On leaving Mapbox after 12 years • Hacker News Board

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#211

Post by Apocryphon » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 4:23 AM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #206

Apocryphon wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because the leadership is actively undermining the survival? From this case alone, it seems possible that the Mapbox leadership is chasing a hopeless strategy by focusing on the auto industry, which is dominated by other much larger companies.

A union can't fix that scenario. You need a coop with employee ownership to have any influence over the business.

If the U.S. had co-determination, as in Germany, where unions reps have board seats, but point is taken.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/06/opinion/warren-workers-bo...

Still, having a union would provide a stronger bargaining position than individuals voicing concerns during all-hands.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#212

Post by Apocryphon » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 4:24 AM UTC

simondotau wrote: post #201

Apocryphon wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps your supposition should be put to the test.

Without access to a parallel universe generator, I don't see how you could. All I'm asserting is that I think that you can't reliably say that management or workers/employees are consistently in a better position to understand the best path forward for a company. Either one can be overly focused on replicating past success; either one can be wrong about opportunities for growth.

It could be put to the test if more industries, such as tech, experimented with unions, or otherwise empowering employees to share in decision-making.

It is rather strange that in a field where there are all sorts of autonomous movements such as open source projects or hacker collectives, there is still the hierarchical belief that the managers knows best. Ah, well FOSS always do have their share of Benevolent Dictator for Life positions.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#213

Post by tinco » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 4:56 AM UTC

Odd story about MapBox, we used to be a customer, and their product was very solid so we were happy but we were using it in a 3d engine which was causing loads of map requests driving up the costs. We only had a couple users and the bills were already in the hundreds per month. So I contacted them to see if we could come to some sort of agreement. The person who replied had a familiar name, I didn't remember where I'd heard that name before so I googled it, and it turned out he was one of the 3 kids that sexually assaulted a drunk girl during a spring break. Even though their abhorrent behavior was caught on video and presented as evidence they got away with less than a slap on the wrist, and the girl suffered emotional trauma and dropped out of university.

Definitely a heavy thing to have show up on the first page of your Google results, and I cross referenced with his LinkedIn it was definitely him, so I would expect him to address it somewhere. But nothing, never a public apology or even a statement, nothing from Mapbox. That was so crazy to me, surely whoever interviewed him did a minimal background check, and they just thought it was ok? It felt really off, so I found a different technical solution and never talked to them again.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#214

Post by woevdbz » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 5:40 AM UTC

roguecoder wrote: post #89

woevdbz wrote: post #58

It sounds like OP wants to be a part of the kind of social change that fundamentally cannot exist independently of politics but trying to enact it without. A single company, especially one that is not generating monopoly/oligopoly profits and is still dependent on funding, is not really able to: unionizing creates a steep competitive downside on the capital market that is not offset by enough employee retention benef…

So your hypothesis is that VCs put their class interests ahead of making money to such an extent that it is impossible to exercise our legal rights without putting the companies we work for in their political crosshairs? You may be right. It still seems like the easiest solution is for all the startups to unionize so they don't have any choice: they can either invest in unionized startups or they can stop being VCs.

No the argument is not about VCs putting class interests above profits, it's about them putting their profit first, together with a perception that unions decrease the amount of profit that is distributed to capital owners as opposed to labor, and decrease the strategic maneuverability of the business by diluting control over operations between management and unions.

> It still seems like the easiest solution is for all the startups to unionize so they don't have any choice: they can either invest in unionized startups or they can stop being VCs.

Yes. Or fight for workers' rights in the even broader sense (not just startups or tech).

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#215

Post by elSidCampeador » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 5:50 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #108

> Then, as is the case with many mapping companies, Mapbox shifted focus to the auto industry. My fear of loss of control fully materialized at this point. I’m a lifelong bicycle commuter, and I think cars are unequivocally bad. They ruin cities, contribute to environmental decline (even electric cars!) and kill people. All these things are correct except for the ruin cities part - that’s a US city planning problem.…

what does a geospatial PBC do?

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#216

Post by thematrixturtle » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 5:57 AM UTC

aikinai wrote: post #210

thematrixturtle wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whatever reason (probably just inertia), JR has been highly resistant to adopt dynamic pricing, so Shinkansen tickets costs the same regardless of whether you travel at absolute peak or when the trains are rattlingly empty. This is starting to crumble at the edges a little bit, and I expect advance-purchase fares to plunge if they ever do make the leap.

If you reserve tickets online ahead of time, you can almost always get the 30% discount now. Maybe what's what you mean by crumbling at the edges.

