Comment by wowdidntreal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wowdidntreal | Hacker News Reader

Why give employees big payouts, when they'll work just as hard for mere unsubstantiated promises of such payouts?

The article shows how most employees are too occupied counting their imaginary fortunes to seek the most basic grasp of how their options really work.

The race for riches in early-stage startups has become a gold-rush, and now that we are clearly after the peak, most employees are chasing the dreams of yesterday's big-payoff exits, failing to look around and notice that these were rare even back in the day, and now they hardly ever happen at all.

Investors got savvy about protecting their investment, while employees are just as clueless as ever, so even when big IPOs do rarely happen, the employees see very little profit.

This works very well for the investors. The downside is the erosion of equity as an incentive, but even more so - any sense of working towards a common goal and shared success, which is what startups are supposed to be about.

This will hurt the entire industry. On an individual level, if you accept substantially lower pay, for a tiny unprotected bit of equity and someone's unsubstantiated promises that it will be "one day" earn you millions, then you are a fool.

Nothing will change, the industry won't suffer. There is a new crop of fools every May.

Do you say May in relation to the "eternal September" (+ 9 months to have a baby?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduation

Sometimes I admire investment banks. They screw over anybody else who doesn't work at their company but within the company the pay seems really generous for everybody. Tech companies could easily pay much, much more and still make a lot of money for investors. Why are bankers so highly paid? Is it because they are asking for more money?

> Why are bankers so highly paid?

The skills acquired at their day jobs also enable them to be much more financially savvy than tech workers. Tech workers, I imagine, get better work computers for similar reasons.

That's a good point. I have been thinking along similar lines about the push to 401k instead of pensions and people having to do their own investing. There are people who can focus 100% of their time on finance whereas we have to be good at tech, which already is a complex full time job, but then we additionally have to be investment experts.

Excel is such a highly valued skill compared to machine learning in the mind of bankers, they think their job can't be replaced by AI as did the Luddites of the 18th century when industrial revolution took over.

Then explain why we've seen almost no automation of the workflow of investment bankers of the last 15 years even though it is a massive payroll expense in banks that are aggressively cutting headcount and automating back office functions.

It's not a job that is easily displaced by code.

who says the next 15 years won't see the automation of investment bankers? We've only recently started seeing the rise of deep learning to reach new heights like AlphaGo, put Picasso to shame, drive cars, replace managers in Japanese factories, mimic human voice, predict conversion and see patterns & deep links unclear to the human.

I don't see why we can't automate the workflow of coke snorting gordon gekko wannabe fuckboys on wall street in the next 15 years as will a large chunk of professional careers. To boot, we see lot of the floor trading becoming automated as a result of the innovation we had in the past 15 years.

Luddites of the 21st century will hit the mid to lower upper class hard, I'd love to work on such problems.

It's going to be one of the last jobs to be automated because it has a massive amount of client facing/relationship work and despite your disdain for it, the fact is that it is more complex and demanding than the vast majority of white collar jobs out there. It also is an extremely small industry in terms of actual headcount, probably 150K worldwide

We've had plenty of stuff like NLP for 10-Ks and management calls but the job has been relatively unchanged overtime save for the introduction of CapIQ, Bloomberg and Excel. Which isn't to say that it can't change, but that it probably won't happen anytime soon.

I have rarely worked somewhere (as a tech worker) where I received a better work computer than a manager. I consider myself an above-average negotiator (compared to my peers) and my comments fall on deaf ears.

The comp is standard across the industry with extremely limited room for negotiation. It isn't a function of them being 'savvy'.

> The comp is standard across the industry

GP's question was "Why is the industry standard high?"

Same reason the top paid executives aside from CEOs tend to be CFOs: they know what they are worth and know to ask for that and often refuse to settle for less.

> Why are bankers so highly paid?

Because a job candidate being told at an interview "we are looking for people who are motivated by things other than money" would walk out, and the banks know it.

That is my dream. I would love to share the wealth with my employees, nay that is in accurate, partners that show up 9-5pm who weather the ups and downs not funding some coke snorting gordon gekko wannabe fuckboy lifestyle who thinks $100,000 USD is pocket change.

I'd give my hard working employees a good chunk of the company over VC any fucking day. I'd love to see a PHP developer take home high six digit bonus checks, even after they leave if the stuff they build keeps making the company money, sort of like the million dollar royalty fees that were paid to developers of Tomb Raider II.

The jobs of bankers, lawyers and businessman is to negotiate and evaluate risks. They do that all day along.

The jobs of an engineer at a startup... oh wait is that a job? I thought they were just naive kid fucking around and making money for the board[1].

[1] Don't worry. You'll understand when you'll see your CEO negotiate £8 millions more shares while children are taking the job for less than 4k and they think it's a good deal. Best day ever! :D

You can't fix other people but you can choose whether you want to be a naive child or a business man.

For one, they routinely work 80+ hours a week and are on call constantly.

Almost every day of their job is managing extremely time sensitive transactions that are often the most important single event in the lifecycle of any given company.

> Why give employees big payouts, when they'll work just as hard for mere unsubstantiated promises of such payouts?

That's why we should start teaching people that they won't get rich.

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