Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are examples of companies dying due to many people quitting?

336 pointsmdcds486 comments

Curious what are some notable examples of companies being forced to shut down due to many people leaving within a short timeframe?

I imagine if half the staff left a nursing home, it would be forced to shut down.

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Atari in 1983 went from the leader in video game production to completely imploding. In 1979, four of their best programmers left after demanding equity in the sales and were refused. Their CEO Ray Kassar famously said, "You’re no more important to those projects than the person on the assembly line who put them together. You’re a dime a dozen. You’re not unique. Anybody can do a cartridge.". They left and formed Activision which led to a sequence of failures by Atari until they finally died unable to compete with the likes of Intellivision, Colecovision, and Commodore.

the irony is that the CEO probably does less work than the assembly line worker

I don't know if it's less work, but certainly the assembly worker definitely delivers more value.

Only one of the two killed the company.

That kind of demonstrates the importance and value of a good CEO though. A couple dumb decisions by an assembly worker won't kill a company. A few bad decisions by a CEO can.

I think most job salaries can be linked directly to how much of a difference the employee can make. A complete dud at McDonalds in the kitchen might cost a few thousand on average but the further you go up, the greater the damage or benefit potential gets.

> I think most job salaries can be linked directly to how much of a difference the employee can make.

I think that the world's, or at least the US's, teachers are a glaring counterexample.

The problem is that the value that teachers create is hard to compute and hard to capture, so in the end, no one is willing to pay for it.

David Graeber, of Bullshit Jobs fame, makes the distinction between service work and caring work. Doing things vs taking care of other humans.

Part of his thesis is that society undervalues the labor of caring workers, because they get so much "job satisfaction". Teachers and nurses are examples of caring work.

I lean towards Graeber's thesis, mostly because I haven't read any other explanation for this pathology, so Graeber wins by default.

> no one is willing to pay for it

parents paying for private schools seem to be willing to pay that for their children

> parents paying for private schools seem to be willing to pay that for their children

Exactly—people aren't willing to pay for someone else's education, but everyone needs an education, so teachers who care enough that they are willing to teach for minuscule pay wind up squeezed between societal apathy and societal need.

Private school teachers are often paid less than public school teachers, and do not have a union or a pension.

> That kind of demonstrates the importance and value of a good CEO though. A couple dumb decisions by an assembly worker won't kill a company. A few bad decisions by a CEO can.

A few dumb (or malicious) decisions by an assembly worker can cause enormous damage and incur enormous cost.

Except the bad CEO still gets a big salary, and a golden parachute when he leaves the sinking ship of the company he killed. And then proceed to get hired as CEO for the next company.

A lot of CEO's at places I have worked didn't really make decisions. They schmooze the biggest customers. Constantly, 12-14 hours a day.

It's also on them to manage, handle, and be responsible for everything. Walk a mile in their shoes and then try say it's so "easy" honestly.

I certainly wasn't suggesting they had an easy job. I agree it's quite a hard job.

Just that it's not always the job some people think it is.

Schmooze is a bit of a demeaning word, isn't it? If the CEO is learning from customers and helping the organization react accordingly, that sounds very valuable.

Schmooze comes from yiddish, and it just means to chat or converse. Seems fair to me.

You can chat and converse idly, or with an agenda. Not demeaning at all, just descriptive.

> talk with someone in a lively and friendly way

Demeaning isn't the right word, but it sure seems condescending. Like calling programming "button pushing".

Making money isn't about making the best product. Commodore proved that. It is about getting people to give you money... So yeah, maybe they are worth it.

But if schmoozing means their company gets a new big customer or their stock price goes up, they have provided value I guess. It's just not from what we consider "real" work.

It really depends on the company. It sounds like you were working at a B2B/enterprise company? But yeah, getting new business and/or funding is often a big part of the job. It doesn't meant they don't also make decisions - but I guess the bigger the company the fewer different roles the CEO is filling.

The effects of a CEO is often lagging. If an assembly line worker stops working, you see the results immediately. If a CEO stops working or does something very negative, you might see the effects years later.

You'd think that losing key staff would kill the company overnight, but even in this situation, it took 4 years between being doomed and actually dying.

what's incredible about this is that Activision remains an industry leader whereas I'm not entirely sure if Atari even still exists.

Ironically however modern day Activision has the exact same attitude of Atari that caused their founding.

Clearly the situation is very different. Activision is much much bigger than Atari was. 4 of the top developers leaving wouldn't cause the company to implode.

percentages duh

The more I learn about game dev the less I think this is true. The number of programmers that can work on bleeding edge game engine tech is incredibly low and the learning curve has only gotten more severe over time.

I mean, I'm sure they wouldn't implode, but I bet they pay their core engine devs a more than decent wage.

The majority of devs don't work on bleeding edge game engine tech, though.

Of course, but presumably the top coders at a game shop are involved in whatever inhouse tech they're building.

A top developer leaving also functions as a signal to others in the company.

I once left a company quickly after a senior leader had left. That proved to be a good move since the company was going under and sold a few months after.

But they might be right this time.

