The war was over after the Marianas were taken, if not at Midway. It doesn’t seem right to discount the industrial might like you do when the US produced dozens and dozens of carriers and escort carriers while the Japanese produced four or five more.
But beyond that lots of reasons,
- Intelligence and damage control (mentioned elsewhere)
- The air war of attrition started early, with the Japanese sending flights 600 miles from Rabaul to the Coral Sea. They didn’t rotate their pilots out to recuperate as the Americans did. The average Japanese pilot was a novice compared to his more numerous American adversaries by 44, and flying a very inferior plane compared to the newer F6F’s. And he could expect to fly sorties until he was killed, which by the end of the war was not much longer than one flight.
- Despite starting the war with Pearl Harbor, Japanese doctrine at the top never really moved on beyond Mahan and their plans tended to obsess with engineering a repeat of Tsushima. Yamamoto’s Midway disaster was an attempt to do just this. Compare to the American carrier raid tactics from Doolittle onwards.
- The Japanese were successfully starved of fuel, and for that reason couldn’t even get their big ships out of port before Leyte, which was a doomed banzai charge at sea.
It doesn’t answer the question on USN motivations but does a great job explaining why the Japanese were stuck in a rut and rapidly surpassed in terms of tactics, morale, and skill.
Japan's bigger problem was that for all that area they conquered in the Pacific, they obtained no industrial capacity. It was just space they had to garrison and supply.
There was something deeply irrational about their decision to go to war. The same irrationality led to subsequent errors, including Midway.
I don't know if it was that deeply irrational, I mean beyond the decision to initiate a war with the United States in the first place.
At the start of the war it wasn't clear that carrier-based air power would be able to effectively suppress ground-based air power. The prevailing theory was that carriers were too fragile to do this. The US Army and elements of the Navy with surface warship backgrounds believed this, too.
That turned out to be super wrong, and the Americans won much faster than expected by cutting off and bypassing Japanese strongholds (Rabaul, Formosa) and keeping their airfields impotent with regular carrier raids.
If those hadn't been the case, the Japanese strategy of seizing "unsinkable aircraft carriers" would appear to make more sense in retrospect. The thinking was that an initial crippling blow to the fleet plus the cost of clawing these back would be too much for the US.
Wrong, and in fact many of the Japanese brass thought it was wrong. But irrational would imply that there wasn't a theory, and there was a theory.
The big mistakes were: starting a war with your largest trading partner, allying with countries that could not make up the trade difference, and assuming the country attacked would just give up rather than exploit its factor of ~6 advantage in production capability.
Attacking Pearl Harbor, in particular, was a lethal mistake. The "sneak attack" guaranteed the US would be filled with a thirst for vengeance. Japan might have done better by simply bypassing US possessions (including the Philippines) and going after European colonial areas to the south.
The US only won much faster than expected if one didn't understand how quickly war production ramped up. All that really mattered was that the US was going to do that.
And, having done that, the US would just swamp anything Japan could do.
That was a mistake, but not such a spectacularly fatal one.
However, it does illustrate the underlying irrational process by which Japan drifted into the wider war. The decision to go to war in China wasn't the product of deliberate reasoning at the top, but was the result of actions of lower ranked hotheads in the Army.
> Right, because it wasn't actually the middle layer that was causing the problems
That's generally true about the overall stability, the DB popped constantly.
One reason Emid got grief was because it started barfing every time sprocs, table schemas, views, etc were changed and nobody ever really managed to resolve this. The DBA's would update the text of a sproc without telling anyone and Emid would start throwing exceptions. Certainly a set of fixable problems, but nobody ever really got a good mental model of when it needed to be HUP'd.
"Emid uses psycopg, ergo we have to rewrite the whole thing" was one of the insane justifications tossed around for the rewrite project. Never made any sense.
The business issue motivating removing the middle layer altogether was just that to do anything you needed to change three things in three different programming languages (maybe four if it involved JS or Flash), and this was foolish.
