with random contestants as well. But either way, I think this particular criticism is a little too hand-wringy. It's not being forced upon anyone and they can leave at any time.)

IMO the biggest issue is the allegation he rigs some of the game shows. That's definitely unethical.

Maybe those sure, but I guess I'm more talking about the corporate IT or legal department setting who are just worried about some micro service having some weird vulnerability or something.

> locking a dude in a room for days on end with no mental health evaluation beforehand to see if he can handle the psychological stress that might induce. Or having said dude run a marathon on a treadmill without any training. Or running illegal lotteries. Or fixing the outcomes of game shows.

I don't think any of these contestants would be doing it with a gun to their head. ergo, they had a choice on whether to do it. We don't know whether they were informed choices, but I assume they were (giving people the benefit of the doubt here).

I think those are references to the Dogpack404 videos: https://youtube.com/@DogPack404/videos

They were the ones that stirred up a bunch of controversy, but had some former employee experiences in them.

I have no idea about he greater situation but I think that’s what the comment is referencing.

there is nuance to all things and that nuance is what GP is getting at.

What you say is also valid but in between, is a lot of grey. For example, should the federal government in your country issue standardised IDs to citizens? A lawyer may point to privacy regulations and say no but there are lots of benefits. If a workaround exists, should we simply ignore those benefits?

And the "best YOUTUBE videos possible" are... toxic, useless brainrot? (with occasional for-views philanthropy)

These videos are certainly the best in terms of what money they can make... but are they any good for their consumers?

Who said anything about consumers? I think viewing "the best YOUTUBE videos possible" in line with "the best CIGARETTES possible" is probably the right framing here.

Yes, best is always wrt some metric, which here is clearly monetary gain.

His competition and giveaway videos are just the modern version of reality TV and game shows, where the draw is the horse race and human drama. You might call that "toxic, useless brainrot," but personally, I feel like such fare is about on the same level as any number of classic novels (including pretty much anything authored by a Bronte sister). Your enjoyment likely hinges on your level of empathy for the people involved, as they're thrown into complex social situations with their livelihood at stake, or whatever.

>toxic, useless brainrot

I assumed that's what all his videos were for years and hadn't ever watched any (given I am not a child, among other reasons), but I gave one a chance out of curiosity and found myself surprisingly enjoying some of the competition videos. The competitions are often well-designed and adeptly narratively structured.

Notably, many of them are similar formats that you'd find in regular TV, except the MrBeast version puts 10 minutes of content into a 12 minute video, while the TV show would put 5 minutes of content into a 45 minute episode.

What's wrong with making things for others' entertainment? The moralization of this is bizarre. Don't like it, don't consume it. This man has figured out how to create a ridiculous amount of value, whichever way you slice it.

What's wrong with asking a homeless person to do an embarrassing dance for a $20 bill? That used to be popular content on YouTube. Don't like that, don't watch it.

If your most potent defense of Mr. Beast is that he's made a lot of money, then he stands due the same scrutiny Rockefeller and Carnegie got. I've watched his videos, it's not an incorrect conclusion to say that his popularity hinges on the "savior complex" present in most of his videos. His content revolves around exploiting charity as a social phenomenon. He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than he donates. His business relies on the emotional manipulation of a destitute audience.

1. I don't think that's an accurate characterization of Mr. Beasts' content

2. > He's a wannabe altruist that pockets more money than he donates. That's such a weak case. So he doesn't donate everything therefore he's evil or something?

3. > His content revolves around exploiting charity as a social phenomenon. What are you even saying? I'm much more utilitarian about it. Is he doing more good than harm? The answer is a clear and resounding yes. Especially as the 'harm' is labeled: Entertaining kids, helping others and filming it, and making money?

I guess this politically correct posturing bothers me because most of the people issuing this criticism have not had as much impact in people's lives as he has. Classic case of armchair thinkers, criticizing people doing stuff, and doing so excellently.

At any rate the outrage seems like it would be better directed at Pfizer or other corporatocratic corruption machines, you know, people doing actual harm. Not a kid that figured out how to make money in a new media landscape and is using a huge portion of that to uplift his community.

> I guess this politically correct posturing bothers me because most of the people issuing this criticism have not had as much impact in people's lives as he has.

Cram it. You can say the same thing about Pfizer, anyone criticizing a dictator, or terrible philosophers trying to publish self help books for profit. By that logic, you're not qualified to defend Mr. Beast either because you don't actually understand the causal relationship between success and charity. It's nonsense criticism, a thought-terminating argument intended to obviate good-faith discussion.

Mr. Beast's problem is obvious, if you're willing to look past his marketing. Because at the end of the day, he's a business. He uses the same playbook as the most abusive monopolies like Apple and Google, laundering his reputation as a healthy net positive on society. Scratching beneath the surface, people know that he lied about how much money he makes, he lied about the cars he drives and the house he lives in, and probably lies to his employees to prevent them from presenting serious competition. Assuming Mr. Beast is, well, smart, assigning him as a happy-go-lucky charity cause is exactly the sort of outcome he wants. If he was serious about charity or altruism, he'd have some grander plan than sponsoring game shows and leeching off his popularity for profit.

By sincerely believing the image he presents, you yourself have been manipulated into thinking he's inert. Give him... I dunno, 3 more months? I've forgotten the average half-life of lifestyle influencers being ousted as racketeers or groomers on YouTube.

Not disclosing that the beneficiaries are friends and family under the guise of charity to get more views seems pretty scummy to me. In general I'm sick of the fake charity we see with influencers, including the classic "show up to a volunteer event, take pictures, and promptly leave" bit that influencers occasionally get caught doing.

>Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions.

Sounds like they're doing their jobs, which is to protect your future selves from your current selves. Sure, finding solutions is great, but faulting them from finding problems and slowing things down until solutions are found is odd.

Yes, security or IT does sometime have to act as a reality check in an organization that has over-hired over-zealous but under-experienced go-getters who want to "move fast and break things". They are a vital counterweight that makes ambition productive, instead of allowing it to wreck the organization's reputation.

I'm going to interject my own experiences and note that some legal advice seems excessively risk averse and honestly just defaults to "no" and lazy. I suspect that's what the OP might have been referencing.

I know we're generally concerned with the folks playing fast and loose with the rules here, and that's 100% true, but. I find in big orgs sometimes it's far more on the other end of the spectrum.

And sometimes security or IT just play it excessively, and never allow anything just to make sure they can't be blamed for anything:

"No, you can't improve the situation with the Linux servers that hasn't been updated since 2013 because those servers don't exist in our roadmap, and therefore there's no policy document that we can lean on to make any decisions. So the servers stay in their miserable state until we can phase over all customers that use those servers to some other product eventually. In a few years. Hopefully."

Note that the above isn't fiction, but exactly what happened a few months ago. Luckily I managed to transfer to a team that didn't have to deal with those servers.

See this all the time - for example, zealous dev "if I had production DB read/write I could get things done so much faster."

Sure, but the production DB has an incredible amount of PII and we are audited out the wazoo, but even if that weren't the case and it was totally fine, all it takes is you being careless with your credentials one time and the company's hosed or we have a massive breach, or some rogue employee encrypts the data with ransomware. So, yes, it would make you faster, and no, you can't have it. It's insane how often I have this type of conversation and insane how often I am the bad guy in it.

The solution is replicating the DB and scrubbing the PII. Then the dev can go wild.

This is a solution oriented approach instead of a lazy ass covering approach which I think the GP was referring to. The job should be finding risks and then figuring out how to work around those risks. Very rarely are there no solutions, most of the time it is due to general laziness or in aptitude where someone can find risks but they do not find solutions.

> The solution is replicating the DB and scrubbing the PII. Then the dev can go wild.

In this particular example, often this isn't remotely feasible, either from a business logic standpoint (I can think of plenty of fintech examples), lack of qualified DBA/sysadmins, network admins, cloud cost constraints, methods and controls to ensure to auditors that devs cannot access production data - none of this is trivial, and often to the dev it seems "silly" they may need to wait a few hours for something they could technically access in a few minutes, but acting like these solutions have no tradeoffs or are always worth doing suggests a lack of knowledge as to how these things actually work in a business and on a development team. It certainly isn't always laziness, and I'd even say it's not laziness that often at all.

In your example, I am not saying you need to give the dev access to prod. But you should be working with the dev to figure out why he needs access to prod and figuring out what needs to happen to make the end goal happen. Getting read/write access to prod isn't the end goal, the dev is trying to accomplish something and they see direct access to prod as the solution.

My point wasn't that lawyers/security/IT/whatever shouldn't do their job. It's that their perspective should be focused on helping the company achieve whatever it's trying to do.

I was glad to see such a clear, actionable mission statement. At companies I've worked for, the mission statements have been either absurdly broad or completely incomprehensible, and as a result most employees (quite rightly) ignore them.

This seems extremely idealistic. How many companies even know what the goal of the company is? Very few employees know this as many companies don’t know it either. Furthermore, there are many times when forgetting about the overarching goal and focusing on the goal that is right in front of you is the right decision. In fact, a strategy that many companies use to avoid this is to split the company up into smaller start up operations that are designed to specifically ignore the overarching goals of the company so that they can on their own perform at the best within their channel.

Calling average professionals average is an old trick in the book. If everyone is an excellent professional comparing to outside, they'll be average inside. And then you need to keep pushing extra miles on top of each other and sacrificing your personal life.

This is the kind of mentality that got us all with anxiety crisis and panic attacks depending on medications.

While I agree with your general sentiment, that doesn't seem like a particularly insightful quote, but rather a nebulous negative definition. Does the guide mean that "best" is balanced blend of all of those? Based on what sibling comments are saying, the goal is to make the most popular videos, in which case, the guide should say that.

It is pretty honest guide on how to succeed at Mr. Beast productions. They have their own metrics of success which may or may not align with your morals or ideals. It is a collection of all their learnings in making the videos.

Lawyers finding problems and trying to stop things from happening instead of finding solutions. Security blocking things and not suggesting alternatives. IT blocking this or that instead of trying solve problems, etc.

Legit, but you're not thinking this all the way through. As an organization grows you'll have people whose primary duty is risk mitigation, without the executive authority to pick up the phone and spend resources on implementing, identifying, or seeking a solution. Indeed, if they spend too much time solutioneering, it will limit their ability to do the job they were hired for. Then they get punished for going too far. The sort of initiative-taking and ownership that works great in a startup can get someone fired in a larger org.

It's code for: "Your goal is to make this company the most MONEY possible"

Given the current landscape of crass hype beasts with all the peacocking vs the "follow your heart" microaggressions crowd it's easy to see those texts were written, but just like today's "tech company's" that "invent" things that existed for decades already, this is nothing new and it's a sign of a culture with very little oversight based on smoke and mirrors. Ironically this is exactly what the distilled core of "Corporate America" is and we all know what "results at all costs" lead to: See Wall Street, Boeing, etc.

Personally I never cared for the guy, it always looked tremendously fake and dishonest to me, to to each each own. IMO there is nothing new o special about this case, there are little dramas like these all over millions of organizations around the World.

While I agree with you, his goal is probably to make the most money. But I understand why he might not have phrased it that way. For any company their final goal is obviously to make the most money possible. But this goal is kind of unclear. It's better to approximate it like Mr. Beast does through saying that he makes the best YOUTUBE videos.

Hey! Have you been reading my email? This is a perfect analogy of the medium-to-large business that I work for.

>I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.

I thought it was well understood that this kind of misalignment is the cost of someone afraid to admit outloud what the goal is.

Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop."

This is hacker news, so take a tech giant (doesn't matter which) and imagine what it would mean for leadership to tell the rank and file what their actual goals were. For starters it would be internally demoralizing, externally scandalous, and include mens rea for many of their legal "whoopsie daisies" over the years.

> Mr. Beast, like Hollywood production companies before him, can say "don't forget, your job is lowest common denominator slop."

This feels to me like an intentionally hostile reading of the content. I think all of us have had the experience of working with a co-worker who is either brilliant but extremely prone to going down rabbit holes, or a co-worker who seems to have a completely different idea of what we’re doing than everyone else. “Make the best YouTube videos possible, not the highest quality” is the same sentiment behind “eventually you have to actually ship your software”. It’s the same sentiment behind the derision in the term “architecture astronaut”. It’s the same sentiment behind the “worse is better” axiom. It’s the same sentiment behind “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. In other words you need to know what it is that pays your bills and be laser focused on delivering that. A YouTube channel isn’t the place to make art house silent films. A community theater production isn’t the place to practice your improv comedy skills. If your company sells a database, it’s not the place to be writing memory safe shells in rust to replace bash, no matter how annoying maintaining your startup bash scripts are.

> intentionally hostile reading of the content.

Why? I specifically mentioned Hollywood to try avoid the rose colored glasses and just skip to the matter of fact stage. If it's just churning out content then it's just churning out content.

> Liz Lemon (friendly, trying to gain favor): Whatcha guys working on?

> Ritchie (Deadpan): Piece for the Today Show about how next month is October.

Because "lowest common denominator slop" is a culturally contextual judgement of media, and varies from place to place, time to time and culture to culture. Fine French Dining fans would call a pizza parlor "lowest common denominator slop", but no one would be offended if the employee handbook for a pizza place said "You're here to make the BEST TASTING PIZZA. Not the best looking pizza. Not a pizza made from the most expensive artesian ingredients. Not the fanciest pizza. Not a pizza lovingly hand crafted with dough that was hand massaged by virgins under the light of a full moon. If it's not making the BEST TASTING PIZZA, it's not your job."

>Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve. I see it all the time in large organizations, where different teams forget what the goal of the company is and instead get hyperfocused on their teams KPI's to the detriment of the company as a whole.

Even if you want to take this sort of Machiavellian approach (if that's the right sort of description), it still isn't the employee's real goal. A person's goal is to make consistent money. That is a combination of not getting fired and working towards raises. If someone owns a significant share of company stock (significant in terms of their own wealth, not in relation to the company's total shares), then it will also include increasing stock price, but even that is only short term until they can diversify.

So if you have a KPI that is actually hurting the business to achieve, but hurts your career to not achieve it, then the right approach is to maximize achieving that KPI, assuming you have no input on the KPI. If you do have input, it involves a much more complex question of how does it impact your career to try to correct the KPI.