Many game devs are fungible cogs, implementing a well-defined blueprint. Especially Activision games like Call of Duty. It doesn’t help that there’s just so many devs these days that they can seemingly abuse them for decades and nothing has collapsed.

if you'd ever worked on a call of duty you'd realize how foolish a statement this is.

Try not to take it personally, there are both devs who are replaceable and devs who aren’t, and with ~40 Call of Duty titles on almost as many platforms, a million and one people have worked on it, some doing more mechanical port work than others. There’s truth in there; the games industry is tough, and it’s relevant that some studios that (for example) demand lots of overtime haven’t seen any large exodus, or sometimes there is high turnover and the studio still survives, to parent’s point. There’s a higher level layer to this, that from a publisher’s point of view, there are a lot of smaller studios that are easily replaceable, and I’d speculate studios go out of business over contracts lost to other studios far more often than over employee walkouts (which of course fuels the need for overtime to be competitive). This is true for games and for VFX production in the US, enough people want these jobs that high turnover doesn’t seem to slow the business.

It's particularly ironic that you mention CoD as an example of how you can treat gamedevs as replaceable cogs. Here's the history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32833895

Call of Duty then and now are very different. Back then, it was more like an indie movie. Now, it's Disney size. Their animators are cogs.

Well for what it's worth my friend is still with them, or at least what you could call the main descendant of that team. They don't treat him as a cog. In fact he was their first full time remote employee as I understand it, as he got sick of living in Tulsa. No offense Tulsans, but when you've lived in the PNW for a while it's kinda hard to give up all the trees, mountains, etc. I do miss thunderstorms though.

That is a great story, and should be an inspiration to aspiring gave devs. As you can clearly see in the thread, I did not bring up CoD. Two comments above me were discussing it. I was just pointing out that it’s now a huge franchise. All the franchises, large and small, have cycled through many, many programmers and artists and designers. It does not disrespect your friend to point out that there are multiple studios he didn’t start that are now developing CoD, or to point out that it has been ported to so many platforms that there has been a metric ton of unsexy porting work alongside the original content work. Having worked on both game and movie franchises, I can safely say that there’s less room for individual input. Not none, just less. I’ve witnessed whole studios (both in games and films) push and push to work on an original non-franchise production, because everyone knew it’d be more fun and felt less like being a cog. The fact that your friend made a wildly successful franchise is absolutely great for him, and for his business, but you can’t claim that it’s creatively great for everyone else involved, even if it does support them financially.

you mean like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered? or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare from 2019 not to be confused with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare from 2007?

Their games are fungible too.

Pretty much, yeah. Annual sports games become obsolete when the next one comes out.

Games have seen incredible growth as an industry over the past couple decades. It works because everyone and their grandma wants to play CoD, not because what they're doing is sustainable. Let's see how they fare once the markets saturate

Big games will have a small core team - engine programmers, creative leads, etc - and a large section of 'grunt work' - modeling, texturing, animation, etc. The kind of thing someone puts on a very long todo list to be picked up. That's likely more work where individual contributions become less important.

It's also an area where there's more and more outsourcing happening these days.

Devs are definitely no fungible, the difference in the productivity, team moral and new bug introduced by just changing one person in the team can be huge.

Even simple boilerplate is done differently by people. Some will automate them, some will do them manually forever. Some will naturally organize to discuss how to limit or improve them, some will stay with the status quo ad vitam. Some will document how to do things, provide templates to limit mistakes and mentor new comers. Some will just do their job.

And that's not even touching the fact some are simply bad at what they do.

In all the successful projects I've seen, hiring the right people or replacing the one leaving were critical processes, not just swapping.

This idea you foster is probably half the reason 2/3 of IT projects fail.

No way they don't pay bank the bulk of their irreplaceable programers.

It’s justified though. Games are basically a solved problem these days, and the developers of today are most of the time just building on abstractions and best practices that didn’t exist during Atari’s time.

Once a particular domain of software becomes sufficiently mature, there is no real opportunity for heroic programmers to emerge who become too valuable to replace. Eventually more people emerge who are just as good.

I very much doubt that. There's a reason why innovation in games often happen, entertainment is not an easy problem to solve, with no set quantity to achieve

While "solved" is a bit optimistic, it is also true that e.g. sports games get sales every year with mainly updates to the player roster.

Or many locked in formulas. Think CoD, BF somewhat, Assassin's Creed. Whatever Ubisoft does.

Decent amount of BF games flopped. Assassin's Creed had three "reboots" of the formula. Ubisoft recently realized they have to shake things up, since flops are more and more common.

it depends on what the poster meant by "games" - do they mean engine and graphics? Or do they mean game design/mechanics?

Game engines and graphics is "solved" if you stick to popular concepts (which are those that are easily available in commercial engines).

Game design/mechanics is an unsolved problem imho - unless you consider it solved when merely taking an existing game design (like an FPS) and add nothing new to it (aka, those yearly COD military shooters).

Consider a game like https://store.steampowered.com/app/1141580/Taiji/ (inspired by the witness). This game is quite unique, and cannot really be recycled in to another game (without it being just a clone).

Not to mention that entertainment isn't a constant. Meaning people will get bored of X after some time, no matter how good the X is.

