pretty much like you've described. When you're making up the valuation and spending your own currency there's no problem; you control both sides of the balance sheet
This is an all stock deal, so valuations are about as realistic as a televised poker tournament. No one is paying a 27% premium in cash; they're spending their own ridiculously valued stock.
There is no business model in the world that makes grubhub a 7B company. If proven wrong I will gladly eat a hat delivered by them.
I disliked JIRA and we switched to Microsoft DevOps about a year ago. Now I really miss JIRA. DevOps is so painful in comparison, especially doing really specialized things like, you know, tracking work items and answering questions like "what's done; what's outstanding". sigh.
I'm a big believer and user of 1:1s and don't think they're a waste of time, because if there are no problems it gives me a chance to get a coffee, go for a walk, get to know my direct reports - how is that a waste?
The challenge with natural check-ins is everything else in our world is scheduled and it will eat all time not allocated. I block off the time and the schedule tells my team mate "This time is for you".
I trust my teamm members too, but it's not their job to proactively bring up every problem in a timely manner:
Some people/cultures will not do this but they will respond to empathetic, well thought out lines of questioning.
some problems are very sensitive and scary and don't need the added burden of "going to the boss to ask for some time to talk"
Some problems are not apparent and the 1-1 gives you a forum to discover them
Some very serious problems are not viewed as problems by your team members. A huge part of a manager's job is to identify them early.
I do a lot of the casual and emerging management stuff as well; 1-1s are not mutually exclusive. There are bad 1-1s too: right now with everyone remote I think the quality has gone down because we can't capitalize on the personal aspects. You learn that the 1-1 process is the easy part; actually giving a shit and working at building relationships is the hard part.
having sat on both sides of the table, this is a weak rationalization for wasting a lot of people's time. You're making candidates do so much work in terms of applications, preparation and interviews and you don't even know what the market looks like? Are the positions you're staffing so unique that you can't get comparable data from anywhere, or are you really just fishing for someone you can low-ball?
I hear this all the time and it's overly simplistic. Maybe if I give you a single number that is my true desired value, yes. If I give you a range where the low-end is 25% higher than that true value, I've now anchored discussion at a much higher value and it will be hard for you to reset the anchor.
This seems reasonable and beyond what other major employers are offering, but as is the fashion I'm sure Amazon will be convicted in the court of public interwebs shortly...
Except they were there for 14 years. Unless it became instantly diametrically opposed to their belief system in the past couple of months, the author has put up with the changing environment for a long time. They're not some skill-less laborer; after all, they worked at google! they could get another job pretty easily, no, one with a company that shared their personal values?
over-commenting is explaining in pseudo-english what you've written in code. Prentend you are at the United Nations but you speak all the langauges, so you don't need a word-for-word translation. You don't understand to motivations of every speaker though, nor their cultural influences and a million other factors, so context is super important. In the briefings you get some of the information is not new; but if the vast majority of what you're told is obvious or discernable from what people say, you're looking at over commenting. It's not a yes-no thing but a balance of evidence, subjective opinion.
I think the question around performing meaningful work is largely rhetorical; the challenge is where do you find meaningful work?
We tend to love the romantic notion of throwing away the high paying meaningless (to us) job to follow your dream, but in reality it tends to be more of a dream than the way things work.
I wish more people would put some deep thought into (1) defining what meaningful work in their context would look like, and (2) building a strategy for moving from their current state to the desire one that doesn't involve essentially throwing away what they have to start over.
As far as trading money for meaning, I see this as an alternative view on the well known limits of extrinsic motivators; you'll trade any money beyond your personal level for deeper purpose. The key then is figuring out what this amount is, then evolving into meaningfulness.