Admitting this openly is not recommended and is comparable to the company admitting openly what its real goal is (or the executives admitting openly what their goals are, which following the above logic, is not the same as what the company's goals are). This does get into a interesting idea of a company having a true goal that doesn't match the true goals of any single member of the company, which has some interesting implications.

So your ideal model of a company is the infinite paperclip machine?

It's interesting to see the discussion from two different angles—there's a lot of support for the type of A/B/C delineation in parts of this thread, and some people who decry it in other parts.

I was on the set for one of the productions, and I'll just say at the time I thought the experience was a one-off for one of the bigger productions they've put on. Since reading other people's stories, it seems more a case where the pressure to push, push, push for the next big video is a ginormous machine that grinds people pretty hard.

An early stage startup, with a few employees, pushing to hit some milestone, could survive like that a while. But you can only burn through so many creative minds driving them at 110% all day like that. IMO, you have to find a sustainable burn rate that might be too much for some, but isn't going to drive away everyone desiring normal family / outside work life balance, especially 5-10 years into an org's lifetime.

MrBeast (the org) has hundreds of employees and probably 5-10 major active productions (in pre-prod, prod, and post-prod). They've achieved a lot of impressive results, but they also get to cut a lot of corners traditional media (Hollywood, TV production) can't due to labor laws and unions.

Edit: Not to mention, the 'No does not mean no' section was a bit alarming. There are plenty of times when no most certainly means no, and you can really damage business and personal relationships if you can't figure those out.

One thing I find interesting over the last few weeks since this was released (and other MrBeast drama) is how there is now a separation between MrBeast the person and MrBeast the company.

Before today, it was never differentiated. Since the drama started, I've seen more news and people (like yourself) clarify that you mean the company vs the person, and I'm not sure its warranted.

While everything was going good, MrBeast the person took all credit for MrBeast the company. Now, it seems like everyone is on tip-toes to clarify they are trash-talking MrBeast the company, not MrBeast the person.

It just seems a bit weird to me.

Honestly I never met Jimmy even though I was in his studio for two weeks working on the video. I did meet a ton of his employees, many of whom I'd gladly work with again, just not on a MrBeast production.

I just can't speak to Jimmy Donaldson himself. Not even sure how much he's involved in the day to day at the company (outside of being the public face).

The bigger the company gets, the more separate it becomes from its founder/face/whatever.

Inevitable.

(Although this document clearly sets out that this distinction should be fought at every step, so that counts against what I'm saying. It is trying desperately to ensure the company reflects the man as much as possible)

> While everything was going good, MrBeast the person took all credit for MrBeast the company. Now, it seems like everyone is on tip-toes to clarify they are trash-talking MrBeast the company, not MrBeast the person.

Yeah, I can't really understand why someone would craft a persona with a unique bespoke name and then name the company the same thing other than to try to make sure that the company is viewed as synonymous with the persona.

MrBeast has given up his life for his youtube channel (he writes exactly this in the doc) - and he is looking for other people willing to give up theirs for his channel

He is fricking 26 years old. He hasn't given his life for anything. At the moment he is, yes, but likely after some years he is retired on his yacht.

Some things leave a permanent mark on you. Try being a workaholic a few years and tell me later how easy is to disconnect, and rejoin with familiy and friends.

Yeah, working constantly for a few years leaves permanent marks. You know what makes it better in ways we'll never have? Millions of dollars, luxury yachts, and fame. Mr. Beast isn't a doctor. He isn't a teacher. He doesn't fight our wars. He makes entertainment for children. He'll be fine.

I think parent comment was referring to employees who are willing to dig in and sacrifice a few years of their lives for MrBeast productions, not to Jimmy Donaldson (though I could be interpreting it wrong).

Giving up your life for many millions of dollar is a choice.

His employees are probably payed well, but obviously don't make as much as he. So I guess asking them to give up their lives for less compensation is to say their lives are or less value...

No, it's to offer them a chance to make a lot of money in exchange for a lot of work.

No one is forced to work there and they are not taken advantage of.

Any of them are free to start their own channel and outcompete him! It's literally how he did it!

the audacity to ask other people to give up their life for helping you fulfil your dream and even sell it to them as them fulfilling their dream.

is it the same "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" shtick the american dream brainwashed americans with?

if you have that much drive and want to invest so heavily in work - do yourself a favour and do it as a leader where you call the shots and have the equity instead of as a follower.

THIS. I would like to tell you a bit of a personal story and this may shed some light on your question. Disclaimer* I am American.

I was working at Tesla on the CapEx team, and unless you were doing something "interesting", like going to Tahoe or something, then you were expected to be in the office on Saturday and Sunday.

I worked my ass off, pulling 70 hour weeks, catching naps in a conference room when there was a big push. I learned to be energized by my work, seeing the factory cells come together gave me this giant rush. Eventually, I got the thought you had but i worded it differently. "I will never be Elon, working for Elon".

So when Covid hit, i got put fully remote and started having some conversations with potential clients to launch my own consultancy. After a couple of months, our managers told us to start coming back into office. I had gotten some traction with the consultancy, so i decideded to "do [myself] a favour and do it as a leader where [i] call[ed] the shots and have the equity instead of as a follower."

At first it was great! I was learning an absolute ton, designed my own website from scratch, wrote a bunch of automation code, my sales ration was like 85% because i was just calling on all my old associates and references of references... life was great!

Then after i scaled, I realized I wasn't actually doing anything... I have these meetings, and my schedule is always swamped with evaluating this peice of software/this person, generating "Work" for different people, and i freaking hated it! I stopped learning... I had no peers, only employees. I had "Mentors" but my consultancy was so nitch so outside "Executive mentorship" i had no one to guide me. I tried to focus on growth opportunities within the company, scaling different verticles as different companies and other things to keep my mind working, but i slowly but surely lost interest. I couldn't push myself 70 hours a week because i didn't have anyone pushing me, and i hated "Consulting".

but every chance i got i would be watching drone videos over the Giga Texas progress. I kept up with every SpaceX, Tesla update ever...

And suddenly i realised, i deeply missed working at Tesla... i don't want to be Elon...

But that Elon is building some pretty cool shit, and factories, robots, automation is super cool and fun.

So i sold my consultancy for 1.5X revenues (Pretty shit deal but i wanted out). It didn't give me fuck you money but i could have chilled for a bit...

but now I'm happily working my ass off back at Tesla, fulfilling Elons dream. But i get to "Give up my life" to get to play with robots all day. I'm learning a ton again, i love my team, and i've never met a smarter group of people.

Very interesting personal experience, thanks!

I agree that doing meaningless work is soul crushing even if well-compensated.

It seems like it ought to be possible to do meaningful work without working 80 hour weeks, but maybe not!

And owning your own business isn't necessarily an easy 40 hours a week and don't think about it when you're not working, but sounds like you did have a lighter schedule? Or actually you didn't mention that! If you traded a 70-hour week as a well-compensated employee doing meaningful work for a 70-hour week being your own boss with possibility of making more money doing meaningless work -- yeah, I would make the same choice between those two! But I'd rather not have a 70 hour week, be reasonably compensated, and do meaningful work, if that were an option...

But we kind of forgot what we're talking about here... pretty sure nobody working for Mr Beast thinks it's meaningful work, and if they do, I'm worried about them.

How could anyone not think that entertaining literal millions of people is meaningful work? For some people, video production is their calling and having an audience is their life's dream.

sure, but holding a mic boom for entertaining millions of people is not meaningful work

I (ggp) actually don't agree, contributing proper mic boom holding to a project you find important and valuable and meaningful can be meaningful. Every contribution is meaningful.

I guess to me the crass eyeball-harvesting of MrBeast seems like exploitation of everyone involved with the only meaningfulness involved being profit. But I realize based on stickfigure's response that different people find different things meaningful, fair enough. Which is different than saying "just getting lots of money is meaningful for me" -- that is a different axis than meaning, and I'm unlikely to be swayed otherwise, although some people don't need meaning they just need money. It was hard for to imagine anyone is doing it for anything but the money at MrBeast, but different people are different and some of them are hard for me to imagine, fair!

Ever watch the Jackass movies? I know plenty of MFA-toting snobs that think it's high performance art. And I don't disagree.

I read the PDF; profit wasn't on the list of KPIs. In fact there was quite a lot of invective against it; he'll kill expensive projects just because he didn't think the quality was good enough. Of course $$ is related, but the focus really is on the eyeballs.

I worked in porn for a while. I found the work fun and meaningful. Not every mission involves saving the world.

Isn't what makes something meaningful in the eyes of the beholder? It might not be sending rockets to mars or curing cancer, but if you perceive it as meaningful, then it is.

what would you say are the chances for tesla to actually deliver optimus and start a commercial humanoid robots operation in the next 5 years?

no idea - I'm working with fanuc and kuka robots on the line, not those robots.

this read like a post written by Grok or Elon himself NGL

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This is what we call a cult.

You can call it whatever you want, it’s obvious you’re never going to be part of it.

People should not do that, though. There are better things to dedicate lives to.

>There are better things to dedicate lives to.

Everyone seems to think that they have the answers to this question... Family, friends, community, god, volunteering at the local soup kitchen..

All over your own wants? If you are a video creator/ creative and that's what gives you energy and all the feel good chems, why not work your ASS off for THE CREATOR of our generation?

Cause from the way i see it, success and the confidence* it brings, solves all other issues.

*As long as you can avoid the pitfall of arrogance.

Because, in my opinion, this is a worse thing to do with your life than the many better options.

I don't have some One Right Answer to what the best thing to do with your life is, but I'm comfortable having a personal - but strong - opinion on a rough ordering that, for instance, puts family and friends much higher than a life dedicated to "THE CREATOR of our generation". Maybe you think that sounds impressive? I think it just sounds very sad.

Or, you can go work there for 1-2 years, learn a lot and move on. Maybe to some more relaxed work, or start your own venture. It actually sounds like a place where you might learn something.

Yep, to the extent that this is a sensible thing to do, this is the sensible way to do it. This is clearly analogous to working in high-pressure finance shops or in startups for a fairly short period of time in order to drink from a firehose.

The problem is that the kind of people who are ambitious enough to think this sounds like a good idea often (maybe usually) get sucked deeply into it.

But yep, I do think it's a reasonable model if you can avoid that outcome and get in and out early in your career.

> There are better things to dedicate lives to.

Then those aren't people Jimmy wants to hire for his company. There are hundreds of millions of teenagers on this planet that want to stake everything they own to make a YouTube channel and reap the rewards - ownership of their work, being their own boss, potentially lucrative amounts of money, microcelebrity if not greater levels of fame, etc. Some will do it, and some won't. Jimmy is very clearly talking to those people.

I know because I was one of them, making my first few hundred dollars ever from adsense at the age of 14 (till I was demonetized a year later and my channel got taken down for copyright, but hey, you learn). I've since grown a bit a taken that energy and it's helped guide me as I learn to make my own startup right now - it's the same adrenaline rush and pursuit of the American dream.

It's interesting to me that you did this with YouTube, as I did the same when I was 16 (almost 20 years ago now) but with AdSense. I earned about $70 (mostly off my buddies anime site) which I never collected. Seven years later Google sends the money to my state's unclaimed fund. Even more years later I finally collect that $70 check.

Just wanted to share some fond memories.

Yep, I get it. This is all true. What I'm saying is that, in my opinion, it's also bad and those people (and perhaps you) ought to choose a better path. I recognize that many of them won't. There are lots of things I think people (including myself!) ought not do, which we still do anyway.

who are you to dictate what people do with their lives and deny them their free will?

Not who you are responding to but I think it is more a case of, long term it might not work out as intended for them. They are more than free to pursue this goal with all their might, but don't be surprised if in a few years they are burnt out and scrambling for the exit.

That said, it might work out, who knows? But at some point it looks like gambling with your time and energy trying to seek fulfillment. Again, they are free to do this, just try not to harm others in the process.

even if it doesnt work, an employee was compensated for labor on mutually agreed terms & one comes out with valuable experience (and arguably a stronger ability to build something better than MrBeast if there is misalignment with MrBeast principles/values)

Note that I'm not dictating anything to anyone, simply stating my view about what things are or aren't good, which I'm certainly entitled to.

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An opinion would be stated like "I believe" or "I feel". The GP comment said "people shouldn't", which is a directive/command. Words actually mean specific things, who'd have thought?

And who would think that context matters to derive meaning from words. "In my opinion people shouldn't" is the very obvious meaning of "People shouldn't" when a rando with no authority whatsoever comments on an obscure internet forum.

So, you can look at my comment history to find me waffling about whether every opinion ought to be prefaced with "I believe". Lots of writing advice suggests not doing that, because it's obvious from context and thus redundant, but I find that there is almost always at least one comment like this one when it is elided, which does make me question this writing advice.

Having said that, in this case, I think this is just wrong:

> "people shouldn't", which is a directive/command

I think this is a misreading of the word "shouldn't"... It does not mean "are forbidden to". I honestly struggle to see how you could possibly read it as a "directive/command", especially in a random comment on the internet rather than, like, a legal document (where it wouldn't appear anyway).

I think it's pretty clearly a value judgment, and thus fairly clear that it is a subjective opinion, as all value judgments are.

> I honestly struggle to see how you could possibly read it as a "directive/command"

I feel like they don't. I believe it's just an attempt at making you refrain from giving your opinion in the future, because reading your opinion bothers them.

If so, I'd say that sickos like me who waste their time opining on random facets of random posts on HN are pretty unlikely to be put off by this sort of pushback. We're all degenerate opiners here! :)

That's like me saying I've given up my life to have the job that I have currently and live where I do. Or you've given up your life for however you spend it.

It just about makes some sort of sense in the context of something like giving up a professional career in a developed country and moving to a remote African village to do aid work, but giving up your life to make a tonne of money creating viral YouTube videos is an absurd description.

My biggest critizism of A/B/C is it is always either a delusion, lie, or manipulation. People that talk frequently about "A players/employees" are almost certainly not the ones hiring them. Why? "A players" don't work someplace where they are not respected and ground to dust as a non-owner. That means at best the best employees are "B-players" and probably most of their staff is actually "C-players"

"A players" know their worth and go somewhere that either has prestige, high pay or work life balance and respect. Like all such places in my experience Mrbeast does not appear to provide those things to all but his inner circle. Which by the way an "Inner circle" is a hallmark of places that like to make noise about A/B/C dynamics.

