351–360 of 429 posts
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This exact "greed" rhetoric is what helps businesses keep dev salaries down. You don't get greedy people for that much, you get smart business people (they know their worth and charge for it).
I do not understand devs who justify low salaries this way. Why make 50% of your potential?
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That does seem astronomical. $4,000 per employee if they have ~100 employees like they say. Anyone think their salaries are absurdly high for some locations and positions? They've got Adnan working as an "Advanced Backend/Frontend Developer" in Sri Lanka, making only $65,104. This actually makes sense to me because Sri Lanka's cost of living is pretty low. But they've got an Advanced "Happiness Hero" which I presume…
$4,000 would barely cover business-class airfare between SF Berlin for one employee. Not to mention accommodations, event space, meals and entertainment.
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I really appreciate your further comments. I agree for most part that humans and other living things ultimately act out of self-interest. However, there are circumstances when rationale breaks, like when member of your family develops a terminal decease. A purely rational decision would be to cut emotional and financial losses and abandon them, wouldn't it? Yet, luckily, we don't see that happen. The length to which…
I'm glad you're enjoying this discussion. I'm enjoying it as well. My view is a little different. I don't think abandoning someone who has been a great value to me because they have developed a terminal disease would be consistent with acting in my self-interest. To do such a thing would be to betray the virtues that I hold dear, such as honesty, integrity, justice, pride, etc. For example, consider honesty. If this…
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In English and European club football (soccer) there are no salary caps. "In English sport, there’s no draft; there’s no salary cap; there’s no revenue sharing, no parity. In the Premier League, it’s every team for themselves." [1] 1 http://freakonomics.com/podcast/leicester-city/
It quite funny how socialist American football is. :)
This may be a little cynical but: "With our culture of bringing our whole selves to work and seeing team as family, with shared values we live by,..." In the American business world, you are an employee until you aren't. Confusing being an employee with being "family" is a mistake, both for the company and the employee. When times get bad, companies do what it takes to survive, including throwing employees overboard.…
I'd say no relationships, including family relationships, should be maintained if they aren't in the long-term self-interest of all parties. In other words, every relationship is a trading relationship, and the currency of the realm isn't always, or even often, monetary in nature.
This may be a little cynical but: "With our culture of bringing our whole selves to work and seeing team as family, with shared values we live by,..." In the American business world, you are an employee until you aren't. Confusing being an employee with being "family" is a mistake, both for the company and the employee. When times get bad, companies do what it takes to survive, including throwing employees overboard.…
So how do you account for companies like ours when, during hard times the CEO and CTO took no pay for two months so that they could continue paying employees? Or by offering employees the same class of stock as the founders with the same voting rights etc...?
You actually want your founders to have these voting rights typically. Most activist shareholders tend to say things like "your business would be a lot more profitable without this expensive engineering team. You don't need A players to maintain the technology you've already built, you should fire most of your team and outsource them." Suddenly preserving founder control sounds a lot better, eh?
1) They planned to spend 1/3 of their remaining cash on flying people around the world to meet f2f. Whoah! They need a CFO with some real power, because that is absurd.
2) Speaking of needing a CFO, one of the first things a CFO will probably point out to them is that their cash target is off by 100%. They're targeting hitting 50% of today's ARR sometime next year, yet they plan to grow ARR in 12-18 months by double. If they truly want 50% ARR on hand, they need to target $10M, not $4-5M.
I also have some questions about the graph -- I'm sure it's well-meaning but it looks fishy. The slope of the curve is noticeably better in the go-forward plan vs the status-quo plan, but there's no logic to support that in the post. I imagine there's a breakdown that makes this make sense, but it's not at all obvious, and the naive conclusion is that these people who were fired were actually slowing down sales somehow. Secondly, every time I see a graph where the next month is negative and then ... magic... and the slope goes positive, my spidey sense tingles pretty damn hard. That said, there are some obvious reasons this might happen, including the cost of the layoff being recognized next month, so that's less of an obvious red flag.
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This is so 100% on point. I think the Netflix NYT article from yesterday had a more realistic tone regarding the "family" aspect: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/magazine/can-netflix-survi... > The key concept is summed up in the 23rd slide. “We’re a team, not a family,” it reads. “Netflix leaders hire, develop and cut smartly, so we have stars in every position.” Your last sentence here is really important. If tha…
I agree the whole family thing is ridiculous. However, the performance focus of Netflix is probably too far on the other end and ridiculous too. People are not machines and performance will not always remain high. And also measurements of performance of people are often silly and useless. Performance will fluctuate and change with time. So a level a loyalty in the face of bad performance is still very advantageous ev…
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As mentioned below, Netflix has the philosophy "we're a professional sports team". Yet they don't pay people millions of dollars like an athlete. If you really want to be cut throat, great, pay people like an athlete then. Otherwise quit the BS.
> Yet they don't pay people millions of dollars like an athlete. They also don't fire you at 30 for being washed up and leave you with brain injuries and zero transferable skills.
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I do not understand devs who justify low salaries this way. Why make 50% of your potential?
Exactly. If you are just greedy then programming is not the right field. Much more reliable to make a boatload of cash through other means if that's all you care about.