On leaving Mapbox after 12 years
trashmoon.com
trashmoon.com
This is a key observation. Every incredible team and inspirational idea eventually has to make the unit economics work. The longer it takes for a leadership team to realize this and prioritize it, the more difficult it is for people (ICs and managers) to internalize the changes that need to be made. Worst of all is when the shift happens because runway is getting short, and "get rich quick" projects become the focus instead of building a good product.
> ...you must understand what your company needs to do to be sustainable. It very likely is different from what they’re doing now, and may come with unexpected ethical compromises.
This sounds like a difficult situation, but is certainly something people should think about. Things can get weird when a company is running out of money.
Maybe unions and workers having more control could curb it? But in such a late stage it sounds almost impossible to achieve.
Cars are certainly a problem, but technology has by and far been a great thing, and I would question whether the gaming is really such a positive industry in the end either.
But the union drive came far too late to help the larger problem. The big change happened in 2017 when Softbank invested $164M into MapBox. In retrospect it was far too much money with too many expectations. And with the ugly side effect of salting the earth for any other map startups. It only got worse in 2021 when MapBox's attempt to go public via a SPAC failed. They're plodding along now but it's hard to see what a good final outcome is going to be.
I'm unsure on that. Mapbox built a bunch of good tech (mostly around vector tiles), open-sourced it, and then lost interest in smaller customers in their rush for the petrodollar.
This has been genuinely great for bootstrapped map businesses. You can easily list a dozen who are using .mvt tech right now and making a good living out of it.
True, it wasn't good for Mapzen. But I can't weep too many tears for something funded with Samsung Accelerator magic money, much though they did hire one of the smartest teams in the business - Softbank vs Samsung is not a battle I can bring myself to care about.
I 100% agree with you that Mapbox went too far, too fast. But on balance I think their trajectory has (unintentionally) been good for wider mapping tech.
The employees have dramatically less incentive than the owners and management to earn the owners an adequate return on their investment.
It is rather strange that in a field where there are all sorts of autonomous movements such as open source projects or hacker collectives, there is still the hierarchical belief that the managers knows best. Ah, well FOSS always do have their share of Benevolent Dictator for Life positions.
What has led you to this conclusion?
I’ve observed the opposite to be true: employees have more incentive than investors to seek the long-term success of a company. Building a career within a company and industry requires an investment of time and effort. Career changes are slow and become increasingly difficult. In contrast, investors can invest in anything so investments are more liquid than careers. In the case of a company failure, well managed investment portfolios are exposed to significantly less risk than the typical salaried career.
Employees concept of this is not aligned with investors. Investors need a return on investment. It’s not enough for them to have a moderately profitable company with happy employees. They need a big exit event that fits their investment characteristics.
And this is fair because then accepting VC money gives them an advantage over their competitors who might have bootstrapped. We shouldn’t feel sorry for employees of a heavily VC funded company, but by their bootstrapped competitors trying to compete.
We shouldn’t try to protect employees with high salaries at entrenched big tech companies. We should allow entrepreneurs to create new companies to challenge them which is better for society. It’s better to have less monopolies and it would be better if one high salary was split in two due with someone from a smaller competing company. This is better for the labor market.
But the VCs whose needs you are arguing for are the ones who are seeking those monopolies, at least in tech. With the advent of blitzscaling as a preferred strategy, we are seeing VCs who are seeking to create monopolies and own markets from the start. So why do you feel sorry for those investors? They burn plenty of money, and if they lose money on one company, they have plenty more in their portfolios.
And if unions are truly as detrimental to the system as you claim, then perhaps it is good if they arise in VC-hyperfunded startups, because then they will thwart these nascent monopolies, and allow bootstrapped companies more of a fighting chance.
Your narrative contradicts itself.
> We should allow entrepreneurs to create new companies to challenge them which is better for society.
The existence of unions would not poise a challenge to entrepreneurship.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/06/opinion/warren-workers-bo...
Still, having a union would provide a stronger bargaining position than individuals voicing concerns during all-hands.
It's one of the few moments where rank-and-file folk realize they do need a say in where things are heading - because you start seeing that the leaders aren't somehow magic beings with perfect decision making qualities. And, at the same point, you get strong reminders that your livelihood is coupled to the company's livelihood - which is making bad decisions right now.
That's why "fight for survival" is a common inflection point for unionization.
Buts it’s not. They can leave and find another job easily.
I agree that management can often be shit and make bad decisions. But at the end of the day everyone is working to make the owners a lot of money, and if the owners cannot see how shit management is, why should employees bother? They don’t stand to gain, only keep working at a company they believe could do great things. See…the incentives for employees drift off into intangible and unmeasurable things.
If a union was able to shift the strategy of a company, what happens if they are wrong and it bankrupts the company. They have no skin in the game. It makes no sense.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31818323
> why should employees bother?
