> Yeah, and how well is that going to work out for them? They should have known better than to invest in this company in the first place; companies like that are cults of personality.
So you are saying the investors (who are the current shareholders) stupidly bought into Neumann personality cult.
So now they are paying for their idiocy.
This isn't some failure of capitalism: it's the failure of large, wealthy, sophisticated investors to properly assess their own investment.
> But I think it's very important to remember that companies can have moral standards and follow them. Many companies don't sell-out in crucial ways, and throwing one's hands up and condemning them all is punishing the ones that stay true.
I agree, which is why I criticize shallow analysis of a company's motivation based on its skin-deep marketing veneer.
In this case it's not even moral standards - the implication is that WeWork's CEO is neglecting his fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value by lining his pocket instead.
That's in fact a corruption of capitalism, it's illegal, and he can be sued for that by shareholders.
> I think moral outrage is a very important and effective market force.
I completely agree, which is why it's important to look beyond the marketing.
If a company can breach standards of morality and decency, but get away thanks to some 30 seconds commercial featuring smiling kids, then we will not be effective as a public in enforcing those very real consequences that companies should face for their actions.
> As others have pointed out, it's not uncommon to get them (and other clauses) struck out of employment agreements during hiring. I've struck that one from all places I've worked, I've struck all patent and IP claims out that were broad enough to cover things I do outside of work, I've gotten copyrights assigned to me instead of the employer, and so on, even very early in my career.
I'll be polite and not accuse you of fabricating. Your experience is extremely, curiously atypical. I know from experience that these clauses are mandatory for several large employers. They are not waived for anyone. If you google, you'll find examples of senior vice presidents being sued for them.
The only way you can have them waived is if you negotiate with small employers who are starved for talent, and even then it won't be easy to do as a junior.
In fact I'm skeptical you even knew what a non-compete was as a recent grad.
> If it's that onerous, sign one to get a job, and while getting paid, immediately look for a new job that doesn't violate it without one.
So your solution is to act unethically, accept a permanent position just to get a paycheck while looking for a new job?
My impression of this comment is sinking by the sentence.
Reality check: if everyone in your area requires a non-compete, and you couldn't get a NC-free offer months, why would you get one now, when you're looking to leave a job you literally just accepted?
To potential employers, you now look worse than before.
> Employment is always a negotiation. If you enter thinking you have zero leverage and are unable or unwilling to find other work, then you do have zero leverage.
Translation:
"I like to make boastful absolutist claims because I have very little actual experience in the job market."
While this may all be true, the upshot is that as individual employees, we have zero leverage or bargaining power against these large employers.
Even now, with the great shortage of tech talent - while is repeatedly used as a justification to import an unlimited number of foreign workers - these very same large employers who complain about this shortage, do not hesitate to reject a qualified candidate who will not sign away their right to work with a "non compete".
I have the opposite experience. I refused to sign non-competes for all past offers that included them, and in all cases the potential employer then walked away. That happened after lengthy interview processes that lasted multiple days and cost the employer many thousands of dollars.
Gives you an idea how important these non-competes are to them.
I should mention these were big, powerful employers. You might be able to negotiate them with small employers who suffer from lack of candidates.
> I’ve found these non-competes often have no teeth. Unless you possess exceptional knowledge or secrets, companies will not waste the resources going after you.
You naively conflate "not biting" with "having no teeth".
Amazon forces all workers to sign non-competes. They only sue those who piss them off. Granted, a small minority. But that minority suffers a harrowing ordeal, typically losing their new job and their ability to work.
You better believe the rest are kept in line by the mere threat of such lawsuit, and the courts have enforced the non-compete in the cases Amazon did take legal action.
> A nation that does not have either strong (and not hindered by law) unions or a minimum wage to support the most vulnerable (your mention of which in the context of your comment comes across as libertarian concern trolling) does not deserve to "grow".
