Skype Fires Executives, Avoiding Payouts • Hacker News Board

Re: Skype Fires Executives, Avoiding Payouts

#61

Post by pthatcherg » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 6:05 PM UTC

pedrocr wrote: post #47

pmjordan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any implementations of it that actually work well through NAT and which have a UI that non-technical people can use? We use Skype a lot - iChat would be fine, too, but seems to require port forwarding on both ends, which isn't going to happen anytime soon. Facetime forces you to use video, which isn't always what you want.

Gmail's voice and video chat works fine and has a pretty simple UI. I'm not sure it follows those specs completely but there are open-source clients that can connect to it. The Google client itself has pretty good Windows/OSX/Linux support as a browser plugin and with the Google Voice integration in Gmail you get a pretty full-featured UI to call both people that are on Google Talk and normal phones. Unfortunately th…

Gmail's voice and video chat now supports the main Jingle standards, XEP-166 and XEP-167.

And there are two open source implementations that it works with:

http://code.google.com/p/libjingle http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/

Re: Skype Fires Executives, Avoiding Payouts

#62

Post by pthatcherg » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 6:08 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #49

pmjordan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any implementations of it that actually work well through NAT and which have a UI that non-technical people can use? We use Skype a lot - iChat would be fine, too, but seems to require port forwarding on both ends, which isn't going to happen anytime soon. Facetime forces you to use video, which isn't always what you want.

Google has just added WebRTC to the Chrome source tree. WebRTC (real-time communication) consists of Jingle, VP8, some voice codecs and other audio software they bought, and various NAT traversal algorithms. The IETF is standardising it and Mozilla and Opera are committed to shipping it. Somewhat interestingly, a bunch of Skype engineers seem to have been involved in it too. http://sites.google.com/site/webrtc/blog/f…

The jingle portion of WebRTC comes form libjingle, and is usable right now with Google Talk. There is also a second open source implementation that works with Google Talk called "telepathy".

http://code.google.com/p/libjingle http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/

Re: Skype Fires Executives, Avoiding Payouts

#63

Post by pedrocr » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 7:00 PM UTC

pthatcherg wrote: post #61

pedrocr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail's voice and video chat works fine and has a pretty simple UI. I'm not sure it follows those specs completely but there are open-source clients that can connect to it. The Google client itself has pretty good Windows/OSX/Linux support as a browser plugin and with the Google Voice integration in Gmail you get a pretty full-featured UI to call both people that are on Google Talk and normal phones. Unfortunately th…

Gmail's voice and video chat now supports the main Jingle standards, XEP-166 and XEP-167. And there are two open source implementations that it works with: http://code.google.com/p/libjingle http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/

I did mention there were open-source implementations that could interface with it. I tested it against empathy (telepathy based) today and was pleasantly surprised with how well it worked. Previous attempts weren't as successful. I tried with both clients inside the same NAT though so I don't know if the firewall punching bits are as good.

Thanks for the clarification on the standards, it seems to have evolved since the early days.

Re: Skype Fires Executives, Avoiding Payouts

#64

Post by chernevik » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 7:07 PM UTC

djcapelis wrote: post #28

r00fus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reduction of equity stake after negotiated compensation just reeks of pure theft. So what are good employees supposed to do? Doubtless the ones who did not get diluted were the big money while the workers get shafted (as usual). Kleptocracy at it's finest.

> So what are good employees supposed to do? Leave, if there's any justice in the world. This is how the market works. The reason you don't screw your employees like this is not just because you're a nice person, but because it costs you money in the long term.

Alas, market mechanisms aren't such great protectors here. They work best with large populations of similar events, where "average" behaviors can signal expectations and volatilities can be estimated on a fairly stable basis. Endgames offer the unethical opportunities to reap excess rewards without market penalties.

Hopefully, there will be enough information to know just how screwed these people are (or aren't, I've seen gossip that several were late-comers) and the VC / executive players involved. It's possible that these decisions make some sense, but it sure looks bad at first glance.

Re: Skype Fires Executives, Avoiding Payouts

#65

Post by gnosis » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 8:50 PM UTC

meterplech wrote: post #56

Just when I (and everyone else) was saying how horrible this is, I was shocked to find out the Google did something very similar to a Director of Operations named Brian Reid. They fired him 9 days before the IPO- leaving him with 119,000 unvested options at $.30 strike price. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scientist)

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/FYIFV

Re: Skype Fires Executives, Avoiding Payouts

#66

Post by gnosis » Mon, Jun 20, 2011, 9:01 PM UTC

Legion wrote: post #35

Corrado wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do any of these strike your fancy? * http://www.oovoo.com/home.aspx * http://tinychat.com/ * http://www.vbuzzer.com/conferencing/web_conferencing.php * http://www.goober.com/ * http://www.voxox.com/

Goober is the only one with a Linux client. I may have to try that one out.

There's also LinPhone:

http://www.linphone.org

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Linphone

It has clients for: Linux, OS X, Android, and iPhone.

Re: Skype Fires Executives, Avoiding Payouts

#67

Post by jarrett » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 3:34 AM UTC

A lot of people have commented that this type of stuff is standard. Maybe that's true.

But if I considered my stock options to be an important, must-have part of my compensation package, I'd demand contractual protections. Double triggers have been suggested; one could envision other safeguards as well. One way or another, I'd make sure that my options were safe in the event of my arbitrary termination.

If I couldn't negotiate that, I'd base my negotiations on the assumption that the worst-case scenario would happen. In other words, I'd discount the value of my stock options accordingly when deciding whether the offered compensation package was adequate.