I would like to believe that's true, but honestly, I know some really hard workers who are gluttons for abuse.

Sure. My point really was though that if you find a place that is openly discussing A/B/C dynamics it is a huge red flag.

"C-Players" tend to keep "A-Players" out of legal trouble, so Jimmy might just now be learning their value.

The no doesn't mean no section was about contractors and dealing with other people. It was a way of conveying that if you ask for something and get an outright refusal, then it's ok to ask again and pivot on details to try and find a fit. MrBeasts company drove a train into a big pit (one of the few videos I watched). That call, would have started with, I'd like to buy a train and a big pit. It probably started as a flat out refusal before he turned up with money.

I bet the folks at Train & Pit Co. Couldn’t believe their ears.

> labor laws and unions

Perhaps this is as much a commentary on the state of labor laws and unions as anything else.

You don't understand. In this culture if you have enough money no does not mean no. You have less laws to care about. In some cases you ARE the law.

I don't have the energy for an intellectual debate, but personally, I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the world and the monetization of Youtube has incentivized and amplified mediocrity, stupidity, and social decay.

I don't follow or watch Mr Beast videos, but from what I've seen, they are largely driven by a money fetish and as far as "creativity", it feels on par with the more boring "What would you rather" conversations I had in middle school.

Maybe he has unlocked the key to virality by vigorously analyzing data, but looking at his videos, at a glance, it seems to more be formulaic, predictable, and simply having an actual budget that sets it apart (if it is actually set apart, as I find it hard to tell how much of it is others copying his work versus hius work being unoriginal).

For as much slop as gets produced on YouTube, I think the high quality educational content more than makes up for it. You can literally look up any subject and find a full blown series on the topic.

His huge budgets and willingness to reinvest all the profits into future videos have allowed MrBeast to produce a lot of unique videos which are effectively unmatched by anyone else. Right now they're really the undisputed kings of the platform, by a massive margin.

This is why those who can appropriately select good information will flourish in this age. I still suck at it (get pulled into mindnumbing shorts for 30 minutes), but then I learned a new musical instrument for _free_ using YouTube.

Agreed, YouTube is the PBS of the internet. It's free and fast.

PBS is not, at least nominally, advertising-supported.

YouTube very much is.

It’s a wonder of the modern world

and it just works. I'm glad there's a monopoly of UGC video

>Youtube is net bad for the world

Disagree. The outliers don’t determine the value of the platform.

The videos of people creating, fixing, coding, diagnosing, doing every day random things - those are a gift to humanity.

Those visual demonstrations transcend language. Because of this, YouTube is more important than Google or any written word website.

Knowledge share is finally global.

> Disagree. The outliers don’t determine the value of the platform.

Agreed.

> The videos of people creating, fixing, coding, diagnosing, doing every day random things - those are a gift to humanity.

These seem like the outliers.

The good news is they don't have to be outliers for you. Watch what you want; skip the rest.

Mr Beast and similar viral videos are hardly the outliers given that their traffic absolutely dwarfs the best educational videos. There is a lot of useful and interesting content on Youtube, but that's very much a niche use. The vast majority of watched hours are on content much closer to Mr Beast than learning how to code or a diy woodworking project.

The value isn't determined by watched hours.

No other streaming platform offers a video catalog that covers nearly all aspects of human activities.

This has never existed in all of humanity.

This is not how YouTube, or people, or virality work though.

The fact there is some useful educational content is a byproduct of the machine of lucrative trash of the capitalist hellhole spiral, and the written word will always prevail comparatively. You can always bet on text. https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html

Also, as you likely know, YouTube is owned by Google so it’s very silly to say it’s “more important.”

What you're saying is that the high quality educational content is subsidized by the trash.

It doesn't make it net-bad. It makes it an ad-supported educational resource. Is that surprising, given that it's owned by an ad company?

It does make it net-bad because the educational content should exist without the trash, which is far more prevalent. It forces the positive stuff to comply with the trash algorithms that make them worse and also forces them to comply with the monopoly of one of the largest, most monolithic corporations in the world that can do whatever the fuck they want with the content. Of course it's not surprising! It's just shitty and needs to be different.

But the educational content DOESNT exist without the trash and you cannot make a case that it just would, that’s unlikely and impossible to prove.

“Net bad” means the world would be absolutely and inarguably better without YouTube. This is so outlandish, honestly; YouTube at its core is an information sharing platform and a lot of useful things have come out of it. Immense amounts even.

> I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the world and the monetization of Youtube has incentivized and amplified mediocrity, stupidity, and social decay.

Interesting that you say this regarding YouTube. I've been saying this regarding Twitter for awhile even though I consume quite a bit of YouTube content. However, I've curated my YouTube feed to be almost entirely stuff that is interesting, educational, and that I think I'm getting value from. I've learned tons of useful stuff from YouTube such as how to dress better and tailor my own clothes, how to fix things that break around my house, more effective training methods to accomplish specific fitness goals...I could go on and on. When I go to YouTube in incognito mode, I definitely see the bottom-of-the-barrel content that you're talking about. But it doesn't have to be that way.

> However, I've curated my YouTube feed to be almost entirely stuff that is interesting, educational, and that I think I'm getting value from.

Those creators are still making orders of magnitude less money than people who make zero content attention grabbing controversy meme slop videos.

> Those creators are still making orders of magnitude less money than people who make zero content attention grabbing controversy meme slop videos.

Off the top of my head, Gamers Nexus is a counterpoint. Obviously not Mr Beast-scale, but we're also looking at a huge difference in target demographic breadth.

Besides, is YouTube any worse in this regard than what came before it? Substance-free reality TV predates YouTube. For as long as cheap printing and mail services have been around, artists have had strong incentive to go design ads rather than pursue their art independently.

YouTube definitely has a race to the bottom going on, but it's not all-consuming and well-researched, high-quality material is still profitable for creators as long as you know how to play the thumbnail game.

> Substance-free reality TV predates YouTube

And I would say 99% of it is worse than the goofy YouTube stuff. Reality TV is mostly people hooking up and pretending to fall in love.

> Besides, is YouTube any worse in this regard than what came before it? Substance-free reality TV predates YouTube.

I extend the same criticisms towards traditional television as well.

They're both just symptoms of the advertising problem. Advertisers are the enablers of this stuff. They'll back any content that draws attention, and the ones which draw the most are memes, controversy, generally negative value slop. People endlessly scrolling apps with infinite content being fed instant gratification with product offerings in between. Algorithms that actively push them towards controversy and hate because it maximizes "engagement".

But are they enjoying what they are doing? If so, then what difference does it make how much cash YT hands to Mr. Beast?

While many try to make a living off YouTube (and some do) there are no guarantees offered nor should any be expected.

> If so, then what difference does it make how much cash YT hands to Mr. Beast?

I think it matters a lot. It creates massive distortions in society's perception of value.

Because of YouTube's advertising, you have people becoming multimillionaires by making total nonsense videos where they do things like react to other videos. Literally a YouTube video of a guy watching other YouTube videos, pausing and saying whatever pops into his head. Like this comment section. And he gets millions of dollars for it.

There's something deeply wrong with a society where you are rewarded for nothing. The people who actually do something tend to feel cheated when they see it happen. Imagine being a professional, a trades person and seeing a random dude get 1000x richer than you because he said stupid shit on the internet. And if you point it out, some startup founder accuses you of sour grapes.

Society should think deeply about the incentives it offers to people. Because people will respond to them.

IF it were a net good, they'd let me disable Shorts. But they don't.

This type of criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what humanity actually is. Mr Beast exists because humans like to watch it. By blaming Mr Beast, you are putting the effect before the cause. There is no enlightened society that is only watching MIT linear algebra lectures for fun, it doesn't exist.

> This type of criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what humanity actually is.

No, that's really shallow. "Humanity" is a perennial struggle. If I'd be looking for a word for the lowest common denominator it would be "beastliness", to stay on topic of the thread.

That criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what beastliness actually is.

Are you arguing that the public fascination with it makes it morally acceptable? If so would you consider gladiatorial fights to the death and gruesome public executions, both of which have been massive crowd-pleasers in the past and no doubt would be again if they became socially accepted, justified by the same argument? If not, what do you think is different here that makes condemning Mr. Beast for feeding unwholesome public appetites wrong, but condemning Roman emperors for it right? Just a question of the degree of nastiness?

Personally, I think human behaviour is massively influenced by culture and that we have an individual moral responsibility to take actions that work in favour of having a healthy culture. And I see that individual moral responsibility as resting particularly on those who profit from culturally influential activities (and if Mr. Beast isn't "culturally influential", please can we retire the term "influencer"). I see arguments often made that amount to justifying amoral, or even actively immoral, behaviours by the fact that money can be made from them, with an implicit assumption that humans have no free will when it comes to money, that an action that makes money has to be carried out and that this somehow morally absolves the one who does it. I see that as a corrosive meme and evidence of a deeply unhealthy culture, not as a conclusion that follows from adopting capitalism as the primary organising principle in a society.

> Just a question of the degree of nastiness?

Just a question of degree of nastiness? Yes, competitions involving life and death are qualitatively different from competitions involving money. Something interesting to think about is that we do have ultra graphic action movies and horror movies. Are those also net negative?

> Personally, I think human behaviour is massively influenced by culture and that we have an individual moral responsibility to take actions that work in favour of having a healthy culture.

There is no human culture that I know of that was not fascinated by things like money and fame.

> I see arguments often made that amount to justifying amoral, or even actively immoral

I don't think Mr Beast is immoral and not for the reasons you state. I think you have in your mind some very judgemental ideas of what is right and wrong.

I think shows like Mr Beast and all celebrity culture is dumb. I think sports are dumb too. I don't think they are evil and I know that humanity will find a way to create variants of these things no matter what kind of insane rules society tried to put in place.

Human nature is full of self-conflict and contradiction. There are more base aspects of it and higher ones as well. This has been known up and down the ages. Vices and virtues. "You're against vice, hence you're against humans because vice is what humans like to choose!" Well, no. You can be against catering to the base urges. You wouldn't feed your dog 10 cakes even if it continues eating it. And that's not hatred of dog-ity.

I would disagree on the net bad for the world, or at least be skeptical about it. Personally, Youtube was my life changing tool which I used to learn almost everything essential to my career and personal development, and I would assume lots of others would be the same. The type of content it recommends goes with the type of content you interacted with in the past. It just a tool and it matters how you use it

> I have the sense that Youtube is net bad for the world

Overwhelming majority of things designed to exploit human imperfections for personal gain are a net bad. Youtube has become one of those things.

Unfortunate, 'cause that's where the money is.

youtube still has a net positive value. the amount of knowledge & learning (and ok, entertainment) i get out of it on a daily basis is immense and i can't imagine the amount of wisdom i'd have sucked up as a kid if i had access to all this.

if it comes at the price of having it subsidised by the likes of mrbeast, i'm all for it. same trade-off as getting ads on instagram to enjoy it as a free service.

What the algorithm seems to favour is a better indicator of what people use Youtube for overall.

I'm also using youtube almost exclusively as a means of education, but a net positive for us doesn't really mean much. If for one more educated viewer you get ten more radicalised and dumber ones, we may be better off without it.

I am with you. YouTube does not offer math lectures about volume calculation. It advertises some fast food alike junk about insane things. And the 8 years old boys watch cartoons about chopped heads and how the dog plays with these heads. Afterwards I was happy, that I am luddite and YouTube is blocked at home and kids don’t have smartphones.

Youtube is the single most important and valuable learning tool that exists on the planet. There are lectures on literally everything, i have been recently learning my way into geometric algebra and lie theory for my physics phd. Sure, there's a lot of crap and youtube is just as happy to waste your time but if you search out and only watch educational content, your Frontpage will become educational content. It's hard to keep that way because there's tons of fun but uneducational things to watch, but there's browser extensions and things to help with that. Extensions that block the homepage and video recommendations, extensions that let you group your subscriptions and create your own feed. It can be amazing if you use it right, it's hard to use right sometimes

More and more it's crystallizing that people with high agency can elevate themselves as never before, while the average person is dragged down into a mud as never before. The divide is crazy and it's starting already in early childhood.

Yes, you and people like you can seek out the best browser extensions, install them, understand how to use them, and can curate a nicely tended online garden for yourself, and this is genuinely great. But "we live in a society", even you are subject to wider trends of how people around you live their lives and spend their time. And average people's front page is filled with slop and AI generated chum and Youtube-face thumbnails etc. While you can configure ublock origin to remove irrelevant recommendations from the middle of search results, the average person browses the internet without adblock and sinks hours into mindlessly scrolling social media.

Our parents worried about us staring at the TV all day, and today we have that on super steroids.

It's super hard to avoid rabbit holes. Once the recommender engine picks up on something you find interesting it will exploit that with no end.

The mind numbing stuff can be highly specific that no human TV program manager would ever think up. For example, I clicked a few videos about cow and horse hoof trimming and horseshoe applications. Kinda interesting, geeking out on skilled crafts like this, never seen it done in real life, maybe I learn something interesting! And a few days later I find myself regularly clicking these because I get so many of these now on my frontpage and I kind of take a step back and think, is this really time well spent? Watching hoof after hoof being trimmed? (By the way, these videos have millions of views each, and have entire channels dedicated to producing them over and over again. It's an entire genre, not just a few videos.)

I see this stuff with family members too. Zoning out and watching repetitive crap, like the hydraulic press channel, red hot ball, a guy who cleans up backyards, powerwashing objects, dashcam crashes, arrest bodycam footage, pimple popping, mukbang. (And I'm not even getting into political outrage stuff, that's a topic to itself.) Once Youtube figures out which type of repetitive brain-numbing genre you respond to, it will push it. It takes more self-awareness to get back in control than a lot of people have. Some of these "genres" are shockingly weird, like jigger removal (a kind of larva) from dog paws. I don't know if this has been studied properly. It's kind of like a non-sexual version of fetishes. Highly specific and somehow repetitively able to "tickle" one's brain, and while it's soothing and satisfying to some, it's disgusting and weird to others, pretty much like sexual fetishes.

