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"Try talking to people but when I say talking I really mean listening with all your heart, and being interested in them. Everyone has a story. If youโre genuinely interested, they will reveal everything within a few minutes."
Why is it so hard to buy things that work well?
"In principle, firms can outsource this kind of work, but people I know who've relied on outsourcing, e.g., kernel expertise to consultants or application engineers on a support contract, have been very unhappy with the results compared to what they can get by hiring dedicated engineers"
"Even after selecting the consensus best product in the space from the leading (as in largest and most respected) firm, and using the main offering the company has, the product often not only doesn't work but, by design, can't work."
"Amazon knew that the courier service they were using didn't really even try to deliver packages promptly and the only short-term mitigation available to them was to tell support to tell people that they shouldn't expect that packages have arrived when they've been marked as delivered."
"A system that requires someone like Kyle to take a stand before successful firms will put effort into correctness instead of correctness marketing is going to produce a lot of products that are good at marketing correctness without really having decent correctness properties"
"It's also true at the firm level that it often takes an unusually unreasonable firm to produce a really great product instead of just one that's marketed as great"
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