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On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

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Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#71

Post by chipotle_coyote »

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.

“It’s not drastic for a company to have lawyers” is probably the point that was being made. It’s not drastic for a company to have lawyers; it shouldn’t be drastic for a union—or in this case, a union organizing effort—to have lawyers as well.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#72

Post by chx »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #40
jenny91 wrote: post #34

I'm saddened by what happened to Mapbox. It's such a recurring pattern of organizational transformation: from a small "mission-driven" group building cool shit that starts taking money (and pressure from investors) and slowly erodes their past core values, changing into a faceless money-making machine subservient to some huge market or industry. In that process most of the original opinionated crowd will slowly rotat…

Unions and Mapbox is a very sore topic and now the subject of a NLRB lawsuit for firing the union organizers. https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/mapbox-sued-firing-union-... But the union drive came far too late to help the larger problem. The big change happened in 2017 when Softbank invested $164M into MapBox. In retrospect it was far too much money with too many expectations. And with the ugly side effect of salti…

This is not the first time I see Softbank as a net negative. Too much money loosely controlled. Is there an example of Softbank doing good?

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#74

Post by afandian »

woevdbz wrote: post #69
afandian wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes staying true to the rhetoric about 'making the world a better place' does preclude certain future states. But that rhetoric can be true, actionable, and not incompatible with profit.

Just saying here's an anecdatum about a money-making business that said the same kinds of things and is doing very well for itself.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#75

Post by tiffanyh »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #71
tiffanyh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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.

“It’s not drastic for a company to have lawyers” is probably the point that was being made. It’s not drastic for a company to have lawyers; it shouldn’t be drastic for a union—or in this case, a union organizing effort—to have lawyers as well.

If you feel like you have lawyer-up just to go to work, that’s probably a signal you shouldn’t be working there.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#76

Post by roguecoder »

nightski wrote: post #55
elil17 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it have to be software-specific? It's a new-ish field and American unions have been pretty disadvantaged over the last few decades due to an increasingly conservative judiciary and some nasty anti-union lawyers. But you can't just ignore that unions got us weekends, OSHA, and 8 hour days. Now there is enough wealth in society to support three day weekends, and people are ready to fight to distribute that wea…

Because as far as I know traditionally unions have existed in jobs where humans are basically robots (manufacturing, etc...). These jobs can be dangerous and also each worker is very easily replaceable giving the employer a huge upper hand. This is not the case in software at all. Skill levels can vary dramatically and the more experience you have with your company often the more valuable and harder to replace you be…

That's a pretty new development, and not necessarily true. Screen writing is pretty obviously creative, collaborative work, and they've been represented by a professional guild since 1933.

I think it is more common for the umbrella union orgs to focus on industries either with high barriers to entry (like nursing) or huge employers, because they are going company-by-company & it's just more efficient. On the opposite end of the spectrum, trade unions are more likely to serve people who change jobs ever couple of years and where most of the learning happens on the job. They tend to be run by & for people actually in the profession and can cross company boundaries.

Trade guilds will do things like specify minimum wages, but most of their members end up paid more than that. They'll specify minimum safety standards, but also support people on specific job sites that want or need additional protection to make that particular job safe. It isn't the same kind of one-size-fits-all approach you may be used to from Detroit auto plants.

There are advantages for employers too: they know that people in the guild are held to certain professional standards, for example. When retirement programs or health care are managed through the guild, workers can take the benefits with them to their next job, and small employers don't get taken for a ride. And employers can benefit from the steady influx of newly-trained workers who have been taught up to the standards the trade feels are important to meet.

Just look at the people in this thread who think it is "drastic" to have a lawyer look at our employment contracts: we may have individual leverage, but we aren't necessarily able to use it to make our working conditions better, or even to ensure the software we build is reliable and safe.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#77

Post by brailsafe »

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.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#78

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #40
jenny91 wrote: post #34

I'm saddened by what happened to Mapbox. It's such a recurring pattern of organizational transformation: from a small "mission-driven" group building cool shit that starts taking money (and pressure from investors) and slowly erodes their past core values, changing into a faceless money-making machine subservient to some huge market or industry. In that process most of the original opinionated crowd will slowly rotat…

Unions and Mapbox is a very sore topic and now the subject of a NLRB lawsuit for firing the union organizers. https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/mapbox-sued-firing-union-... But the union drive came far too late to help the larger problem. The big change happened in 2017 when Softbank invested $164M into MapBox. In retrospect it was far too much money with too many expectations. And with the ugly side effect of salti…

> And with the ugly side effect of salting the earth for any other map startups

I'm unsure on that. Mapbox built a bunch of good tech (mostly around vector tiles), open-sourced it, and then lost interest in smaller customers in their rush for the petrodollar.

This has been genuinely great for bootstrapped map businesses. You can easily list a dozen who are using .mvt tech right now and making a good living out of it.

True, it wasn't good for Mapzen. But I can't weep too many tears for something funded with Samsung Accelerator magic money, much though they did hire one of the smartest teams in the business - Softbank vs Samsung is not a battle I can bring myself to care about.

I 100% agree with you that Mapbox went too far, too fast. But on balance I think their trajectory has (unintentionally) been good for wider mapping tech.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#79

Post by roguecoder »

slively wrote: post #8
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.

To say this person joined and then tried to subvert is a pretty dishonest reading of this story. They worked on something for 12 years and I’m sure there were many others similarly invested. To spend such a significant portion of your life on something and have basically no input on how it’s run, directed, etc… is not a good system. In my opinion the people forming the union had much more invested in this company tha…

There is a good chunk research indicating that when employees share governance, it has a mild positive effect on productivity & firm survival: https://voxeu.org/article/worker-representation-worker-welfa...

There are many short term pressures on executives and finance people. Sharing power with the people their decisions affect leads to better outcomes for the business than when they use their power over workers for short term gain.

Re: On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

#80

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

prescriptivist wrote: post #65

A lot of negative sentiment about Mapbox in this thread. I have been prototyping a (native) app powered by Mapbox -- would it be a bad idea to hitch oneself to their ecosystem?

Don't hitch yourself irrevocably to their SaaS. Make sure that, if your app becomes successful, you can swap out for Maplibre (the open-source fork of Mapbox GL) and an alternative provider such as Thunderforest, Geofabrik, Stadia or Maptiler. Mapbox have a lot going for them, but your app's success shouldn't be dependent on one company's tariff.
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