"YouTube does not offer math lectures about volume calculation."

oh really did you try searching because I found one in about two seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qXIkr05tk

It absolutely does offer more maths lectures than you could ever conceivably watch.

They’re there. Hidden somewhere. I watched some of them. But you need to search for them. Like there is quality food I prepared for my workday today. But I must actively work on that and not take offered junk food.

>But you need to search for them

Oh the horror

Yes, but good luck trying to watch them when the thumbnails in the side bar are full of seductive junk.

Browser extension solution to that problem: https://github.com/lawrencehook/remove-youtube-suggestions

I see it differently. I don't think YouTube fundamentally changes people; it might serve up low-quality content to those seeking it, but they'd likely find it elsewhere if not on YouTube.

On the positive side, YouTube has brought the world closer. We can access videos from nearly every corner of the globe, giving us insight into how others live and interact in their environments. Additionally, it's become an incredible resource for information. If something breaks in my home, I can probably find a video explaining how to fix that exact model. While I'm not old enough to have "adulted" without YouTube, it’s amazing how much you can learn from it.

It's infinitely better than television because you can remove ads and choose what you want to see! I know you never compared it to TV but that was the main mode of entertainment before streaming.

I think it's meaningless to criticize MBs content because it's a kids show. Of course it's formulaic and predictable. And I dislike his content too, and blocked him from my feed a year or two ago.

there's lots of ways to succeed on youtube and in this world. MrBeast is only one form.

As one of many examples, the ww2 channel is quite different but also financially successful: https://www.youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo

It's not YouTube per se that's bad. YouTube is just a symptom. The underlying pathology is advertising. The attention economy, surveillance capitalism. Those are the real problems. Those are the reasons behind this distortion of the world. They enable people who make moronic meme videos to make orders of magnitude more money than people who actually try to contribute something to society.

Yes agreed. Another commenter said YT is the most valuable educational tool in existence today. I think the real answer is a library.

YouTube is 99% junk and just because 1% of it is decent, that doesn’t make up for the 99%.

There are plenty of terrible books and trash novels. Easily 99% of books are junk (often junk dressed up as non-junk). I think it's very possible that in 2024, YouTube is net more educational than reading. (Speaking in terms of total amount of knowledge acquisition.)

Maybe but YT recommendations are good enough so that you don't see those 99% you are not interested in.

Trusting an algorithm that wants you to watch the next video for ad impressions may not be the unbiased metric you think it is.

So, you always go to the library for every problem you have where you need a detailed guide?

Does youtube have a lot of trash? He s certainly a (very big) outlier but the other trashy content is mostly about expensive cars and shit which is harmless by comparison.

This guy has a genuine love of torturing people

Surprising reference to The Goal [1], which Mr. Beast "used to make everyone read ..." and still recommends. The Goal is a business novel about optimizing manufacturing processes for throughput and responsiveness rather than "efficiency" and is filled with counter-intuitive insights. Presenting it as a novel means you get to see characters grapple with these insights and fail to commit before truly understanding them. Excellent stuff, along the lines of The Phoenix Project [2], with which I assume many here are already familiar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-pro...

Theory of Constraints is fascinating because, as MrBeast points out here, it seems extremely obvious. I've had numerous interactions on this site where a person dismisses an insight from ToC as "obvious" and then 2 sentences later promulgates the exact type of intuition that ToC disproves.

Yeah, this is the brilliance of the novel format. Someone presents an insight, and it can see obvious in isolation but then seems obviously wrong in context. "Of course we should favor throughput over efficiency" is obvious until you realize it means, for example, allowing idle time on incredibly expensive machines to favor responsiveness, which just seems wasteful.

In the novel, you get to see the characters bang their heads against these "paradoxes" again and again until it sinks in.

>is obvious until you realize it means, for example, allowing idle time on incredibly expensive machines to favor responsiveness, which just seems wasteful.

Weird how things that seem to make sense in one context seem to make no sense in another context. If you told me a factory runs their widget making machine at 70% capacity in case someone comes along with an order for a different widget or twice as many widgets, at first glance think that's a bad idea. If your customers can keep your widget machine 100% full, using only part of the machine for the chance that something new will come along seems wasteful. And through cultural osmosis the idea of not letting your hardware sit idle is exactly the sort of thing that feels right.

And yet, we do this all the time in IT. If you instead of a widget machine told me that you run your web server at 100% capacity all the time, I'd tell you that's also a terrible idea. If you're running at 100% capacity and have no spare headroom, you can't serve more users if one of them sends more requests than normal. Even though intuitively we know that a machine sitting idle is a "waste" of compute power, we also know that we need capacity in reserve because demand isn't constant. No one sizes (or should size) their servers for 100% utilization. Even when you have something like a container cluster, you don't target your containers to 100% utilization, if for no other reason than you need headroom while the extra containers spin up. Odd that without thinking that through, I wouldn't have applied the same idea to manufacturing machinery.

This is a very key insight many need to be aware of. The thing that can be sacrificed in order to obtain efficiency is resilience.

To master the bend not break model.

You can make a bridge that can handle a 10 ton load for half the material of one that can take 20 tons. 99% of the time this isn't an issue but that outlier case of a 18 ton truck can be disastrous. This is why power cables have sag in them, in case there is an extreme cold snap. Why trees sway and bend with the wind so that anything but the most extreme evens do not break them; with that analogy, grass is much weaker but could handle even higher winds. The ridged are brittle.

I'm not saying to not strive for efficiency but you also have to allow those efficiency gains to provide some slack in the system. Where I work, there is a definite busy season. So for most of the year, we operate at about 70% utilization and it works out great. Most people are not stressed at all. It means that when those 2 months of the year when it is all hands on deck, everyone is in peak condition to face it head on.

In my previous job in manufacturing, efficiency was praised over everything else, it was 100% utilization all of the time. So when the COVID rush came, it practically broke the business. After a year of those unrelenting pace, we started to bleed out talent. Over the next 6 months, they lost all the highest talent. A year later from those I still spoke with, they said they lost about two thirds of their business over the next 12 months, they are now on the edge of collapse.

Slack allows a bend, pure efficiency can lead to a break. There is a fine line between those two that is very difficult to achieve.

I see the parallel you're drawing but even the core idea is I think different enough to be worse dissecting.

In manufacturing, you keep spare capacity to allow for more lucrative orders to come in. If you don't expect any, you run at 100%. For instance when Apple pays TSMC all the money in the world to produce the next iPhone chip, they won't be running that line at 70%, the full capacity is reserved.

Or if you're a bakery, you won't keep two or three cake cooking spots just on case someone comes in witb an extraordinary order, you won't make enough on that to cover the lost opportunity.

We run our servers at 70% or even 50% capacity because we don't have control on what that capacity will be used for, as external events happen all the time. A manufacturers receiving a spike of extra orders can just refuse them and go on with their day. Our servers getting hit with 10x the demand requires efforts and measures to protect the servers and current traffic.

Factories want to optimize for efficiency, server farms want to pay for more reactivity, that's the nature of the business.

I think even for a company like TSMC these ideas are important to understand.

To give you an example TSMC might have a factory with 10 expensive EUV lithography tools, each capable of processing 100 wafers per hour. Then they have 4 ovens, each able to bake batches of 500 wafers per hour.

TSMC could improve efficiency by reducing the number of ovens, because they are running only at 50% capacity. But compared to the cost of the EUV tools, the ovens are very cheap. They need to be able to produce at full capacity, even when some ovens breakdown, because stopping the EUV tools because you don't have enough ovens would be much more expensive then operating with spare capacity.

> Or if you're a bakery, you won't keep two or three cake cooking spots just on case someone comes in witb an extraordinary order, you won't make enough on that to cover the lost opportunity.

I think it's always worth thinking about what you can leave slack / idle space in. For example, you might not keep multiple stations free, but you might invest in a larger oven than you need to make the cakes you currently make. Or you might invest in more bakery space than you need, including extra workspace than you can utilize at 100%. Not because you necessarily anticipate higher demand, but because you might get a customer that's asking for a cake bigger than your standard. Or because you might have a customer placing a large order and need some extra room to spread out more, or to have a temporary helper be able to do some small part of the job even if they can't use the space as a full station.

But also idleness might look like "you don't spend all of your time baking orders for customers". If you never build in slack for creating, experimenting and learning, you'll fall behind your competition, or stagnate if your design and art is a selling point.

Even for a server farm, you can prioritize the web traffic and still use the excess capacity for CI or whatever.

> using only part of the machine for the chance that something new will come along seems wasteful.

Because it is. My brother works in industrial manufacturing machinery supplies. I can assure you the overwhelming majority of manufacturing machines on the planet are not only run constantly but as near to 99.999% as possible. So much that they are even loath to turn them off for critical maintenance rather preferring to let the machine break down so they don't get blamed for being the person to "ruin productivity"

This book sounds like one of those flights of fancy armchair generals are so found of going on.

Perhaps it works in small boutique shops making specialized orders but that is a slim minority of the overall manufacturing base. I could see why the advice would appeal to HN readers.

It really depends on whether the capacity is fixed or not. If capacity is fixed and demand is unlimited (eg. because you just can't get more EUV light sources this year) then you should probably run as close to 100% utilisation as possible.

But if you can easily scale production capacity, you should not strive for 100% utilisation. You should expand capacity before you reach 100%, because if you are running at 100% you will not be able to take any more orders and lose the opportunity to grow your business.

Yeah it mostly only works for small boutique shops like the Toyota Production System or Ford’s manufacturing line.

And yes, a lot of manufacturing doesn’t behave this way. That’s the “counter” part of “counter-intuitive” revealing itself.

This comment is yet another of these excellent cases in point!

You really don’t see how “they’re afraid to turn them off even for critical maintenance” might be actually suboptimal behavior in the long run?

One of the most insightful things I heard someone say at Toyota (in an interview) was that they replace their tools (drill bits and the like) at 80% wear instead of letting them get to 100% and break.

Why waste that 20%?

Because if the tool breaks and scratches a $200K Lexus, then that might be a $20K fix, or possibly even starting from scratch with a new body! Is that worth risking for a $5 drill bit they buy in boxes of 1,000 at a time? No.

Then the interview switched to some guy in America looking miserable complaining how his bosses made him use every tool until breaking point. He listed a litany of faults this caused, like off-centre holes, distorted panels, etc...

And you wonder why Tesla panels have misaligned gaps. Or why rain water leaks into a "luxury" American vehicle!

Toyota uses price premium and reputation to achieve this. Its not something every company can do, and I don't mean in theory. I mean that economics don't support it. Most buyers cannot and will not pay extra premium for reliablity. The reality is letting them break/damage/fix/replace actually is cheaper overall otherwise it would not be the popular choice.

If tomorrow Ford decided to start this process it would be a decade before the market believed that hey had changed their ways. Would they survive this gap? IDK the new ford Mach-E is not selling so I doubt it but I"m not an economist. People don't buy fords because of the reliability. They buy it because it's cheaper and the risk of downtime is less important to them than the price premium. Don't forget that in order to achieve that lost resource return you must be disciplined all the time and most people/corps cannot achieve that.

Toyota’s strategy is cheaper, and their cars are very cost competitive.

PS: “It’s too expensive to save money with your methods!” Is the most common response I get from customers to this kind of efficiency improvement advice. Invariably they then proceed to set several million dollars on fire instead of spending ten thousand to avoid that error. It’s so predictable, it is getting boring.

I would really recommend coming into these conversations with more curiosity!

Toyota makes some of the cheapest and some of the most expensive cars on the market. They don't "use" their reputation to do this, their reputation is the result of excellent production.

You're missing the point with Ford, which is an example of another very successful manufacturer who uses similar techniques/philosophy as Toyota, which are not similar to what your brother's machine shop does.

Edit: Sry, missed your Poe's law. People buy fords because they are cheaper for the most part. People that have more money buy Toyota. This is just market segmentation of a couple of the biggest brands.

Companies that have hammered out an effective cost/production/time ratio are not something you can compete with without becoming the same thing as them. Which is why factory managers are literally afraid to turn them off for any reason.

My brother constantly tells me about how when they do repairs they will see something within 1-3 months of failing and tell the factory manager. He said almost without exception they always ask will it increase the repair time "TODAY" and of course the answer is yes. They always decline and deal with it when it breaks at a greater time/cost. I think this is more an effect of the toxic work relationship that has become forced on everyone by MBA's.

What are you arguing here exactly? Most production systems work the same way as your brothers', which is to say they suck. We're pointing to a methodology that has a very strong track record of making production systems that don't suck, such as Toyota's and Ford's (empirical disproofs of your claim that such an approach is only applicable to boutique shops).

>Toyota's and Ford's (empirical disproofs of your claim that such an approach is only applicable to boutique shops).

Where was this provided? I didn't see you or any poster provide claim or evidence that Toyota or Ford intentionally leave unused production capacity. I had a busy day so I may have missed it somewhere.

Far as I'm aware they also run their assembly as close to 99.999% of the time as possible.

My brother is not a mft. He works for an engineering company that makes and maintains manufacturing equipment. He has worked in nearly every major company you can name's manufacturing plants fixing their stuff or installing new stuff. Its a whole world I did not know about until he started. I'm just forwarding some stories he tells. Not sure why you think you know more than all the people involved.

Interesting -- I'll have to read The Goal! I've only read the reference material around ToC, so this sounds additive :)

This sounds intriguing. Of note for anyone with an audible membership: The Goal is in the free library.

It's also included in Spotify Premium for free.

One of the key details missing from the analysis being done in this thread is that Jimmy was iterating and figuring out how to optimize every part of his content for years before he really blew up in popularity. Having a loop where you keep publishing content and analyzing all aspects of it is the ultimate key to success, given enough time and resources.

As I understand it, MrBeast helped fund the creation of ViewStats [0] in order to gather more data on thumbnails and channel / video performance over time. Then this knowledge is applied to their own content in order to make it even more successful. At this point there's probably multiple people who specialize just in thumbnail optimization.

Another key detail about MrBeast production is that they target a global audience, so they hire famous voice actors of every major language to do their voice-overs. A few years before YouTube supported multiple audio tracks, they had different channels for various languages and regions. Now it's just a drop-down in the video settings. Many products fail to take internationalization and localization seriously, so their products are unable to penetrate non-western markets.

