fredkbloggs

Oh, you're such an optimist! Everyone knows firmware developers will only rewrite something needlessly if it's correct.

On the contrary, the comments are far too kind. This sort of error is simply unconscionable and the person responsible for it deserves far worse. It's unfortunate that the poor sod responsible for working around it can't do any more than write a scathing comment, because at an absolute minimum the responsible party should never work again (in any industry or role).

The person responsible doesn't care in the slightest. They got paid, their product not only got sold but is still being sold, and so there's nothing to be bothered with. That's what firmware's about: toss it out the door and move on. Trust me, if the person who did this even knows about it, he surely does not care at all.

Really, or are you just saying that? They "missed it" because either (a) they didn't bother to test at all, or (b) they actually thought November has 31 days and didn't bother to do the 4 seconds of research required to get both the implementation and the test correct (since, of course, the people writing this are almost certainly Chinese and know as much about the Gregorian calendar as they know about McDonald's hamburgers, Norman Rockwell's art, or the present value of the euro).

Welcome to firmware, folks!

Do you mean companies as well established as Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, and Netscape? Or companies as well established as Woolworth, Kodak, MCI, and Sears? Or perhaps you had in mind the New York Central Railroad, LTV, and Pan American Airlines?

Yes, it is possible that you will be given additional grants or options repricing if your company's stock price declines. Usually not, unless you're a key employee or top performer, but maybe. But that doesn't mean the price won't just keep going down anyway. To say nothing of the bonuses and raises you won't get, or the mandatory across-the-board 10% pay cuts, or the elimination of all the miscellaneous perks. At least, unlike the employees of many of the companies I named above, you won't have a pension you can lose too.

I know it's hard to believe. Intellectually, you can look at history and accept, know very well, that most of these companies will fail someday, and many of them probably in the very near future. But viscerally, you can't get it, because they feel invincible right now. But they aren't. Believe it[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braniff_%281983%E2%80%931990%2...

> 150k guaranteed comp, 25k bonus, 75k vesting equity is low for the companies w/ equity run-ups in the past several years, in my opinion.

You're right, assuming that everything continues as it has. Nothing is guaranteed; that 150k can vanish in a puff of smoke through no fault of your own, and take all your unvested comp along with it.

> the bonus is basically guaranteed.

No, it is not. Many, many people will tell you of their time spent at BigCo when the economy is not booming, and after the free donuts, the first thing that goes is the bonus. You have to read the bonus plan very carefully to understand how it's computed. It's quite possible that your bonus at Facebook or whatever depends solely on your own rating, but at most companies that's just the final multiplier and all kinds of other things have to happen in order for the bonus pool to exist at all. In even mild headwinds, it's likely that only a part of the expected bonus will be paid, and not unusual for there to be none at all. Furthermore, the bonus plan is usually determined one year at a time, so the fact that whatever needed to happen this year for everyone to be paid at 100% did happen is no guarantee that the criteria in next year's plan will be satisfied.

Do not assume that the future looks exactly like the recent past. It is certainly possible that the near future will be even better than the recent past, but at least some kind of mean reversion is a hell of a lot more likely. I predict that very few people will end up receiving as much total cash for their work over the next 5 years as their simplistic and rosy-eyed calculations of today would indicate.

The rule of thumb if you work in California is that you'll take home half, assuming all your income is base + bonus + RSUs and not exotics like ISOs or deferred comp plans. The rest goes to the cost of non-cash compensation, various governments, and your tax-deferred retirement savings. It's usually slightly more than half, depending on the exact numbers, whether you're buying medical plans for a family, how much you save in a retirement plan, etc., but that's the safe first-order approximation if you're budgeting.

So someone starting at BigCo in California should expect to take home 100-125k a year for the first few years. That said, I would caution new entrants to the workforce about three things:

- Tax rates are likely to go up, and certainly will not be going down. It would not be shocking if you were taking home 10% less in a few years solely because of higher taxes. You can also expect your cost of living to grow much more quickly than the tax bracket boundaries will rise.

- Your RSUs are likely to be worth less than you're expecting, because market prices will decline in a bust (a major bust is all but certain at some point in your upcoming 4-year vesting period).

