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Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?

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Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?

#381

Post by meroes »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #229
rvanlaar wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an interesting story. It made me look up how medal of honor started. Could you clarify a few things? I don't think the story adds up. Wikipedia has the followin information. Medal of Honor was made by DreamWorks interactive. [..] Filmmaker Steven Spielberg Spielberg founded DreamWorks Interactive in 1995. [1] And: Danger Close Games (formerly DreamWorks Interactive LLC and EA Los Angeles) was an American video g…

Yes, I'm talking about 2015. The first two Playstation only MoH games were not exactly failures, but they were little more than Goldeneye clones with WW2 themes. The first PC game is really the start of what we think of as the Medal of Honor franchise proper. The team that bailed founded Infinity Ward, which was the origin of Call of Duty, or at least the first like 8 games in the franchise. So yes, my story does in…

So they didn’t start MOH, thanks for clarifying and I now can understand your post better.

Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?

#382

Post by egberts1 »

As “the” rockstar programmer fresh outta high school who started “the credit card at the gas pump” business, the entrepreneur too got too greedy and stingy with the payout despite me helping hiring the best development team … in 1980. And I was paid $10,000/month (1981 dollars), the least of all sr. programmers.

Platform was 8086, Motorola 6502, 16KB RAM, RS-488/RS-232, and assembly languages.

Surely enough, we broke away and and many of us joined Gasboy, Inc.

The budding star of a startup at many gas and oil conferences was then no more.

Had numerous offers (due to my networking of my business card being handed out at conference). Them recruiters were all initially shocked at my price tag but insisted then.

I instead went into 1980s primordial cybersecurity and never looked back.

40 years later, there is at least 6 of those credit card paypoints at every gas stations throughout the world.

And I am glad I did. I liked what I contributed to the safety of the computing world.

Off topic: And most designers are still an idiot, security-wise.

Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?

#383

Post by Double_a_92 »

fredrikholm wrote: post #231
_nalply wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the good ones left when they realized what was going on and the mediocre ones stayed. I, being Deaf, would have been forced to stay with the mediocre ones because interviewing is difficult for me. I am lucky that I don't need a job now.

Don't they accommodate you knowing that you are deaf? Granted, I don't know where you're situated, and from what I hear the hiring process in the US is sketchy, but this sounds like an easy problem to fix, if it's even a problem at all.

It's just plain discrimination. If you have to equally skilled people, do you pick the one where you need to make special accomodations? Probably not, even if you are free of prejudices or other malicious thoughts.

Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?

#384

Post by RajT88 »

darkerside wrote: post #338
RajT88 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly wasn't suggesting they had an easy job. I agree it's quite a hard job. Just that it's not always the job some people think it is.

Schmooze is a bit of a demeaning word, isn't it? If the CEO is learning from customers and helping the organization react accordingly, that sounds very valuable.

Schmooze comes from yiddish, and it just means to chat or converse. Seems fair to me.

You can chat and converse idly, or with an agenda. Not demeaning at all, just descriptive.

Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?

#385

Post by mempko »

joyfylbanana wrote: post #379
MikePlacid wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine any software company CEO nowadays saying that out loud, no matter what they privately thought. A daughter of my friend was not very happy in her job: a Silicon Valley company hired her as a security pro, but was using as a coder, which she hates. She was going to leave, but decided to wait ten months or so until her stock options vested. She and a big group of other engineers were fired right before the ves…

> All this time the CEO was generating absolutely politically correct sounds: people are our best capital, diversity is our strength, etc. She would be better off if he was honest. Honestly rarely pays and is also unthankful. There is only a little benefit and lots of downsides, such as people getting seriously pissed at you. It is not a wonder that corporate leadership roles are filled up with people who see no prob…

They meant honesty from the CEO would be good for her, not the CEO. Because she could have found another job instead of waiting ten months to be fired.

Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?

#386

Post by pmontra »

hunter-gatherer wrote: post #341
pmontra wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tragedy of the written word between people that don't know each other. One could say "Could you clarify a few things?" in anger or "I don't think the story adds up" smiling and with a friendly tone. In writing the intention of the writer is in the mind of the reader.

It is indeed peculiar that even though humans have communicated over written word for so long, so many are seemingly unaware of this fact.

I could be wrong but it was not so easy to write to strangers until very recently. Except laws, books (with plenty of space to make the context clear) and journalism (same thing) I think that most written communication was letters to friends and relatives. Again, a lot of shared context. It's the internet (forums, comments on sites and social media) that lets us write to strangers maybe more often than we're writing to people we know.

Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?

#387

Post by TuringNYC »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #194
zomgbbq wrote: post #25

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…

Gaming abounds with stories like this. A friend of mine went to work for a small game studio in Oklahoma that'd gotten some acclaim for their quake mod pack. They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP as a quake licensee. They made a ahem mildly successful game named Medal of Honor. Some time down the road, the owner of the studio didn't want to share the wealth. As a result the top programmers, design…

>> That studio owner literally made a billion dollar mistake by not simply being fair early on to the team. Never, ever, treat a team that has achieved rare success as replaceable cogs. If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want.

What prevented them from offering bad deals that are common today? Some examples I've seen:

- give lots of equity, but vesting over long timelines

- give no refreshers, if people leave, they lost lots of unvested

- stay private for a long time...equity is almost unsellable and theoretical only

- give lots of equity, but lag on salary and save big

- give lots of equity, but leave people with huge unfunded tax liabilities if they want to leave company

- give "lots" of equity which is worthless if people actually saw the cap table

I dont feel any of the above are good practices, but they are common practices for equity theatre

Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?

#388

Post by bluescrn »

xwdv wrote: post #74
denkmoon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically however modern day Activision has the exact same attitude of Atari that caused their founding.

It’s justified though. Games are basically a solved problem these days, and the developers of today are most of the time just building on abstractions and best practices that didn’t exist during Atari’s time. Once a particular domain of software becomes sufficiently mature, there is no real opportunity for heroic programmers to emerge who become too valuable to replace. Eventually more people emerge who are just as g…

'Solved'? - Take a look at some of the Lumen/Nanite tech in Unreal Engine 5. And that's just a small chunk of what's happening on the rendering side of things. Game tech continues to evolve at a fair pace.

Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?

#389

Post by jdbiggs »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #239
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm talking about 2015. The first two Playstation only MoH games were not exactly failures, but they were little more than Goldeneye clones with WW2 themes. The first PC game is really the start of what we think of as the Medal of Honor franchise proper. The team that bailed founded Infinity Ward, which was the origin of Call of Duty, or at least the first like 8 games in the franchise. So yes, my story does in…

They asked very politely for you to clarify some details after they tried themselves but were unable to verify it by looking it up. Your hostility is unwarranted and rude. People are not psychic, it was quite reasonable for them to ask.

The response could have been:

Wow cool! Can you tell us more about the story? Edit: Spelling

Instead it's a wikipedia dump.

Re: Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?

#390

Post by kritiko »

pmontra wrote: post #331
rkangel wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's hostility on both sides here. "Could you clarify a few things?" is one thing, but "I don't think the story adds up" is a direct accusation of lying.

The tragedy of the written word between people that don't know each other. One could say "Could you clarify a few things?" in anger or "I don't think the story adds up" smiling and with a friendly tone. In writing the intention of the writer is in the mind of the reader.

>One could say ... "I don't think the story adds up" smiling and with a friendly tone. While you can call bullshit in a friendly way, it's almost certainly better to assume that you are wrong if you think the other party is equally or more credible than you.
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