Perhaps they care about the mission. Perhaps they care about the customers. Perhaps they want to ensure the work they've been working on was not made in vain. You seem to see work as purely satisfying the lower ranks of Maslow's hierarchy, but for many workers it is also a means of self-actualization.
> If a union was able to shift the strategy of a company, what happens if they are wrong and it bankrupts the company.
And what if management or the owners do that? How about giving someone else involved in the endeavor a try?
> They have no skin in the game.
They literally have skin in the game?
2) Uh, yes, unions do have skin in the game. Again, it's the whole "keeping your livelihood" thing.
3) I'm not saying it's the best moment for people to start thinking about a union. They should've done that way earlier. Better late than never.
4) "What happens if they are wrong and it bankrupts the company" - I am sorry, do you have any idea what unions are and how they work? There are any number of vultures that'll fleece the body of a company before a union can "bankrupt" it. They happen to be all on the ownership side.
Basically it happens when people start needing money for life, and that need becomes more pressing than idealism.
Consider the start of your career, maybe you came from school or college, probably you had _very_ low money needs. You may have had subsidised living (living with parents, student loans etc.). You live in a world where money isn't as important, you have no obligations, you are as idealistic as you'll ever be.
At this point your world is "open source" - everything should be free, make the world a better place. It's not hard to find like-minded people, join companies with like-minded founders.
But life happens. You have expenses. Relationships, kids, obligations. If you have employees you have to make payroll. Some might call it "growth" - some might call it "growing up" - really its just discovering (and losing) some of those subsidies you took for granted.
Crucially it happens at different rates for different people. So inevitably there's friction - this isn't the company I joined - and so on.
It's hard for employees to understand the pressures that come with being an employer. Pressures that lead to decisions an employer would rather not have to make. Pressure to make payroll. Pressure to somehow make it work. Seeing the car park and realise the number of people dependant on making that work.
To an employee every decision looks like maximising profit. And in some companies that is true. In others its about maximising income, income to pay everyone, income to keep the lights on, income to build reserves to weather the storms.
Employees have the luxury of quietly looking elsewhere. Once they're set then can simply leave. Employers don't have that luxury.
Unions, especially unions belonging to one specific business, not industry wide, are not a bad thing. But a seat at the table means understanding the responsibility of that table - and the need to satisfy the needs of all, not just your own. I've seen unions be a huge asset, I've seen them destroy factories and industries.
Yes companies pivot from open source all the time, because yes they need to "capture" value - because at some point costs, and life, catch up and unfortunately "giving it away for free" doesn't really pay the bills.
I wish people better understood what taking VC money means: trading control for money. While employees might _feel_ the company is still theirs, that’s only true to the extent that they hold majority control of the board of directors.
It’s certainly possible to take VC money and keep your original vision intact. But only if your original vision works well enough to keep your shareholders happy. Failing that, the board will push management to compromise with the ideals as much as needed to get a return on investment.
The point of VC funding is not to pay salaries, really. If you squint it seems close enough, but it sets a terrible precedent that most VC's wouldn't want: looking at venture funding as how the company pays its bills. That's a natural way to read your statement - but also counterproductive & undesirable.
The point of VC funding is to take a profitable business and allow it to scale. Ideally the company could turn $1 into $1.25, before funding; that is, ideally it's making money. It should be able to pay some bills.
The VC funding is helping it to make more money, faster, and shortening the loop from sales -> payment -> expansion. It's helping it to leapfrog its competitors. That's what that money should be doing.
But what if it hasn't found product-market fit? Well, it's still not good to look at the VC's as "where our money comes from." That source is supposed to be customers, and you never want the focus to stray too far from there.
There’s a heck of a lot of VC money funding only the dream of a profitable business.
Once you take VC, the goal of the company is never to make the world better or empower their employees. The goal is now solely to make money, by any means it can. The funders will allow you to do that ethically, at first. When you're not making their return as fast as they'd like, which you never will, the ethics go out the window.
Unless you are Facebook, Tesla or SpaceX?
1. Do I recommend the company to my network? I can make it a lot cheaper or more expensive to hire.
2. How do I spend my time? All my technical choices will make certain changes easier down the line, and others harder. I work hard to understand the business context & help those choices serve our shared goals, but the emphasis there can be on "shared".
3. How much do I streamline my own work? I can work efficiently, or I can wait for that build to finish and that PR to be approved and merged before I move on to the next thing. This can be a particularly effective way to incentive investment in a platform team & build tools, if I'm not allowed to just fix them myself.
4. What do I collaborate on with my coworkers? We can pick priorities we care about, and negotiate together for specific improvements. I've gotten more vacation time, better computers, bigger screens, paid on-calls and time to fix bugs all just by talking with people about what's hard about our work.
5. Insisting on pushing improvements to open source software upstream if we are going to use the libraries at all. The company could decide it wants to write everything entirely in house, but as long as we are using open source software I personally only make changes to it that we are going to push back to the community.