- In a bust, you will likely get a smaller bonus or none at all (even if the company is still making money), and are unlikely to get a raise, even a nominal cost of living adjustment. These conditions can last for several years, so even if you keep your job (hardly a given), your total compensation will likely be much less than you expected when you were hired. A few companies may be doing well enough that you will be exempt, but don't count on it.

All of these things need to be factored in when evaluating compensation. It's not as simple as adding X + Y + Z and assuming that all changes over the next 5 years will be either neutral or positive. That's not how life is.

In my BigCo experience, they do recalibrate pay scales at different locations, but not nearly to the extent that they should. For example, one of them had three US geo "zones" that were supposed to reflect the cost of living there. The bay area and perhaps Manhattan were the highest, I forget what was in the second, and the third was basically "everywhere else". The difference between the top and bottom was maybe 10-15%, considerably less than the width of the salary band for each grade.

So to make it concrete, a new hire at a particular grade might have gotten $120k in SF or $105k in Little Rock (base). Considering the high taxes and housing costs in SF, the new hire in Little Rock would have had a much higher standard of living.

Of course, working at a non-HQ site is a major career-limiter, so 10 years down the road you might have been better off relocating anyway. Depends on where you are in life and what you want to achieve.

By contrast, non-US salaries are dramatically lower independent of the cost of living at a particular location. So if you're working for a US BigCo outside the US, you had better be in Chiang Mai or Belize, not Berlin or Hong Kong. As the author of this post notes, no one seems to know why this is so, only that it is.

They are also overestimating the likelihood of hitting the jackpot at a startup. The d100 rule of thumb guidance is insanely optimistic; there is not anywhere close to a 5% chance that your lottery ticket will be worth life-changing money; it's probably 1% at best (and later discussion suggests that 0.5% might be about right). Nor is there a 30% chance your ticket will be worth anything; 10% is more realistic (ignoring all the ways that your ticket in particular may end up being worthless), and the "anything" is likely to be so small as to be noise relative to a BigCo base salary. Remember, a general rule of thumb across all industries is that 90% of new ventures fail within 5 years.

Of course, given today's stock market prices, it's likely that any options you get at BigCo will be out of the money when they finally vest, and there's a good chance your RSUs will be worth less than you're valuing them today. But the effects of these things are still much smaller than the vastly overstated likelihood of ending up with a winning lottery ticket.

Obviously, it matters very much what the market price of the stock is. Your grant will be for a certain number of shares on some vesting schedule, not for a certain cash value.

Remember kids, stock prices don't always go up. Some stock prices go down, and sometimes all stock prices go down together. Those RSUs that, if fully vested, would have a market price of $400k at time of hire, may well be worth anything from $0 to $millions at the time they actually vest.

It is, in fact, possible that some aspect of a negotiation can be beneficial to both parties, but not for the reasons the parent suggested.

If we assume that your minimum bid is in fact below their maximum offer, then the market should clear: you should get hired. Under such circumstances, anything preventing a successful conclusion to the negotiations is harmful to both parties, since there exists a price at which both sides would be satisfied that they're getting more value than they're giving. Therefore, anything eliminating or preventing such an obstacle from arising is beneficial to both parties.

The corollary is that employers who insist on "social proof" place themselves at a disadvantage; they're less able to hire, and the people they do hire will likely be inferior. They are giving up value every time they enter negotiations, not by overpaying but by failing to engage in beneficial transactions. Those hidden costs can be, and often are, far greater than overpaying by some small percentage on the transactions in which they do engage.

To be fair to the Chinese, whether a price going up or down is alarming or encouraging depends on whether one wishes to buy or to sell.

> I've gotten "I need a number for us to continue" multiple times.

"Considering your obnoxious lack of professionalism and the fact that your approach is apparently acceptable to the company, I'm not sure there's any offer you could make that I'd be excited to accept. But everyone has his price, so write down $500,000 for now and I'll decide how much to increase it after I hear the rest of what you have to say."

Bluntly, it doesn't matter what the investors or managers do. They can piss off their employees, fire them, or do neither; they can cut products and staff or grow or both or neither; they can become two companies or three or 400; they can spend their $5 billion of cash on marketing or salaries or lawyers. Nothing is going to bring back "Yahoo's core business". Ever. It's dead. Dead dead dead. We're not even beating its bloody corpse because its corpse rotted into dust years ago.