As they say: All good things must come to an end.

And: You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain.

I agree as well that technology wise it still isn't solved, but I think it is the creative side that will be the most unknown part of the project these days.

That is why we have so many bland but technically impressive games. Studios want safe bets, an FPS game is easy, making it interesting to play is still very hard.

Writing software is creative.

Agreed, but a lot of industry work doesn't give you much leeway to be creative. You can say the same for a level designer who just has to implement pre-specified designs they had no hand in.

There's plenty of unsolved problems in gaming and that's usually where indies make their money. Games like Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Rimworld.

I'm genuinely curious, what money did Dwarf Fortress make? The game is very cool, but I think it's a bit unapproachable to the majority for it to make any amount of serious money like Minecraft, Stardew Valley and RinWorld did.

I could be out of loop, but the last time I played Dwarf Fortress, it still used terminal graphics and white I believe in gameplay > graphics, my brother and the majority don't and probably won't even touch the game. (Not to mention the _menues_)

Okay, maybe DF is a bad example. It seems to be roughly $15k/month on donations for two people now. It is coming on Steam with a major graphics and UX overhaul, so I guess we'll see eventually.

>Games are basically a solved problem these days

I... have you played games at all recently? Have you seen the recent major releases? BF2042, Cyberpunk, etc. Even the highest quality game studios (not the aforementioned) have trouble making good high quality releases, especially with consistency.

Games are certainly not a solved problem.

re: Cyberpunk, they tried to solve it again - over-estimating their own abilities to build a game engine (like they did with the Witcher games before) and ending up getting the basics wrong (e.g. resource loading on lower-end systems like the PS4).

Performance is by far not the only problem with Cyberpunk, although the most visible one.

people in the tech industry like to overestimate their own skills.

we see the same attitude in software industry - somethin' that has existed since the 60s that software is solved problem. yet everyone has difficulties in shippin' software that actually works whether that's titans like Apple / Microsoft to small mom and pop shops.

Games the difficulty is two-fold. 1: games are an art - and making art to good taste is a complex problem. 2. games are software - thereby suffering from problems encountered by the regular software industry etc lack of labour / resourcing etc

Games SHOULD be a solved problem. There is no good reason for us to have to reinvent the wheel over and over. There are compsci white papers that neatly solve all of the big problems games run into.

But games are not a solved problem. There are multiple overlapping reasons why.

One is that gamedevs often just don't do the research. Why would they? The deadlines loom, the milestones have to be delivered, nobody cares if it's a hacky mess right now, surely management will give us time to fix it once they realize that it's broken--but if we don't deliver anything, the publisher cuts our funding.

This overlaps with scheduling and management issues. It turns out that writing good software takes up time[1], and the problem with games in particular is that they don't make money until they're released.

You don't write games like you write business software, where the other company paying for your milestones is the company that's going to use the software; that company usually has a revenue stream even without your software, so they don't have to care as much. For a game, though, there IS no revenue stream until the game launches. Every year that a game is in development without a release is a loss, and that pisses the board of directors right the fuck off, so that means the game needs to be out ASAP.

Because of this, games are often not given enough room in the development schedule to be made correctly. There's no time for research, testing, planning, or any of the other important parts of software engineering--we have to write this code NOW, or it doesn't ship. And if you read that source I linked in the footnote, you'll know that this produces rotten software.

This is compounded by the kind of one-upsmanship that is created by such an environment--leading to a phrase I've heard from friends in other companies: "Very optimistic people who are no longer with the company made this decision". You get into a situation where people made promises to impress the publisher, claiming that they can turn out a game in an impossible timeframe, and that got them fired--but now you're stuck cleaning up the mess, and the publisher has already wasted a lot of money on the years spent thinking it wasn't a mess.

Mix in the siloing of information (because all of this shit is proprietary) and, despite all of the problems being solved on paper, nobody's solved video games.

[1]: https://jacobian.org/2022/sep/9/quality-is-systemic/

'Solved'? - Take a look at some of the Lumen/Nanite tech in Unreal Engine 5. And that's just a small chunk of what's happening on the rendering side of things. Game tech continues to evolve at a fair pace.

Video game studios taking advantage of young, naive people who will burn themselves out working unpaid overtime for the privilege of working for a game studio? I'm absolutely shocked, shocked I tell you!

Some of them probably get 50 applicants for every position they advertise. It's a meat grinder.

Video game developers (and working class in general) desperately needs to unionize, young folks are too naive to realize they're working towards chronic health conditions.

In a sense, some do - by quitting and/or going indie. There's some good studios out there; Team Cherry (hollow knight) famously doesn't do crunch. They also don't (need to) make any announcements about games until they're ready.

Isn't Team cherry like 10 people though?

I'd argue that's part of what makes it work. You can get ten people into one meeting room (or one zoom call) and still be able to talk to each other clearly.

My sister is a vet. She works in a normal vet practice in our city dealing with mainly cats and dogs. Once I asked her why she doesn't work as a vet in the zoo, an extremely prestigious and wealthy institution with zoological research, wide variety of animals, etc. She just said that all young vets want to be a vet in the zoo. So they have much worse pay and conditions than other vet jobs.

