321–330 of 434 posts
It's easy for laid off tech workers to start their own companies. Lots of my friends and colleagues have over the years. The fun thing about starting your own company, is you find out how much you're really worth!
in the majority of cases the number is negative. but seriously, most people do start-ups for passion, not money, and they get what they want out of it. not everyone sees making money as the be all and end all of life. the people who do make a lot more of it. good for them. better to not worry about other people's choices and make sure you are happy with yours.
It is true that some I know who quit a high paying job to do a startup had a very rude reality check on how good they actually were. I know one who would always be ushered in to see the CEO to make the sale. On his own, he couldn't even get an audience with an underling. He eventually begged to get his old job back.
> most people do start-ups for passion
A dry cleaners is not a passion project.
It's easy for laid off tech workers to start their own companies. Lots of my friends and colleagues have over the years. The fun thing about starting your own company, is you find out how much you're really worth!
two words for you: health insurance
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Would you trust unions over markets to determine which programmers are skilled? How would they determine that?
Traditional guilds fostered apprenticeship, mentorship and relationships between practitioners that transcend firms/projects. Given that “the market” seems to have settled on LC as the only measure of skill I don’t think it’s far fetched to imagine that a guild system could be better.
That’s not true and I suspect you know it.
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> You have seen how little it takes these companies to layoff employees. This is a reasonable ask. It's easily addressable - build a notice period into the offers (for example, if you've been with the company more than a year, you get at least 4 weeks notice). The problem with any sort of exclusive guild is that it becomes more difficult to break into, which is bad for a growing industry.
Who will enforce that? The policies are made by companies themselves and they can change them whenever/however they want with no employee welfare in mind. We as individual employees don't have any power influencing or enforcing those policies. The idea behind organized workforce is to balance the power dynamic between employer and employees. It's harder for employer to ignore the demands of an organized workforce tha…
One thing I've noticed over my career is that over the past 20 years the cultural gap between typical SV "tech employee" and typical SV "tech leader/founder" has widened dramatically . In my opinion there are a few reasons for this. As the industry has matured, it has moved out of the earlier phase where to a certain extent everyone was a bit of a pioneer. As the industry expanded, it mainstreamed especially amongst…
Maybe something to do with the change in the type of people wanting to work in tech - it used to be geeks and now it is a high status job and attracts status/money seekers. Great discussion on “The cult of conformity in Silicon Valley” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia7IKW0yuG0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668098
2000’s
- “the Dark Ages you and I went to school in the early and mid 2000s”
- “it's probably hard for us to explain to a current college kid how uncool Tech was”
- “I was a Yale 05 graduate and in my graduating year Yale graduated 10 CS majors in a class of 1200 kids”
- “status seeking thing that a gunner should want to go after:” Finance, Consulting, Law, or Medicine (not startups, not tech)
2020’s
- “now things have changed you know fast forward um a little less than 20 years and Tech is now attracting conformists”
- “college kids today obsess with getting jobs at Facebook and Google. They study how they interview just as much as people study how to interview how to get into Goldman Sachs”
- “they want the status they want the money that used to be associated with these Finance or professional jobs: bam, they're all now associated with big Tech”
- “at first you see the explosion of CS majors in school and I think you would think to yourself oh man that means that there are a lot more people who are interested in building but that's not actually the case like it's it's it's uh it's deceiving the numbers are deceiving. I remember going to a class and talking to a bunch of kids who are kind of interested in in Tech and startups and so forth and I remember saying to them ‘hey like how many of y'all are studying CS and and write code’ and 90 of the people raise their hands and then I remember asking oh that's amazing like ‘what percentage of you would want to be writing code as part of your job in a startup or a company’ and like 90 of those hands went down”Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know this is beside the point you're making, but that guy at the top does not have greater risk. The right measure of risk isn't money, it's freedom. Work as CEO of Google or Roche for a month and you don't have to work any more. You don't risk shit, you can only win or win bigger. This is what I don't understand. There are plenty of people who can run a business, so why is it that we pay so much for them? There's…
One creative theory I heard is that a rational benefit of seemingly-irrational executive pay is to incentivize harder work among the people who desire to be executives. Not sure if it makes sense or not, but it's an interesting possibility.
Sometimes I can't even begin to comprehend the POVs I read on the internet. The FAANGs and adjacent companies treat their workers better than pretty much any other company in the world. The idea that workers there are somehow this abused underclass is ridiculous.
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We generally talk about risk and probability when discussing this. You get 50% when it's just an idea with a 99.9% chance of failure, and below 0.1% when it's a rocket ship. So we have to apply that to your question too, and apply "market for lemons" thinking. So while it's possible that they can save a zillion dollars by making amazing decisions nobody else would have made, the odds of them doing so are empirically…
That's not the expected value thinking anyone would go through when deciding who to hire as a CEO. I mean, firstly, it's ignoring the large downside of hiring the wrong CEO. There's steps of difference between hiring someone good (Steve Jobs is worth a hundred million dollars a year if you can get him to run Apple, because he will improve Apple's market cap by more than a hundred million dollars), hiring someone aver…
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Amazon's moat is massive vertical integration across multiple verticals, which they also leverage cross-vertical for e.g. promoting new services (say, their streaming service) and to gain business intelligence on a scale no startup can dream of (see: Amazon Basics). You might— might —out-compete them in some niche they're overlooking, just picking up their crumbs, but you'd need stupid-high amounts of capital to take…
So you seem to agree that Jeff Bezos is doing some things right, since it's easy to get vertical integration wrong - looks at Japanese or South Korean conglomerates for plenty of evidence. Doesn't that handily disprove the "you didn't build that" POV?
Other businesses get started and are very successful, somewhat often. Are all those successful business people just not going after Bezos because he's so much better at business than them that they cannot hope to succeed, or is it because the market is transformed by the existence of Amazon such that trying to take Amazon on is a bad use of capital?