Oh, neat, I recall a trial of that but didn't realize it was rolled out permanently. And apparently you can even book tickets online without jumping through insane hoops! Huzzah!

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#217

Post by kodah » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 5:57 AM UTC

sclv wrote: post #128

erlich wrote: post #115

This is such a crazy and enraging read. If you don’t like your job, go join another company. It’s not as if devs don’t have plenty of high paying choices out there. Especially for a startup that had struggled to find market fit, the last thing they need is a union. Companies are not democracies and setting up a union is a hostile action. It basically says: here are the things we want and if we don’t get them we all s…

Yes, companies are not democracies. That's why we need unions! That's the only way to exercise our collective power to negotiate with the employer on more equal terms. When we negotiate individually we also say "here are the things we want, and that is our condition of work." There is _always_ a conflict between what employees want, which involves wages and conditions, and what employers want, which is getting the mo…

I think the problem unions face in tech is that, for most developers, salary isn't an issue. Benefits probably aren't an issue either. What people in tech want to unionize to do is a bar far higher than the average union, they want to steer the direction of the company, they want to pick and choose what they work on, etc... all while struggling with the idea that tech is a very diverse landscape in terms of politics, and the language of people who create unions don't speak kindly to them all.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#218

Post by jillesvangurp » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 5:59 AM UTC

donohoe wrote: post #73

Is it fair to say that MapBox is moving into auto services? Or to put it another way, is it not a good idea for me to move to a different provider for basic mapping services?

That's where the money is. Otherwise, Mapbox provides a lot of relatively low value commodity services. You can get maps from them but there are lots of competitors for that. You can get libraries from them for rendering those maps. But they are now closed source and have been forked by others (maplibre seems popular) and also there is some competition: leaflet, overlay and proprietary things like Here, Google and Apple maps.

The big money is helping big corporations (including automotive) with advanced use cases around logistics, very detailed 3d maps, gis, etc. So, that's increasingly what they are doing at the cost of the business that made them big (shipping good quality openstreetmap based maps and OSS software). They are now very similar to Here, Tomtom, and a few others. The latter two used to be mostly about consumer navigation products for in cars but that is now a commodity business that got disrupted by Apple and Google just bundling it with their phones (actually Nokia started this by giving away Here maps 14 years ago). Mostly if I'm in a rental car with tom tom / here maps built in, I end up using my phone with Google Maps instead. Just easier for me. Both will get me from A to B. I don't pay for it directly. That's no longer a viable business model.

We are currently using maplibre with Maptiler.com as our maps provider. We may have to switch maps provider for some of our customers (our German customers are picky about where their data is hosted). Maplibre has been pretty solid for us. Last year when I had to pick a library, I briefly considered Mapbox and then noticed all the activity around the newly created maplibre fork (and the reasons it was created) and went there instead. All the commit activity happening there is no longer happening around mapbox. That's the value Mapbox lost by going closed source. So unnecessary and short sighted.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#219

Post by pm90 » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 6:11 AM UTC

erlich wrote: post #189

pm90 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If management sucks and cannot listen to their employees then it’s better that they don’t get more capital/talent and their competitors suck up all their talent. Except thats not how it works in practice at all. Companies can run for a long while by brutally exploiting employees if they have captured the market (look at Amazon). They can exploit immigration laws to squeeze the workers. Unions can help prevent that…

You touch on a common mistake with collective bargaining. It assumes the market and landscape stay static. That the entire industry will not go through huge waves of change and huge levels of innovation will be needed to survive. If companies suck they should die. We should not have too big to fail. Look at blockbuster vs netflix. Companies don’t have to fail completely but certain projects should be able to fail. We…

> It assumes the market and landscape stay static. That the entire industry will not go through huge waves of change and huge levels of innovation will be needed to survive.

Collective bargaining doesn’t assume that though?

You keep saying that “companies that suck should die”. This is just the worst kind of approach to solving any problem: do nothing, let it sort itself out, “trust the market”. Well, we’ve seen what the economy is like with strong labor and without it, and the people that are involved in the economy should get to choose the system that they prefer.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#220

Post by mourner » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 6:20 AM UTC

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #70

mourner wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With this much saltiness, it's not hard to guess the result of that interview :)

It’s possible to interview at a company and decide that it’s not for you, and frankly I wish I’d done that more often over the years. I used to be more inclined to ignore the little voice saying “aren’t these warning signs?”, accepted the offer anyway, and quickly realized the little voice had absolutely been right.

Oh, nothing wrong with going with your gut and paying attention to the warning signs. But, "I briefly looked at these people from afar and immediately concluded they all only pretend to work and never accomplish anything" is just ridiculously arrogant.