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Dropbox S-1

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Re: Dropbox S-1

#321

Post by lsc »

kome wrote: post #320
lsc wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Great that you're content with crumbs, but I'm not, and I certainly don't want to see the next generation of technicians laboring under the same conditions as so many of ours has done. I'll do my part to leave the world a better place for my successors; not just the same status quo. What's the point of life otherwise? dude, I'm a silicon valley computer technician. I literally make 10x what the service people I see…

to be fair, you can do both at the same time. and not only you can, but to achieve the second, you need the first.

Perhaps I am not parsing. I'm reading this as "We should work to increase our wages in order to increase the wages of those who are paid less well"

I think that in a real way, people who create and maintain automation infrastructure are playing a role a lot like the role of management in the economy, except we manage machines that do the job of the worker rather than managing workers. Capital can pay for management to figure out how to pay the old professions to get a job done, or capital can pay us to automate that job away.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#322

Post by elmar »

Frondo wrote: post #311
lsc wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Good for you if you're OK with that extreme imbalance. But, I know too many people that discovered only upon an exit, that the financial reward was never destined for them. so personally? I don't care about the imbalance, I care about what I'm getting and how that compares to what I can get elsewhere. I understand I'm playing in a rich man's sandbox, and I'm okay with that. The fact that the man three levels up make…

Ok, personally, I do care about the imbalance, and I strongly encourage my fellow techies to care, too. Why? Because when enough of us care, we can change the sandbox itself. None of this stuff is set in stone. Great that you're content with crumbs, but I'm not, and I certainly don't want to see the next generation of technicians laboring under the same conditions as so many of ours has done. I'll do my part to leave…

> Because when enough of us care, we can change the sandbox itself.

no need to wait, you can change the sandbox right now, you can create your own startup and give equal ownership to everyone.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#323

Post by nathan_f77 »

throwaway93192 wrote: post #247

I'll just point out that the SVP of engineering, a former Microsoft exec, received $34 million in compensation, since joining less than 6 months ago. For all employees that are considering joining a startup as rank-and-file engineers and putting in years of effort, remember that your compensation will be paltry compared to founders and top execs. When your work finally pays off, it will mostly pay off for them. Good…

Sometimes I think about starting a tech co-op where every member has an equal stake, and we just build SaaS services and mobile apps or games until something works. I've been doing that by myself, so it would be nice to diversify and get a stake in a number of other projects. Similar to an angel investor who invests in a lot of startups, but we'd be investing time and effort instead of money.

I'm thinking we could have a group of 10 people working on 10+ different projects, and we would each own 10% of the parent company. Then we could try a bunch of different ideas and focus on the ones that work. I would want to build passive "lifestyle businesses" that make 4-5 figures per month, and we wouldn't need to aim for an exit. We could just take a salary and retire, or keep making apps and games because it's a lot of fun.

It would be awesome to share a lot of boilerplate code, so it's super fast to get started on a new idea. We'd also have a single kubernetes cluster on AWS that runs all of the backend services, maybe with something like Deis Workflow. And who knows, maybe we turn that into a business as well, and provide hosting to other companies.

Sorry for the tangent, but that could be one way to solve the imbalance.

Here's another discussion about tech coops: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7634152

EDIT: I decided to put together an application form to see if anyone is interested: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dnm-SZxbcKuQ7PUU9ArRnlD1LiK...

There will be a lot of challenges, but I think it could work. Just need to find the right people.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#324

Post by Kiro »

throwaway93192 wrote: post #247

I'll just point out that the SVP of engineering, a former Microsoft exec, received $34 million in compensation, since joining less than 6 months ago. For all employees that are considering joining a startup as rank-and-file engineers and putting in years of effort, remember that your compensation will be paltry compared to founders and top execs. When your work finally pays off, it will mostly pay off for them. Good…

Where do you see that?

Re: Dropbox S-1

#326

Post by anonytrary »

tetrazine wrote: post #264
anonytrary wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of my favorite irrational behaviour is the one in which people value object they got more than the equivalent price in which they could buy//sell that object. Art is also a good example. Art is globally unique, so what does it even mean for art to be worth $X? Seems like the only "value" of art is the price the next guy is willing to pay. The price is undefined until it's not. On the other hand, if I have a fak…

This is actually a subject dealt with widely in the humanities. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is a good start, for instance. It does seem odd for art to be valued by the market, but there are clear ways to construct standard valuation (based on utility, etc) around it. some computer and printer somewhere can easily reproduce the piece if I ever need it again [...] well-defined manufacturing co…

> "Fake" is a spectrum as well.

I suppose this is true, very interesting. A piece (real or not or unknown) with history, can become (de)valued in its own right.

> how can physical assets, and their movements, be indisputably registered to a blockchain

For example, I think VeChain and Modum use physical ID chips, but I don't see how they solve this problem. It seems like a tall order to create an injection between physical assets and digital ones. I could see how this would be done if the physical assets were fungible and centrally sourced, which is only going to be the case with certain physical assets.

How would people register those assets to the blockchain? No one in the world should be able to register my laptop, because they don't have it. It would need to be derived from physical measurements, but this is a can of worms because the measurements can change; physical matter is not immutable in the way that digital matter is. Coupling the two seems like a tall order, or maybe I am small minded.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#328

Post by afterburner »

lsc wrote: post #308
throwaway93192 wrote: post #247

I'll just point out that the SVP of engineering, a former Microsoft exec, received $34 million in compensation, since joining less than 6 months ago. For all employees that are considering joining a startup as rank-and-file engineers and putting in years of effort, remember that your compensation will be paltry compared to founders and top execs. When your work finally pays off, it will mostly pay off for them. Good…

>Good for you if you're OK with that extreme imbalance. But, I know too many people that discovered only upon an exit, that the financial reward was never destined for them. so personally? I don't care about the imbalance, I care about what I'm getting and how that compares to what I can get elsewhere. I understand I'm playing in a rich man's sandbox, and I'm okay with that. The fact that the man three levels up make…

> I don't care about the imbalance, I care about what I'm getting

Yeah that's how they get you.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#329

Post by matchagaucho »

rrcaptain wrote: post #301
matchagaucho wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's ever an Equifax scale breach at Dropbox, accountability will fall on the SVP of Eng.

You realize Equifax has had pretty much no consequences for their gross negligence, right?

Execs were forced to resign. Rank and file Engineers were not.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#330

Post by brisance »

lylo wrote: post #162

I’m a fan of Dropbox, it’s an excellent product. It’s the only file sync product I’ve used in anger that I actually trust — I’ve had glitches of one sort or another with iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive... never with Dropbox. It just works. Apple should have bought them, Jobs got it wrong ;-) Dropbox Paper is also a delight to use, from a personal perspective. I’ve never used it on a team. I would be interested to hear…

Apple did not get it wrong. Steve Jobs offered to buy (for a putative $800M) but Drew Houston said it was not for sale. Thereafter, Steve was reportedly to have said that Apple would crush them since Dropbox is a feature and not a product.
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