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Billionaire Revealed: The Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Billionaire Revealed: The Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of

#11

Post by mjn »

systemizer wrote: post #8

Self-maintained groups and incentives based on performance. It would be interesting to adopt this in the tech area: the amount and quality of your unit tests means you get paid more. You can also do code analysis: look at branching factors; code duplication; runtime performance; etc This might be hard to implement in a company setting; but it may be easier to apply with contracting work.

IBM was big into quantitative code metrics in the '60s through '80s, but the practice ended up developing a bad reputation, since the metrics inevitably created perverse incentives to game the metrics themselves, and sometimes got in the way of doing the right thing if it didn't fit the rigid model's idea of the right thing.

This is basically a version of Campbell's law, from a 1976 paper by Donald T. Campbell: "The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Lines of code per unit time (LOC) is probably the most notorious, but there have been dozens of attempted improvements. Function point metrics were a late-'70s approach (also out of IBM) that tried to fix some of LOC's shortcomings as productivity metric, but turned out to be highly correlated to LOC and also problematic. There are dozens of books from the past 50 years with titles like "Applied Software Measurement" and "Measuring the Software Process", but they've become associated with bureaucratic bigcorp software engineering.

Re: Billionaire Revealed: The Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of

#12

Post by qwerta »

bpodgursky wrote: post #5
rocky1138 wrote: post #3

I thought once companies got to a certain size they were forced to go public? Or is that in Canada only?

In the US once a certain number of people hold stock you have additional financial disclosure laws. But if it's owned by a single owner / family, you're never forced to go public regardless of revenue. That wouldn't make any sense, since you'd basically be forcing the owners to sell their shares whether they wanted to or not.

I think in California you have to go public over certain number of employees. Facebook had problems with that.

Re: Billionaire Revealed: The Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of

#13

Post by atlbeer »

qwerta wrote: post #12
bpodgursky wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US once a certain number of people hold stock you have additional financial disclosure laws. But if it's owned by a single owner / family, you're never forced to go public regardless of revenue. That wouldn't make any sense, since you'd basically be forcing the owners to sell their shares whether they wanted to or not.

I think in California you have to go public over certain number of employees. Facebook had problems with that.

No. Same issue. They had over the legally allowed number of shareholders

Re: Billionaire Revealed: The Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of

#14

Post by CyrusL »

qwerta wrote: post #12
bpodgursky wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US once a certain number of people hold stock you have additional financial disclosure laws. But if it's owned by a single owner / family, you're never forced to go public regardless of revenue. That wouldn't make any sense, since you'd basically be forcing the owners to sell their shares whether they wanted to or not.

I think in California you have to go public over certain number of employees. Facebook had problems with that.

That was also based on the number of shareholders, not the number of employees. Facebook began issuing RSUs, which don't count towards the limit, to employees when they started approaching the 500 shareholder limit, but I believe trading on SecondMarket pushed them over 500.

Also I think Facebook was originally a partnership and then converted into a DE c-corp. I don't think they were ever a CA company.

Re: Billionaire Revealed: The Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of

#15

Post by _delirium »

bpodgursky wrote: post #5
rocky1138 wrote: post #3

I thought once companies got to a certain size they were forced to go public? Or is that in Canada only?

In the US once a certain number of people hold stock you have additional financial disclosure laws. But if it's owned by a single owner / family, you're never forced to go public regardless of revenue. That wouldn't make any sense, since you'd basically be forcing the owners to sell their shares whether they wanted to or not.

I took the comment as meaning "go public", somewhat confusingly, in a colloquial sense of "not be stealth" or "go public with their numbers" rather than "becoming a publicly owned, stock-market-traded company". The latter is indeed not the case in Canada; you can have a large privately owned company. But above a certain threshold you have to at last disclose annual revenue figures.

Re: Billionaire Revealed: The Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of

#16

Post by rocky1138 »

_delirium wrote: post #15
bpodgursky wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US once a certain number of people hold stock you have additional financial disclosure laws. But if it's owned by a single owner / family, you're never forced to go public regardless of revenue. That wouldn't make any sense, since you'd basically be forcing the owners to sell their shares whether they wanted to or not.

I took the comment as meaning "go public", somewhat confusingly, in a colloquial sense of "not be stealth" or "go public with their numbers" rather than "becoming a publicly owned, stock-market-traded company". The latter is indeed not the case in Canada; you can have a large privately owned company. But above a certain threshold you have to at last disclose annual revenue figures.

Sorry, yes, I meant become publicly trade-able. I assume this is done to force companies over a certain size to open their books? Maybe I've misunderstood how it works in Ontario/Canada as well, considering the other comments mentioning the number of shareholders.

Re: Billionaire Revealed: The Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of

#17

Post by chiph »

danilocampos wrote: post #2

So why are we hearing about the company now? Is this how you sell a successful but previously-unknown company?

Sounds like what happened is the original reporter in Boston came across him, did some investigating, and found out how wealthy he is. Also sounds like he didn't really want the publicity, preferring to live a quiet life. If he ever intends to sell, his competitors certainly know about him, and I expect equity firms know about him as well.

Re: Billionaire Revealed: The Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of

#19

Post by systemizer »

tbrownaw wrote: post #10
systemizer wrote: post #8

Self-maintained groups and incentives based on performance. It would be interesting to adopt this in the tech area: the amount and quality of your unit tests means you get paid more. You can also do code analysis: look at branching factors; code duplication; runtime performance; etc This might be hard to implement in a company setting; but it may be easier to apply with contracting work.

How do you quantify whether someone is solving a problem the wrong way, just because that way will score better on the metrics?

I don't have a good answer for you, but let me shoot a question back at you: "How do you determine whether the code you're looking at is good or bad?" Surely, there's an algorithm you run in your head that looks at specific features of the code and analyses them. All I'm saying is that there may be a way to automate that algorithm and use it to drive incentives. Even if the algorithm is as simple as "make sure X and Y unit tests pass."

Re: Billionaire Revealed: The Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of

#20

Post by DougWebb »

systemizer wrote: post #19
tbrownaw wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you quantify whether someone is solving a problem the wrong way, just because that way will score better on the metrics?

I don't have a good answer for you, but let me shoot a question back at you: "How do you determine whether the code you're looking at is good or bad?" Surely, there's an algorithm you run in your head that looks at specific features of the code and analyses them. All I'm saying is that there may be a way to automate that algorithm and use it to drive incentives. Even if the algorithm is as simple as "make sure X and…

Assert.IsNull(null);

It's easy to make unit tests pass. To defeat this kind of gaming, you'd need extensive code review of the unit tests. But that circles around to your point: when you look at code there's something that tells you whether it's good or bad. That algorithm can't be based on passing tests, because tests are code too and also need review.

If you had a team of completely selfless developers, you could probably have code-reviews and peer-reviews drive incentives. But as soon as the team suspects it's a zero-sum game and they're competing for a limited prize, they're going to stab each other in the backs, and your best developer will be the prime target. That'll make your best developer leave, and the next-best becomes the target, until all you're left with are lousy developers who are only good at office politics.

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