And I am sure there are more: those are just the ones I've used recently.
I have observed many folks join startups as employees, take on risk without understanding it and without a clear benefit.
This is not true. Employees carry salary risk. For most people, unplanned loss of salary is catastrophic in the short-term.
Imagine you've put your soul into it, and some years later they tell you that you can no longer pursue your vision and respect your users, and you're now a mere executor. Your opinion no longer matters, and the fact that you have one at all is a nuisance for the new management.
I personally don't work for the money, for me the money is very much a side effect of making the world a better place.
Ya, my argument is that people are absolutely naive to do this, for the reasons I mentioned.
> For me the money is very much a side effect of making the world a better place.
That's what they want you to believe. People sure as hell weren't clanging pots and pans for the software developers who instead of writing code all day in their ivory tower in downtown SF, only to leave and walk past human feces, needles, and suffering, instead got to go home and write that code from their $5k 1bdr apartment. If you can try to choose your industry more carefully, that's great, but don't lie and tell me you're paid so well because of your noble contribution to the human race.
People should try and be good to others, and if they can afford it, work for companies on products that don't actively harm people, but when they can't pay you or their stakeholders decide that's irrelevant, you can leave.
A single company, especially one that is not generating monopoly/oligopoly profits and is still dependent on funding, is not really able to: unionizing creates a steep competitive downside on the capital market that is not offset by enough employee retention benefit to be worth it, and that alone creates existential risk for the whole company. Long term, it simply helps another competitor to come up without a union.
Systemic problems need systemic solutions. It saddens me a bit that people want social change so much but dislike politics so much more that they take up the wrong fight, and then retreat to something like making videogames, which frankly as an industry has an even worse track record than tech in terms of respect for its workers.
I hope OP changes their perspective and fights a wider fight, either on behalf of a party or of a larger union.
My old employer made the leap to employee-owned and they seem to be going from strength to strength. https://torchbox.com/careers/employee-owned-trust
Just saying here's an anecdatum about a money-making business that said the same kinds of things and is doing very well for itself.
Germany's auto industry is a great example of a highly unionized industry. Pay is good. But also, it's very hard for Germany to enact anti-oil and gas policies (carbon reduction / pro-environment) because it hurts auto workers. It should also give anyone really pro-union pause to consider why Germany didn't produce Tesla. They had every advantage imaginable including a well-trained workforce, existing manufacturing infrastructure, the deepest capital markets in Europe, and existing distribution relationships. And yet, the Americans beat them to it. Why, you ask? Because workers don't want to retrain or change what they've been doing for 50+ years. There's too much inertia, too much complacency, too much "this is how we've always done things".
this does not take into account the other side of the ledger -- the behavior, movement and dispersion of Kapital. Is there a shortage of profit in the last forty years, that requires creative destruction at every turn?
Perhaps the secret ingredient would be something called "stability" that includes accounting for the real system-level costs of luxury resorts, massive sports franchises, excessive personal medication and single-use plastics?
Am I seriously proposing that the German Auto Industry is good the way it is for the next 200 years? no.. is California a model for the world economic growth in the next twenty years? you tell me
Growth creates new opportunities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative#Economic_stability
On the other hand, less free market - which is what you get when you allow monopolies and oligopolies to dominate it - is harmful to them, just like any other business that's not "big enough".
You may be right. It still seems like the easiest solution is for all the startups to unionize so they don't have any choice: they can either invest in unionized startups or they can stop being VCs.
It's much simpler than this and it is about making money.
Whether unions impact the ultimate success (in terms of ability to build) of a company or not, they certainly shift the share of money that is going towards labor as opposed to owners who want a profit.
This lowers the expected return of company equity which means people will be willing to pay less and you will be able to raise less money while you are trying to scale up. A non-unionized competitor will be able to raise more money and if there are positive returns to scale, outscale & outcompete.
European approaches like sectoral bargaining and codetermination don’t have these problems; a single company isn’t disadvantaged vs its competitors and the employees on the board are motivated to grow the company. Europe doesn’t have VCs and the culture doesn’t support failure like Silicon Valley, but that’s for different reasons.
No, it is the same effect I am describing but inter-national as opposed to inter-firm. Capital allocation is transnational.
You can't start a company there because all this social spending makes it super hard to get going. I think the US is heading this way too now, toward lots of big companies with fat required benefit packages the little guys can never match (even if they eventually go on to become huge).
I wish people who would being so starry-eyed about Europe. One of the 10 biggest companies in Italy is the post office. Lots of industrial power, that.
The US actually got there first, and hasn’t collapsed in any wars recently, and as such we’re on the old version of all government software so it all sucks yet nobody is willing to risk upgrading. Starting from scratch is a lot easier since there’s nothing to lose. (And of course, having the country collapse is bad too.)
FAANGs have European offices with work councils and all and aren’t considered unproductive, but they’re not the corporate headquarters because they didn’t start there.
