"But this year it seems like the seal is broken, and we've seen major companies delivering internship and full-time offers with 2 week (and less) hard deadlines. Other companies now routinely deliver expiring bonus offers for signing early. Many of these offers circumvent or outright break the guidelines set down by schools, and if past matching markets are a model for this one, next year will come with even earlier offers and worse conditions."
Will you name the companies, and give further specifics? Otherwise it's hard to tell what really has changed.
I'd say this is not new, nor unique to tech. Finance, consulting et. al have been dealing with this for years - both with new grad offers, and with banking/consulting to PE/HF offers (often analysts have their next job within 6mo of starting their first job).
Mental math (and arithmetic tricks) are pretty important for scoring high on the GMAT (for MBA admissions). No calculator is allowed, and while you can solve by pen and paper, for a very time constrained test, tricks can be the difference between a good and great score.
It's also somewhat valued in the business / consultant crowd for talking through assumptions and making estimates of problems.
I was young for my year after being pushed ahead a grade. I did fine academically, socially, etc.
Two factors that make me want to start my future kids late:
-Social maturity: it's way easier to handle social dynamics with a year extra of emotional maturity. Particularly important in high school and college
-Physical maturity: older kids often perform very well in high school sports. I, for example, grew and gained ~15-20lbs after I graduated high school (playing sports). That would have made my HS sports career much different, and therefore college prospects as well
I don't see any reason to starting kids early for upper/middle class folks, besides parent's bragging rights.
If these securities have been held for <1 year, their gain/loss goes into the short term bucket. So losses (in this case, writedowns) can offset the size of distribution, which is a bad deal for investors.
To a personal investor (e.g. mentioned in the world of WealthFront/Betterment), this is 'tax loss harvesting'.
Stasis' logic is along the right lines - you need to think about it in terms of portfolio management strategy. Effectively, the manager is trying to switch as much of the gains of their fund from being taxed at 40% to being taxed at 15%. A decent explanation here: http://www.nicholasfunds.com/dividend_info.html
You're right that it won't be a large drop in the bucket. It's not news because it's a large drop in a bucket, it's news because its a valuation change on companies many here follow. Nonetheless, one could object to poor management if Fidelity didn't take this action, regardless of size.
Note - this only gets at the 'why now' part of the motivation. What it means for 1) their internal company valuations and 2) implications for shareholders without liquidation preferences is more interesting.
But Fidelity isn't writing down the value of the company, it's writing down the value of its shares. Do you have any guesses as to what this means, given they are probably the most senior equityholders on this investment?
My suspicion (from experience in the mutual fund industry) is that this is tax accounting related. Overly simplistic explanation: Mutual funds typically distribute short term capital gains at year-end, which is taxed as ordinary income (~40%), not capital gains (~15%).
Managers of funds that hold private securities actually have the choice to 'mark down' the prices of their securities in any given month. Think of it like valuing a house - if you want to value your total net worth, you can mark your price as what you want, to an extent (see Trump). Managers often use this flexibility to 'bury' losses in down times, or for tax advantages.
Finally, can't agree enough about who loses in these cases. Employees who vastly over-value options are the folks who lose in this case. Investments made by institutional folks like Fidelity are too small to even register as a blip to their overall funds, and those funds are diversified and managed to handle downturns in sectors like this.
Postmortems like this are always a bit unfair. You ask employees who lost their job when the company folded what was wrong with the company, and they'll air every little complaint or inefficiency that existed within the company.
Isn't the ethos of Silicon Valley to 'hack it together' with tape and glue? Moreover, I'm pretty sure that's the reality of almost every high growth company. I'm sure you could find matching stories from within almost every winning unicorn: key bugs they didn't catch, poor decisions that cost them along the way, leadership gaffes, etc.
I think there are a couple interesting points to consider that the other comments address: difficulty of direct services, customer acquisition costs, 1099s. But we should expect more from reporters than to throw in every other possible anecdote they could dig up.
The other thing that comes to mind is that they are a business fundamentally reliant upon distribution. Of course they should be building out a footprint, and marketing their services in sync with their technological development. It seems like one may have gotten ahead of the other, but in any other business this would be perfectly typical. The only industry for which this doesn't apply is software, where distribution is pretty simple. For example, talk to anyone in the cold supply chain business - frozen or refrigerated goods. There is a huge chicken/egg problem with product awareness and product access.
Most software companies will retract upgrades when they're not stable. Are the stakes different here? At first glace, yes, but upon second glance, if your magical test is replaced with a normal blood test in a Theranos booth, you're probably Ok. In that case, Theranos is just a sales/marketing company - which is a viable business too.
Their founder, Chris, is actually a former McKinsey guy. The thought was exactly that - to align 'McKinsey pitch deck thinking' with professional design.
I've used their service and was pretty happy with it. A large share of YC companies use them too.
This is pretty crazy analysis for what I see to be a pretty simple phenomenon. Put the truncated "Oh" in front of the "no", in order to indicate emotional sentiment, and you have your simple explanation.
