> It's also a crap deal for buyers. If Telegram did an ordinary IPO, you'd get stock, a share in the profits of the company, and voting rights. "Grams" give you none of those things.
This is the part I never understood. Even if you could suspend disbelief over the regulatory risk of this whole thing, it still seemed like a fundamentally bad offering.
I don't disagree with this, but I do feel like there is some benefit to movement within different niches of engineering. I've been on teams where someone who, while being an experienced engineer, was new to the stack or hadn't worked on a project like ours, and they brought new ideas/technologies to the table simply because they were so excited to look for them—i.e. the "Wow!" factor of stepping into a new space. To agree with you, however, I've only ever seen this among engineers who had a strong general base. I've personally been the junior who tried to solve the halting problem :)
This is the part I never understood. Even if you could suspend disbelief over the regulatory risk of this whole thing, it still seemed like a fundamentally bad offering.