Q. Wang
Profile
Experience
- Feb 2010 - PresentDirector of Product Management / Playfish (EA)I led the product managers at Playfish
- May 2009 - PresentProduct Manager / PlayfishMetrics, cross-game PM
- Sept 2007 - PresentBusiness Analyst / McKinsey & CompanyStrategy and due diligence in telecom, high tech, and PE/hedge-fund sectors
- Dec 2004 - PresentCo-founder / The Boxing Co.Co-founder and COO We help students at Northwestern move in and move out of their homes between school years with storage and shipping services.
Education
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2003 - 2007Northwestern UniversityBA in Economics, Computer Science
Posts
It’s a pity Escher died 3 years before fractals were discovered. I want me some infinite staircase of infinite complexity.
Copy-paste keyboard shortcuts aren’t particularly intuitive, but they sure are powerful. I think over the coming years we’ll see lots of these non-obvious, yet powerful gestures come to touch UI. Which makes you wonder: Is touch inherently more intuitive than cursor? Or is it just because we’re still in the early days, where the apps are just simpler?
I love this kind of design that flows into the black padding of the screen itself. In a world of tight space economy, It’s like getting free whitespace!
The alarming thing is, the mistakes that produce these regrets are all errors of omission. You forget your dreams, ignore your family, suppress your feelings, neglect your friends, and forget to be happy. Errors of omission are a particularly dangerous type of mistake, because you make them by default.
Modern economics is obsessed with efficiency. But an efficient system is antithetical to a resilient one. Perfect efficiency means zero waste, but any resources dedicated to disaster tolerance appears wasteful under normal circumstances.
Such is the case using antibiotics on livestock. You could of course dose every single animal you have. You could do this cheaply and it virtually eliminates sickness and hence yield. But then you’re breeding bacterial resistance inside livestock, and so we wouldn’t be very resilient to any resulting disease outbreaks that crossover to humans. Making the right decision here is obviously beyond the scope of market forces. Sadly, it’s appears also beyond the scope of our government. (see previous post on tail risk)
Say you’re Comcast and you’re not a fan of the net-neutrality rules passed in 2010. Say for some reason, you can carve out a chunk of your bandwidth and call it a “Private IP network” and it won’t be subject to the same net-neutrality rules that beleaguers the “Public internet”. So you do, and you use that private network to carry traffic for your Netflix-killer service called Xfinity. So now when a user watches movies on Xfinity, it doesn’t count towards their 250GB/mo bandwidth cap, but when they watch on Netflix, it does.
Yay, you’ve successfully funneled the most bandwidth-hungry use of the internet into a private network that works essentially the same way (IP based) as the public internet, except for the fact that it’s unregulated.
The sad thing is that the FCC knew about this loophole, but didn’t have the political might to close it.
I’ve never understood why regulating by making people go buy something is somehow more intrusive than regulating by making them pay taxes and then giving it to them.
…where people who worked in a manufacturing company switched roles — in some cases moving from a worker to foreman and in other cases, moving from a worker to a union steward. The numbers were not large, only some 58 people changed roles. But the magnitude of the effects were quite large, especially among the new foremen. They changed their attitudes markedly, turning pro-management, pro-company, and anti-union within 6 months of taking their new jobs.
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Then, there was an interesting twist that Seymour Lieberman took advantage of; as a result of a downturn, about a third (8) of the 23 workers who had been promoted to foremen were then demoted to workers, while the other two-thirds remained foremen. The numbers here are very small, and while modern studies have replicated related findings with more rigor, it is still interesting to see that the 8 workers who returned to being workers soon developed pretty much the same anti-management and pro-union sentiments as their fellow workers; but those who remained as foreman retained their pro-company and pro-management attitudes.
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Hey there, my name is Q.
I’m an econ & CS grad now working at a games company in SF/London. Before this, I did a stint in consulting, working mostly with investors in the telco industry.