"oh no" = hat tip to an [unexpected] unpleasant feeling
"oh yes" = hat tip to an [unexpected] pleasant feeling
Take the "Did you see any birds at the park?"
"yeah, no, I didn't see any" = "Oh yeah, it would have been nice to, but no I didn't see any.
This stuff is already being done legally, with certain industries and within certain financial institutions. Just seems like these guys were just caught in an unfortunate legal snag - otherwise they just seem like good traders to me.
In the summer of 2007 I was doing a bunch of research as to whether or not to buy a few shares of $100-$130 Apple stock. I knew the iPhone was coming, and I thought it was going to be big. The reason I eventually decided the iPhone was going to be a loss? Rumors of a Google phone, which I thought would be the end-all.
Heh.
A few years later working at Google, my boss discussed with me about how Google is just not a very good products company. Big consumer products require a polished launch, with products that speak to the consumer. Google on the other hand, rolls things out slowly, iteratively, and rarely takes them to a polished, user-friendly state. If this ever happens, it's usually over a very long period of time, and quietly. And that's just with software products - you could say this is even more the case with hardware.
I don't think glass will be the silver bullet of wearable computing. It will be the concept definer, the 'what', but the 'it' will come from somewhere else.
Also interesting to note that while car sales in the US declined steeply in '07 and '08, they are slated to have a consecutive record sales year in 2013, possibly surpassing the record year of 2005. [1]
In the last 5 years, many manufacturers have had substantial YoY growth - the luxury segment had 13.4% YoY growth in 2012. [2]
An analogy that comes to mind - physical exercise. When you are stopped doing exercise (e.g. running at a traffic light), people often will jog in place. Obvious reasons - keep heart rate from large deltas, muscles warm/responding well, etc.
If you watch competitive PC gaming, you will notice that even professional gamers will often 'spam' their hotkeys in low activity periods, typically the beginning of games. Some people claim that it is simply for actions-per-minute stats, but I could see it as some kind of setting of mental/physical cadence.
I think you're right - the post fails to address how big of a necessary / not necessarily negative component of our foreign policy/diplomacy is centered around arms trade. I'm no expert on the subject, but have worked with people with experience in this area. One thing I remember is hearing that the US has the distinction/disadvantage in the business of refusing to work with bribes.
My question to you - if you thought the article was off-target, why submit it? Seems pretty disingenuous to me.
It's never too late to transfer - and being a transfer doesn't make you ineligible for financial aid!
I went to a major public university my freshman year and transferred to an Ivy League school once I decided I wasn't satisfied with my experience at the public university. It ended up actually being significantly cheaper for me to go to the Ivy League, and opened up a world of opportunity and support I would have never found at my original school.
Since then, my sister has also attended the same Ivy League (you see a lot of families/siblings at such schools) almost free of charge. I could also go on about how the resources and individual support from a private school (effective tuition of 50-60k) far exceed that of a public school - even a top UC.
You've said what I've been trying to articulate for a long time - in much better terms than I ever could. Thank you!
I like the dichotomy of songwriter vs. producer - but I would guess it isn't always so discrete - i.e., production and mastering is essential to conveying the emotions and moods of the songwriting. In fact, I would argue the lyrics are often overemphasized in analysis - they are more of a vessel for tones and cadence of the song.
It bothers me a bit when people link this to 'explain away' pop music.
It's my belief this is an oversimplification - many of these songs are written in different keys, which can create different sounds and feelings of songs. Sure, you can transpose them to a common key (as they've done here), but at that point, it's not really the same song anymore.
Also, I've found that chord progressions can be quite flexible if only 'snip-its' of certain songs are being used, namely the standard chorus or verse. Much of the genius of songwriting comes in transitions or bridges.
I'm not denying this is not entertaining, and it works to an extent, but I would say that there is a degree to which this hinges on the widespread renown of these songs. It's not so easy to say they would have become so popular if they were all written in the same key, and not the one of the original artist.
Pop music is frequently spoken down upon, that it's 'talent-less' or 'garbage', but it really is like any other expert discipline - if it were so easy, there wouldn't be such a saturation of experts dominating the field. My opinion most of the talent is in production - Dr. Luke, Red One, Max Martin, etc.
It's definitely the native feel. I think for a lot of non-technical people, engaging on a tablet makes them feel like they finally are on top of technology - a sense of control. Perhaps it could be equated to the feeling of mastery when you know a video game quite well.
And also - 'cutting edge' for the average upper class Joes, not cutting edge with technology. A well designed, sleek/sexy - even if simple from a functionality standpoint - app can really get people excited.
I feel a little bit bad about my post, because it is so far from being data-driven, but it's what I have observed from watching 40-60 something SVPs, CXOs, and partners. "Can I do that from my iPad?" is a common question.
Will you name the companies, and give further specifics? Otherwise it's hard to tell what really has changed.
I'd say this is not new, nor unique to tech. Finance, consulting et. al have been dealing with this for years - both with new grad offers, and with banking/consulting to PE/HF offers (often analysts have their next job within 6mo of starting their first job).