Certainly some European countries prefer having a few old large companies because it’s easier to regulate. Asia has the same problem; it’s an everywhere except Silicon Valley thing.
edit: actually, ASML is an example of a European headquartered tech company where all the value is “actually” American. Not sure how that happened. Video game studios also seem a lot more international than other tech companies.
FAANG companies having EU offices with work councils is completely irrelevant to what I am saying.
> It still seems like the easiest solution is for all the startups to unionize so they don't have any choice: they can either invest in unionized startups or they can stop being VCs.
Yes. Or fight for workers' rights in the even broader sense (not just startups or tech).
Alternately, long term it helps attract and retain excellent staff who care about the business and feel like they have a stake, and helps the business make better decisions because the decisionmaking process takes more information into account.
Again I agree exceptions exist, but if it was some magic secret sauce, it'd probably be obvious by now...
Citation needed.
Unionizing by itself does absolutely nothing, and if I, as the employer, genuinely want the best for my employees there will be little friction even with a union.
I think a huge factor in this is that there are zero unionized businesses around in general. Chances of any of them being invested in by VC is therefore similarly zero.
If some marginally popular company unionizes, everyone will see that it’s not the big deal they make it out to be.
A collective of employees is not going to make better decisions than management. And if there are some who would, then they should be moved into management.
I only see the impact a union could have on improving morale and staff retention and therefore productivity if management/owners didn’t value it enough. These are things management are measuring and factoring in to their decisions. If management/owners are this bad then there isn’t much hope for the company.
And without a union management could simply provide autonomy to have the same effect. If Union force needs to be used to get mgmt to do the right thing for maximizing profits, it’s not really worth it.
True enough in tech, though the economy will tell.
> For investors they lose a lot of money. Employees have less to gain+lose.
VCs expect 9/10 of their investments to fail. Ask Masa Son how much Vision Fund's startup losses impact Softbank's bottom line, or his machinations.
> A collective of employees is not going to make better decisions than management.
Unsubstantiated value judgement.
> If management/owners are this bad then there isn’t much hope for the company.
And what's so wrong trying to save a company?
> If Union force needs to be used to get mgmt to do the right thing for maximizing profits, it’s not really worth it.
That's just defeatism!
There is literally no higher calling.
Employees already have a say.
Startups trying to survive don’t need the distraction and overhead of unions. What is the point of ideal conditions if the company won’t exist.
Yes I am saying that. They need more flexibility. Imagine a startup that cannot make employees work longer than 8 hours a day. It’s just detached from reality.
There are benefits that come from being early stage startup employee. More ownership, equity, etc.
Employees can chose if they want that and if they don’t.
My measure is if someone else wants to do your job for less pay with same conditions then they should have a chance at that job. Existing employees shouldn’t gate keep by inflating their wages and conditions.
Unions only seem to care about existing employees to the exclusion of those who are looking for work and would work for less pay or conditions.
I think you mis-understand that unions and coops are about employees having a say. If the employees want to work more for less in exchange for equity they can. All unions are not the same, because the union is the workers.
You say working at a startup should be worse, but really it’s trading things. You get to learn and experience more. More equity instead of higher wages, and greater access to leadership. I work at one right now, I get it. I think this is what your saying, and workers know this. A union does not preclude this arrangement. Also the people that are willing to work at a startup tend to be more invested and want more of a say in the company. If the company succeeds I argue they deserve a seat at the table as they built it along with the founders more than any investor.
So many comments in this post setup imaginary straw men for what a union would do, then argue against that. The union is the employees, and employees at startups are not trying to kill a company and gate keep jobs.
I guess we now have some more insight into why this occurred.
> "In order to use most Services, you must register for or authenticate into a Mapbox account. When you use our application program interfaces (APIs), including our SDK Registry/Downloads API, each request to an API must include one of your account's unique API keys."
Especially for a startup that had struggled to find market fit, the last thing they need is a union.
Companies are not democracies and setting up a union is a hostile action. It basically says: here are the things we want and if we don’t get them we all stop working. If you want to run the company differently go setup your own company or buy some shares.
Unions in tech are as possible and necessary as unions anywhere else. Nothing about being it tech makes us "special" and the whole mythology it does only serves to keep us from organizing and solidifying our conditions and strength.
Contractors in minimum wage roles would be the only candidate for unions.
> A company like Mapbox hadn’t ever unionized before, so it seemed like an exciting experiment
Regardless of one's views on unionization, in this scenario as an underdog competing with 2 multi-trillion dollar companies in the space (Apple and Google), this "exiting experiment" reasoning seems especially reckless, irresponsible, and naive.
IMO, at such a small company like mapbox, it's akin to mutiny.
employees who left and started a competitor? how is that mutiny?
> ousting of Jobs
technically, the board had the voting power, and he wasn't even CEO. Generals removing a lieutenant isn't mutiny. If anything, he was planning a coup (mutiny) himself.