Video game developers don't have terrible conditions and relatively low pay because of some anomalous lack of bargaining power which can be fixed by unionization. They have lots of bargaining power, most of which they use to choose the industry they work in. There are lots of young men who want to work in games, and far fewer who want to work in financial software. So pay and conditions are far worse in games, to the point where supply meets demand in each type of development work.

Looks like they were facing extinction in 1991 until now-CEO Bobby Kotick took over.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision#Purchase_by_Bobby_K...

>Kotick and additional investors bought Mediagenic for approximately $500,000 in 1991.

Wow,that's one hell of a successful investment.

atari very much does not exist, the trademark/name has passed through like 3 or 4 different hands now. whatever corporate entity is now calling itself atari has absolutely no relationship to the original.

This is correct. Nolan Bushnell sold the brand to WMS Industries in 1996.

Atari still exists today.

In 2018 I met Frédéric Chesnais in NY, and learned about the latest things related the company. Here's an interview I found from 2019. [0].

It seems that the current CEO is now Wade Rosen. [1]

Company is still up and running.

[0]: https://frenchamerican.org/interview-frederic-chesnais/

[1]: https://venturebeat.com/games/atari-ceo-wade-rosen-interview...

It’s just a shell that rents the name to whoever gives them the most, right?

There is “atari NFT” and “atari blockchain casino”

Not really, it's a French video game company (Infogrames) that bought Atari when it was just a shadow of its former self and rebranded itself Atari.

Anyway no relation to the original Atary.

No, the Atari name exists today. Famous defunct company names regularly get bought by entities wanting to cash out whatever goodwill or positive associations still left in them. Would-be buyers with less extractive ambitions can't compete in the auctions.

So no, Atari doesn't exist today, what exists is a company wearing Atari's skin as a suit, in order to fool you. Don't be fooled by names without the organisational continuity to back it up.

Another famous example of this "brand" re-use that I only recently found out about: AEG

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

Yeah but Electrolux is still a good brand.

Better example is AKG which used to be well respected for making high-quality headphones, until Samsung bought their parent company and started just using their logo from 2017 on cheap crap.

The original engineers formed a different company Austrian Audio (no article on wiki apparently)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKG_(company)

I think of the definitive example as Schwinn bicycles.

Is there a book on this you can recommend?

This is all laid out in the Nov 28, 1983 edition of InfoWorld Magazine.

pp. 151-158

https://books.google.com/books?id=sy8EAAAAMBAJ&printsec=fron...

Interestingly, this is kind of an anti-example of what was asked for in the OP. Here, few people quit, not many.

This was the beginning of an avalanche that led to most of the remaining engineers at Atari to leave and try to start their own third-party game companies to follow in the success of Activision.

OP here. I assumed that many people needed to quit for a company to implode.

turns out I was wrong!

> Their CEO Ray Kassar famously said, "You’re no more important to those projects than the person on the assembly line who put them together. You’re a dime a dozen. You’re not unique. Anybody can do a cartridge.".

Imagine any software company CEO nowadays saying that out loud, no matter what they privately thought.

today they have their scrum masters whisper it in our ears at the daily stand up

Ahaha this just made my day :)

no scrum mumbo:jumbo in daily meetings; only engineers

I feel like software developers have either the biggest or the smallest egos; the majority is in the last category and will keep their head down. But in companies, all the managerial staff - including these days scrum masters, which is now a dedicated role by a non-developer - will strut around like they own the place and everything would fall apart if it wasn't for them.

To me honest and harsh conversation, even if it is wrong, is still better than firing 100s of employees in a zoom call with corporate speak.

> Imagine any software company CEO nowadays saying that out loud, no matter what they privately thought.

A daughter of my friend was not very happy in her job: a Silicon Valley company hired her as a security pro, but was using as a coder, which she hates. She was going to leave, but decided to wait ten months or so until her stock options vested. She and a big group of other engineers were fired right before the vesting moment.

All this time the CEO was generating absolutely politically correct sounds: people are our best capital, diversity is our strength, etc. She would be better off if he was honest.

> She was going to leave, but decided to wait ten months or so until her stock options vested. She and a big group of other engineers were fired right before the vesting moment.

I'm not an expert in the Silicon Valley ethos, but to me it sounds that both your friend's daughter and the company were playing the same game: trying to extract the most value from the other party without actually having a long term commitment. I suppose she was not going around saying how much she hated the company and that she would have left as soon as it was convenient.

The company had the upper hand, but can she really complain?

Yes, she can complain.

You are entitled to hate your job and still do what you're being asked. For lack of knowledge about more facts we should assume the friend was doing the job.

She also most probably had an at-will contract, so the company was entitled to let her go whenever they liked.

> The company had the upper hand, but can she really complain?

She is a bright girl, so she is not actually complaining, she knew the risks and trade offs. It was her first job after a college, btw. It’s me who is a bit bothered by her story. You see:

1. She was hired to improve diversity targets (her estimate).

2. After she was hired, her brains were ignored - a rather painful situation for a person with brains.

Would have this bright girl been better of if we as society put less pressure on companies to hire girls?

