61–70 of 508 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the irony is that the CEO probably does less work than the assembly line worker
A lot of CEO's at places I have worked didn't really make decisions. They schmooze the biggest customers. Constantly, 12-14 hours a day.
Lesson: Don't piss off FAANG execs, they can throw what amounts to unlimited resources against you.
Fortunately for the startup, it turned out they were massively overprovisioned and didn't really need all those intelligent engineers and executives. Startup ended up closing their Bay Area office and moving engineering to South America. The undead zombie corpse husk is still chugging along.
The startup still somehow went public during the pando, but the IPO eventually became an embarrassing flop. Turns out a business based on surveys isn't that lucrative, after all.
It didn’t kill the company for several reasons, but primarily because:
1) The company had enough momentum, revenue, and cash in the bank that they could go on hiring sprees to replace everyone. The new hires had a lot of churn when they realized what was going on, so they just kept hiring until enough replacements stuck around.
2) Many of the employees who didn’t quit saw this as their opportunity to rise through the ranks and fill the voids. They weren’t wrong and it paid off for many of them in the form of rapid promotions and advancement. The CEO became more hands-off as he realized his micromanagement wasn’t helping, so they basically inherited a slightly better situation.
After this experience, I don’t really see a developer exodus killing any big company with good momentum and decent cash reserves. As long as a company has cash flow they can spend their way into hiring replacements as long as it takes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But they might be right this time. Many game devs are fungible cogs, implementing a well-defined blueprint. Especially Activision games like Call of Duty. It doesn’t help that there’s just so many devs these days that they can seemingly abuse them for decades and nothing has collapsed.
if you'd ever worked on a call of duty you'd realize how foolish a statement this is.
Atari in 1983 went from the leader in video game production to completely imploding. In 1979, four of their best programmers left after demanding equity in the sales and were refused. Their CEO Ray Kassar famously said, "You’re no more important to those projects than the person on the assembly line who put them together. You’re a dime a dozen. You’re not unique. Anybody can do a cartridge.". They left and formed A…
what's incredible about this is that Activision remains an industry leader whereas I'm not entirely sure if Atari even still exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision#Purchase_by_Bobby_K...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the irony is that the CEO probably does less work than the assembly line worker
A lot of CEO's at places I have worked didn't really make decisions. They schmooze the biggest customers. Constantly, 12-14 hours a day.
The wedding photographer/videographer business I discussed in another thread last week. All his employees quit and he went under. I've personally been involved with more than one general contractor going under. When I was a young carpenter, I followed my best friend from job to job and contractor to contractor. When he walked off a job, the rest of us followed. He and I and a group of Dominicans (from Dominica not th…
> It's incredibly difficult to find skilled tradesman in the Caribbean that will show up sober each day and perform quality work. There's a lot to unpack in that sentence. Care to elaborate?
FYI, that’s a trap. If there is a jobsite accident that afternoon, you are liable for allowing someone who’s been drinking to work.