Every generation throws off the ideals of the generation that came before.
Parents monitor their kids for a combination of:
1. Worry about the outside world. Justified - but monitoring location doesn't make it any less likely that they'll get hurt.
2. Worry about their child doing something they consider dumb. Again - justified. They will absolutely do something you consider dumb. But monitoring your child won't make then agree with you and won't stop them from doing something you don't like. The tighter the grip, the more they'll fight and the more they'll resent you for making them fight.
Parents like to think that this resentment will go away when the child is older. It doesn't. Many of you probably resent something your parents did when you were younger. But it does become less intense with distance - like everything else.
Anywho - Monitoring teenagers doesn't actually help anything. Monitoring younger children might make you feel more safe, though.
> Going from owning 1% of a 1M company to owning 0.5% of a 2M company isn't unfair. The extra value comes directly from the new shareholders investing their money.
If this we're true, investors wouldn't be adding things like dilution protection to their contracts and special stocks that have further liquidation protections (and potentially voting rights) wouldn't be the norm for non-employees.
Investments are not one-to-one exchanges and employees take up most of the personal risk in the exchange due to lack of any protections as well as lack of a (personal financial) safety net if things go wrong.
Though I agree with you in that whether this is fair or not has nothing to do with what modern companies will do.
The reason that employees do not get these protections and rights is because they lack the leverage to demand them from the people who make those decisions within the company.
The shares given to investors often have dilution protection and guarantees as to when the company can sell and what minimum compensation will be given to them if that happens.
They also have protections such as "If the company dies, we will have first claim to any assets of the company"
The reason this is not offered to employees is a combination of fear (if we're being generous) and lack of incentive (the employee often has little leverage and no legal representation to look over contracts).
The end result being - if you have the capital, you have the leverage.
If you're in this position, also be aware of whether you're being offered stock options or stock.
It's a little heartbreaking to watch years of equity disappear, in the company you built, because you don't have a year's paycheck worth of savings lying around to buy your options before they expire.
I think that your evaluation of the employee not entirely understanding the toll it has taken on you, is fair. Sympathy and empathy only go so far.
One thing I'd suggest is - In this description, you've emphasized the hours put in.
That's fair. You work hard and feel that this deserves compensation. But - if you were following that logic - your first 2 employees SHOULD combine to have more stock than you. You certainly don't put in more man hours than 2 employees put together.
Nor are you likely paid for the risk you take. You could hire an employee that drops out of college or otherwise risks their future opportunities. They will likely not get as much stock as you.
The thing that you could probably emphasize is how core to the success of your company your contributions are.
It is not a given that your contributions are worth your compensation (compared to the developer).
On a similar vein, one could argue that parents are the people who contributed the most to the success of their children. While you could argue that this is logistically true - in practical, the conception is a very small part of what makes the child successful. What's important is what comes afterwards.
So - It might be true that you work hard. But I'd recommend you fall back on to the value you bring to the table, when justifying your compensation.
If the first employee had left their college, family, or country to join the startup - would they have gotten as much stock as the founder? How much risk must the first employee take on in order to be compensated at the same level?
On the same note - the lack of a paycheck says nothing about the risk of a founder. A founder may very well start with more money, more opportunity, or a bigger safety net than any future employees.
The lack of a paycheck also doesn't tell us anything about how much the founder's skills and creative input contributed to the success of the company VS the first employees.
If they both have been there since the beginning, it is very possible that the company would similarly not exist if the first employees hadn't joined. So "The company couldn't exist without the founder" could also hold true for "The company couldn't exist without the first employees".
I think it's an interesting question - should you be compensated for your contributions to the success of the company or should you be compensated for the risk you took on in working for it.
I feel as though most founders would agree with being compensated for your contributions to success. Though most founders also wouldn't give their first employee's a similar cut of the reward, to themselves.
Startups don't tend to be fans of tying their own hands in terms of what they can do with stock.
To be fair - investors are also not fans of that. Potential investors will look at how shares and stock options are distributed and determine if it will allow them the flexibility they need in future fundraising/buyout efforts.
To go against this (investor interest and personal flexibility) founders would both have to have strong conviction and KNOW they won't need to rely on pleasing VCs in the future, for the company to survive.
This goes against how startups are currently built.
I might be oversimplifying this - couldn't companies that want to take part in the parallel world set up local sensors around their building to estimate position to a much more accurate degree?
I'm thinking along the lines of "Want to be a Pokemon gym? Place these devices around your public space and we'll overlay our AR reality while people are there!"
What happened to innovation? Innovation on privacy isn't possible?
The only way we can assure that cryptographic algorithms are in fact secure is to subject them to public scrutiny over many years.
Perhaps the only way to ensure that machine learning algorithms are not racist, harmful or biased is to have access to both the algorithm itself, the trained model, and the data that created it.
Algorithms can be biased. Data can be biased. Trained models can be biased.
We can't trust the government or companies to prove that a cryptographic algorithm is secure and we can't trust the government or companies to prove that an algorithm is unbiased and unharmful.
I'm curious what a solution like "All Machine Learning algorithms, and the data that taught them, must be open-source and easily accessible by the public" would look like.