> All this time the CEO was generating absolutely politically correct sounds: people are our best capital, diversity is our strength, etc. She would be better off if he was honest.

Honestly rarely pays and is also unthankful. There is only a little benefit and lots of downsides, such as people getting seriously pissed at you. It is not a wonder that corporate leadership roles are filled up with people who see no problem of talking bullshit all day.

They meant honesty from the CEO would be good for her, not the CEO. Because she could have found another job instead of waiting ten months to be fired.

> Imagine any software company CEO nowadays saying that out loud, no matter what they privately thought.

Comarch CEO famous quote: "any developer could be replaced with finite number of interns"

This is Polish software company (quite big, one of the biggest) and since this quote went public, they don't have best reputation among developers. You go to work there only if you are actually intern fresh after uni.

Do you have a source? I couldn't find it in English at least

I don't think there are any online sources. I don't think I've met a polish coder that wanted to work for them. Some companies won't even hire a candidate that spent more than a year at Comarch (they would argue - if a candidate could withstand that company for that long there must be something wrong with them).

>- if a candidate could withstand that company for that long there must be something wrong with them

Or just being exposed to a architecturally dysfunctional organization breeds negative behaviour and mentality.

Privately I consider this kind of behaviour espoused by executive management to clearly qualify as harmful to society surpassing criminal threshold. This needs concerted study however to form the basis of anything more than a grizzled opinion.

My mom, who's a programmer, once worked for Computer Sciences Corporation, which she jokingly referred to as "the whorehouse of the computer industry".

But she was just being charitable, because they were into so much more that just that!

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

>The company has been accused of breaching human rights by arranging several illegal rendition flights for the CIA between 2003 and 2006, which also has led to criticism of shareholders of the company, including the governments of Norway and Britain.

>The company has engaged in a number of activities that have resulted in legal action against it. These are:

>Its so called WorldBridge Service (Visa Services), which processed and issued millions of visa applications to enter Britain, did not involve British authorities.

>CSC was one of the contractors hired by the Internal Revenue Service to modernize its tax-filing system. They told the IRS it would meet a January 2006 deadline, but failed to do so, leaving the IRS with no system capable of detecting fraud. Its failure to meet the delivery deadline for developing an automated refund fraud detection system cost the IRS between US$200 million and US$300 million.

Quote 3 from https://pl.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Janusz_Filipiak

Sadly only in Polish.

Gaming abounds with stories like this.

A friend of mine went to work for a small game studio in Oklahoma that'd gotten some acclaim for their quake mod pack. They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP as a quake licensee. They made a ahem mildly successful game named Medal of Honor.

Some time down the road, the owner of the studio didn't want to share the wealth.

As a result the top programmers, designers, etc, grouped up and negotiated a deal to become a 2nd party dev studio with a competing publisher. Nearly the entire company left with them. They couldn't take the IP with them so they rebranded their new game franchise as Call of Duty.

That studio owner literally made a billion dollar mistake by not simply being fair early on to the team. Never, ever, treat a team that has achieved rare success as replaceable cogs. If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want.

What an interesting story. It made me look up how medal of honor started.

Could you clarify a few things? I don't think the story adds up.

Wikipedia has the followin information. Medal of Honor was made by DreamWorks interactive. [..] Filmmaker Steven Spielberg Spielberg founded DreamWorks Interactive in 1995. [1] And: Danger Close Games (formerly DreamWorks Interactive LLC and EA Los Angeles) was an American video game developer based in Los Angeles. [2]

This doesn't sound like 'a small game studio in Oklahoma'.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor_(1999_video_gam...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Close_Games

Edit: It seems you were talking about the acclaimed: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.

Made by: 2015, inc[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Games

Edit 2: Spelling

Yes, I'm talking about 2015.

The first two Playstation only MoH games were not exactly failures, but they were little more than Goldeneye clones with WW2 themes.

The first PC game is really the start of what we think of as the Medal of Honor franchise proper.

The team that bailed founded Infinity Ward, which was the origin of Call of Duty, or at least the first like 8 games in the franchise.

So yes, my story does in fact check out. Which is because I lived it. My friend tried to get me to join the team for 2 years because he knew they were onto something, but I'd fled a childhood in Kansas to build a life on the west coast and wasn't looking to move back to Tulsa of all places. That proved to be a bad career decision but I'm ok with it as a life decision.

Can you have some self awareness of how annoying it is for you to adopt this skeptical fact checker tone when you have so little familiarity with the events and people involved you don't even really understand what to google for and which wikipedia articles to read?

Edit: I'm annoyed because if you tell someone their story doesn't check out, calling me a lair in this case as the story is direct personal experience, you probably need more of a basis for that claim than googling a wikipedia article about a story you'd never heard of 5 minutes ago.

You didn't really provide that much detail, how are you expecting someone to understand what to Google?

If your suggestion is for people to not question, or be curious at all then I think you're in the wrong place...?

I don't think they were annoyed by the follow-up, they were annoyed by being softly accused of an inaccurate story and not being given the benefit of the doubt. Removing the "I don't think the story adds up." and changing the period of "This doesn't sound like 'a small game studio in Oklahoma'." to a question mark would've have helped make it less accusatory.

