If your only value proposition is “I write good code and pull well defined stories from Jira”, your career was in danger a decade ago as an enterprise dev. The commodization between its not hard to be a good enough developer and outsourcing and plateauing of comp was happening then.
Yes I am aware of BigTech comp - I’m talking about boring old companies like banks, airlines, etc where most developers work.
AI is just making the problem worse for the “ticket takers”. No matter what your title is if you are pulling tickets off the board - that’s mid level behavior.
On the BigTech and adjacent side which is a completely different industry with separate rules to enter and different comp, being able to do leetCode to get a job isn’t enough as of 2022.
Saying you want to control your company and you want to be around 10 years and then raising VC funding is either naive or dishonest.
VCs aren’t interested in a lifestyle business throwing them maybe a small dividend and a miniscule number of companies go public. Look at YC, they have invested in thousands of companies and only around 20 have gone public and only 3 have had positive returns since going public
My “analysis” was the idea of a private company that seems to want to stay independent and control their own destrone like the author of the submission wants. There are only two ways to stay independent - stay private forever or go public.
Once you take outside funding, you really have no choice but an acquisition or go public. VCs don’t want to get tiny dividend checks. Even public shareholders will insist on a sale at the right price
Going public doesn't keep you independent, though, unless you were already the kind of unicorn that has enough pull to own a massive amount of shares and/or a special class of them
Yes, but that isn't all you said and it isn't even right.
Public shareholders generally don't insist on anything as they are dispersed. They may elect directors to the board, but that question gets into all sorts of dynamics about who actually really votes when annual meetings come around, board independence, activist shareholders and whatnot.
Put all of that aside and assume for a second that directors are a perfect representation of shareholder interests. Boards do not "insist on a sale". Instead, they may have the _fiduciary duty_ to consider bona fide acquisition offers and take the decision that maximizes shareholder value, triggered upon certain conditions (cf Revlon Duties)
The entire submission is about someone who doesn’t want to be acquired even at “the right price”. You don’t have that option when you take outside investors.
I don't know the specifics of your company so I can't give you valuation advice, but I'd just like to add that, in my experience, I've seen lots of C-level teams and Directors refuse to sell even when a great offer was on the table because they believed they were worth more. In numerous cases, it turns out they were wrong and the company either fizzled out or sold to a different buyer a year or two later for much less than they could have gotten.
I'm talking refusing a $3.5 billion offer because you think you're worth $4B, only to sell for $2B later.
Not every deal is a good deal, but remember as an insider who's built the company you're also likely somewhat biased. There's nothing morally wrong about selling if it is quote-unquote "the right price".
I can't really name names in public, but email is in profile if you ever want to chat
We started traveling a lot post Covid and after all of the stars aligned for us. But this is the first year that we have done any international travel besides flights Mexico (cruises don’t count).
We went to Costa Rica (Manual Antonio), London with a day trip to France and Canada (landed in Buffalo NY).
We are going to see if Costa Rica is a good Plan B when we retire on paper (I am 51) it looks good. We are staying for a month next year. I work remotely.
As far as side projects? I plan to continue my 30 year next year streak of never doing anything software development outside of work. Between continuing to learn Spanish, exercise, and spending time with family and friends, I’ve got enough on my plate.
They do, but you sell forward contracts instead. This is perfectly legal, and the approach I've seen. There are a few companies, and even funds that will engage in this, in an effort to attain future upside.
The various valuations you see for OpenAI are overwhelmingly based on the prices offered for shares in their employee tender offers so I’d say for OpenAI and SpaceX at a minimum (which has a similar setup for its employees) we have a pretty good idea of what employees are getting for their equity compensation if they so choose.
They've changed the laws recently which makes it far easier - I believe you'd still need to be accredited but for most of HN, that's a low bar. For OpenAI specifically, they've allowed employees to participate in the funding rounds and they did a separate tender offer with Softbank to provide liquidity to early employees as well;
People are making a things way too hard. The old way still works. Manage your music using the native app on Macs or iTunes for Windows, sync with iPhone. Music you buy from Apple has been DRM free since 2009.
Apple has always sold 256KB AAC and most of their songs they sell are now lossless ALAC. Yes it’s open source and Apple provides open source implementations to convert to other lossless formats.
You weren’t around pre Google were you? The only thing Google learned from other search engines is what not to do - like rank based on the number of times a keyword appeared and not to use expensive bespoked servers
Ranking was Google's 5% contribution to it. They stood on the shoulders of people who invented physical server and datacenter infrastructure, Unix/Linux, file systems, databases, error correction, distributed computing, the entire internet infrastructure, modern Ethernet, all kinds of stuff.
Eh ... I question that 5% ranking is google's only contribution, even if it was important.
Everyone stood on the shoulders of file systems and databases, ethernet (and firewalls and netscreens, ...) Well, maybe a few stood on the shoulder of PHP.
Google did in fact pretty much figure out how to scale large number of servers (their racking, datacenters, clustering, global file systems etc) before most others did. I believe it was their ability to run the search engine cheap enough that enabled them to grow while largely retaining profitability early on.
More specifically on that last point, I remember reading something like Google's biggest contribution hardware-wise was using lots of cheap, easliy-replaced distributed storage with redundancy instead of expensive large singular storage with error-correction? Or maybe it was memory and not storage. Whatever it was I remember them not caring as much about error correction as others, and being able to use relatively cheap hardware because of it.
Anti-trust doesn’t have to involve force, but monopolistic behavior.
Google has spent over a decade advertising Chrome on all their properties and has an unlimited budget and active desire to keep Chrome competitive. Mozilla famously needs Google’s sponsorship to stay solvent. Apple maintains Safari to have no holes in their ecosystem.
Stop being silly defending trillion dollar companies that are actively making the internet worse, it’s not productive or funny.
Yes I am aware of BigTech comp - I’m talking about boring old companies like banks, airlines, etc where most developers work.
AI is just making the problem worse for the “ticket takers”. No matter what your title is if you are pulling tickets off the board - that’s mid level behavior.
On the BigTech and adjacent side which is a completely different industry with separate rules to enter and different comp, being able to do leetCode to get a job isn’t enough as of 2022.
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