It is completely baffling that people who otherwise decry the government as a pack of dictatorial bureaucrats turn a blind eye when corporations internally act the same way, complete with lavish amounts of wasteful spending.
* You are dependent on your employer for your work visa; * You are dependent on your employer for your health insurance (US-specific problem); * You have don't have much experience in industry and thus will not easily be able to find a similar job; * You don't have enough savings to be able to be unemployed for a period of time while you find another job (doubly so if you have dependents or you have a non-compete agreement which would make you unemployable for a significant amount of time); * You have a criminal record that makes hiring far more difficult; or * There are few competitors in the space where you have expertise (or the few competitors you do have wouldn't hire you for one reason or another).
There is a very large number of people which would fall under at least one of the above points.
But unions also risk making it harder for these people to find jobs in the first place.
He clearly didn't want to go join another company – he joined Mapbox because he shared its early vision, and thought that original vision was worth fighting for.
The company raised a huge amount of cash and needs to make money to survive. The mistake was probably raising too much money.
So somehow, he thinks that the projects his colleagues „believe in“ are going to be more profitable than what they are currently working on. Do they have a business plan? Have they spoken to customers? It’s just so naive.
And it’s important to note that while they raised and spent a huge amount of money, they sucked up all the talent and probably prevented other competitors from emerging in the space. So we shouldn’t feel so sorry for them. They were privileged to have so much money available to them when others didn’t.
But I won’t lie, it’s always nice to have VC money dumped into open source work while it lasts.
> Do they have a business plan? Have they spoken to customers? It’s just so naive.
If things are going downhill, isn't it more naive to believe that the current people overseeing that have the right idea?
That doesn't strike me as the point of the blog post. He's not trying to tell us all the things he would have done differently, he's telling us what went wrong and why he left.
He didn't provide any ideas in this blog post, but that doesn't imply he doesn't have any ideas.
It’s amazing how easy it is for all of us to just take for granted that we are powerless at work and the only way to gain power is to create a company and disempower others.
Is it so hard to imagine doing it differently?
I would be far less sympathetic to the author if Mapbox avoided humanist language in their marketing and recruitment of personnel. But that's the language the company chose. Turns out if you say shit like "We are using technology to better the world" people are going to actually hold you to it!
Anyway, I feel like there's sort of this culture clash going on in the tech industry between Gen-X cynicism - where all that flowery humanist language is delivered with an unsaid "wink and a nudge" and millennial earnestness, where they take people at their word.
If you're a founder seeking to avoid this kind of stuff I would recommend not gilding the lily and be very up-front about what kind of business you're trying to build. Strip out faux-humanism from your mission statement and avoid it when recruiting. If the people doing the purchasing of your product are under 40 however you'll probably need to keep it in your marketing however. Do this in the beginning and not when you've already hired hundreds of employees.
I think this is why I can still sort of respect Amazon. They’re very clear about who they are and what they stand for.
No it is not.
All stake holders matter. Some stake holders have power, some do not. Unions (when they work) balance that.
And yes, you're right - setting up a union is a hostile action towards owners of the capital. And we need more such hostile actions to give control over capital to the people who actually use it to produce wealth, as opposed to the moochers who collect economic rent from it by virtue of abstract ownership claim.
It's hard to know one way or the other. Might be nice for employees to identify themselves.
Personally I was intrigued with the formation of the union and knew that many of their employees were quite liberal:
The company evolved from something called Development Seed - basically a progressive humanitarian and development focused company. It is different from most SV companies. And based on open source and open data. Them stopping key open source projects and charging for use of just their mapping JS library (not data usage, any use of the code anywhere) was shocking.
I'd love to hear from an original principled humanitarian employee on what happened to the company and/or them. Maybe money is better. Maybe they left?
We don't hear much about the union at all. We assume from the usual SV unions that it was all about identity, inclusion and diversity but perhaps it was more about this conflict of their humanitarian roots and money.
To be clear, I did receive an offer and passed.
The whole story reinforced the idea that if you build a company with value but no profits eventually you either abandon it as a business or give control to VCs, and if you had any emotional or political investment in the company you will be disappointed.
For instance in some countries with stronger unions and better labor conditions the union often has a board seat and so can advocate and don't have by any means control over the directio of the company.
As an aside, I’m slightly skeptical about unions in the US. The US’s economic model seems to be based around innovation and unions arguably make making decisions slower and more difficult.
If you look at Germany’s economic model, one with very strong employee protection, it seems largely based on pre existing industries. Yet the US’s seems more based on innovation and failing fast. And German political culture seems more consensual compared to US political culture.
Of course, this doesn’t mean I don’t think unions are possible or a good idea in the US—for certain industries I think they could alleviate the US’s problems—but I just doubt they’ll readily get government backing, support or favorable legislation in the short term.
