Yeah, all the "wealth creators" at the top will do fine. It's only the people who did the work and made the stuff who will be laid off. Their fault for not cultivating the right connections.
The HN Hivemind that I've witnessed as of the last 18 months or so is decidedly supportive of founders giving up much much more equity to employees, owing to ease of fundraising and low capital startup costs, combining to derisk the once very personally risky endeavor of starting a company.
In that sense the hivemind currently loosely follows the words of Sam Altman who is the present overmind of YC, so it is rather apt.
American CEOs get paid obscenely cartoonishly evil amounts of money for running companies into the ground. Even when the company does really well and they get massive stock grants, the rank and file get nothing.
They get less than nothing, they get fired.
As you say, anyone can found a business. Getting hired as a CEO is entirely to do with contacts; it's not usually a job that's advertised and you can apply for.
It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade
Dug the mines and built the workshops - endless miles of railroad laid
Now we stand, outcast and starving, 'mid the wonders we have made
But the union makes us strong
Well... what do you expect? You're either the job creator or the job filler.
If you could create jobs and had the right motivation and ability to do so, you wouldn't be filling a job.
> Their fault for not cultivating the right connections.
And yes, knowing the right people is part of that game.
And yes, sometimes the job creators must destroy some jobs in order to save the rest. What's better... 10% of Yahoo! laid off... or 100%?
Haha...
I'm happy you believe this. No sarcasm; it just made me wish that I still did.
In this world, merit is judged by more than ability. Motive, if not aimed perfectly, is a burden that will decrease your chances, not increase them.
Background is so important. My family was totally broken, like one hundred percent shattered. There is no chance I'll be a job creator, no matter how driven.
Why can't I meet the right people? Because of what I say when given an initial opportunity. And why am I not able to say the right things? Because of the background and context I grew up in.
And I'm not talking about appealing to some rich person and asking for an opportunity. I'm talking about meeting peers, or building a team, or any of the things that really matter.
One could argue that this situation is mutable, and that it's mostly my fault for what I say. Obviously, yes, it's my fault for the things I say.
But when your whole life has been spent being trained in a certain way, by being in the river of society that pushes us all along, the slipstream that you end up in as a child pretty much makes or breaks your ability to learn how to do anything close to what you're suggesting. To play that game you mention.
Enjoy being a job creator. It's an opportunity that you should make the most of, in the stead of all the people who can't.
There is no chance I'll be a job creator, no matter how driven.
The journey sucks a lot, but at the end of the day that's all we got, not the different destinations we traverse to and from.
It's easy to have your sentiment when your road is the former and not the latter.
But when it's broken you think about just walking and not smelling any of the shit... Just left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot...
Mine was too.
> There is no chance I'll be a job creator, no matter how driven.
That need not be the case, all it takes is a lucky break, worked for me.
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It's what you do with that drive/anger/passion/frustration/motivation/defiance that counts.
It takes a lot of risk, and guts to strike out and create jobs - and more often than not it doesn't work out... but that's all part of the game.
It's one thing to be really good at what you do... to even be the best. It's another thing entirely to convince other really good and sometimes the best people to work for you, your company, and your ideas.
It's one thing to be really good at what you do... to even be the best. It's another thing entirely to convince other really good and sometimes the best people to work for you, your company, and your ideas.
This is in fact the central argument of my original comment: Merit is mostly communication, and your ability to communicate is defined by the context you grow up in. Not in spite of it.
When the world shapes you, reshaping yourself is not the only thing that matters. Your old mistakes can brand you for life.
Please have a wonderful year.
A modern-day polymath, he was a NASA astronaut, Disney Imagineer, and physician among other things. He holds six academic degrees.
He, too, had an extremely troubled upbringing.[1]
In his own words, "I came from an extraordinarily dysfunctional family, full of abuse and alcoholism. And eventually everyone within the family had committed suicide."
This is the first and last time I have ever spoken to an HN member like this, and I say that not out of pretense, but to illustrate both the gravity and the finality of my background that no one will believe.
I sincerely hope it was all a fluke, and that I was really the only one in the world to go through all of that. It's not even worth trying to understand.
I'm glad you were able to have a happy life. Please enjoy it, and hug whoever makes it all worthwhile.
It's such a perfect illustration of the entire life, start to finish, like a waking nightmare.
Goodbye.
Goodbye to you too.
The world can make you feel so worn. There's sometimes just no chance left.
That's a very simplistic view. Doing the work and making the stuff also create jobs. How many right here have jobs because developers - not execs, not investors - created the technology we use? Yes, even at Yahoo. Like Hadoop. The idea that the people who contribute money create jobs and the people who contribute labor (in our case via code) don't is utterly, obviously, dangerously wrong. It's self-serving claptrap from those who have no ability to participate in acts of creation instead of arbitrage. No hacker for which this site is named should accept it.
What impact did it have? Zero. Because some technocrat apparatchik decided it wasn't worth it developing and promoting the thing further.
One can have insane ability to create things, but it will be ultimately futile, if the things created can't sustainably reach consumers.
You're either the job creator or the job filler.
Clearly the former. In 2012 Yahoo had 11,700 employees, and by 2014 they had 12,500 employees.[1] The 10% layoff is going to be around the difference there (so net zero), but I don't think any reasonable person could argue not cutting jobs in this situation would result in a net gain for Yahoo.
It's a company in trouble, and it's a reasonable course of action.
[1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/260291/number-of-full-tim...