Yahoo's investors should be focused on how they get as much as possible of the current market value of Yahoo's:

- Yahoo Japan shares - Alibabi shares - cash

Period. That's how they maximize total return. Not fretting over whether they pay for employees' phones and coffee. You're right that it isn't the problem. But neither is any of that other stuff you talked about.

It's dead, Jim. Move on.

If that's shameful, who should be ashamed?

- Yahoo's current management, for pretending there's anything to save?

- Yahoo's past management, for blowing their phenomenal brand equity?

- Yahoo's employees, for sticking around?

- Yahoo's investors, for owning this dog despite knowing the situation when they bought it?

- Congress, for having a braindead tax code?

- The press, for continuing to publish countless stories about a company that hasn't been relevant for at least a decade?

- Us, for continuing to read and comment on them?

- Someone else?

> some marketplaces (e.g. Amazon) have taken up suing fake/paid reviews

So, do you think it's likely that Amazon will sue these reviewers? Think carefully about the lobbying chain before answering.

Why would they be concerned? Their customers are cops. Cops have decided they want Tasers, and cops do whatever they want whether you like it or not. The response to the flap is just good business; posting the reviews in the first place was simply a waste of time because no amount of public outrage is going to change what cops do. That's been about as thoroughly demonstrated over the past 24 months as any theory of basic science has in the last 500 years.

When your customers are all cops, there's no reason to care whether you, your company, or your culture are viewed favorably by the common proles. The guy knows who his customers are, I'll give him that. They probably love him for this, because their attitude is exactly the same: Are you fucking joking? I'm a cop, I can do whatever I want.

I actually agree, but you have to pay people. That means you need to have enough cash -- either in startup capital or revenue -- to pay a fair market wage for the work you're getting. If you do, then absolutely that's how you should compensate your work force; it's better for everyone. But too many founders take $400k in seed money to start a business that's going to need 12 months and 4 people's time to reach revenue and another 18 months to break even. How are those founders supposed to make that work? The right answer is not to accept the $400k because he really needs more like $2m, but that's not what people are doing, so the extra money has to come from somewhere and that somewhere is the employees' pockets.

That might be part of it, but it also speaks to an extremely common mentality among founders that they can (and should) get a business off the ground with only a tiny fraction of the capital that's actually needed to do so. They're unwilling to bootstrap, but they also want to build a business that needs $25m of runway with $5m, and take the rest out of their employees' pockets. There are four parties to blame for this:

1. VCs, who refuse to adequately capitalize their portfolio companies.

2. The cultural environment that encourages this approach.

3. The founders, for their lack of business sense and willingness neither to bootstrap nor demand adequate startup capital.

4. The employees, for going along with it.

Many owners of bars (and similar cash businesses) skim some part of the business's cash for themselves. This has two effects: first, it provides them personally with undocumented and tax-free income; second, it greatly reduces the business's profits (because you're not just keeping the profit, you're also keeping the cost), in turn reducing or even eliminating its own tax burden. As far as I know, this is illegal in every jurisdiction that has an income tax, but it's still a very common practice. If you were the owner, rather than an employee, of such a bar, that would make this an attractive proposition, even ignoring the cost of the card processing.

As an employee, it might still be attractive if you're in the habit of stealing from the owner. Obviously if there's any documentation that the drink was served, it won't work as the contents of the till will be wrong and usually that comes straight out of your pay. That in turn takes us into all the various ways the help can steal from owners, which is another topic altogether.

If one assumes that everyone involved in the operation of the bar is law-abiding, then your point stands. But that's less common than you probably imagine.

That's fine, but if you're that kind of founder you have to know your limitations and hire a top-flight COO to handle that side of things. If you can't, or won't, you're just another shitty founder-CEO whose company is going to fail.

I see your point, but I guess I don't feel that strongly about it. We all have biases, and the way to ensure good results is to document them thoroughly and make sure they're reproduced. After all, some of the people with biases are right. Another good way to make this better has been suggested many times, perhaps most famously by Feynman: require that everyone publish their results, even if they're negative or inconclusive. That way you can't just publish a steady stream of things you agree with, and everyone gets to learn whatever you learned (or ought to have learned) from whatever experiments you did.