Haim (DB) and Chris (Front-end) were sitting next to each other hammering out the API together, I was mostly working remote.
They would tell me the API updates/changes over IRC, I'd update the Emid code, and we'd kick the servers to restart.
> Never made any sense.
Nope. :)
(In hindsight, given what I know now, rewriting the whole thing in Erlang would maybe have been a good idea!)
Sid #1 was someone that worked with Rob's dad, IIRC. Not from the investors. He continued to come around for a long while. It was amusing to me watching Chad (CTO hired after the eng founders left) take meetings with the guy.
During the period between Rob's CEO tenures he and Sid #1 built a Google Analytics alternative together, which was in fact written in C. We very narrowly avoided acquiring this company.
Haha no not in general, but at this point Coinbase has survived some pretty severe market swings, so if you ask me with no additional info (of which I have basically none on Coinbase) I'd assume they at least have some institutional awareness that a 90% drop in all the coins they offer is not perceived to be an "INF sigma" event. (Which it probably was perceived as for a vast number of the know-nothing ICO schemes)
I'm as ambivalent about capitalism as the next person. But Etsy is a lousy counterexample to the premise of combining success in business and progressive values. Current and former employees conflating the two is disappointing.
Etsy grew rapidly and organically for a decade, and never figured out how to grow intentionally in an ROI-positive way. As a private company it was not particularly concerned with revenue per employee, and headcount expanded like a gas to fill available revenue. After going public it was way too slow to realize that this wasn't going to fool the public market.
I feel deranged pointing this out, but hiring triple the headcount you need to run your business is not a progressive social value. I don't know what it is.
n.b. I worked for Etsy from 2007-2014. My own values force me to own this.
>>I feel deranged pointing this out, but hiring triple the headcount you need to run your business is not a progressive social value. I don't know what it is.
To me it feels like a byproduct of an overemphasis on a certain kind of inclusiveness, in which people are elevated based on how long they’ve been around and how much buyin there is into the mission. Everyone’s opinion is valued, everyone wants resources, everyone wants to be promoted. If there’s not money constraints or a sense of practicality driving decisions, everyone gets headcount and promotions, driving bloat.
My last job was with a very mission driven startup. We were short on money so headcount wasn’t bloated, but we were plagued by “managers” with no one under them who’d been around since the beginning and didn’t contribute much. The product drifted, and we wasted a lot of time.
I switched to a new, more unapologetically capitalist company, and my team has been subject to some absolutely cold blooded re-orgs. It’s a much less friendly place, but much, much better run in terms of getting stuff done.
Not sure what the moral is. I made some great friends at the first company, not so much at the second. But the new place is in many ways a much less frustrating place to work.
> I feel deranged pointing this out, but hiring triple the headcount you need to run your business is not a progressive social value. I don't know what it is.
From an investor's point of view this would not be ideal. Having said that, from a broader societal point of view, it's less clear.
Put it this way: as an investor, I am going to view a business that has 1 employee (on $100k) and $1m in profit much more favourably than a business that has 10 employees (on $100k) and $0.1m in profit. From the broader societal point of view though, the second arrangement could be better.
You're assuming that in the first example, they'd be unemployed. Instead, they're freed up to do new initiatives that generate new wealth that would not exist in the second scenario.
More activities across the same labor pool makes more wealth in a society than fewer activities which consume all available resources. This is why we're much richer now that 70% of workers aren't farmers.
I agree, but in this context I think it's important that wealth shouldn't be the only measure of social value. There is plenty of wealth generation going on. Perhaps there is a greater good at one place than the other thing they may have been doing.
All hypothetical. But the point is wealth can't be the only measure of success.
Actually, what I had in mind when I wrote that was a situation where total economic activity was sufficient to meet everyone's needs (as I believe it currently is) and each employee was working 1/10th of the total time expected of the single employee. An extreme example, I'll admit, but one that demonstrates that people might be in a better situation if they have a lot more time and sufficient resources rather than an over abundance of time and no resources or an over abundance of resources and no time.