Speaking of international reach, I saw in an interview a few years back that MrBeast was trying to expand to the Chinese market, but none of his public interviews since then have discussed how he's doing there. This goes a bit against the extreme focus on YouTube as his primary platform. A quick search on bilibili (which I believe is the Chinese equivalent of YouTube), shows his latest video hitting 1.6 million views and 8k comments, which isn't bad but it doesn't really compare to the amount of attention that he gets on YouTube. It seems like even the most skilled content creators in the West still struggle to break into the Chinese market.

[0] https://www.viewstats.com/

I didn’t know that YouTube supports multiple audio tracks for the same video. Can alternate tracks be uploaded at a later point in time? Can the feature be used to replace the original audio in a video?

It's only available for certain channels. You can see more info here.[0]

[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/13338784

It might be interesting to contrast MrBeast’s management approach with that of Marques Brownlee (MKBHD). He is also a successful YouTuber who leads a team that puts out videos on several channels. While his videos don’t have the huge production scale of MrBeast’s, they seem to be produced on short deadlines and must require close coordination among his team.

If I were young and wanted to work in online media production, I would much rather work for Marques Brownlee than for MrBeast.

Brownlee is such a mystery to me. The #1 rule of Youtube is show energy, show enthusiasm. Brownlee is like if Urkel were given a sedative and told to review the latest iPhone

You mean he talks more like a normal person talking about a product rather than a Youtuber going over the top with everything? The fact that he is genuine is a big part of his appeal.

He’s been doing it a long time, has an excellent understanding of the tech industry, and is a master at producing content that is easy for everyone to digest. I’ve been watching him for years and have always thought he had a knack for his craft. Just because he has a calm demeanor shouldn’t take away from what he does, but in my opinion should add to it even more.

The #1 rule is clearly not show energy, show enthusiasm. It's the #1 rule for a subset of content, like MrBeast. The content world is a big place, and the silent majority has no interest in loud and obnoxious.

Right. Take Asianometry-- a channel dedicated to economics, politics, and tech in Asia. Very high quality stuff. He goes into deep detail about a lot of technical stuff.. and as you can imagine his delivery isn't anything like a showman. He can be monotonous but if anything that is likely preferred by his audience, given his niche.

despite less views, MKBHD is more net positive for humanity than MrBeast. MrBeast's whole game is to draw people's attention to not-so-useful content.

Is product fetishism really better than light entertainment? The MKBHD slop is just branded with that same vibe of the products he likes to cover, namely the self-satisfactions of luxury goods that people mistake for high quality. That gives the false signal it provides more value than Mr. Beast. Yes, MKBHD technically covers products, but so did Top Gear. The content is neither necessary nor sufficient to make an informed purchase decision.

Watching a review on a device you'll never buy is hardly a net positive compared to watching a yacht get blown up.

Not so sure, while I like Marques, he has a 100% focus on consumerism.

MKBHD feeds the worst aspects of consumer culture.

Come on, they're both useless consumerist slop (i watch a lot of slop not throwing stones just don't see either as beneficial at all)

MKBHD intentionally has a small team that makes relatively low budget videos. I think MKBHD mainly has a relatively large audience because he was very early to the high quality videos game on YouTube. I wouldn't be surprised if his edge is lost now and his viewership does not grow faster than would be expected of an active channel of his size.

Not to hate on him, but just saying that's in sharp contrast with what MrBeast and LTT are trying to achieve.

MKBHD is not even in Top 500 of the most subscribed Youtube channels, first give me the details of what those other 500 channels are doing then maybe MKBHD... (and I'm saying this as a long time subscriber)

Would you say the same about companies, that the only interesting ones worth talking about are the ones in the Fortune 500? If anything, I would say many of them are rather boring examples, we all know roughly how they're managed and run.

That’s a bit naive. I’m willing to bet that most of them have interesting details, with each one doing things in their own unique way.

> I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page.

I've always wanted to be able to tell people they're the bottleneck. I've had talks with management about this. "We need to tell people bluntly so they understand the impact they're having."

Nope, it could hurt a relationship and relationship is more important than delivering.

I don't want to be an ass, but I do love this approach by Mr. Beast.

I feel the same, but I realized I don't want to be the blunt person; I just want some other blunt person to do my dirty work. This is not really a fair expectation for me to have.

That said I feel like having people who are constructively blunt in your organization can make all the difference. If you listen to stories about successful managers and CEOs it often comes down to bluntness.

It can also go the other way though. Being blunt while lacking in other areas (technical knowledge, judgment, vision, ethics) will just add toxicity.

The pdf is fine nothing really sensational. Some good advise for video creators and how to commit to succeed at their company. Written in what you need to invest not what you need to sacrifice. The bar is high which is fine tho. For example he wants one to work on 3 different projects on a workday instead of 1 project for 3 workdays.

I watched one video of MrBeast in the past and the pdf explains well why I actually watched it to the end. I do dislike these kind of videos and don’t watch them but success is success and he does things right. One of his rules which is kind of neat is that the clickbait title and thumbnail needs to deliver on the promise - which is a great concept considering over 97% clickbait isn’t.

I think following through on the crazy thumbnail is the most defining part of the MrBeast brand.

Lots of Yt videos have crazy thumbnails; only MrBeast follows through!

I was fully expecting to read a load of nonsense, but it chimes quite a lot with military training, which shouldn't actually be that surprising.

e.g. if someone is your bottleneck make them aware, give them a due date, check in regularly, in person comms is better than written etc.

> “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”

Mr Beast throwing out viral video ideas sounds like the Family Guy joke generator from South Park[0].

Doing a quick web search, it seems several people have made idea generators based off his formula.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTC9j0QpCBM

Just wanted to add, completely unrelated to the line of business and the moral judgement on what Mr Beast Production does, that I really cherish seeing such a well written onboarding material. The sharpness in articulation, the consistency in the leadership vision, and the cultural undertone is of very high level. For comparison, any tech company I've worked for, doesn't get even closer, drawing in acronyms, micro-cultures and personal interest.

He has annual revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars. "lol"

goes to show formal language isn't a necessary component of high communication. might even be antagonistic

This point caught my attention, as my experience has been quite different, though in completely different industries. How does one go about finding genuinely good consultants, in any industry?

  > "Use Consultants

  Consultants are literally cheat codes. Need to make the world's largest slice of cake? Start off by calling the person who made the previous world's largest slice of cake lol. He's already done countless tests and can save you weeks worth of work. I really want to drill this point home because I'm a massive believer in consultants. Because I've spent almost a decade of my life hyper obsessing over YouTube, I can show a brand new creator how to go from 100 subscribers to 10,000 in a month. On their own it would take them years to do it. Consults are a gift from god, please take advantage of them. In every single freakin task assigned to you, always always always ask yourself first if you can find a consultant to help you. This is so important that I am demanding you repeat this three times in your head "I will always check for consultants when I'm assigned a task""

Disclaimer: I'm a software consultant, so obviously biased.

MrBeast enters a new domain every week so consultants are way more important to him than to a software business.

He has enough budget and fame to, as he says, use the Guinness Word Records book as a phonebook. Or any other resource that records world-famous achievements. So that's one way.

Another is to have friends in the business that can recommend people they worked with.

I'm not sure a third consistent way exists.

Edit: very good technical people can recognize very good people in very different technical fields by their thinking and communication habits. Same for business people I believe. So if you have a wonderful devops employee/consultant and need an ML consultant but have zero idea how to evaluate them, have your devops guy talk to a few candidates and ask him whether they're good technical people.

I think the key thing here is he's talking about "the person who made the previous world's largest slice of cake".

In other words, if I were working on a new programming language (just as an example), and could go hire Anders Hejlsberg as a consultant, well, that -is- going to be a mega cheat code. The amount of experience he'd bring to bear to even a 30 minute call would be insane. He would save me months or even years in mistakes and bad directions, and lead me straight to the core of whatever I wanted to do.

That's the thing - he's not talking about hiring a generic "cake consultant". With that in mind, it'd be much easier to find those people - you'd know them by their achievements.

Just an aside, not arguing...

You don't necessarily need to hire someone like Anders to pick their brain.

A lot of people who are not huge in the zeitgeist (and also are not assholes) are surprisingly reachable.

Funnily enough, I've chatted with Anders about programming language design -- I got the impression he thought my ideas were terrible.

For a while, you could just email Noam Chomsky and he would respond.

It's really a question of your expectations.

If you're a software shop, hiring an army of consultants to build out core parts of your solution who will walk away when they're finished, you're doing it wrong. Success doesn't come from assembling piles of slop, it comes from putting together a team that will stick together to build value over the long term.

If you're an individual who wants to improve X part of themselves (fitness, musical ability, scholarship, whatever) then hiring a "consultant" (a trainer, a coach, a tutor, a therapist) is not only massively beneficial but almost an essential part of the process. You can easily measure the value you're getting from the consultant against the progress you're making.

If you're assembling highly complicated custom work on strict deadlines, hiring experts in that specific area of customization is pretty critical to consistently making those deadlines.

> How do you find them?

Connections, networking, and reputation, usually. MrBeast is lucky in that YouTube presents a good search platform; trying to find people who had made massive cakes before was probably just 5 minutes of searching and sorting by views.

Both of the examples in the quote give you the answer: talk to someone that’s actually done it.

It’s always amazing to me how often the person 3 desks over has already solved the same problem, but is never asked how by the next person. Instead, too many people act like they’re the first person to ever attempt whatever they’re working on.

Are you dealing with MBB consultants? These are ivy-educated MBAs with no operating experience and no real expertise in almost anything other than powerpoint and credential attainment.

Mr Beast is talking about actual experts in incredibly niche things, like baking giant cakes. Completely different type of person to the extent that "consultant" is just a total misnomer if you're used to the term in the land of F1000 corpo-speak. Mr Beast is probably reaching out to people guerilla-style that don't even have "consulting" firms -- which makes total sense if you're doing crazy stuff on YouTube.

This, like a lot of the advice is "Things that worked for me that likely won't work for you". A lot of people are going to talk to Mr Beast that won't talk to you, Mr Beast is doing a variety of one off projects that he'll never need to revisit. Mr Beast has a shit tonne of money and a shit tonne of resources. For all those reasons, it's something that he can do that you probably can't.

I can't be the only person disturbed by the penetration of terms like "obsession" into nominally professional culture. You should not be asking your employees to qualify for DSM symptoms just to not get fired (with severance, lol, that is genuinely a step up from nothing even if it's clearly meant to soften the psychological shock of reading about A- B- and C- employees).

You may not find it appealing, but the truth is that most major successes are driven by obsession. It’s not a balanced or psychologically sound way to live—no one claims it is. If you believe great achievements come from people working regular hours, taking it slow, and maintaining a comfortable pace, you are mistaken.

Newton, Steve Jobs, Marie Curie...the list goes on. These people's success wasn't a product of balance or moderation

> You may not find it appealing, but the truth is that most major successes are driven by obsession.

Great, don't force it on your employees. I am not working for you for anything other than a paycheck and flexible working conditions and stimulating work.

Nobody is forcing you to work for Mr Beast

> Nobody is forcing you to work for Mr Beast

No, being unemployed is the coercive factor here. It's not fair to treat at-will employment as non-coercive unless non-employment is actually zero. Non-employment currently stands at about 7.7%: https://www.richmondfed.org/research/national_economy/non_em...

Why would anyone turn down a chance to make a living if a job is offered? Why do you think the fed ensures that there are never enough jobs for everyone? Why do you think the fed and the business world talks about the economy in terms of "jobs" and "unemployment" when these are metrics largely unrelated to stuff like "am I actually getting a fair wage" and "is housing priced anywhere near rationally"? etc—the non-coercive labor market is a complete illusion.

"Obsession" predates the DSM and psychiatry as a profession.

You'll find that most undesirable human behavior and perception does. This is just "product obsession" marketing bullshit forced onto real-life relationships. If you want to engage in this type of culture because it helps you fit in with founders; fine, that's your own brain you're messing with. Don't force it on others.

> Don't force it on others.

Nobody is forcing anything on anybody here so there's no need to end your thought with a defiant coda.

> If you want to engage in this type of culture because it helps you fit in with founders; fine, that's your own brain you're messing with.

You misunderstand the objection I hinted at. Which is fine. I'm not pro-"marketing bullshit" because it's not an either/or choice. What I object to is taking a perfectly normal word someone uses and then choosing a narrow, fraught, medical interpretation of the word to ascribe to them a viewpoint of, essentially, "they want you to be mentally ill!"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41559705

I wouldn't wish "obsession" on anyone. It is extremely unpleasant and harmful to experience. Willingly giving your life to a company is not obsession, it's a choice.

So does schizophrenia.

i would argue the communication registry of influencer/youtuber culture skews superlative.

meaning i would translate obsession -> dedication in common language.

The only information about this obsession in the document is about learning, and there is a specific mention that people are judged based on results and not hours, so I am willing to say that this language is much less alarming than what I heard in my experience in startups.

Yea, you're right. I really hate this though.

this is why we need unions.

in order to disallow obsessive work?

Yes, this is a large part of the concept of liberation. Why are you trying to sell people shit nobody asked for? We could be making technology that enables expression of the individual and of society rather than commodification of it.

Direct link to the PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...

Or the actual PDF file instead of Google docs: http://splet.4a.si/dir/How-To-Succeed-At-MrBeast-Production....

MrBeast - an OG Founder Mode guy?

I'll leave it to you all to debate the ethics of MrBeast's videos, YouTube, and the questionable value of these videos.

Meanwhile, the most fascinating part of this is a glimpse into a new kind of media company, where he instituted a particular process and approach and scaled it up outside of the initial set of producers.

You get the sense he's flying by the seat of his pants into a whole new world, and he's creating the org and the processes on the fly based on what's been successful so far.

The energy, drive and enthusiasm required to create a new model of not only "product" (even one that solely exists to please the algorithm) and company is fascinating.

There are more parallels to startup founders than one might admit.

> There are more parallels to startup founders than one might admit.

It is a startup and he is a founder. There are no parallels, he is simply an example. His video production company is very similar to other entertainment companies catering to the same audience like roblox (studios) or mobile gaming startups in general.

Fair, I should have said "tech founders" I suppose. I think it's reasonable to draw distinctions between tech, media, clothing, retail, etc startups.

