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Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

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Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#111

Post by incision »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #46
maxsilver wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree entirely. This is a perfect write up of the situation at hand. > but one sector that isn't being targeted is the (disintegrating) middle class. So, what (if anything) can we do to fix this? Is there anything a regular person can do or work on to help the (disintegrating) middle class?

I would suggest joining unions and encouraging others to join them. With all the nonsense coming out of Google, Microsoft and others regarding wage warfare against their own employees I'm shocked that developers haven't unionized.

>'With all the nonsense coming out of Google, Microsoft and others regarding wage warfare against their own employees I'm shocked that developers haven't unionized.'

I think it's a whole mess of things - outdated misconceptions about unions, overestimating their own abilities, being oblivious to the efforts of employers to commoditize the profession and/or play labor against itself.

I was a member of a union which included developers for a while and it wasn't close to a bad deal for anyone short of perhaps the top 0.5-1% and even that was arguable.

One of the brightest guys, who I know quite well, was endlessly dissatisfied with his not-too-shabby top-end union rate and left seeking more.

Today, not only is he paid notably less (though still comfortably over 100k) has endured layoffs and of course lost the 457, 401 + matching, 5 weeks annual vacation, fast accruing sick leave, 1.5x on-call rate and health plan. In the same period he'd have seen 2 guaranteed longevity increases from the union plus across the board bumps from a revised CBA.

Developers will keep thinking they're all 10xers who'll see their rates quartered by unions until a16z has its way and software development truly is a 'low-skill trade', 'decoupled from ability and experience' [1] and it's too late.

1: http://a16z.com/2014/07/30/the-happy-demise-of-the-10x-engin...

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#112

Post by aestetix »

brothe2000 wrote: post #15

I think the author of the article went looking for stats to support a title. Corporate America has been disrupted however I think this article was looking for financial failure versus adapting to the market pressures. The corporations below have faced massive disruption: Kodak, HP, GM, Ford, JC Penney, Sears, McDonalds, Radio Shack, Circuit City, Best Buy, Borders, Barnes&Noble, IBM, Microsoft, Xerox, and Target have…

Ok. Kodak wasn't really disrupted so much as its market base moved to digital cameras. I suppose you can claim that retail has been disrupted by online markets like Amazon, but (to take an example) there were a lot of reports that Borders went under because of crap management. Radio Shack is still around, and with open doors to anyone who needs a cell phone ;) IBM and Microsoft haven't really been disrupted...

It seems like you're pooling together a bunch of companies that are seeing misfortune for a variety of reasons and assuming they have all been "disrupted". Further, the context of the comment implies they were disrupted by startups, which I don't think is true at all.

I'm happy to admit I'm wrong if you can give more evidence, but this comment seems a bit misguided.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#113

Post by pyrrhotech »

autokad wrote: post #77
pyrrhotech wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, state schools are still pretty cheap. My sister's tuition with room and board is $10k per year. If you are someone smart enough to be an entrepreneur in your late 30s, you should have a corporate job paying 150k+ and can save all 4 years worth in a matter of months with a bit of determination. And health care, while expensive, isn't as big of a deal as most people make it out to be. Get a high deductible pla…

considering that 250k for a couple puts a person in the top 2% in the nation, its not as easy as you make it sound to pull off 'just getting a 150k salary job'.

it's a hell of a lot easier than becoming a successful entrepreneur

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#114

Post by sedachv »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #33
sadface wrote: post #24

I have another suggestion for the decline in startup rates: health care and college expenses. The historically "prime" years for entrepreneurship are in one's late 30's to early 50's, years when one typically has a family in need of healthcare, college tuition, and hopefully retirement at some point down the line. In the 70's and 80's someone could leave the security of their big company, get relatively affordable pr…

I dunno, state schools are still pretty cheap. My sister's tuition with room and board is $10k per year. If you are someone smart enough to be an entrepreneur in your late 30s, you should have a corporate job paying 150k+ and can save all 4 years worth in a matter of months with a bit of determination. And health care, while expensive, isn't as big of a deal as most people make it out to be. Get a high deductible pla…

> If you are someone smart enough to be an entrepreneur in your late 30s, you should have a corporate job paying 150k+ and can save all 4 years worth in a matter of months with a bit of determination.

It takes 10 months to save $40,000 if you're putting away $4,000 a month (which is half of take-home pay at $150k). If you are someone smart enough to be an entrepreneur in your late 30s with a corporate job paying 150k+, your children are probably smart enough to want to go to an expensive college.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#115

Post by layman »

brothe2000 wrote: post #15

I think the author of the article went looking for stats to support a title. Corporate America has been disrupted however I think this article was looking for financial failure versus adapting to the market pressures. The corporations below have faced massive disruption: Kodak, HP, GM, Ford, JC Penney, Sears, McDonalds, Radio Shack, Circuit City, Best Buy, Borders, Barnes&Noble, IBM, Microsoft, Xerox, and Target have…

Kind of agree. The author arbitrarily took 1 year as "startup" and any business longer than 1 year as "establishment". It was probably possible to start and sustain a small business in 1 year earlier, perhaps. But now the world is integrated, and the probability of survival by serving people of your neighborhood or city, is much less. IOW, a business has to grow big and hence it takes longer than 1 year to succeed. So by author's definition, Blockbuster being disrupted by Netflix doesn't count any more because it's establishment displacing establishment.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#116

Post by sedachv »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #113
autokad wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

considering that 250k for a couple puts a person in the top 2% in the nation, its not as easy as you make it sound to pull off 'just getting a 150k salary job'.

it's a hell of a lot easier than becoming a successful entrepreneur

Your comments make one want to ask: if it's so easy, why didn't your parents save up the money to send your sister to a better school?