Expenses rising to meet revenue is a pretty common pattern everywhere. (Except for many VC-backed companies where they rise to exceed revenue in the name of growth.) It's a pretty natural tendency because there are always people you want to hire, amenities that seem eminently reasonable, investments you think will pay off, and gear/services that will make work easier/faster.
Additionally, profits are taxed / expenses aren't, so it makes sense for a business to spend money in an effort to grow, or just generally flail about.
> As a private company it was not particularly concerned with revenue per employee, and headcount expanded like a gas to fill available revenue. After going public it was way too slow to realize that this wasn't going to fool the public market.
Wouldn't it have been fine to not go public?
That is, it sounds like, regardless of whether Etsy was profitable (in the sense of producing dividends), it was at least breaking even: it was hiring as many people as it could support on revenue, but not more, and certainly not as many people as it could support on venture capital raised in exchange for equity (or worse, debt). Is that correct?
If so, why should a company like Etsy even bother to go public? What did it gain that was worth being subject to the judgment of people whose value system is that breaking even isn't a good goal?
(I got an Etsy job offer days before the layoffs. It basically sounded like the Etsy I wanted to join died that day, and I still haven't understood why the "old Etsy," pre-IPO, couldn't have lived.)
>If so, why should a company like Etsy even bother to go public?
Etsy took $85m in VC funding. Those VCs want an exit. So, in my mind, they made the decision to eventually go public at the same time they made the decision to take that funding.
I do agree with your broader point "Wouldn't it have been fine to not go public?" but I think if you want to plan to not go public, you probably should bootstrap your company instead of taking VC funding.
> But Etsy is a lousy counterexample to the premise of combining success in business and progressive values. Current and former employees conflating the two is disappointing.
There was zero reason for Etsy not to be profitable. It over-hired and over-spent.
> I feel deranged pointing this out, but hiring triple the headcount you need to run your business is not a progressive social value. I don't know what it is.
I think the implication here is that hiring huge amounts will ultimately lead to needing the giant reorganizations that leave a bunch of people suddenly jobless.
>> I feel deranged pointing this out, but hiring triple the headcount you need to run your business is not a progressive social value. I don't know what it is.
There's a certain bay area company that has a large developer office here in my rural state. They've been hiring as fast as they can for the past few years. From all my friends who work there, I get the impression that there are way more people now than there is actual work to do. And yet they continue to hire because I assume head count alone is primary metric.
I would argue that Twitter and Facebook have more that triple the headcount that they need to run their business. That headcount is in sales and marketing and is acquired in order to "monetize" latent value in the customer base. The actual product (that attracted the customer bases) could (and was) be sustained by a far smaller head count focused on the technology and minimal revenue development operations. Essentially .coms are utilities and have developed into rent seeking utilities.
I find myself having to just imagine the narrative that goes along with most presentation decks you find on the internet. Videos of conference talks take too long to watch. I finally had enough of this situation and worked out how to dump out Keynote presentations along with their embedded presenter notes. This script emits HTML that looks a lot like how @idlewords shares his decks, and it also makes a nicely formatted PDF.
But beyond that lots of reasons,
- Intelligence and damage control (mentioned elsewhere)
- The air war of attrition started early, with the Japanese sending flights 600 miles from Rabaul to the Coral Sea. They didn’t rotate their pilots out to recuperate as the Americans did. The average Japanese pilot was a novice compared to his more numerous American adversaries by 44, and flying a very inferior plane compared to the newer F6F’s. And he could expect to fly sorties until he was killed, which by the end of the war was not much longer than one flight.
- Despite starting the war with Pearl Harbor, Japanese doctrine at the top never really moved on beyond Mahan and their plans tended to obsess with engineering a repeat of Tsushima. Yamamoto’s Midway disaster was an attempt to do just this. Compare to the American carrier raid tactics from Doolittle onwards.
- The Japanese were successfully starved of fuel, and for that reason couldn’t even get their big ships out of port before Leyte, which was a doomed banzai charge at sea.