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Employee Equity

blog.samaltman.com

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311–320 of 342 posts

Re: Employee Equity

#311

Post by dang »

mikeg8 wrote: post #301
michaelochurch wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know what the fuck you are talking about. If you have actually lived in the society that actually exists , rather than the one entirely in your own head that you wish to believe in, you'll recognize that there is a positive correlation between social position and being unethical. (1) Power corrupts, (2) power attracts bad people, (3) bad people are more willing to make moral compromises to get power, (4) go…

Damn dude, I think you forgot to take your Midol today.

Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News, regardless of how wrong you think someone is.

Mixing in a gender slur makes it worse.

This is the kind of thing we ban people for, especially when they don't have a history as a positive contributor on the site.

Re: Employee Equity

#312

Post by michaelt »

michaelochurch wrote: post #148
redmaverick wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

overperformance is far more dangerous (in large companies) than underperformance. Why? Can you explain.

Most underperformers don't really cause any problems. They work slowly and can't be assigned anything important, but over time the organization can adapt to them. Consequently, nothing really happens to them until there's a general belt-tightening. Usually, because people don't like being dicks and most underperformers aren't disliked, they're rolled into a general layoff and get a severance. Overperformers, on the o…

  If you're an overperformer, then unless you have someone 
  powerful who goes out of his way to protect you, you're 
  going to be fired in 3 months.
Let's say I am a junior manager at a big corporation, and I notice some of my subordinates are doing a great job.

I was thinking I would put them to work writing good software, delivering business value and generally making my team look good. In the fullness of time, and if they're interested, I would support them for promotion. While I would lose them as programmers, blocking their promotion would not be productive (assuming they're smart enough to notice, which you'd hope high performers would be), and as managers they would add to my political allies in other teams.

How would I benefit from firing them instead?

Re: Employee Equity

#313

Post by S4M »

hga wrote: post #300
pyrrhotech wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is $120k/year to live in a top 5 most expensive city in the world to work harder than 95% of the people on the planet on a boring CRUD app winning the lottery in any stretch of the imagination? That sounds terrible.

" Employees, many of them young and without significant real-world experience.... " Getting that first job on your resume can be quite a trick. Just before he emphasizes, with italics, that this is only "compelling in some cases". Because of the circumstances in which I got dumped into the job market, I started out with a sysadmin job with some programming, which I turned into more programming, but it was not a great…

I'm curious what was your job that required (or at list benefited from) an experience with Lisp Machine.

Re: Employee Equity

#314

Post by hga »

S4M wrote: post #313
hga wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Employees, many of them young and without significant real-world experience.... " Getting that first job on your resume can be quite a trick. Just before he emphasizes, with italics, that this is only "compelling in some cases". Because of the circumstances in which I got dumped into the job market, I started out with a sysadmin job with some programming, which I turned into more programming, but it was not a great…

I'm curious what was your job that required (or at list benefited from) an experience with Lisp Machine.

Working for Lisp Machines Inc. (LMI), the other MIT Lisp Machine spinoff, in the early '80s.

They were working with Western Digital, which like everyone else at the time was designing a 68000 based workstation, and conveniently enough, it was based on MIT's Nubus NuMachine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuMachine

So they were doing all the normal infrastructure for a high end workstation, and LMI was designing a 4 board Lisp Machine CPU with a Nubus interface that would work in one of their machines, with or without the 68000 processor board running UNIX(TM).

People with a serious UNIX(TM) background were actually harder to find in the community at that time....

Re: Employee Equity

#315

Post by S4M »

hga wrote: post #314
S4M wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what was your job that required (or at list benefited from) an experience with Lisp Machine.

Working for Lisp Machines Inc. (LMI), the other MIT Lisp Machine spinoff, in the early '80s. They were working with Western Digital, which like everyone else at the time was designing a 68000 based workstation, and conveniently enough, it was based on MIT's Nubus NuMachine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuMachine So they were doing all the normal infrastructure for a high end workstation, and LMI was designing a 4 bo…

In the early '80s... Oh, I didn't realize it was so long ago. I was hoping that your experience with Lisp Machines would enable you to enter in some lucrative but secretive niche sector, that would still be using something similar to Lisp machines now. I know a company has built one internally, but I don't have its name in mind.

Oh well, lucky you for having been exposed to Lisp machines.

Re: Employee Equity

#316

Post by dang »

603techguy wrote: post #241
michaelochurch wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, if scumbags control the company, scumbags control the company. Fortunately, most people aren't scumbags. Most people aren't, perhaps. Most people who have the connections to be VC-funded startup founders are scumbags.

Read: I am not one of them or have the social skills/drive to be one of them therefore they are scumbags.

This kind of personal attack is not allowed on HN, regardless of how wrong you think someone is. Please don't post any more comments like this.

Re: Employee Equity

#317

Post by pyrrhotech »

mgkimsal wrote: post #307
pyrrhotech wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is $120k/year to live in a top 5 most expensive city in the world to work harder than 95% of the people on the planet on a boring CRUD app winning the lottery in any stretch of the imagination? That sounds terrible.

"to work harder than 95% of the people on the planet" What?

assuming startup 80+ hours/week.

Re: Employee Equity

#318

Post by trevelyan »

lukego wrote: post #275
apinstein wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We came to this conclusion as well; we decided to do bonuses based on Y/Y revenue growth rather than equity. The bonuses are not capped. This allows us to: 1) Justly reward our employees to the upside (with cash, delivered semi-anually) if things go according to plan 2) Automatically controls costs if we don't perform as a team 3) Achieve upside fairness across early vs late employees since we can adjust the bonus %…

Cool :-). I worked at a very successful company that used a similar model: flat 50% of profits paid to employees as bonus. This worked fantastically well in the short term. Now, 10 years later, the company is still very successful but the upside has all shifted to the owners due to departures, renegotiations, and new hires not getting the same terms. So at 3 years it looked very pro-employee but at 10 years it looks…

The owners stuck around. Why didn't the employees? Serious question... were people fired for having too remunerative packages? Or did people just move on mostly?

Re: Employee Equity

#319

Post by lukego »

trevelyan wrote: post #318
lukego wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool :-). I worked at a very successful company that used a similar model: flat 50% of profits paid to employees as bonus. This worked fantastically well in the short term. Now, 10 years later, the company is still very successful but the upside has all shifted to the owners due to departures, renegotiations, and new hires not getting the same terms. So at 3 years it looked very pro-employee but at 10 years it looks…

The owners stuck around. Why didn't the employees? Serious question... were people fired for having too remunerative packages? Or did people just move on mostly?

Many people just moved on over time for non-monetary reasons.

Re: Employee Equity

#320

Post by 7Figures2Commas »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #317
mgkimsal wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"to work harder than 95% of the people on the planet" What?

assuming startup 80+ hours/week.

80+ hours per week? Are you joking? Most startups aren't 9 to 5, but please name a single startup where you believe employees regularly put in 80 hour-plus weeks.

Even in professions like law and investment banking, where employees do have to work grueling hours on a regular basis, the "80 hour work week" is largely a myth. I think medical residents are one of the few groups that really puts in these types of hours consistently.

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