It'd allow for public scrutiny at the algorithms that run our lives. It'd essentially mandate thorough vetting of how anonymous and/or biased the data being fed into these algorithms is.
It's based on watercolor painting but I have to say that Making Color Sing by Jeanne Dobie has dramatically improved the UI of my applications through better use of color!
Most everyone's job, at pretty much every company, is to make life easier for their coworkers.
Let's say you're asked to build a signup-with-facebook button.
The task is not to build a signup-with-facebook button. The task is to make it easier for people to sign up. Presumably the signup-with-facebook button is a good way of doing that. At least some people in the company think it is.
But the task isn't to get more signups either - it's to gain an audience - potential sources of revenue.
Your company wants to gain the revenue because, well that's what companies do. Companies aren't people. Doesn't matter what the company wants.
But your co-workers want to gain revenue because either it will make their work lives easier (less pressure. Possible promotions) or their personal lives easier (bonuses. Raises. More PTO. Less stress at work).
The Facebook button was never the job. The job was to make your co-workers lives easier.
If you keep your head in the weeds and view the sign up button as "the job" - you'll be surprised if you build it, it underperforms and you don't get recognition or rewards.
But if you view "the job" as making lives easier for those around you - and optimize to do that well - then you'll be surprised much less often by the results of your work. Even if there are some surprises
Higher powers might still make decisions that throw you under the bus. Though this is essentially outside of your control. Regardless of how good at your job you are.
This has one exception - If you are at a non-profit organization full of selfless people. Then the actual job might be to make the biggest impact regardless of the well being of your coworkers
I definitely agree that higher education should be accessible to everyone and for free.
I feel like the conversation should be
- "We need ethical and professional standards because our current way of doing things isn't working out too well!"
- "But that will exclude people who don't have access to education!"
- "Then we should give everyone a means to get the education. Because it is an unlimited resource that can be freely given without being taken from someone else and enriches all of humanity!"
- "Yeah! Let's do both those things!"
At least that's how I had hoped the conversation would lead.
But we can't throw our hands in the air and say "Accessible education is impossible and so we can never have standards of ethics or quality". That is definitely a dead end for society.
There were budget cuts. Teams were shuffled around.
You're running the team now. Your colleagues have only ever built boxes. Go get em', master architect!
This is my (hopefully humourous but actually taken from my experience) way of saying that companies will often do what is most immediately profitable rather than what's best in the long run (for humanity or themselves).
Does it bother you that every day, your personal information is transferred between a massive number of services created, maintained and secured by individuals with no security or ethical training whatsoever?
That personal information is then sold to even more organizations that need no scientific or statistical basis, again with no ethical oversight, to make decisions that impact your future and the future of those around you.
Picking up a compiler will never be banned anymore than it is banned to pick up a scalpel. But to call yourself a doctor you'd accept the responsibility (ethical and professional) that it entails. To call yourself a professional engineer you accept the responsibility that it entails. You hold yourself to a certain level of quality and ethics or you give up your right to hold the title.
Without a standard level of responsibility there is no way to build any more of a foundation than we have. We will always have the rickety mess of data leaks, corruption, and general lack of accountability that we have now.
We will have employers that can pressure programmers to go directly against their morals and ethics to get what they want.
I'm not proposing that the poor be excluded from the field. I'm proposing that you not only give them a job but give them a pathway to a quality, independent education that will continue to prepare them for the major challenges they will be expected to face and the ethical questions that they'll have to make a stand on.
I agree with the general point of this article. Showing that you have the skill to accomplish a job effectively will get you a job most anywhere.
There's a major issue when this is applied to a certain class of problems in ML and Data Science that people tend to ignore.
If you could get a job as a civil or mechanical engineer (building bridges or whatnot) by showing that you built a small bridge in your backyard... We'd have some unstable bridges.
If hospitals just let residents run the hospital... We'd have a lot of mistreated illnesses.
If you could show a realty company that you can build a recommendation engine and they hire you to build their advertisement algorithm... Suddenly you're breaking housing discrimination laws.
I am all for folks being able to get jobs from their cool projects. But we need ethical standards and educational standards before folks are given large, real-world problems to work with.
We need to take a page out of engineering and medical playbooks and build official education or apprenticeship requirements. We need to have licenses that can be revoked if someone fails to follow ethical or quality standards.
So - love creative people getting jobs. Now give them a high-quality education program along with those jobs.
Parents monitor their kids for a combination of:
1. Worry about the outside world. Justified - but monitoring location doesn't make it any less likely that they'll get hurt.
2. Worry about their child doing something they consider dumb. Again - justified. They will absolutely do something you consider dumb. But monitoring your child won't make then agree with you and won't stop them from doing something you don't like. The tighter the grip, the more they'll fight and the more they'll resent you for making them fight.
Parents like to think that this resentment will go away when the child is older. It doesn't. Many of you probably resent something your parents did when you were younger. But it does become less intense with distance - like everything else.
Anywho - Monitoring teenagers doesn't actually help anything. Monitoring younger children might make you feel more safe, though.