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I've always been curious about trying a system that rewarded people for the value they created now, instead of owning shares/options and waiting for a liquidity event. Bonuses are the traditional option I guess, but is there anything else? How else might you distribute a portion of funds earned by the company in a meaningful manner to employees?

I'm Australian, the law may be different over in the US.

Usually you want a contract to specify IP rights. You own the work you author, whether you're paid for it or not, unless you specifically transfer ownership of the IP in the contract. If you're a programmer, you may assign the IP rights of the project code to the client, but only issue a non-exclusive worldwide licence to your utility code. Similarly, if you're a photographer, you still own the actual photograph, but may specify to a client how it's legally able to be reproduced. Plenty examples abound, depending on your line of work.

Mostly, I find written contracts are WAY clearer about who gets what and when, and shows the client is at least willing to "trust but verify". I wouldn't do business without them.

No I think you're right, they shouldn't ship gimmicks (though personally I think the Touch Bar is interesting) - they should improve the damn specs. However, I still think they'd receive the same level of criticism if that's what they did (hence, damned if you do...).

I'd like to see improvement too, but the problem is everytime Apple tries to improve a product, everyone talks how Apple have lost their way and haven't put out any revolutionary products in X years (admittedly, sometimes Apple's marketing department doesn't help).

Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Agreed, what's required is solid discourse, to fill in the endless details of a plan that will no doubt take longer than expected. However, the broad strokes are there, the goals have been set, and action is being taken. This is what makes me excited - not SpaceX, not Elon Musk, but that someone is trying to make commonplace space travel in my lifetime a possibility.

I think people getting excited about space and space travel again is a good thing. It's the first step to getting people involved again, even if only to remember what we're capable of as a species, despite all our flaws and all the other problems we've yet to solve. Whether you agree with Musk's methods or not, I enjoy living in a time where we dream about the possibilities of new worlds, rather than reminiscing about a golden age of space travel long past.

They also send you free repair kits too, which I'm about to use on my pair of them.

And here I am trying to transition going from tech into music (as a musician though - we'll see how it goes). Any words of wisdom from your side of the music bench?

I don't know if statuspage.io is similar to what you're doing, but their blog documents much of how they got profitable. Makes for interesting reading.

Thanks for this. I had never read any of his poems, I'll have to do that now.

The place I'm currently about to leave had a similar situation in times past, due to the fact they weren't a software organisation. Facebook is a software organisation, so the same situation would rarely apply. However, I think you should trust but verify. If you're unable to accomplish the verify part (for whatever reason), you'll have problems.

Is it you that's toxic, or is it the organisation? I wouldn't readily assume you are the problem. If you're in a culture that avoids confrontation and criticism, anyone who is outspoken will be targeted as a troublemaker. Just some food for thought.

This is where convenience trumps security. Virgin Money used to require you to enter your password using an on-screen keyboard, except they REARRANGED THE LAYOUT EVERYTIME YOU USED IT. Thank fuck they eventually got rid of it, but it was such an abject pain in the ass, I cringed everytime I needed to log in to view my details.

I imagine this is a corollary of the phrase, "you manage what you measure."

Usually the metrics we measure are an indirect substitute for what we actually want to measure, e.g., lines of code as a measure of programmer productivity. What inevitably happens is that behaviour is optimised for the metric, and not what the metric was intending to measure. It's really just gaming the system.

It's less expensive than Sydney or Melbourne, but I'm not sure I'd call it affordable at the moment.

You got that right, the housing market is getting more expensive here all the time. I pay slightly less than you for a 1B flat down at Glenelg (though I do have a sunroom which I use for my office). Mind you, I have no need for anymore room than that; I downsized from a 4B house in Brompton which was cool but ended up getting too expensive (and getting housemates was a pain).

Judging from the parent comment, I don't think growing potatoes is the problem, but storing them.

I've seen both, so I'm guessing there are multiple things that make a productive programmer.

Where does it say GrantTree pays significantly less than market rate?

BobX is the logical conclusion of said behaviour.

http://thedailywtf.com/articles/We-Use-BobX

Was hoping the website was a .it domain.

There's still some dopey shit that happens here, but it's nothing compared to the US. Glad to have you Mahmud.

That's gold. I'm going to use that one next time.

I did this with my brother. Would always ask me beginner programming questions instead of getting Google-fu (while running a business making FileMaker Pro integrations, ugh).

Eventually I LMGTFY. He stopped asking.

It's decriminalised in SA, but they always change the bloody number of plants that are considered a commercial quantity. I don't think anyone gives a shit anyway, everyone here in Adelaide is puffing away anyway.

Any suggestions for a format that is sane?

The amount saved affords an extra C-level hire. What intrigues me though, is what required them jumping from 25 to 80 people.

Get out of there as soon as you can.

I am the team I am afraid, and only at the planning stage so there is no code to speak of as yet. I'm in Australia so it might be better to send an e-mail and see what can be done. Thanks for the info.

Curious, was just thinking about this the other day. What does Gravitational offer in the way of special sauce that can't be achieved just be working with Docker/Kubernetes directly? What cost to the developer? How are you taking on customers at the moment?

Just asking because I was in the planning stages for something and this was the first step to what I wanted to achieve. I don't know if it's worth learning Docker/Kubernetes or signing up for something like this before I've coded anything.