In my opinion the original story was a bit misleading though, reading as if the small game company's novel IP was the original Medal of Honor, so I do think the follow-up was warranted: "They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP as a quake licensee. They made a ahem mildly successful game named Medal of Honor."

I also think the response to the questioning was a lot more hostile than it needed to be but ultimately that there was rudeness on both sides

They asked very politely for you to clarify some details after they tried themselves but were unable to verify it by looking it up. Your hostility is unwarranted and rude. People are not psychic, it was quite reasonable for them to ask.

I think there's hostility on both sides here. "Could you clarify a few things?" is one thing, but "I don't think the story adds up" is a direct accusation of lying.

Thanks for the responses, much appreciated.

Maybe it's an unfair assumption on my part, but the post starts out exactly in the format of deliberately written /r/IAmVerySmart satires. But it's not. Just because you're using polite vocabulary does not mean bare toothed sentiment doesn't read through.

The tragedy of the written word between people that don't know each other. One could say "Could you clarify a few things?" in anger or "I don't think the story adds up" smiling and with a friendly tone. In writing the intention of the writer is in the mind of the reader.

It is indeed peculiar that even though humans have communicated over written word for so long, so many are seemingly unaware of this fact.

I could be wrong but it was not so easy to write to strangers until very recently. Except laws, books (with plenty of space to make the context clear) and journalism (same thing) I think that most written communication was letters to friends and relatives. Again, a lot of shared context. It's the internet (forums, comments on sites and social media) that lets us write to strangers maybe more often than we're writing to people we know.

That's why you have to be extra careful when writing, especially in discussions with strangers.

That’s also why you have to be extra careful when reading, especially in discussions with strangers.

When I read something where the author sounds rude, I try to step back and think if there is another way to interpret it.

It’s unlikely that strangers will accept advice on writing styles, so I try to adapt my reading style while I wait for a perfect world.

>One could say ... "I don't think the story adds up" smiling and with a friendly tone. While you can call bullshit in a friendly way, it's almost certainly better to assume that you are wrong if you think the other party is equally or more credible than you.

The problem is that the anecdote, as originally told, was told poorly. This:

> They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP as a quake licensee. They made a ahem mildly successful game named Medal of Honor

... makes it sound as if the studio started the franchise—which is not helped by the fact that it says "Medal of Honor" (which is apparently a thing), not "Medal of Honor: Allied Assault" (which is apparently the thing they actually meant). Anyone interested who tries to follow up based on these breadcrumbs is going to run into an issue. That is anyone—it doesn't take someone with a predisposition to being an asshole to end up here; even someone who read the initial comment and though, "wow, that's cool; I'm interested in learning more", and then proceeded to try to learn more would have gotten tripped up this way. (It's only by starting at the opposite end—with Call of Duty—and working backwards to its origin story that you're going to be able to resolve this.)

To make out as if someone is being automatically uncharitable and then airing emotion-driven grievances about it is, perversely, the most uncharitable thing (and, for the reasons just mentioned, perhaps only uncharitable thing) to have actually happened here.

It's easier to start from the end by googling "Call of Duty founders" than starting from Medal of Honor and hoping there aren't too many branches with only one leading to Call of Duty (which is the case here).

"Call of Duty founders" -> first link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Ward -> 3rd sentence: All of the 22 original team members of Infinity Ward came from the team that had worked on Medal of Honor: Allied Assault

Actually I sympathise with this response. Getting tired myself of people larping as fact checkers and professional skeptics.

Not enough detail in someone's response? Here are some ideas:

1. Ask moar polite. Not, "I don't think the story adds up."

2. Assume the story is yet true and go to prove it to your satisfaction. Post the links and thank op for the interesting nerd snipe.

3. Enter the proposition into your mental database with some lower level of confidence and move on.

Moreover, people often forget that the poster probably took some time out of their life to chronicle something. Starting by acknowledging personal experience and their effort documenting it goes along way towards building a collaborative discussion.

The response could have been:

Wow cool! Can you tell us more about the story? Edit: Spelling

Instead it's a wikipedia dump.

This isn't wikipedia; claims on these forums do not need to be substantiated with fact. I agree with the sibling comments that there is too much fact-checking here and it is rude AF

Storytelling does not require that one cites their sources. Especially when that source is, "I lived it"

> They asked very politely for you to clarify some details after they tried themselves but were unable to verify it by looking it up.

Not really. GP straight up accused the OP of lying, under a thick but transparent layer of euphemisms. Coming at someone out of nowhere with accusations that "your story doesn't add up", specially after failing to do their homework, is the opposite of politeness.

You may have found it annoying, but I think it's good to have a healthy level of skepticism on the internet about stories whose source is 'a friend of mine'.

I agree OP could have been a bit less confrontational, but...

> The first PC game is really the start of what we think of as the Medal of Honor franchise proper.

