"Thought leader" isn't an actual title (or at least it shouldn't be). In my mind, its simply someone who you recognize as having the expertise worth paying attention to.
It’s a title that is given to people to get them to present at junkets, a modern socially and legally acceptable way to bribe people. No one should take them seriously.
I just said the word "domain expert" in my head 5x, and I don't like it any better.
Both of them give off "influencer" vibes. They're meaningless without more context. We used to just call people "experts", but now that's an arbitrarily bad word.
If by "thought leader" you mean domain experts making criticism then yes.
For example, Nouriel Roubini calling out the risks of the 2008 Recession before it happened, Michael Pettis calling out the risks of a real estate balance sheet crisis in China before Evergrande happened, and Arvind Subramanian calling out the risks of a a shadow bank crisis in India before the ILFS collapse in 2018.
For AI/ML, I'd tend to trust Emily Bender, given her background in NLP which itself was what became LLMs originated from.
Hrm. I'd read "thought leader" to mean "hype man"; that's how the term is normally used. I certainly wouldn't read it as "domain expert"; the people generally referred to as 'thought leaders' frequently are not.
It's just another anecdote, but the "vibes" feel like they're shifting.
The employment numbers, the inflation numbers, government austerity, the gpt-5 disappointment... the valuations are all more like meme stocks and not based on reality.
If enough articles about the crash start appearing, and enough people believe the crash is coming, the congratulations: the crash will occur.
Ember has always dwarfed by Angular and now more recently.. React. They simply have more marketing dollars behind them. That said, it has always had a strong community behind it, and believe it or not it's still growing strong.
She inherited a mound of shit. The one mistake I'll admit she made was not gutting management when she came in. It is, and was, completely dysfunctional at the management level. The only people rewarded were those willing to play the political games.
Well, it's not like there's been any positive Nest press in the last year or so to obsess over.
Based on the stories, what's been happening at Nest is an extreme case of many of the same organizational antipatterns that people in the tech industry see in their own companies on a smaller scale. The things that have happened at Nest (if the stories are to be believed) are like cancer to a tech company. If left unchecked those antipatterns can grow and consume a company, and can ultimately kill it. No amount of reform will save a company if they can no longer retain talent or recruit replacements of the same or better caliber.
Given that so many HN readers are in the tech industry themselves, they probably worry about these kinds of cancers taking root at their own companies (I know I do). This stuff exists everywhere, it's just that for stable companies it's the exception and not the rule. I'm not surprised that it's been a hot topic.
> Well, it's not like there's been any positive Nest press in the last year or so to obsess over.
Their performance versus the rest of the Google ventures? The product line that was previously leaked? And, in the eyes of Hacker News perhaps celebrating Tony stepping aside.
A lot of these stories, if they are in fact true, likely happened prior to Google acquisition and those people are now just feeling comfortable to speak out without the fear of it being spun as retaliation.
I have a lot of faith that the Google HR department wouldn't tolerate any of the behavior, which is why it smells like a marketing campaign.