Increasing minimum wage is liable to cause a host of well-known unintended and paradoxical adverse consequences:
To you it seems like a simple way to benefit the poor, but in reality it raises unemployment - a far graver problem - among these very poor you are ostensibly trying to protect.
You can flame that as "concern trolling", but these are not just very real concerns - they are real consequences that have been observed numerous times across history, including in this very case in Korea, where unemployment has risen substantially as a result of the recent minimum wage raises.
> My solution to this is simple - abolish the wage.
Truly an excellent practical suggestion for the modern growth economy.
Your comment offers zero practical solutions, or anything but empty moral posturing and inciting inflammatory language.
> It is largely because of the previous Soviet invasion that Ukrainians would today fight to the last to prevent a future Russian invasion.
Read some history of the cold war. USSR was happy to invade and subdue its weak neighbors in the past, in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, all the way up to the 70s. It won't do the same today because of international retaliation, part of which are sanctions.
Russia had no right to invade Crimea. They just did because they had the military might to do so. If your argument is that they should be allowed to do so without consequences, then I strongly disagree. Your position makes you feel morally superior, but in reality it will pave the way to WWIII with Russia increasingly emboldened to extend militarily until an inevitable clash.
> AQI developed in Iraq after we had completely destroyed civil society there and created a vacuum of law and order.
By that logic, UK and France are responsible for the Nazi regime and all the evils it has done because they defeated Germany in WWI and created the conditions for the rise of the Nazi party.
There's a fashionable trend to blame the US as "directly responsible" for everything bad that goes on the world, by applying preposterous liability standards that nobody has ever applied to any other nation in history.
I never said folks couldn't pick up a stack of books and in theory study well enough to get a good tech job.
I said they generally don't because they don't have the stamina, discipline, and curiosity to do so.
Some do. The minority. Most don't.
Respondents are attacking me as if I am saying this is how things should be.
Trust me, I wish it was the opposite. I've been involved in hiring in all my recent roles, and we'd be happy to hire anyone who has enough motivation, discipline, and interest in the field to learn CS and React through books and come work for us.
There's just not many of these.
I didn't make it so. I didn't stand behind people taking Udacity courses and whispered in their ear "give up!" like some sort of comical Satan.
If I could, I'd whisper "Try harder! You can succeed!"
However when I did end up interviewing folks coming out of code bootcamps, I ended up not being able to offer them a job.
Bluntly, most of them seemed to have no real interest in tech. They initially studied something else, were on a different track in life, typically had little interest in tech at best. Then they heard you can make 6 figures in tech no problem, and I met them 4-10 months later, often after they went through some lazy course designed specifically to game my interview process.
Results from recruiting straight out of bootcamp simply do not justify the effort.
In fact they're so bad that despite all our need for talent, we don't hire anyone straight out of bootcamp anymore. We'll gladly be your second job after bootcamp, but never your first.
Because the vast majority who even complete these bootcamps realize the money isn't enough to keep them engaged in a field they don't inherently like - which is why they didn't go to tech in the first place.
My impression is that a large majority of them leave the field after working for a short while on their new job. This is based on reports from friends in the industry + the fact we get a ton of resumes from people who just finished bootcamp, but very few from people who finished bootcamp and then worked in the industry for any amount of time.
All this is for people who signed up and finished a bootcamp, which is already a high bar. The amount of people who bought a "micro-degree" from commercial companies like Udacity is probably far larger, and only a tiny minority of them even completed this relatively easy course (look up MOOC completion ratios), let alone went through a bootcamp which is far more taxing and less accessible.
People will probably attack me like I'm the evil wizard who conjured this unfortunate situation. They're killing the messenger.
Did you forget that Facebook used to play David to Myspace's Goliath?
There was never any shortage of competitors, and Facebook wasn't the first on the social media scene by any measure. It came out of nowhere and toppled the dominant incumbent, and is still going strong against competition from giants like Google.
