Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

trashmoon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 271 posts

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#221

Post by mch82 »

brailsafe wrote: post #77
mikl wrote: post #17

> Over the next few years, Mapbox tried to find success in a variety of industries: journalism, social media, travel, ect. We never hit numbers that were big enough for our investors. In the process, we abandoned our focus on Open Source and Open data. 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 lifelon…

Employees should never feel like the company is theirs. Unless you have a real seat at the table, you should assume you have no influence over the business. That's what being an employee is (with no actual shares). You give up the risk by being an employee, and your only negotiating power is leaving.

> You give up the risk by being an employee

This is not true. Employees carry salary risk. For most people, unplanned loss of salary is catastrophic in the short-term.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#222

Post by worik »

"Fight for motives beyond profit."

Sigh. Profit is good. Profit is necessary. Profit is not a great motivator IMO. It motivates, but alone it motivates the wrong things the wrong way.

Money is my only motive available to me at the moment, and I am sad about that.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#223

Post by worik »

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…

> setting up a union is a hostile action

No it is not.

All stake holders matter. Some stake holders have power, some do not. Unions (when they work) balance that.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#224

Post by mch82 »

erlich wrote: post #169
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.

And a committee of employees has a better strategy for profitability? I don’t see it. The employees have dramatically less incentive than the owners and management to earn the owners an adequate return on their investment.

> The employees have dramatically less incentive than the owners and management to earn the owners an adequate return on their investment.

What has led you to this conclusion?

I’ve observed the opposite to be true: employees have more incentive than investors to seek the long-term success of a company. Building a career within a company and industry requires an investment of time and effort. Career changes are slow and become increasingly difficult. In contrast, investors can invest in anything so investments are more liquid than careers. In the case of a company failure, well managed investment portfolios are exposed to significantly less risk than the typical salaried career.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#225

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

hutch120 wrote: post #103

Like many others no doubt, I invested heavily into the mapbox-gl-js library (pre 2.0). I was able to build amazing value on top of that library including a routing voice navigation app for an aged care facility that is used to this day 24/7/365. It was a very sad day when they changed their licencing model to lock in vendors and I had to walk away from that investment of my time and effort. Luckily I had also worked…

Out of interest, is there a reason you can’t switch to Maplibre, the open source fork?

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#227

Post by numlock86 »

xyzzy4747 wrote: post #3

In my opinion you’re hired somewhere to work there and be productive, not to unionize. Workers who join companies and then try to subvert the entire system are a cancer to the org.

> In my opinion you’re hired somewhere to work there and be productive, not to unionize. Workers who join companies and then try to subvert the entire system are a cancer to the org.

We are doing the "Tell me you haven't read the article without telling me you haven't read the article." kind of posts on HN now?

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#228

Post by severak_cz »

eldavido wrote: post #110
woevdbz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, that works until you need more funding (unless you can raise from employees, but that also has consequences and limits). I'm guessing that Mapbox is angling for an acquisition or more funding at some point.

The other thing it does (giving employees more power) is make it harder for companies to change course. Most people hate change and will fight it as hard as they can, seeing all layoffs as "bad" and "evil". Germany's auto industry is a great example of a highly unionized industry. Pay is good. But also, it's very hard for Germany to enact anti-oil and gas policies (carbon reduction / pro-environment) because it hurts…

Germany had/has promising range of electromobiles - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#229

Post by zx8080 »

siraben wrote: post #109
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.…

> Japan, everyone’s favorite high public transit country with a lot of demand for maps, has a higher car ownership % than the US. They just discourage using them for personal trips and commutes via small roads, toll highways, expensive parking etc. Do you have a reference for this? From a precursory search it seems the US has a much higher car ownership rate.

According to [0], the US has higher (812 per 1k population) than Japan (590).

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle...

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#230

Post by dougSF70 »

When it is hard for worker-bees to transition to become manager-bees then unions are important and necessary. In any other business where worker-bees can become manager-bees then they should take that opportunity if they want to create change. Unions in tech businesses smack of entitlement, if you want to change the working conditions at [insert tech corp name here] then join management otherwise leave. Small companies change as they evolve. Noble ambitions are set aside in favor of profit (rightly so). With that, early employees may well feel the firm they joined is not the same firm they are working at. In which case they should leave because the boat has already sailed and there are probably a 1000 more compatible candidates willing to work at the company. I hear non-profits pay incredibly well and do amazing work.
Post reply on HN