There's also your point in:

> He fails to report his funding sources.

Which to me is inherently dishonest, especially in a world where you can decide not to publish your results.

So I guess I still don't think what you're suggesting is ok, but my solution is different and more complex than I think you're suggesting. Mainly because I don't think unanimity is healthy and I don't think lack of bias is achievable or even necessarily desirable. But I still agree that what you've suggested is a problem given how science is done right now.

If you work out the math, Yahoo could sell those assets, take the tax hit (whether or not the tax is legally owed is irrelevant), then by shutting down the entire company, hand its shareholders several dollars per share more in cash than the market currently values the share.

It's possible that some shareholders would realize significant capital gains on that, and the taxes would offset part or all of the profit. But of course other shareholders would not only make a profit, but would also have a fat capital loss to go with it. It just depends on when they bought the shares and what they paid.

Overall, though, when one factors in all the tax effects, the market is assigning a negative value to Yahoo proper. Why? Because they, quite reasonably, assume that Yahoo proper will chew up the cash that's currently on the books and any that is obtained via asset sales. That is, should the shareholders ever receive a dividend of any kind, it is likely to be the current cash value of the company less some large fraction wasted between now and whenever that might hypothetically happen.

Bluntly, if the company were being valued as a going concern, the market would be pricing it a lot lower even than it is. The only reason for the share's relatively high price is the expectation that some kind of spinoff will happen to allow the shareholders to receive a larger fraction of the value of the company's assets than they would if the company sold those assets itself and used the capital to continue its own operations. In the latter event, one must reasonably assume the ultimate return to shareholders would be very close to zero (an eventual sale of the rotted carcass to private equity) or zero (bankruptcy).

That wasn't the question. The question was what Yahoo's business has been for the last 15 years, not what it was when the company was founded.

The actual answer is that Yahoo sells ads. That's their business model, just like it's Google's and Facebook's and hundreds of other companies', some very old and some founded yesterday.

I assume your question was intended as rhetorical, but there's an actual answer to it: because when the owner of the Yahoo stock (or a hypothetical Yahoo holding company for Alibaba stock) sells his shares, he will pay tax on his gain from that holding.

To turn the question on its head: why should some capital gains be taxed twice and others once (or in rare cases, three times or not at all)?

> You are being overly pedantic when it comes to _science_ and I say this as a trained scientist.

Reckon you're part of the problem, then. Appeal to authority and a refusal to hold research to a high standard.

> They should at minimum lose their jobs, have any research redacted from journals and possibly face jail time.

We agree on this. I don't even see how it's controversial. I'd just like to see the other 99% of crap science handled the same way.

I assume this happens already. It's unlikely that with so much money at stake, only one party is doing the dirty. Same applies to any issue where a lot of money is at stake.

> How would you feel if Hawkings were a Christian, and he would take money from the Pope and then wrote a report on how he saw Jesus in the black hole?

The same way I feel about all such claims: if they can't be independently reproduced, they're garbage. The more bizarre the claim, the easier it should be to disprove it. Authors who publish outlandish claims that cannot be substantiated by others will be first disgraced and then, worse, ignored.

Hawking and the pope aren't relevant to your example. All that matters is that someone claims he saw Jesus in a black hole. It's not even clear that such a thing is a falsifiable claim, and if it weren't, it wouldn't be accepted for publication anyway. But even if it took the form of one, it would be immediately disproved and that would be the end of it. It's the claim that's important, not who made it or who paid him to do so.

> We cannot know what his original view on climate change might have been.

Does it matter? You don't have the right to demand that everyone agree with you, even if you're right. We don't burn people at the stake or try to silence them for disagreement. Please stop trying to create unanimity; it's not healthy.

What we should punish people for: lying to Congress, taking or offering bribes, doing dishonest work while in the public employ. All of those apply, and any should be sufficient, at a bare minimum, to justify firing these professors. However, thinking that climate change doesn't exist or isn't anthropogenic is not a crime. Saying so is not a crime, either. And I'm damned glad of it!