You are pointing out some real problems, but your attempt to pin them all on capitalism ("the almighty dollar") is incoherent and fallacious.
It's not "capitalism" turning young people to Tinder, which is dirt cheap. Capitalism as a system would much rather them start families and have lots of babies. Raising one kid yields far more purchases than a Tinder Plus subscription and a pack of prophylactics.
It is certainly not the "capitalism" strawman pushing aggressive gender politics. Most of these are based on Marxist studies, and closely associated with socialist and Marxist views and movements, that is - the opposite of capitalism.
In short, you invoked a bunch of very different problems with current American culture, bundled them together and strapped the collective label "capitalism" onto them, so now you have a single throat to cut to cure all that is ill with society. Unfortunately, it's not a single problem, and certainly does not have a single cause.
You're also ignoring agency completely. Nobody "pushed" people to use Tinder. They could keep dating seriously and getting married at 23 like they did in the 50s. They don't do that because they don't want to.
> The pay for Senior & Principal level positions at Netflix are $350k-$500k+ base compensation. The same shape of thing at Apple, Facebook, etc. would be about half that in many cases.
A Principal Engineer at FB would make "half" of $350-500k in compensation?
Pure nonsense.
Moreover, it seems like Netflix pays more cash and less equity, so some folks on this thread love to talk about "base compensation", "salary", etc.
What really matters is total comp, and from what I know, Netflix is about on par with the rest of FAANG.
I don't know much about them directly, but I do know folks who work for FAANGs very close to Los Gatos, and would certainly be inteested in moving if Netflix paid more "by a significant margin".
> One of the primary properties of the tech boom (and, lets face it, almost all industrialized capitalism) is that it doesn't account for nor take responsibility for side effects of their overwhelming wealth.
How is the tech boom different from any previous period of explosive growth, in that regard?
Examine similar periods in the past, and you will find far more harmful consequences, that were given far less attention or caring by their progenitors.
Major developments in the past had far more disruptive and harmful consequences to affected communities, that were basically ignored and treated as "price of progress" by the people of the time.
How much negative impact does the current boom even have on local communities? It's very misleading to blame it for homelessness in San Francisco. The homeless of SF by and large aren't people who can't afford rent anymore so now they live on the street.
> Nobody claims the solution is CEO-mandated "artificial" wage inflation, the report emphasizes the need for strong workers unions that can demand more equitable pay.
The report suggested multiple policies to attain "wage equality", including increased taxation and forcing companies to increase pay for subcontractors. The result of such policies would be downwards redistribution: less pay for high-skilled workers, more pay for low-skilled workers.
I'm sure you don't think that "wage equality" means that janitors in SV start making $250+ like senior engineers. That is not sustainable. Any realistic solution would bring engineers way down, while lifting the bottom a little bit higher.
I'm not sure when "equitable pay" became a goal. In a healthy free market, people are rewarded for their effort in developing rare and valuable skills. As far as I know, a market in which the government actively intervenes to keep all wages equal is called communism.
If the government wants to take action, perhaps they should work to make SV more affordable for everyone, for example, by lifting ridiculous NIMBY restrictions that keep housing expensive.
All those "high paid engineers" still can't afford a home anywhere near SF. Somehow I doubt the solution is to cut further into their pay.
> If high-skill talent is rare their wages should rise. I do not see that happening. Well, at least not here in Germany. Industry is crying about a skill shortage but the corresponding wages are stagnant.
Businesses resist increasing pay, because that eats into their margins.
Even in capitalist America, SWE pay stagnated until fairly recently. Employers actively fought against increasing SWE pay, even as their shortage was getting worse. They kept wages artificially low, and successfully lobbied the government to fill their openings with cheap H-1B employees - the H-1B quota back then was over twice its current level.
That was a short-term victory, and long-term loss for the industry. If more engineers made $150,000 in SV back in 2005, there wouldn't be such a shortage today.