> They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP [...] They couldn't take the IP with them

That may be your opinion, it certainly isn't mine, having played both the Playstation games and none of the PC games. I very clearly remember the splash screen for Dreamworks on starting up the first Medal of Honor game. I'm still not sure how the third game in a franchise could be considered 'novel IP', especially as it seems they were approached by Dreamworks[1], so it's not surprising they couldn't take it anywhere else.

Without the explanation above, I would have dismissed your comment as nonsense out of hand without bothering to engage.

However, OP questioned, you clarified, and I learned something. Choosing your own definition of when the franchise started made it very difficult to accept your comment as it stood initially though.

Perhaps you could also have some self-awareness of how often people post about 'my friend who told me this anecdote about this big thing' with red flags in their story, and how much it's important not to believe everything you read?

1: Wikipedia mentions this on the 2015 page with a reference to https://www.tulsapeople.com/tulsa-people/july-2009/powering-..., but unfortunately I'm not able to open that link to verify its contents. https://venturebeat.com/games/the-making-and-unmaking-of-inf... seems to indicate as well that Dreamworks approached 2015, https://www.ign.com/articles/2009/11/06/ign-presents-the-his... suggests EA 'employed' 2015 which sounds about right (Dreamworks Interactive was sold to EA)

The PC games done by 2015 nee Infinity Ward were basically them getting to do whatever they wanted, vs being handed a prepared design bible as was common for 2nd party dev in that era. That team absolutely deserves credit for what people commonly call MoH. Great you loved the PSX games. You're rather alone in considering them the same thing in all but brand.

"...calling me a lair..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DZKwCVKneg

Sorry, found the typo funny. Not trying to antagonize anyone this morning.

Lately HN feels more like a bunch of lawyers quibbling over semantics... It gets really old, really fast.

Whatever happened to assume positive intent?

> Whatever happened to assume positive intent?

I think positive intent is different from truth.

To make good decisions, I need to drill down to the truth of the situation. People can be super honest and be wrong or conflate ideas.

So for me, I work on being politely skeptical and assume it’s false until substantiated.

Intense levels of plausibly-deniable passive aggression, and absolutely god-awful intent being treated as something better to the detriment of discourse thanks to the "assume positive intent" rule, are what I consider some of the core defining features of the HN experience.

I dunno if it does any good, but these days when I smell ill intent beneath the surface of a "just asking questions" post I just flag the bastards rather than trying to help them by answering. Responding is simply feeding trolls, and HN threads are full of that sort of thing. Argumentative jerks who are just trying to argue, while staying just civil enough that they don't get slapped down (not too quickly, anyway).

My kingdom for sigs and blocklists.

The problem is that your figurative sense of smell may not be correct. It really is quite easy to mistake an honest question or assertion as passive aggression or sarcasm in text form.

Maybe, but I can assure you from back when I tried to engage in good faith it's pretty damn accurate. It doesn't hurt that HN's a target-rich environment for such a detector, of course.

I had the feeling my honest questions were not-rarely seen as sarcasms or bad faith arguments. Probably has some overlap with autistic spectrum disorders.

And I often wished I could specify “please read this comment in literally the way I wrote it and don’t try to find a non-existing message between the lines”. Alas.

> And I often wished I could specify “please read this comment in literally the way I wrote it and don’t try to find a non-existing message between the lines”. Alas.

This is definitely a problem, and while typical on the Web more broadly, there are a few flavors of it that are more common here than other places. You have my sympathy, and I do try to be aware of my own limitations and don't just run around flag-happy for anything I might be able to read as having a bad tone. Though I'm sure I mess up sometimes.

However—there's a certain kind of needling, brash posting style that's nearly always just someone trying to tee themselves up for some usually-idiotic rant or series of needlessly-aggressive arguments they have prepared but don't yet have an entry to post without being off-topic, that's often initiated with a question that looks kinda innocent but's just a little off. That's the "smell" I mean, and it's the kind I've learned to just flag without trying to "help" (due to assuming good faith), and I'm pretty sure I have a low false-positive rate on those. This is, from what I can tell, an extremely successful approach to trolling HN (I'm quite certain a few posters do it for that express purpose, though I do think the typical motive is different and not purely aimed at creating chaos and bad feelings), and one that HN has no good defense against except cleaning it up after the fact, which is often after the whole discussion thread's mostly dead, anyway.

It's not unusual for half the posts in a thread to stem from these kinds of premeditated argument-prompts that were never intended to curiously explore the problem space (though they may, for a time, masquerade as such) and to end up acrimonious and/or in massive wheel-spinning flame wars—as there's no other way it could have gone, because the instigator was looking for a fight, even if they weren't trying to troll per se, and were relying on assume-good-faith engagement to let the embers mature into a full-blown fire so they could embark on their righteous crusade or whatever it is they think they're doing, rather than being ignored (again: for god's sake, give us user ignore-lists—that and making poster identity a little more prominent so we can more easily recognize patterns, rather than instances, of behavior would help so much and I bet those flame sub-threads would get a lot quieter) or instantly called out and told to fuck off as they might on other sites that lack strong adherence to the "assume good faith" rule.