I think the US is screwed for unions mostly because to unionize you basically have to join one of the existing huge unions none of which are run very democratically or transparently; as well as the huge anti-union sentiment and misrepresentation of what unions could be. But those things are nigh impossible to change...
That means that innovators probably come with slackers, because they are secure in their standing.
As it stands right now, the most vocal advocates I see for unionization can't seem to help but slather their speech with the collectivist twang that turns so many off.
And I disagree that job protections would "hinder some of the innovation" happening -- if anything, more comfortable and safe employees are more free to innovate. I think it would just hinder employers giving us impossible deadlines to do underspecified or ill-specified things to tick some useless checkbox, or to deliver a feature they already sold without it having been written yet.
I am not saying that job protections hinder all innovation. But the "liquidity" of labor most certainly gives companies more control and an easier time making changes in many ways. I think that has an undeniable upside for instance with startups who want to push growth to the max without worrying much about possible troubles later.
And I think safety and comfort in tech doesn't come from the particular employer but rather how sought after tech employees currently are.
Anyway, I'm talking specifically about tech and tech innovation here: for other industries things are again slightly different. And I do really think that job protections definitely drive innovation in established and stable organizations!
As a counter: in tech, its the workers that generate a significant amount of value by writing software and building products. Giving them more control and a seat at the table can be useful in encouraging long term investments in lieu of extreme short term thinking that VCs typically promote.
Employee equity is usually not enough to be worth fighting for. It’s just the ability to pay less salary or get good people.
But that sort of conversation isn’t really useful. Study after study has shown employees’ job satisfaction doesn’t scale infinitely with compensation, other things start to matter after a certain income is reached. With many highly paid software devs, I would wager they are at or beyond that point.
If management sucks and cannot listen to their employees then it’s better that they don’t get more capital/talent and their competitors suck up all their talent.
Except thats not how it works in practice at all.
Companies can run for a long while by brutally exploiting employees if they have captured the market (look at Amazon). They can exploit immigration laws to squeeze the workers. Unions can help prevent that sort of outcomes.
Theres also that little thing where companies dying due to poor decision making is just an overall loss of value for everyone involved in the short term. Why subject society to the vagaries of laissez faire capitalism when we have the tools to prevent that?
If companies suck they should die. We should not have too big to fail. Look at blockbuster vs netflix.
Companies don’t have to fail completely but certain projects should be able to fail. We don’t want huge companies expanding into everything with their sheer sales networks. We don’t want monopolies and oligopolies.
Look at amazon. It has a terrible reputation. And a monopoly. What we want and need is more competition. And it will come.
Collective bargaining doesn’t assume that though?
You keep saying that “companies that suck should die”. This is just the worst kind of approach to solving any problem: do nothing, let it sort itself out, “trust the market”. Well, we’ve seen what the economy is like with strong labor and without it, and the people that are involved in the economy should get to choose the system that they prefer.
Putting devs in charge is not the same thing as giving them structured and respected input.
It's a massive jump from "give devs a seat at the table" to "putting devs in charge", and one I frankly find hard to believe is made in good faith.
By „seat at the table“ you mean a way to get what they want by force or against the will of the owners.
You don’t need a union to collect employee feedback. Smart management will do this and if they don’t then employees can jump ship to a competitor that does.
All companies collect employee feedback. Much harder to act upon it. Yes, workers can leave- but not always!- but isn’t it easier if they had a mechanism to negotiate with power, to talk it over like adults, instead of having to resort to quitting?
I wonder how much additional stock the employees are buying with their paychecks…
It’s that belief that still keeps me from going that route even while working through a regular career for several years. If the project succeeds, well you’ve already sold it to the people who ru(i)n the world. Bootstrapping is so expensive but you diversify power in tech. Don’t sell out!
Call me crazy, but taking such a drastic move as unionizing shouldn’t be trivialized into just being an “experiment”.
EDIT: why the downvotes? Why not simply reply with your thoughts so that we can have a thoughtful discourse.
Until Boeing got taken over by finance people, the Boeing engineering guild had spent decades being a book club. It is only when things go wrong that unionization significantly changes how we work.
How is that not drastic?
You’re own words are saying unionizing is to bring in lawyers to be used against your employer.
EDIT: to answer your question below since I can’t reply.
No, it’s not drastic for a company to have lawyers. A company needs to ensure they are staying regulatory compliant, not breaking laws and de-risking company … that’s what the lawyers are doing.
I see why that is advantageous for companies that get to employ workers at a disadvantage. I don't understand why it would be good for workers.
(Not that I've done it.)
That's what "derisk" means: it means the company is protected from your interests.
Definitely a heavy thing to have show up on the first page of your Google results, and I cross referenced with his LinkedIn it was definitely him, so I would expect him to address it somewhere. But nothing, never a public apology or even a statement, nothing from Mapbox. That was so crazy to me, surely whoever interviewed him did a minimal background check, and they just thought it was ok? It felt really off, so I found a different technical solution and never talked to them again.
