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On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

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Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#61

Post by roguecoder »

tiffanyh wrote: post #56
roguecoder wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unionizing isn't "drastic": it is the norm for most trades in the United States. Any individual union is basically just you & your coworkers crowd sourcing employment lawyers you wouldn't afford individually. Until Boeing got taken over by finance people, the Boeing engineering guild had spent decades being a book club. It is only when things go wrong that unionization significantly changes how we work.

> “crowd sourcing employment lawyers” How is that not drastic? You’re own words are saying unionizing is to bring in lawyers to be used against your employer. EDIT: to answer your question below since I can’t reply. No, it’s not drastic for a company to have lawyers. A company needs to ensure they are staying regulatory compliant, not breaking laws and de-risking company … that’s what the lawyers are doing.

The company has lawyers: is that drastic?

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#62

Post by afandian »

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…

It's surely not that bleak (at least, not everywhere). And it doesn't have to be remotely about 'politics'.

My old employer made the leap to employee-owned and they seem to be going from strength to strength. https://torchbox.com/careers/employee-owned-trust

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#63

Post by draw_down »

danpalmer wrote: post #5
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.

I agree that union organisation work is not _work_, it's not what people are paid to do, and it should therefore be done on personal time. However, employers are in a position of significant power over their employees, and unions represent a way to balance that power. I think this is a broadly positive thing that I think employees should be in favour of, and that I think the best employers would also be in favour of.

No post body was provided.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#66

Post by Nextgrid »

mulligan wrote: post #59
tschellenbach wrote: post #42

VC funding enables the high salaries in tech. You can definitely be bootstrapped and work 4 days a week, you'll just have a hard time earning your current salary.

VC funding enables the high salaries in startups and that is because those startups are competing for talent against high margin, highly profitable other companies which can afford to pay very well.

Those startups are competing with other startups and ultimately VC money.

There's significantly more tech talent out there than the business problems that can be solved profitably with said talent.

When the VC money runs out and the "growth & engagement" engineering playgrounds close up shop we're going to see a massive readjustment. We're in the beginning of it now.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#68

Post by thinkingemote »

There are some mapbox employees replying to comments here. I think some appear to be defensive of their employer, but if there are some who are in agreement with the article, I can't tell.

It's hard to know one way or the other. Might be nice for employees to identify themselves.

Personally I was intrigued with the formation of the union and knew that many of their employees were quite liberal:

The company evolved from something called Development Seed - basically a progressive humanitarian and development focused company. It is different from most SV companies. And based on open source and open data. Them stopping key open source projects and charging for use of just their mapping JS library (not data usage, any use of the code anywhere) was shocking.

I'd love to hear from an original principled humanitarian employee on what happened to the company and/or them. Maybe money is better. Maybe they left?

We don't hear much about the union at all. We assume from the usual SV unions that it was all about identity, inclusion and diversity but perhaps it was more about this conflict of their humanitarian roots and money.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#69

Post by woevdbz »

afandian wrote: post #62
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…

It's surely not that bleak (at least, not everywhere). And it doesn't have to be remotely about 'politics'. My old employer made the leap to employee-owned and they seem to be going from strength to strength. https://torchbox.com/careers/employee-owned-trust

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.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#70

Post by chipotle_coyote »

mourner wrote: post #31
iamleppert wrote: post #28

Blame your leadership for creating such a bloated company that the only thing to satiate investors was to sell out completely to auto companies. I interviewed at Mapbox at one time, a ridiculous 3-day interview at their SF office where lots of PM's and managers were buzzing around hosting meetings, giving the perception of getting stuff done when in fact it was even clear to me, an outsider, that nothing was being ac…

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.
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