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#117

Post by ridgeguy »

mcdougle wrote: post #83
jusben1369 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 100% with you. When I left my job to do my startup to maintain my health plan at current levels was $1400 per month. That's $18,000 or so a year pre tax dollars. Basically the first $25,000 a year you pay yourself is going to just having healthcare! Assuming you want a decent plan. When we were 4 people all making just enough bootstrapping before we raised 35% of our costs went to healthcare. It was never raised…

I grew up with parents who worked in healthcare (my dad, specifically, has a ton of connections within the health and life insurance industry), I've sold health insurance, I now have a full-time job in a hospital system, and I'm working on launching a health insurance-related product (to augment Obamacare benefits for small businesses) and I can tell you, they didn't touch on many of the most important issues in the…

The politicians can't get rid of the PPOs, even if they wanted to. Politicians have to get (re)elected, which takes increasing amounts of cash. No cash, no office. If you're out of office, you're out of power.

The PPOs have very large revenues and therefore wield great power in determining the outcome of any move to reduce their influence.

This is regulatory capture by economic interests that don't provide value in the health care service chain. It's making health care more expensive for everyone.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#118

Post by atomi »

mcdougle wrote: post #83
jusben1369 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 100% with you. When I left my job to do my startup to maintain my health plan at current levels was $1400 per month. That's $18,000 or so a year pre tax dollars. Basically the first $25,000 a year you pay yourself is going to just having healthcare! Assuming you want a decent plan. When we were 4 people all making just enough bootstrapping before we raised 35% of our costs went to healthcare. It was never raised…

I grew up with parents who worked in healthcare (my dad, specifically, has a ton of connections within the health and life insurance industry), I've sold health insurance, I now have a full-time job in a hospital system, and I'm working on launching a health insurance-related product (to augment Obamacare benefits for small businesses) and I can tell you, they didn't touch on many of the most important issues in the…

PPOs are the only way right now to get all health care providers to compete for patients.

disclosure: I'm for a single payer system that allows everyone to choose their preferred provider.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#119

Post by AnthonyMouse »

rayiner wrote: post #3

I think there is a bit of cognitive dissonance in the tech community about "disruption" versus "big companies." Technology, in general, makes it easier to scale companies to large sizes, and "disruption" often involves using technology to enter an existing industry that is dominated by small, inefficient companies. A great example is Uber. Uber is making the taxi market a lot more efficient, but it's also well on the…

> Technology enables consolidation.

I don't think that's quite right. Technology enables scale. That doesn't inherently mean consolidation.

For example, you can imagine Uber as a decentralized or federated P2P free software app. It's essentially a market for rides. There is no inherent reason it has to work like Facebook rather than TCP/IP or DNS. Someone like FSF or Mozilla could build the technology and then the the only people making money would be all the small timers offering rides and getting good deals on rides.

The obvious question is why that hasn't happened. And it's because there are other forces pushing consolidation. Markets don't inherently need middlemen but you end up with them when some serious problem(s) exist which require a consolidated entity to solve them. Somebody has to fight the taxi commissions. Somebody has to process the payments.

It's the same reason Paypal exists. The technology for processing payments is hardly rocket science. Paypal shouldn't be a company, it should be a standard protocol supported by all financial institutions. You authenticate to your bank or credit provider, you provide an amount and a routing number and that much money is transferred from your account to the target account.

A protocol something like that must already exist as it must be what Paypal uses to communicate with the banks. The problem is it isn't directly available to the actual account holders. So I can't write a free app or library that will allow you to connect directly to your bank and request bank transfers regardless of which bank you use.

So when Joe Blow wants to pay for a ride or some knickknack on eBay, he can't just tell his bank to send the money, he first has to sign up for Uber or PayPal and tell them to tell the bank. Solely because they've filled out all the appropriate forms with the Department of Redundancy Department in order to gain access to your money that you don't have yourself. That's where the consolidation comes from.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#120

Post by dpritchett »

nostrademons wrote: post #101
dpritchett wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really sounds like status quo bias to me. No one's going to tell you that face to face communication isn't an incredibly efficient medium, but that doesn't mean teams and companies built around remote work can't (and don't already) thrive. I would even hazard that your experience is possibly colored by the teams you've worked on and the companies you've worked for.

If there's a status-quo bias, it runs the other way. In college, I led a website rewrite with team members in Massachusetts, Oklahoma, France, and Australia, with the site owner in Florida. For my first startup, my cofounder and I usually worked remotely, though we were within driving distance so we could easily have meetings. I've worked on both distributed and colocated projects at Google. My personal preference, a…

I won't deny that colocation wins in a ceteris paribus scenario - almost by definition. Remote staffing allows you to tip the scales in many situations though: companies outside of the top 3-5 big tech firms suddenly have access to great people they'd never get otherwise. How many colocated 95th percentile developers are equivalent to one remote Linus Torvalds?
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