Vector tiles, Mapbox GL, and Mapbox styling, and numerous other libraries however did grow out of Mapbox - the amount of geospatial developer talent they hoovered up must have made it pretty amazing to work at for a time.
Hats off to everybody who made it happen.
How could you possibly come to this conclusion while on an interview loop? Did you sit in on all these meetings?
All these things are correct except for the ruin cities part - that’s a US city planning problem.
Japan, everyone’s favorite high public transit country with a lot of demand for maps, has a higher car ownership % than the US. They just discourage using them for personal trips and commutes via small roads, toll highways, expensive parking etc.
But once you’re a family or want to go somewhere low density and take some luggage, it’s hard to beat them.
What it looks like to me is this guy wanted to work at a geospatial PBC but didn’t know such a thing existed.
Do you have a reference for this? From a precursory search it seems the US has a much higher car ownership rate.
https://internationalcomparisons.org/environmental/transport... (2015)
The UK having the highest transit mode share (in 2014) is a bit surprising.
I think there are more business vehicles in Japan. There are too much sales people. Goods transport is mainly done by vehicles.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle...
Japan’s strength is that you can take yourself everywhere daily on a train or walking/biking, and there’s density and malls in the train stations.
Besides renting/owning a car, the real cheap option for intercity travel is night buses.
Companies benefit by taking as much of the profit for themselves as possible, rather than doing right by their workers. Some of that pressure comes from VCs or shareholders, but even in private companies it takes a rare founder to put a worker's interests ahead of their own.
I think this is changing though. There’s a lot of people working in tech and with the kind of abuse that’s been reported (ahem, Amazon) we might see that change.
Tech companies can afford to be more vocal about it because a significant number - arguably, the majority - of their employees genuinely believe that they would do worse with unions (regardless of whether it's actually true).
I think at least in part this is because much of tech is in US, which has widespread "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" syndrome in general, but especially so in tech.
Browsing the old union website (https://www.mapboxworkersunion.org/) almost all of the supporters of unionization were on the engineering side of the house, much more than I'd expect if you randomly sampled the org for job titles.
I wonder why that is?
There's significantly more tech talent out there than the business problems that can be solved profitably with said talent.
When the VC money runs out and the "growth & engagement" engineering playgrounds close up shop we're going to see a massive readjustment. We're in the beginning of it now.
And then end it with:
> "The skills and connections I developed at Mapbox set me up for a smooth and satisfying career transition."
So do you have a career or not?
I really hated it, but what could I do? I couldn't afford another car, so I had to live with it every single day. I'm guessing author feels something similar about having a career.
Sigh. Profit is good. Profit is necessary. Profit is not a great motivator IMO. It motivates, but alone it motivates the wrong things the wrong way.
Money is my only motive available to me at the moment, and I am sad about that.
> Technology is fundamentally neutral
It is in the same way guns are fundamentally neutral. You can't view it without context. Include that and it is clear that tech (or guns) isn't neutral at all.
Or to put it another way, is it not a good idea for me to move to a different provider for basic mapping services?
It seems so
https://www.mapbox.com/navigation/
Perhaps that's just their 'thing' for now and their core mapping/viz work will continue - I hope so as it's great tech and still relatively open compared to other cos.
The big money is helping big corporations (including automotive) with advanced use cases around logistics, very detailed 3d maps, gis, etc. So, that's increasingly what they are doing at the cost of the business that made them big (shipping good quality openstreetmap based maps and OSS software). They are now very similar to Here, Tomtom, and a few others. The latter two used to be mostly about consumer navigation products for in cars but that is now a commodity business that got disrupted by Apple and Google just bundling it with their phones (actually Nokia started this by giving away Here maps 14 years ago). Mostly if I'm in a rental car with tom tom / here maps built in, I end up using my phone with Google Maps instead. Just easier for me. Both will get me from A to B. I don't pay for it directly. That's no longer a viable business model.
We are currently using maplibre with Maptiler.com as our maps provider. We may have to switch maps provider for some of our customers (our German customers are picky about where their data is hosted). Maplibre has been pretty solid for us. Last year when I had to pick a library, I briefly considered Mapbox and then noticed all the activity around the newly created maplibre fork (and the reasons it was created) and went there instead. All the commit activity happening there is no longer happening around mapbox. That's the value Mapbox lost by going closed source. So unnecessary and short sighted.
And beyond the legal and moral implications, you still haven't addressed my core critique: Silicon Valley tech startups claim they can change the world and disrupt everything. Yet when it comes to the subject of labor relations, they default to some sort of Victorian Era fear of workingman unions. There's an inherent fear that unions are unworkable and malevolent. That just completely clashes with tech's belief in its infinite innovation. Even if past unions didn't work in America, why be so afraid of building a new one?
Did they create products? Features? Internal tools? Design guides/system? Any actual work? Or just agitating for a union that their coworkers clearly did not want?
