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On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

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Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#251

Post by woevdbz »

Aeolun wrote: post #245
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…

> unionizing creates a steep competitive downside on the capital market that is not offset by enough employee retention benefit to be worth it Citation needed. Unionizing by itself does absolutely nothing, and if I, as the employer, genuinely want the best for my employees there will be little friction even with a union.

A "competitive advantage in the capital market" means something that VCs require from the companies they invest in, like "strong founder team" and "established product market fit". I don't see a lot of VCs demanding or preferring unionization among the companies that they invest in. Do you know of many VCs that have pro-union stances? Even if there are some, I think it's fair to say they're not the majority, hence it's likely a unionized business will not have as good of a capital-raising opportunity as a non-unionized business.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#252

Post by jenny91 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #211
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you, that was the concept I was referring to in another comment but didn't know the name of!

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#253

Post by woevdbz »

jacobolus wrote: post #97
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…

> Long term, it simply helps another competitor to come up without a union Alternately, long term it helps attract and retain excellent staff who care about the business and feel like they have a stake, and helps the business make better decisions because the decisionmaking process takes more information into account.

If this were the case, I would expect many more successful companies to have discovered this secret competitive advantage. It's not like employee-owned or union businesses are new. They've been around forever at the timescale of the Internet, and it's not like they haven't tried investing. I used to work for one that tried to diversify into tech and I can tell you what I saw: during growth phases, union pay wasn't competitive enough to retain top talent (due to a more egalitarian pay structure than the industry), and pretty quickly the strategic long term prospects of the company became pretty bleak compared with where the industry was going. So everybody who stayed aboard the egalitarian pay ship basically sunk with the ship.

Again I agree exceptions exist, but if it was some magic secret sauce, it'd probably be obvious by now...

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#254

Post by worstestes »

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…

Are you familiar with MapLibre? It’s a great project. It’s an open-source fork of Mapbox GL. I’ve only used the JS variant myself but there’s definitely a native one as well.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#256

Post by whimsicalism »

astrange wrote: post #126
whimsicalism wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Europe doesn’t have VCs and the culture doesn’t support failure like Silicon Valley, but that’s for different reasons. No, it is the same effect I am describing but inter-national as opposed to inter-firm. Capital allocation is transnational.

There isn’t an issue with starting companies in Europe as much though - Skype, Nokia, Booking are examples. The issue is they don’t stay European owned. US companies buy them out because they run out of ability to grow. FAANGs have European offices with work councils and all and aren’t considered unproductive, but they’re not the corporate headquarters because they didn’t start there. Certainly some European countrie…

None of this is contradictory to what I am saying. The fact that companies have been started in Europe does not contradict the fact that it is harder to raise in Europe.

FAANG companies having EU offices with work councils is completely irrelevant to what I am saying.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#257

Post by Apocryphon »

erlich wrote: post #246
Apocryphon wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Dictat…

Employees can become managers. This class divide is so much less relevant today than it was due to startup culture. Funding is not that hard to come by.

If the divide is not great, there's no reason why collective representation of employees would "distort market forces." If c-suite can represent themselves, no reason why engineering guilds shouldn't have the power to determine the outcome of their companies. Especially if the class divide is not as great, as you say, then the employees would have similar incentives to that of management.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#258

Post by Apocryphon »

simondotau wrote: post #233
Apocryphon wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Dictat…

If you want to look at it that way, then it's already being put to the test. Successful companies succeed, unsuccessful companies do not.

But as there are not many tech companies with unions, co-ops, or other structures with more employee power, that test does not exist and the current success and failure of companies is immaterial to this debate. The experiment has not been started in full, other than a few isolated causes such as Kickstarter (which was only inaugurated recently).

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#259

Post by Apocryphon »

erlich wrote: post #244
mch82 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

> Long term success Employees concept of this is not aligned with investors. Investors need a return on investment. It’s not enough for them to have a moderately profitable company with happy employees. They need a big exit event that fits their investment characteristics. And this is fair because then accepting VC money gives them an advantage over their competitors who might have bootstrapped. We shouldn’t feel sor…

> It’s better to have less monopolies and it would be better if one high salary was split in two due with someone from a smaller competing company.

But the VCs whose needs you are arguing for are the ones who are seeking those monopolies, at least in tech. With the advent of blitzscaling as a preferred strategy, we are seeing VCs who are seeking to create monopolies and own markets from the start. So why do you feel sorry for those investors? They burn plenty of money, and if they lose money on one company, they have plenty more in their portfolios.

And if unions are truly as detrimental to the system as you claim, then perhaps it is good if they arise in VC-hyperfunded startups, because then they will thwart these nascent monopolies, and allow bootstrapped companies more of a fighting chance.

Your narrative contradicts itself.

> We should allow entrepreneurs to create new companies to challenge them which is better for society.

The existence of unions would not poise a challenge to entrepreneurship.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#260

Post by jjmorrison »

Apocryphon wrote: post #145
jjmorrison wrote: post #106

Thinking that organizing a union to change the direction of the company is an exciting experiment is really irresponsible. All the paycheck everyone at the company is getting needs to come from somewhere. You do not have the right to bet everyone's paycheck on an exciting experiment.

What happened to disruption, innovation, experimentation in this industry? What happened to move fast and break things?

Then start a company and choose to make that experiment. Don't shove it onto someone else's.
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