Like, MrBeast seems like a media startup which is different than, say, a SaaS startup or an AI assistant startup. Fair enough?

This is actually a really good document for someone who is a junior or assistant. I've worked a variety of jobs and didn't get much documents on training like this, mostly compliance stuff. You could take a lot of it out and get good points on managing people and taking ownership for tasks. It seems redundant or basic, but a lot of these things aren't explicitly mentioned, usually informally only.

You are correct. There are way too many assistant roles in the creative industry that come with little to none real job training, just “watch what I do, or do as I tell, and never make a mistake twice or you’re toast”.

I think it’s due to the sheer amount of candidates, and the total power some superiors have over you.

It’s a sink or swim strategy, but you’re also swimming with sharks.

It is nice to see the red flags in writing ahead of time. After all "boys will be boys"

That’s there, but the parts about taking responsibility for your work, keeping people you delegate work to accountable and negotiating with vendors and being persistent is stuff you usually get informally.

I also find those signs that it’s a more honest document. Most things publicly available are so neutered there’s not much useful grey info

It's hypocritical, those closest to Jimmy have get-out-of-jail-free cards and others get fired. And the "no doesn't mean no" stuff reeks of toxic hustle culture.

Most handbooks are boring and legalese because they can be evidence in court.

Interesting, I only learned about this Youtuber recently, maybe 2 months ago or so despite him having so many views. Youtube seems to be good at not showing you what you don't search for.

What his videos are lacking in my opinion is the quality of scenario and planning. They build an expensive set, give away a large prize but the challenges are either too simple or not very creative. Too little challenges, too little competition, too little motivation, too little expressing of personality like mutual help, sacrificing or betrayal, too little unexpected scenario twists. In this aspect they are not as good as TV shows. As an extreme example, take "give away money to random people" series. What fun is in getting money for nothing? And watching that is probably 100x more boring.

Keep in mind that you are not the target audience. Also:

"Our audience is massive and because of that you have to be simple, for 50 million people to understand something it must be simple."

I find his stuff sloppy and uninteresting, too, and he has no charisma. This just goes to show that he really does know what he's doing. He identified the statistically meaningful things to focus on and perfect. Imagine if he was just the producer for someone who actually gave a crap about making quality content.

Billions of views and total YouTube dominance disagree with you.

No, they're not exclusive at all. As the guide itself says:

> Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.

You can get billions of views and total YouTube dominance without making particularly engaging content, and I think that's the interesting point here.

It does not define best.

Best revenue? Best profit margin? Best viewed?

They spell it out pretty clearly in the PDF.

> The three metrics you guys need to care about is Click Thru Rate (CTR), Average View Duration (AVD), and Average View Percentage (AVP).

> How to measure the success of content

> Like I said at the start of this the metrics you care about in regards to virality are CTR, AVD, and AVP. If you want to know if the contents of a video are good, just look at the AVD and AVP of a video after we upload it.

I feel it’s more that the average person likes to watch something simple sometimes, myself included

In other words, the commenters suggestion would not make the video better fit that need.

> “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”

> In general the more extreme the better.

I may be sounding like "get off my lawn" guy right now but should there be some realization that these people are a cultural analogue of if not heroin than at least cigarettes? They are making a good living from making things objectively worse in a society by tickling the base instincts of the addicts. I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS but is it too much for me to expect at least some cultural pushback here?

I don't know what subculture you're living in, but in several of mine there absolutely is pushback against this, with people avoiding consuming this kind of content and trying to prevent their children from consuming it, too.

Now, the question why the larger US (or English-speaking) culture isn't uniformly doing the same is much more interesting, but there's no known reason for this and most of the common explanations are both somewhat political, and not backed up by much evidence, so discussion often degenerates to talking about why your theory is more plausible.

I wish we knew.

IMHO it's quite divisive; there's a significant percentage of the population that's addicted to this sort of content, and there's another which actually finds it boring.

I've watched a few MrBeast videos and similar content, out of curiosity. It just does not appeal to me, in the same way that "influencer" content and celebrities don't.

Your acute observation that a large number of people find MrBeast content boring suggests part of the reason why there isn't more cultural pushback to it - because lots of people simply don't care about it.

Not only boring, I am stressed out by it. I feel like I'm losing valuable seconds of my life watching it, and it makes me feel depressed and disconnected from society to think about how popular it is.

It’s boring in part because it’s so blatantly formulated and packed up to be something that, for lack of better explanation, shouldn’t be formulated or packaged.

It’s like going to the store to buy fun. It doesn’t work that way. Excitement and wonder occur organically and typically in real life, and at the very least as the product of something truly awesome. In the case of Mr Beast, it seems like the ostensible happiness and excitement of the crew and contestants is combined with money to convince viewers something really great is happening. But it’s simply not. It’s vapid and fluffy, and really loud and obnoxious.

But I also feel a bit like Mr Skinner wondering if I’m out of touch. Yet… This stuff probably would have weirded me out as a teenager, too.

It's not English-speaking community specific. In every language I can speak, I can think of an equivalent of MrBeast for that area. Maybe a majority portion of the entire world's population actually enjoys that kind of content. Nobody in my friend group enjoys that, but looking at my nephews, they're all going crazy about it. There are going to be people who grew up with him for almost a decade, and that's a crazy amount of time to build parasocial relationship with your favourite celebrity.

Ah, sorry, when I said "the question why the larger US (or English-speaking) culture isn't uniformly doing the same" I meant "why there isn't greater pushback" not "why aren't there other MrBeasts" (although that was my assumption).

It's very interesting that the phenomenon itself is multi-cultural, though. Or maybe it's internet-cultural? It's probably tied into the nature of human beings and people exploiting that.

Most people are dumb because they are lazy and gave up long time ago. Their parents the same way, so the kids never had a chance. Like I had a house mate in my 20s. His parents just gave him everything. He busted his car, parents got him a new one. He lost his job and he just played call of duty all day and drank or smoke weed.

One day he asked me about programming and this dude just couldn’t sit still without needing a distraction.

He consumed all these meme videos and used to bug me by sending me brain rot.

Unfortunately this is the majority of people. I used to be poor so I lived like this in a house where 4-5 people shared the space.

They just cannot think because they gave up and it’s impossible to do anything for them.

On one hand I’m glad gig economy exists so it can keep people like him busy. I believe people like him would be dangerous if not provided a distraction.

I don’t understand how people don’t have curiousity to learn more. Instead they will waste time since kids just throwing all potential to waste playing games like COD or watching YT all day. It’s not even sad anymore just pathetic.

I like the idea that entertainment made for broad appeal is an existential threat to society worthy of comparison to drugs that kill hundreds of thousands of people per year. People have been appealing to the lowest common denominator for forever and yet the world soldiers on.

Your larger question of “why haven’t they made things I don’t personally find appealing illegal yet?” is worthy of exploration, though I don’t think many posters here are in a position to dig into it deeply for you

Comparison to drugs is a bit extreme, but I think that some level of concern about MrBeast-style operations and the content they produce is warranted.

It’s not just broad appeal, but the mass reach of YouTube, the audience targeting and tight feedback loop it enables, and the resulting race to the bottom for who can make the most stupid and/or shocking videos, which in turn informs the tastes of the masses. Where does it end? Will it eventually get to the point that the only profitable YouTube channels are MrBeast-style because nothing else can bring in views?

IMO, spending 24 hours in ketchup doesn't sound any "lower" than jackass sitting in a circle and throwing stuff at each others' balls. So I would say that raced ended 20 years ago.

Watching Gallagher’s Sledge-O-Matic and mourning the once brilliant minds of humanity

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Nxls1KnKCA4

It's not just "broad appeal". Shakespeare plays were made for broad appeal (he was a professional playwright, after all). Mozart's music was made for the broad appeal. I see nothing wrong with the broad appeal. It's what this appeal is made to and how. Humans have a lot of ways to appeal to them, and this particular way of appealing targets very base very addictive psychological mechanisms that ultimately hurt the person - just like addictive substances do. They don't make the users better or smarter or calmer or anything like that - if anything, they make them dumber and more attention-deficient. That's my problem with it.

> why haven’t they made things I don’t personally find appealing illegal yet

You are not good at reading, are you? I specifically said "I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS" because I knew you are around and you are going to maliciously misunderstand me. But I guess the joke is on me since you didn't even bother to read that part.

>Shakespeare plays were made for broad appeal (he was a professional playwright, after all). Mozart's music was made for the broad appeal.

This statement is misleading because the broad appeal of both Shakespeare and Mozart today is the culmination of centuries of attempts to understand (and misunderstand) them. Calculus can be taught to high schoolers nowadays, but how many scientists in Newton's days could understand the Principia in its entirety?

Not to mention that Shakespeare and Mozart were both able to produce works of the highest sophistication that leaves most of their contemporaries (and many today) baffled. Harold Bloom wrote that the sophisticated word play in Love's Labour's Lost was not surpassed until Joyce, and Mozart's contemporaries complained endlessly about the complex textures in his opera finales. When Mozart wrote piano trios for the public, his publisher cancelled the series after two pieces because they were judged far too difficult for the masses, and when Mozart intended to write some easy piano sonatas at the end of his life, the first (the only one he completed) turned out to be the most difficult he ever wrote.

Invoking the popularity of Shakespeare or Mozart as analogues to Mr Beast reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the longevity of both Shakespeare or Mozart, and leaves unmentioned the extensive body of difficult works on which their reputation rests today.

> I specifically said "I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS" because I knew you are around and you are going to maliciously misunderstand me.

What does this mean? You introduced the idea of government intervention unprompted because you wanted to be misunderstood by me?

Generally speaking if I do not want to introduce a topic to a conversation I just don’t do that. The laying of rhetorical traps is too complex for me when conveying something simple like “I don’t like this guy on youtube”

How much societal progress has been killed from the amount of time spent watching Mr beast videos? How many potentially otherwise productive hours were wasted watching someone in ketchup? Obviously it’s not a 1:1 ratio, but it’s a valid question to ask.

Also he clearly states it shouldn’t be illegal. You should read posts more carefully before resorting to ad hominem attacks

> How much societal progress has been killed from the amount of time spent watching Mr beast videos?

This is a good question. I would say that I don’t know how to quantify “societal progress” aside from arbitrary wishes that I can imagine, so I guess since we still have war, hunger, illness, poverty, crime and indignity in our society… all of it? All societal progress has possibly been killed by mrbeats.

I haven’t had a lot of time to reflect on this. What in particular do you envision society could have accomplished without this man on youtube?

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Hey you guys, please avoid getting caught in flamewars and especially please avoid tit-for-tat spats on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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Hey you guys, please avoid getting caught in flamewars and especially please avoid tit-for-tat spats on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Since this reply is to something a day old and identical to another one on an adjacent post, is this an automated post in response to the inclusion of the words “good/bad faith”?

If not and any criticism or even-surface-level inspection of how a question or statement is made, wouldn’t it be best to codify the “Yes, and…” improv rule (1) into your link (2)?

1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes,_and...

2 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40761301>

Mods on HN are people, and there's one person who posts publicly and responds to emails (dang). Moderator comments are not automated AFAICT, though they do lean heavily on standard language for all manner of self-evident reasons.

Mods also tend to get overwhelmed with busy threads and we've had a few particularly contentious ones in the past couple of days (middle-east conflicts).

Most HN moderation overall is accomplished through member votes and flags, and some automated tools to up- or down-rank submissions and automatically flag or kill submissions. There are a number of other factors at play, including the flamewar detector (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40437018>, generally, posts with more comments than votes), and banned sites / userIDs. But none of those result in moderator comments to the thread.

If you have further questions, email mods with your concerns at hn@ycombinator.com. They're quite patient in explanations, which is how I know much of what I'm saying here, along with reading dang's mod comments, as I did when I found this thread.

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The ratio probably goes the other way. You'd be counting the amount of productive hours that were enabled by letting people relax their brains watching novel and enjoyable content. MrBeast videos likely add to GDP.

Personally I think that’s a stretch, but I’ll admit it’s a possibility. I’m not claiming to have the answers on this subject, just trying to objectify the premise put forth by the OP.

You make a good point though! There are definitely a non-zero amount of productive hours resulting from his videos, just as there are a non-zero amount replaced with his videos. It would be fascinating if there was a way to quantify this, but it’ll likely forever be a philosophical argument

Meh, we don't know what the counterfactual of a different media environment would be. For example, it seems not-even-crazy to believe that media's addictiveness has played a major role in sedentary lifestyles which in turn is a major contributor to several of the top causes-of-death in the developed world (far greater than drugs).

Most hobbies are just as dumb when you think about it.

Sports = watching grown men play with balls, Games = giving yourself unnecessary problems to solve, TV/Reading = learning (usually) completely useless information

What do you mean unnecessary, I saved king Casimir twice, random people at the tavern are talking about it every single day.

watching sports is entertaining as you're watching highly skilled individuals perform at the highest level + gives you a sense of belonging; games - entertainment and skill development, whether those are multiplayer games that teach you cooperation and competition, or single-player games that is fun and in a lot of cases learning (through lore), developing motor skills, strategic thinking and so on; tv/reading - learning (nothing is useless information, it helps create more connections in your brain);

yet, sitting in ketchup is brainrot content - 0 value

To be fair, watching sports is absolutely also brainrot for people not enjoying it.

Watching sports is literally watching other people live their dream…. While you do not.

I'd literally prefer to watch MrBeast sit in ketchup for 50 hours than watch an NFL game.

I get the feeling, but at the same time, this feels like normal culture gaps. I don't get "sponge bob square pants" but there are people out that that insist it was if not a pinnacle of animation entertainment, then a hugely creative and entertaining show that deserves its place in the pantheons of animation. And all those huge 80's era properties that so many have years of nostalgic memories of, like transformers, he-man or voltron were all "cynical cash grabs" and 30 minute commercials for toys. So much so the concerned parents of the time demanded the government step in. Now the jury might be out on whether that generation is worse than previous generations, but if they are I don't think it's going to be because transformers was a toy marketing gimmick instead of high art with a strong moral message.

