Six figures in the bay area is less than 79k in Rochester when it's cost of living adjusted. This article is just wrong in many ways.
1,368 karma · joined September 16, 2009
Room and board is given to a housekeeper. That in and of itself can translate to thousands a month in rent and many times, are better living conditions than HK citizens can afford.
The author comes across as someone who's looking to find fault so I wouldn't be surprised if she read too much in to this (then again I wouldn't be surprised if she was spot on). I can certainly see people having the same reaction in this interview to men.
I'm not sure if I'm the only one, but the first story written by Alden had meat and data to it (although with heavy spin in a certain light). However, all these follow up pieces are weak and have no substance. Does anyone else feel he's doing himself a disservice by detracting from the original piece with these followups?
Working in a commodity job means less opportunity. It's the same reason not every company has Uber's valuation. Pay is (roughly) correlated to value.
I'm not worried one bit, as we had the best technology available. And with the amount of data being generated, it's basically impossible for them to arbitrarily find something unless they're specifically looking for it. Privacy by bad technology and hard problems.
Visual Studio seems to be the only real benefit I'm seeing (and I agree, it's a very major benefit).
I'm trying to point out that there is a very large number of companies where open sourcing on acquisition doesn't make sense. And there's also very serious financial risk to founders if they choose to adopt this idea. The way you've stated this suggestion, I'm afraid unsuspecting founders will adopt this policy and shoot themselves in the foot a few years down the line.
I draw a lot of this from personal experience. I just sold my company a few months back, I currently work at an open source company (which you've already mentioned as one of the "model" OSS companies), I have first hand experience with a company getting acquired that had this "open source" clause a few weeks back, and I'm also heavily involved in the due diligence process for many tier 1 VCs that look to invest in the infrastructure space.
Having been through all of that, I can say that my personal outcome would not have been possible had I had the "open source" clause for my company, and we would have needed to pivot hard. The company acquired with this clause lost a vast majority of its acquisition value because of this "open source" clause. It's basically become a talent acq. And from doing due diligence/working at an OSS company, it's become clear that most founders SEVERELY underestimate the challenges in building an OSS company. It's a double edged sword. And it's one where arguably the edge facing you is sharper than the one facing your market.
It's not impossible to build a business around open source, but it's incredibly hard. Take MySQL for example. MySQL's initial pitch was this "We'll destroy 50% of the DB market, and then capture 25% of the remaining market." And MySQL the company never really made it. This is with arguably the largest pure technical market to ever exist (databases).
Forcing an open source on acquisition severely limits your exit options and lowers your acquisition value. In terms of the companies you've mentioned with commercial open source models, none of them are clear successes. All still have battles to fight. Open source is a really hard path to take, and it's littered with dead companies and zombies who's revenues have been cannibalized by their open source creations.
As much as the users feel like startup founders owe them something, startup founders are human like everyone else. They don't exist to be our slaves. Imposing rules like this on companies would result in fewer tools and companies overall as the companies themselves would no longer make economic sense.
There's quite a bit that's misleading/not quite correct in the TC article, but we definitely have a solid plan in place for sustainability.
1. I've never heard of your University. It's not from the US and isn't Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, MIT or Berkeley, so it isn't an immediate forward to a phone screen. Not an IIT or Waterloo either.
2. The GPA system I don't understand, but doesn't seem particularly high. I'm not a stickler for GPA, but it seems to be close to a 3.0. At that GPA, even if you were from a top CS school, it'd be a tough sell for a phone screen.
3. I don't see a class schedule, have you ever written an operating system from scratch before? Written your own network stack?
4. Have you done something amazing worthy of recognition? Amazing top coder results? IOI Medal? ICPC World Finals? Again not necessary for a phone screen, but given that nothing else is a signal for a phone screen, this would be it.
5. Expected 2016. Ok, at least if we hire him as an intern, there's a good chance he'll come back as a full time. Sophomores are risky since most will intern elsewhere next year and you won't be able to hire them back.
6. No evidence of work (OSS contributions, intelligent blog, etc) to judge you by.
I sometimes go through 3-4 interviews a day, and the fact is, most people with perfect resumes and 4.0's from Stanford fail my interview anyway. Nothing here signals to me that having a dev spend an hour in a phone screen with you isn't a waste of everyone's time. You're going to need some hook to make it to the next step. If there's a referral from someone internal that says to interview this guy, we're giving you the benefit of the doubt. Admittedly, these are snap judgements I'm making and are very likely completely unfair. There aren't enough hours in the day to give everyone applying a shot at a phone screen, so we need to weed out 99% of the resume's immediately--even if that means throwing away a few that would have passed.
Not reading the contract and understanding it shows naivete and a lack of common sense. This also makes me question how much of your opinion of unbabel should be attributed to your naive worldview.
They couldn't have chosen a more misguided and uninformed kid to interview. If this article is indicative of the current collegiate generation's mindset (which I'm pretty sure it isn't), none of them understand how Silly Valley or Wall Street works. Actually, most of Silly Valley doesn't even know how Silly Valley works, so I guess that's fair...
Also, nobody seems to understand the difference between wealth and earnings. 1% wealth isn't the same as 1% earnings and is a hell of a lot better. I forget the stat but a surprising number of people in the US like 25% hit 1% earnings at some point in their life due to some event.