Hacker News Reader

Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

>People nowadays often ask me how much money we get per bottle sold. My answer is that we were paid about £3,000 all-in for the development

This is an awful part of a great read.

View on HN

Well that's the trade. You get a guaranteed pay, the company assumes the risk and gets the reward. In dollars today it would be about $45,000- and think of all the times they would have done that development and the product didn't take off.

Ideas aren't really worth that much. Everybody has ideas. It's the execution, and the risk taking, where the money is.

My professor always said:

"ideas are like hemorrhoids, every asshole sooner or later gets some"

It reminds me of the scene on The Wire with the chicken mcnuggets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyg_v7Vxo4A

If you want to get paid more than a one-time flat fee, don't sell your IP. It's that simple.

Despite appearances, there's no IP in a recipe.

You can keep it as a trade secret -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret.

Let the potential buyer taste it without sharing the recipe, then negotiate the terms of sharing how to make it, plus your not disclosing it.

Though be careful, some people are crazy good at telling what's in some food just by taste and smell.

(I know some. In a restaurant they can tell you exactly where the kitchen staff put in the extra work to do things 'properly', and where the chef took a shortcut.)

Yes, that's the other option. But secrecy is contractual, fragile (see other reply above) and only really protects you vis-a-vis the sampler, not the wider world.

It’s the same for graphic designers, make a logo and get paid once, no matter how large the company...

Sometimes you get paid more than once.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2004273/Woman-design...

Outlier, had her in my mind her when I was writing my previous response. That’s why Basecamp(37 signals) stopped doing graphic design.

Because swoosh?

They stopped doing graphic design because one designer got 500 Nike stock shares?

Similarly, Brooklyn Brewery’s branding was done for a 5% stake in the company back before they had any money

https://www.fastcodesign.com/3059055/the-true-story-of-milto...

Same for anyone who works on contract, in any industry. Designers will obviously charge more money depending on the size and budget of the client...

I was an engineer at Boeing, designing airplane parts. Was I ripped off because I don't get an ongoing royalty for every 757 sold? Engineering is creative work, too.

Per-plane sold? That's underselling yourself. Go the song-writer way: demand to have your royalties calculated based on flight-hours or per-passenger ticket /s.

I like the cut of your jib!

I honestly think that in a just society, you would deserve a fraction of the profits, yes. Even if it's some percentage of a cent.

I was paid for my time spent there, an amount freely agreed upon by myself and Boeing. How is that not just in every way?

I did want a piece of Boeing, though, and I did it the usual way - I bought BA stock. It's now worth something like, 100x what I paid for it.

Anyone can get a "piece of the action" of any public corporation by buying shares of it. It'll cost you less than $10 in commission if you use one of the online brokers.

Many corporations will also sell employees stock at a discount (usually called an "employee stock purchase plan"). Or they may grant you some stock options.

You made a thing that is now part of someone's capital. That person is getting exorbitantly rich far out of proportion both to the effort you put in and to the risk they took in bringing you on. In what ways would the world not be a better place if some of that capital defaulted to its creator? Would this arrangement be any stranger than some of the Byzantine corporate laws we already have to deal with? I'd say that a great number of our societal ills are caused by the top 1% hoarding over 40% of the wealth, and it would be great if we could take steps to correct this injustice systemically. Maybe not even with new laws. Maybe by simply incentivizing more companies to organize as cooperatives. I dunno! But the current system seems unfair, and even if some employees make bank, most of that bank is only human scale — not corporate profit scale, which is what the executives see.

Shares aren't really the same thing since they don't grant you royalties; they're really more like supplemental income.

IMO.

Shares give you a cut of the profits.

> That person is getting exorbitantly rich far out of proportion both to the effort you put in and to the risk they took in bringing you on.

Investors are always looking everywhere for deals like that, which means in reality they are pretty rare.

If you believe you are unfairly compensated for your efforts, you can:

1. quit and get a better deal elsewhere

2. negotiate for a better deal

3. borrow money from a bank/friends/relatives and exploit the opportunity yourself

4. join a workers' collective/cooperative/commune

All those are perfectly legal and possible in the US, and people do it all the time.

..and for everything else. Several of companies that I have worked for are still using code that I wrote without continuously paying me for it. That was what we agreed on so I don't see any injustice.

You missed the second part of the sentence... * ...though the company did keep employing me for another 30 years.*

Sounds like he parlayed the Bailey's idea into a career-spanning contract (or full-time gig, not sure which). That's far from a bad outcome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com