Kids I know find all sorts of things ridiculously amusing and entertaining and it all seems stupid, brainless and mind rotting to me. But then again, the stuff I found ridiculously amusing and entertaining at that age was (I can attest, having gone back and watched some of it) was just as stupid, brainless and mind rotting. Some of it is not having a "sufficiently developed palette" for humor and entertainment. Some of it is because that humor and entertainment was genuinely new to me at the time, where as now I've seen it before so when it shows up in the kids stuff, it's not entertaining anymore. It's sort of the reverse of the "Seinfeld isn't funny" issue. We're not looking at something in the past and wondering why it was so great because it's been out shadowed by what it inspired. Instead we're looking at something from today and wondering why it's entertaining because we've been entertained in the same way in the past.

Can't agree more. 10 years ago I looked up transformers uploaded to YouTube, and they couldn't stand the nostalgia test. Plots are primitive, characters are flat. It made me actually recall that by 13 years, I started feeling little embarrassment watching them because of thqe plot itself.

Apart from that, what surprised me was that it had vibes of 1950s: watercolor still images, and the music score not with analog synths (that we'd expect from the '80-s), but a (small) orchestra with TRUMPETS leading. (This was the biggest '50s factor for me.)

Wasn't Fear Factor this exact same concept already, twenty years ago?

And just reality TV in general. His "Girls vs Boys" stunt is just a budget version of Big Brother, Survivor, etc.

I think it's worth reflecting on why you feel that way. I don't see how other people are spending their time is something I need to push back on...

> They are making a good living from making things objectively worse in a society by tickling the base instincts of the addicts

Looking at this phrase in isolation is such a fun. There are whole industries which work exactly like this (food, news, games, politics). These particular people aren't the cause, they are one of many many symptoms of the causes.

Causes are in rules, norms and incentives of the social and economical systems. We can't solve the problem at the leve at which it was created. These videomakers aren't even close to that level.

> but is it too much for me to expect at least some cultural pushback here?

And they are getting it. Which is not enough for a change, as "benefits" they are getting are way greater. Main driving forces behind the phenomena is rooted somwhere else, not in space of scope this type of conversations (moral, value, human-centric or achievement-centric aspects).

On another hand it's a point of turning for all those that dismiss it like yourselves. Maybe culture needs this so all "bad curiosities" are catered for, so it can serve as a base for more ambitious next steps.

Maybe more "old man yells at cloud" but I am kinda with you in thinking it's trash. The thing is that every generation has had its own equivalent swill for kids, this one is no different. His channel won't last, there's too much baggage around it, but it'll get replaced with something equally trashy.

I have a lot of memories in my childhood, but I can't remember anything on this level. Sure, I grew up in a very different environment than the US, but even in the US - say, was there a constant stream of content aimed at kids that is optimized to be maximally extreme and maximally attention-grabbing? All I can remember was cartoons - but were kids spending hours glued to the screen watching cartoons? I surely wasn't.

I would say it depends a lot on environment the children are raised in, I grew up in the 90's my family had one television set in the house (in our families living room) and it was only turned on if someone was watching a program. There was a tv guide which you would consult, if there was nothing you were interested in then tv would never get turned on. My Dad in particular would get annoyed at what he saw as "needlessly flicking between channels".

I can remember visiting friends houses where there would be multiple television sets (including tv sets in bedrooms) and television would always be turned on, even if no one was watching it. It was like a constant low level background noise. I found it strange but it was normal to them, they were used to eating dinner or playing with legos etc with tv constantly on in the background.

> All I can remember was cartoons - but were kids spending hours glued to the screen watching cartoons?

In the US in the past few decades? Yes. Absolutely.

Going back to at least the 1990s a kid could watch cartoons before school and then for several hours afterwards on broadcast channels.

For households with basic cable there were also very popular networks running all day full of children’s content (Disney Channel, Nickelodeon etc.)

These networks were very successful because they excelled at grabbing attention and keeping eyeballs on screens. For one example of these corners of hyper-popular children’s entertainment that kept kids glued to screens before YouTube just look at the works of Dan Schneider. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Schneider

And such is the age old tale of old people forgetting what they were like when they were children.

The younger generation always has been, and always will be, totally so much worse than the older generation.

Don't afterschool cartoons every weekday and several hours of Saturday morning cartoons qualify? IIRC that was the usual habit of children a few decades ago.

> but even in the US - say, was there a constant stream of content aimed at kids that is optimized to be maximally extreme and maximally attention-grabbing?

Depends on your era. The 90's gave us Beavis and Butthead, Southpark, Ren & Stimpy and the Power Rangers. It gave us XTREME!!! everything. It gave us Mortal Kombat and AOL. There was a lot of parental concern about the stuff the "kids these days" were consuming.

The 80's gave us Transformers or Voltron. It gave us MTV and the rise of Nickelodeon. It gave us GI Joe cartoons, He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and an endless supply of toys imported from japan and accompanied by 30 minute commercials for those toys (see also Transformers, Voltron, He-Man etc). There was a lot of parental concern about the stuff the "kids these days" were consuming, heck they got the federal government involved they were so concerned.

Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes had people concerned for its mindless violence and effect on kids. Remember that Mr. Rogers started his show (and pitched continued funding for PBS to congress) on the concerns that TV was just mindless dreck rotting children's brains.

Start going much earlier than that and the ability of entertainment to be just broadcast into your life and home reduces considerably, but I imagine parents in the 1800's also had plenty of concerns about various mindless entertainment drivel that was luring their children off the godly paths.

Having been a young kid in the 80s, what I recently discovered was the primary concern with parents at the time (because, I genuinely don’t remember) was using those afternoon and Saturday morning cartoons as a vehicle to sell products to kids - a barrage of advertisements. Seems pale in comparison to extreme behavior that potentially endangers others, e.g. deliberately crashing your airplane for views/hits.

I'm only 26 and I'm also perhaps falling into the "old man yells at clouds" thing, but this feels different to me. Not Mr Beast by himself perhaps (never watched anything he's made), but just in general the kind of content that is being pushed to kids algorithmically is insane to me.

Watching my nephews grow up, I'm sort of gobsmacked about what my sisters are allowing them to watch. It's quite literally brainrot, I genuinely think what they watch is actively detrimental to their mental health and intelligence, especially since they're all below 10. It's just constant stimulation every single millisecond with no room to breathe, filled with random sound effects and noises constantly, while the "plot" is always some nonsensical crap.

The minecraft ones are the absolute worst for this, and to me the saddest thing is they'd rather watch some brainrotting machinima-style thing rather than play the damn game themselves.

As a side note, reading this comment back I'd like to formally apologize to my parents, because it seems I've turned into them and saying the exact same things they said about my hobbies :)

Maybe a little sprinkling of PT Barnum in there as well?

Is it shallow entertainment? Sure.

But sometimes you want to eat a soggy kebap and not a Michelin-star gourmet meal, and that's fine too (and I can't stand people who malign what other people enjoy because it's "not pure enough").

Sometimes? Sure. All the time? You'd likely to hurt yourself pretty badly doing that, eventually (and maybe sooner than you'd realize). Nutrition-wise, I think, people starting to understand that. Information-wise, not so much.

Do you think you should go to a Michelin starred restaurant every night?

I think there are many options between pink slime and Michelin three stars. I have never been in Michelin restaurant, and I don't eat in pink slime ones, but I never felt I am lacking options for food service. The middle road is extremely wide, you don't have to go to the sides.

Been only to one but it had decent food that you could eat ever day.

The couple I've been to were pretty rich; I don't think you'd actually want to go there every day. Example: a dish at Chez Panisse which had an inordinate amount of duck fat. Delicious, but...

I am that get of my lawn guy, no shame. You are 100% correct and I do call for bs like government intervention, as the lesser evil, ofc. See what happened with tobacco. IMO it's the same.

> I am not calling for government intervention or any of such BS

Why is this BS? It wouldn't be unheard of to pass stricter age restriction laws so that at least the kids are not so easily exposed to brain damage. Same thing with the drugs you mentioned.

Yes, but there's a difference between drugs and this. The lack of evidence that they are the same or even similar for example.

Also, would govt stepping in even help? We all know where that led to with the "war on drugs" in the US. I think there is no simple/easy fix.

My view is, you need to educate parents (backed by solid peer reviewed etc studies), and give them the tools (and free time) to help their kids. Most parents I know are too busy working to put food on the table to spend time encouraging their kids not to watch trash tv/youtube.

> Why is this BS?

Because the cure would be way worse than the disease. Both parties don't have my best interest in mind, but only one party has the power to ruin my life. I am not inclined to add to that power any more that it is absolutely necessary. And we're so far beyond that point that any addition at this point is extremely suspect.

MrBeast's videos are total slop that I would put serious effort towards preventing my children watching if I had some but reading this it's immediately obvious why he's successful.

I think the authors intention was to pull any positives from this document that they could, but it seems almost negligent to not even mention the "no doesn't mean no" section of this document. As well as the context of the current ongoing gigantic mess, where Mr Beast tortured a guy while doing a "I spent X Hours in Solitary Confinement" video, and had to scrap it after the contestant was harmed.

They refused to shut the lights off for days on end and then coerced the contestant to run a literal marathon on a treadmill... and then there's the sexual abuse allegations high up in his team, hiring a convicted child predator and someone else with a long sexual abuse criminal history, among other things. I'm not sure I would talk his business practices up without directly making some kind of distinction or acknowledgement here.

I didn’t try to extract positives, I extracted what I personally found most interesting.

I skipped the “no doesn’t mean no” section because it felt like pure hustle culture to me, not to mention something which wouldn’t work outside of MrBeast because they can lean so heavily on their brand - “find an employee who has a kid who is a fan” etc.

I didn’t actually spot the relationship between the “no means no” section and the sexual abuse scandals (I’m apparently not completely up to date on MrBeast scandals) - I caught the bit about squid game and though that would be a useful thing to highlight to remind people that MrBeast’s history isn’t without its nasty incidents.

you empower your employees with a mindset of "no doesn't mean no" and have them get results with pushback on no's. they are young kids mostly, don't you think that they will apply the same learned mindset the next time a girl tells them no?

Honestly I think the biggest problem with that section is the choice of title. I don’t think we would be having this conversation if that part of the document was titled “If someone says something is impossible, always try to explore and see if there are alternatives ways we can get it to happen instead”.

When a big chunk of your business is about filming ludicrous stunts that nobody else on YouTube has been able to film it’s understandable that this idea would end up in your employee handbook.

You didn’t spot the relationship with the “no doesn’t mean no” stuff because as you said in the next sentence, you skipped it. Nice one.

> You didn’t spot the relationship with the “no doesn’t mean no” stuff because as you said in the next sentence, you skipped it.

No, it was because I had not read the news about MrBeast having a sexual predator on his team. My interpretation of the earlier comment here was that this should have been a flag that the heading “no doesn’t mean no” should have been called out.

Without that knowledge of the current predator scandal, I don’t think I was wrong to skip that section when writing up my summary. I read that section and it didn’t make my “highlights” list for when I wrote about the document.

I’m being defensive here because it sounds like you are calling me out for something, but I’m not sure what that something is.

Fair, it wasn’t clear to me that you meant “skipped writing about it” - I thought you were just some rando that was commenting on something that they skipped over reading in the article (which I now understand you wrote). Sorry for the misunderstanding!

sigh skip as in skipping to write about it in the blog

Some dramatic takes in this thread. Is watching a mr Beast video really that much worse than watching Friends or Spongebob or Game of Thrones?

At least your two examples try to tell a story. They have some artistic integrity.

Mr. Beast has one goal: Eyes on content. For a long as possible. There is no artistic vision - every decision is made in the name of profit, attention, and addiction.

I barely know who Mr. Beast is but isn't his whole channel about, like, the joy of doing nice things for people? Like yes, it's for profit, and yes, it's schlocky and distasteful to us wise adults or whatever, but there's seriously nothing you find redeeming about kids enjoying seeing people getting their vision restored?

That’s some of his channel. Other bits of his channel are about putting people through extreme conditions to try and win money.

The Rolling Stone profile has a good breakdown of his content cerca 2022: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/mrbeas...

I'm not sure I agree. I don't watch his content but from reading the document it's quite clear his goal is to make stuff that's "fucken funny" - he's not creating any content for the sake of it, he wants to entertain himself.

that's a ridiculous take and blinded by your own preferences... It's all content... and it's all trying to get "Eyes on content. For a long as possible."

By his own admission in this onboarding document he admits his only goal is to make viral youtube video by any means necessary. It's all about "hacking" the algorithm and peoples' attention faculties.

Contrast that with very traditional Hollywood media - yes, of course they want to get people to watch their shows, but for the most part they try do that via a story and art. Not hacking peoples brains.

His content is like "Reality TV" on steroids. I don't watch or believe in traditional "Reality TV" either. Both are trash content - amongst the lowest forms of "entertainment" available.

> but for the most part they try do that via a story and art.

No they don't. When you are young and everything is new it seems that way, when you get older you realize it's all just nonsense for entertainment.

That's also why film critics seem to hate all films, except for the boring ones. They are looking for art, but it's not there.

Indeed. At least when it comes to your regular type of broadcast tv we must not have any romantic illusions. One of the most glaring tricks is having multiple items within a program and round-robining them in short chunks. And even the supposedly higher art of netflix shows uses inane stuff like cliffhangers and needless sex scenes.

yeah i thought that was interesting, as if to say, if we made a pet torture video that has the most views ever, that's what's important. Also how wedded it is to youtube. understanding how youtube works is more important that making funny or engaging content. it's a reverse of 'if you build it they will come' when it comes to excellence.

never saw GoT, but I wouldn't think so. you put an episode on and all of a sudden half an hour has passed.

all these things are just convenient timeskip tools.

> Since we are on the topic of communication, written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it.

Excellent.

I know virtually nothing about Mr Beast other than that he's massively successful due to dumb videos that apparently raise lots of ethical questions.

That's not an endeavor I'd be interested in participating in, but I did find the PDF fascinating and read all of it.

A good bit of his guide is about 1. taking responsibility for delivering what you are expected to 2. keeping the big picture in mind

Plenty of folks could benefit from that advice and the examples he provides to make it more concrete.

This, fr, is a better explication of "founder mode" than anything pg & co have put out about it so far.