Source: I overlapped with them for the first 7 of those 12 years, back to the <20 employee days.
[0] https://blog.mapbox.com/behind-mapbox-studios-new-look-874c1...
However, employers are in a position of significant power over their employees, and unions represent a way to balance that power. I think this is a broadly positive thing that I think employees should be in favour of, and that I think the best employers would also be in favour of.
Unionization is how employees get a seat at the table and a say in the business they contribute their labor to, labor without which the business could not exist. Comp and benefits are only a component why organizing is important, in my opinion.
This is not the case in software at all. Skill levels can vary dramatically and the more experience you have with your company often the more valuable and harder to replace you become. Software developers are expensive, especially bad hires. This puts them in an advantageous position. In sum we are - In demand, scarce, hard (or at least expensive) to replace (skill & domain knowledge vary considerably). The exact opposite of what a union fixes.
I think it is more common for the umbrella union orgs to focus on industries either with high barriers to entry (like nursing) or huge employers, because they are going company-by-company & it's just more efficient. On the opposite end of the spectrum, trade unions are more likely to serve people who change jobs ever couple of years and where most of the learning happens on the job. They tend to be run by & for people actually in the profession and can cross company boundaries.
Trade guilds will do things like specify minimum wages, but most of their members end up paid more than that. They'll specify minimum safety standards, but also support people on specific job sites that want or need additional protection to make that particular job safe. It isn't the same kind of one-size-fits-all approach you may be used to from Detroit auto plants.
There are advantages for employers too: they know that people in the guild are held to certain professional standards, for example. When retirement programs or health care are managed through the guild, workers can take the benefits with them to their next job, and small employers don't get taken for a ride. And employers can benefit from the steady influx of newly-trained workers who have been taught up to the standards the trade feels are important to meet.
Just look at the people in this thread who think it is "drastic" to have a lawyer look at our employment contracts: we may have individual leverage, but we aren't necessarily able to use it to make our working conditions better, or even to ensure the software we build is reliable and safe.
Isn’t it fairer to rely on the free market to set wages? There are shortages and surpluses in many industries that vary over time. Unions seem to just distort the market.
Reviewing employment contracts can be done by one’s own lawyer via legal insurance too. Why does this need to be collective? Why not pay a fee for services you use rather than union dues. A lot of the benefits you mention doesn’t need unionization.
I own shares in public companies and have basically zero say in how they operate and those shares are worth quite a bit.
At this point it’s clear these arguments are flippant and not serious. I hope one day you can have a perspective on these issues that is not so shallow. They are important and you also should have a say in your workplace. Our voices matter.
Instead of banding together and threatening the management and owners with strike action it’s better that they quit because maybe there are other people who are happy to do the work without a union.
I think the problem is most people don’t imagine themselves as owners/managers. If they did they would oppose unions too because they would not want their autonomy taken away.
If workers have a say it distorts these forces. And by say you mean the ability to force the hand of management. Because they already can have a say and modern companies measure everything and listen to feedback.
Also, if in most tech companies workers are given equity, are they not owners also?
Examples of unions fighting for management to make better business decisions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13986889
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3mjxg/general-electric-work...
Why? It's pretty weird to say they should use the most extreme option without negotiation or do nothing, and that this is better than using intermediate options.
> because maybe there are other people who are happy to do the work without a union.
The main concern isn't the mere fact the union exists, it's to have a more even negotiating position, and I feel like everyone should want that. And I'm quite sure that the number of people that want that is much bigger than the number of unemployed workers, so that trade you suggest isn't even possible.
> I think the problem is most people don’t imagine themselves as owners/managers. If they did they would oppose unions too because they would not want their autonomy taken away.
Are you actually encouraging the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" point of view? How about an attempt at an objective view, that even if we look at it like a zero sum game, it's better for 20 workers to have more autonomy than for 1 employer to have more autonomy.
People like to pretend we don’t live in a cut throat capitalist system and that it has worked out best.
But if employees always demanded things to be run they way they want, then you couldn’t have this level of experimentation and innovation.
I think the obvious fact is that there are not many co op companies because it doesn’t work. It’s like: stop trying to change someone else’s company, and start your own and build it from the ground up with the governance structure you want.
The people who make the laws get to set all the rules. The shares are valuable anyway, because an economic interest in a profit making entity is valuable whether you have perfect control or not.
There are many short term pressures on executives and finance people. Sharing power with the people their decisions affect leads to better outcomes for the business than when they use their power over workers for short term gain.
Your other comment indicates they should have to amass 51% of company shares. Ridiculous. Their ability to organize and vote to do so comes from their labor rights, and is precisely why they don’t require capital (per labor law) to have a say.
Businesses can be built without capital. They cannot be built without labor.
Even if you aren't unionized, it is your right to get together with your coworkers & advocate for better working conditions.
We are doing the "Tell me you haven't read the article without telling me you haven't read the article." kind of posts on HN now?