Eventually this flimsy dam broke, and now we're seeing pay more in line with where it should be according to the supply/demand curve. Arguably it's still not quite there, even in SV, where engineers with their "outrageous" pay still can't afford a home.
So in Germany, apparently employers are still in the "resist and whine to the government" phase. I bet they're begging for the government (i.e. taxpayer) to fund skill-building programs, import more high-skilled workers from 3rd-world countries... the usual stack of solutions.
I'd also suspect higher taxes have something to do with it. Why should I stretch myself paying $120k to an engineer, if he's only going to get $65k out of it? I don't know too much about the taxes in Germany, but I've seen this problem in other foreign locations where we were recruiting: increasing pay did not result in more or better candidates, and all the best candidates were just trying to get to the US any way they can.
I don't think there's one universal "dark side" to working at any successful startup, not anymore than there's one "dark side" to working at any other very broad category of projects.
At best, you're going to get a laundry list of various issues people encountered at (what they consider to be) successful startups.
I'd answer the question a bit differently: the downside of working at a successful startup versus a successful mature company.
At a mature company, success is more of a uniformly good thing. There will typically be growth, people will be promoted, there will be a strong inclination to keep the current team ("don't change a winning horse") so often anyone in influential position will see increased bonuses and other benefits. Very often you can expect promotion, especially if it's a mid-sized growing outfit rather than a huge one.
In startups, "success" often means your shares are worth more on paper, but not necessarily more profit. For example, "success" at a startup may mean your userbase is exploding, but you're not making profit on each user, and perhaps even losing a bit. Like every other process, success can lead to less stable and predictable results in startups versus mature companies.
Often it will increase stress, as more successful startups are under even more pressure to keep performing, since you are now a potential unicorn. There will be a lot more investor interest, but that comes with increased scrutiny and pressure to succeed.
It's quite likely there will be changes, including personnel changes. Many startups are a wild bet at first, so they start with a "B team", a group of people whose opportunity cost is typically low, which means they're not at the top of their field and often don't have a solid track record, so they're willing to take the risk on an unproven business model. As the startup shows signs of success, investors will be willing to pay more, and the bet starts to look more promising, so "A players" will start showing more interest. Very often there will be pressure to bring such A players in to replace anyone important all the way up to the executives. This is especially true when VCs are involved, and they will often have an "A team" in mind to replace the old "B team".
So I'd summarize that success at a startup will tend to bring more pressure and a lot more risk of bad outcomes for you as an employee. For many employees, that may be a net negative. There's also a positive though: if you're considered an essential, well-performing employee, and willing to work very hard and withstand the increasing pressures, you may end up as part of the new "A team", which may get you a fat package of shares that are now more likely to be worth something. But I've also seen startups where any one who worked there so far was looked down upon as a stereotypical "B player", with even great performance disregarded and ignored. So there's potential reward, but a lot more risk.
There are also many horror stories about how getting dismissed as a "B player" at this stage also involves the owners trying to suck back every piece of equity you may have hoped to retain. Now that the equity is worth something, you'll find the majority owners typically a lot less willing to share it. You'll obviously lose any options that haven't vested. Sometimes "B players" with a lot of yet-unvested options will be dismissed for that reason alone...
Curious how articles like these almost never give the most obvious advice to businesses, which is: pay developers more.
Instead, this article for instance advises employers to "increase developer productivity" and "outsource":
> If developers are your company's most constraining resource, the key question is how to increase their productivity.
"Increasing productivity" typically puts pressure on developers. This is quite surprising: developers are seen as a scarce valuable resource, and in a free market that means they should be rewarded for their rare and hard-won skillset. Instead, the universal advice is to pressure them to be more productive, outsource them, etc.
So you are saying the investors (who are the current shareholders) stupidly bought into Neumann personality cult.
So now they are paying for their idiocy.
This isn't some failure of capitalism: it's the failure of large, wealthy, sophisticated investors to properly assess their own investment.