One thing I find interesting is that y combinator content (like Michael and Dalton videos) don’t talk much about team intensity and culture aside from cliche terms, but successful teams obsess over it. I mean he’s literally saying he’ll give you $1000 to study the handbook, and the handbook says average employees should be fired immediately (in all caps). I’ve never heard something like that come from y combinatory, but I’ve seen other successful teams do similar things

Reads like a "How to PM" and "Extreme Ownership" rolled into 1 doc.

The one area that I'm wondering a bit on is the statement that you need to be working on multiple 'videos' aka projects at 1 time and if your not then your a FAILURE... so whose priority list is "prio" when, lets say, you are working on 5-10 projects? And they all have prios/emergencies etc.... Interesting expectation setting here. And concludes with a rather harsh statement too with the "failed as a MrBeast employee that day"...

For reference: Work on multiple videos EVERYDAY Please do not come in and only work on one video during a workday. That’s how you fall behind on future videos and create a nasty cycle that i’m trying to stop. If you drop everything and go all in on a video for 3 days then that’s 3 days your other videos will fall behind and eventually you’ll have to drop other videos to focus on those videos and it will snowball into you can’t do anything but focus on what’s right in front of you because you murdered any lead time you had. If you ever only work on one video during a day, you failed as a MrBeast employee that day

Seems incompatible with a 40h work week.

Any ideas what is being referenced with this quote?

> Do not leave consteatants waiting in the sun (ideally waiting in general) for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $500,000 and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out. Ask James to know more

Willing to Die for MrBeast (and $5 Million)

https://archive.is/lDVoz

He blames Crowdstrike for his org treating humans like shit for money. Nice.

Is that all you got from the quote?

"was unfortunately complicated by the CrowdStrike incident, extreme weather and other unexpected logistical and communications issues"

"extreme weather"

"communications issues"

Are you doing this on purpose? I'm not even a fan of the guy but this type of out-of-context taking just hurts discourse. It's the type of thing I came to HN to avoid.

I notice you don't correct anything I've said, because none of it is false.

He did blame CrowdStrike, right at the top of the list of blame. He did not take any responsibility for what he and his org did.

I appreciate this is how a startup must run, but must every small tech company be a startup? Where do you find jobs for small companies which are just happy to exist and grow sustainably. Where you can come in at 9:00am, have an uninterrupted hour long lunch break at 12:00pm and stop working at 5:30pm? While also not being paid pennies? I can care about your company and be passionate about my work without having to sacrifice all semblance of any aspect of the rest of my life. If that makes me a "B" or "C" player then that's fine.

They exist, but they are rare. Large tech companies have the benefit of economies of scale. For what you're looking for, you really need to find a niche player, and those folks don't hire very often. OpenDental, Rogue Amoeba, Impexium, and Cronometer are a few.

I've seen these be referred to as "calm companies" which is nice.

From the referenced doc:

> CTR is basically how many people see our thumbnail in their feeds divided by how many that click it.

That's actually 1/CTR.

Another example of math fluency not being required for success at the top.

I think it's a good example of understanding how people think is good for the success at the top. Out of 1000 people asking "Wtf is CTR now?" maybe one needs a precise definition usable for immediate conversion to the programming code. That's the person for whom CTR and 1/CTR difference is important. The other 999 need to understand what's this term is used to measure and where it comes from - and for them this explanation is just fine. They are not people who make decisions or calculations based on it - those already know what CTR is. They are random people that need to fit a new thing into their mental model - and they won't even notice the difference, especially given the followup explanation.

whether you're looking for CTR on one end of the continuum or 1/CTR on the other end of the spectrum, you're looking at the same thing, just without understanding what one word means

... Sounds like a person with plenty of fluency made a typo.

How do you guys find employees/founding team members who actually value results over hours worked just like MrBeast?

At this point I’m convinced any great company follows this same principle. I also strongly believe in this in my startup.

But I’ve been finding it super hard to find employees or founding team members with this kind of mindset.

How do you spot these people?

> I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. “Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” […] Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date.

This sounds to me a lot like the idea in software engineering of being “blocked on” something. I wonder what jargon other fields use for the same concept. Could be cool to have a table cross-referencing jargon across fields, haha.

A close friend of mine was an associate of Mr Beast, even living in his house in Greenville for several months. He confirmed a lot of the negative press about him in the media, and was himself ultimately screwed over by Jimmy and has been trying to get recompense for years.

MrBeast has always been clear that his goal is to make the best videos in the world. Not to be the most nurturing place to work, or the most philanthropically minded. This document makes that clear. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that in becoming the best in the world at youtube, he's had to become an extremely toxic individual.

He is sick. This is the work of a sick person. He even knows that he is sick but does not care, because of the sickness. I pray for his audience, really.

What's this about the Squid Game video and the half a mil lost because of the "waiting in the sun" ? Did someone die ???

Here’s the squid game story. Thankfully nobody died but it was not a safely run set: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/style/mrbeast-beast-games...

How to Succeed in a Torment Nexus: Make the best TORMENT NEXUS videos possible

"Since we are on the topic of communication, written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it."

Gonna keep that one handy.

Huge +1. If I'd understood this mantra earlier in my career it would have saved me a large amount of hassle.

For juniors: any time you send something important to your manager, confirm they read the document. Don't ask "did you read it?" Don't rely on reactions in chat. Ask a specific question that would require them to read the contents of the document. For example, if you're sending over a quote from a vendor, and you'd already sent another quote before, you could ask "how does this quote compare to the previous one? [link to previous one]" Always get confirmation at least 24-48 hours in advance of the point-of-no-return (e.g. launch, meeting, changing dates, company-wide emails), very preferably in writing.

And for _very_ important meetings, ensure all parties have either acknowledged understanding of the required information, or schedule pre-meeting briefings with individuals. There's nothing quite like getting thrown under the bus because someone showed up and couldn't figure out the subtleties & context on the fly. Unfortunately you can't just say "it's a 12 page document for a reason." when your manager is confused in front of their manager.

Mr.Beast is in some big controversies right now, and it's honestly much more interesting than this PDF, I expected to see the "no does not mean no" section in this PDF.

If you read the content of the PDF instead of focusing on the problematic wording of the section title, you'll see that he doesn't mean it in a personal boundary context, but in a problem solving / sales context. Most people's default answer to ideas that are totally new to them is "no" and accepting that first no on its face means you don't get to achieve your goal.

It's there, on page 19.

I think this document predates the current scandal - the page 19 reference is to https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/style/mrbeast-beast-games... where the more recent scandal is https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna164777

(Sorry, my mistake: the page 19 bit is indeed “no does not mean no” which is unfortunate wording given a current scandal! The scandal I referred to is the one about leaving contestants in the sun for three+ hours)

I wonder why it wasn't mentioned in the article.

I hate the actual content he produces - the first time I watched it, I kept thinking it's a trailer because of all the cuts and I wondered, where is the actual video, when I realized no, I am watching the actual video - but I have to commend the grind.

He is trully obsessive about getting the most views, almost soullessly designing the perfect viral content, caring about every second. He literally starts with the thumbnail and title and only then works out the rest of the video!

I also like this 2 years old video of visiting his studio. This guy literally sleeps in his giant studio, everything is super optimized.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUzpK0tGFcE

Of course the end result is entirely pointless. But still. I respect the grind.

(I also love when he "builds 1000 houses in Africa" or whatever, and he usually never even mentions the country or the place name. It's not that important. But at least he does some good, I guess.)

Average Americans (his main audience) always visit "Europe" or "Africa", never mentioning a specific country.

In similar fashion, European students with a gap-year will go backpacking in Asia

> He is trully obsessive about getting the most views, almost soullessly designing the perfect viral content, caring about every second. He literally starts with the thumbnail and title and only then works out the rest of the video!

That sounds like standard goal-oriented planning. Amazon starts with the product's press release. "The Amazon working backward method is a product development approach that starts with the team imagining the product is ready to ship. The product team’s first step is to draft a press release announcing the product’s availability. The audience for this press release is the product’s customer."

https://www.productplan.com/glossary/working-backward-amazon...

Let's fact check that final comment:

"I Built 100 Houses And Gave Them Away!" 127M views, mentions Jamaica 45 seconds in: https://youtu.be/KkCXLABwHP0?si=3oMfNy0iAGVrTwqo&t=45

"I Built 100 Wells In Africa" 202M views, mentions Kenya 12 seconds in: https://youtu.be/mwKJfNYwvm8?si=qYc8jZWsYXwF1qrm&t=11

"We Powered a Village in Africa" 26M views (different channel), mentions Kenya 12 seconds in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FQvRZg3bcg

It's just fast food content.

There is a reason it's called "content", "content" for the mere "container" we've become

Yeah and I respect fast food chains in this regard. So, that makes sense.

except it doesnt even feed you

Arguably neither does fast food - it gives you energy, but it's also quite bad for your health and your wallet. So, it feeds you, sure, but the negatives likely far outweigh the positives.

If you've ever cooked meals for multiple days with just some ground beef, cabbage and some lettuce and friends for ~10 bucks per day, you'll see how crazy expensive a $20 fast food ""meal"" is.

So this is fast food content, because it does entertain, but you could do many things to get good entertainment and also not consume absolute slop.

Fast food aren't worth much nutritionally so they aren't much different.

Lol he didn’t build 1000 houses. 100 only. But also, I think many of the houses were rushed to build… so…

I Googled a bit (I'm not a consumer of these types of YouTube videos) and apparently this guy is pretty rich by now. He identified a path to wealth that clearly works and exploited it well, so he is definitely smart. Well deserved from that point of view.

However, it makes me sad that we as a society even let what he does (a zero-net as many pointed out) be a path to wealth on the first place. The fact that we reward so much something that is so void of value is our fault and IMHO what needs to be corrected somehow. It's sad to think we throw so much money at people covered by ketchup, but many PhD's barely make any money and we cannot figure out how to make open-source sustainable.

If our reward schemes were more aligned with actually providing value to society, this guy might have applied his intelligence and amassed his wealth doing something more worthwhile for everybody.

His section on monitoring your information diet is generally applicable to many fields.

If you want to be expert in X, consume content in X (in addition to the deliberate practice and focus on the craft of X).

Reading through the document, this company seems hellish for its employees. I wonder how the pay and perks are

Seems like your average creative industry company, to be honest.

Underpaid, overworked, expectations of “total dedication”, for the off-chance that you can rise to the top or branching out.

Spoken like a “c-player” haha. I’m with you though. It’s only for people who really very much enjoy working on the things he does.

The unwavering fixation on metrics like Click Thru Rate, Average View Duration and Average View Percentage explains why so many of my previous channels get formulaic over time. It sounds like a small thing, but for some reason the thumbnails/titles with the Youtube face enrage me the most.

Thankfully there are still enough channels which are not that optimized.

But I wonder: How would the scene of Youtubers cope, if Youtube suddenly changes its algorithm to something completely different? I remember the tears in SEO-land, when Google did it.

There are various browser extensions that you might like. Clickbait Remover for Youtube, DeArrow, etc. They remove the thumbnail images and replace them with a frame from a random time within the video, and replace or modify the video title to make it less sensational. I also recommend Sponsorblock.

I'm using an even more nerdier variant: Subscribing via RSS feeds, then downloading as MP4s.

Having a small backlog of video files in the file system shows how great file systems are compared to a subscription feed on a web site: You can pick and choose your next video, you can sort by different criteria, you can tag then and/or put them into folders and you can do that all one the fly.

Yep, I do something similar as an alternative to subscribing to things on Youtube itself.

There's a disincentive for YouTube to change because it'd make both creators (to a greater extent) and users (to a lesser extent) unhappy.

It's almost like the situation of buggy hardware implementations of networking protocols being so prevalent that software has to adapt to it, and vice versa, leading to lots of silly non-compliant (or non-optimal) behavior because it's disadvantageous to fix your behavior before upstream/downstream fixes theirs.

I think the better ways to fix this would be either gradual change, carefully-crafted regulation, or a new platform entirely that's not owned by an ad company.

Are we sure this got “leaked”? Or is this merely part of the not leaked production PDF?

It will generate a ton of attention. Who cares if it’s bad?

As far as I can tell this was leaked to a person who’s been having a high profile disagreement with MrBeast, by either a current or former staff member.

Maybe it’s a fake or a deliberate release, but it doesn’t read like the at to me. There is a ton of commercially sensitive information in here. Not to mention that note about the expensive squid game incident which I doubt they would have included in a document for public consumption.

I don’t think MrBeast needs to farm for attention outside of his current very successful video tactics.

> I don’t think MrBeast needs to farm for attention outside of his current very successful video tactics.

Well he is in the middle of a PR push responding to the claims from former employees that he fakes his videos and is generally fraudulent

Mr Beast’s company has been getting a ton of negative attention for how it works and how it treats employees and contestants. It seems plausible it was leaked as another example of toxic culture.

It was leaked with a lot of attention being paid to the "no doesn't necessarily mean no" section in the context of abuse at the MrBeast org

Let's work hard to make the rich man rich. It is poisonous to only do your work. You need to sacrifice everything for the well being of the man This mentality should be banned from everyone's lives

> Here’s a darker note from the section “Random things you should know”:

>> Do not leave consteatants waiting in the sun (ideally waiting in general) for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $500,000 and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out. Ask James to know more

Can someone explain this to me? I don't quite get what the original quote means.

The conditions when filming their Squid Game episode weren't great for contestants: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/net...

I don't know what "cost us $500,000" refers to though.

medical expenses and lawyers I imagine.

s/consteatants/contestants. My guess is that they left the players in Squid game is the sun and someone got hurt?

I really liked his distinction between A, B and C-team players. This could be a really good framework for recruiting in an ambitious startup.

I personally deeply disliked the semi-cult like explanation that anyone moving out was basically not good enough to be there in the first place.

Apart from that, it's the good old Netflix playbook: empower managers to remove adequate team members with good severance to give space to good team members. The danger is letting it deteriorate into stack ranking if you are not careful with the deleterious effect on team work associated.

I hope everyone here who is praising the A, B, C-player framework recognizes that it comes from Jack Welch’s much criticized Vitality Curve system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Ratings

I don’t see much similarity here, other than the use of those three letters and the idea that Cs should be removed from the company.

The MrBeast As are rated on their ability to learn - which is surprisingly a characteristic that’s not mentioned in the Welch model.

MrBeast Bs are As who haven’t got there yet - Welch Bs are not expected to get there.