To avoid just shitting on the site (I'm not here because I hate it... though I do think some parodies and unkind criticisms of HN are closer to the truth, than its own collective self-image is), if I could pick out one cultural thing I really like about HN, it's the relative lack of value-free posts about obvious typos or accidental word omissions or that sort of thing. You see occasional corrections of actual usage or spelling mistakes, where the poster seems not to have slipped up but to actually have a poor idea of what's most-correct and to have done the wrong thing unknowingly, but on purpose, but those are usually polite and at least convey potentially-useful information. But, very little "did you mean X LOL?" where every single person reading it can tell that yes, they meant X, and simply made a mistake. That shit's really common on some other corners of the Web and it's just the worst. I think that quality's mainly a consequence of HN being pretty decent at policing blatantly low-value posts in general.

> Lately HN feels more like a bunch of lawyers quibbling over semantics...

There is no semantics challenge in a random coming at someone out of the blue with accusations of being a liar. The only lawyering involved is determining if it would represent libel or slander.

So they didn’t start MOH, thanks for clarifying and I now can understand your post better.

HN is the only place on the web that I know of where someone will tell you--someone who has experience in X, Y or Z--that you are wrong, or "sealion" you, or better yet, attempt to correct you with their armchair experience.

Then, you'll be reprimanded for pointing it out, asking you to "not do that here."

I wish moderation would curtail this obnoxious behavior, because I see HN as a place where experts can detail their experience, and over the years I see more and more amateur butt in or sealioning behavior take place, and people I know have left over it.

If you go to the souce on the Wikipedia page, it tells a slightly different story than what the OP said -

https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/publishing/the-medal-of-...

>Yet 2015 would never get the chance to make another Medal of Honor. EA decided to take all development for the franchise in-house. Morale was low amongst the team and they were looking to start up on its own.

>We had bonded as a team, but decided we wanted to work with new management. Many members of the team were actually going to leave to find new jobs, regardless of potential royalties coming in from Medal of Honor.

>After leaving 2015 we were working with a major publisher. For legal reasons I will say things didn’t go as planned with it. We were left in a situation of unpaid milestones that were delivered and no finances to operate on,” says Thomas.

>The company was potentially going to disband. In a last ditch effort our then president, Grant Collier sent out a signal to all the major publishers in the industry letting them know that the majority of the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault team was available. Within days of closing the doors on the studio, Activision responded immediately with an offer.”

Yeah, I'm giving a simplified version, and also avoiding disclosing some details that might blow back on my friend. It was considerably more nasty than that article portrays via the quotes.

Except you basically said "they quit solely because of money" and the article basically says "it wasn't at all about the money."

Those are very different things. One isn't a "simplified" version of the other.

The money was definitely the root issue. I can't say more without sharing things that could blow back on a friend. Either you believe me or you don't.

I suppose that explains why they felt so eerily similar and shared same engine.

Funny thing is that the owners did the same thing a second time, going back to the EA, forming Respawn Environment.

yeeeeeeuuuup :P

I agree with your message though there's a scarier story in there. What if those people never left to make Call of Duty?

Under the boss they would have made more Medal of Honor, and maybe the next MoH's were not billion-dollar products.

Maybe had they gotten equity, we would never have a billion dollar CoD series!

Indeed.

It's very similar with tech startups. Once you've been around the washing machine loop a couple times you realize just how much of this stuff is arbitrary and luck dependent. Unicorns born upon butterfly's wings. Having a certain background lets you buy more chances at the luck part. It's not fair. It is.

Personally my read on this is we should have some humility about how unpredictable this all is.

> Maybe had they gotten equity, we would never have a billion dollar CoD series!

The good timeline xD

If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want.

Quotation of the month. Devs should have this knitted into a pillow in their cubicles.

Yeah this story has a problem.

An entire company 'quits' and just 're-does the thing' is almost assuredly theft of know-now and IP, but more than that theft of the operating modality.

It takes in incredible amount of work, risk, investment etc. to 'get something up and going' - with all of the parts working.

Any time you walk into a company you'll see what looks like 'things working' on some level, usually that took incredible trials and travails.

It's a bit like 'decent code' - it takes iterations, after which, it's 'obvious in hindsight'.

Every coder knows it's 'figuring it out' that's hard, whereas doing it a second time is easy.

Employees who tool 100% salary to start, without higher risk equity, and then wanted to 'trade after the fact' shouldn't be miffed - they just shouldn't have taken the job if what they wanted was equity.

It could entirely be the case of cockroach management giving horrible terms to everyone including underpayment etc. but these stories are often one-sided.

I'm working with a company right now that I've discovered has a seemingly 'simple' product. It took this young girl 4 years of struggle (and failure before) that, to get this thing where it is and establish all the sales relationships. I'm sure I could duplicate it quickly with minimal resources (I wouldn't do that to her), but it has dawned on me how much effort it takes to move things forward.

Here is the story, and it doesn't really speak to some kind of greedy action by 2015, the original game devs. More subtle than that. More like the original team, which was assembled by EA, liked working together, and were lured away by another studio as a team.

[1] https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/publishing/the-medal-of-...

FYI the founders of 'Call of Duty' were eventually fired on bad terms again.

I would reserve judgment on these situations.

Especially in entertainment and creative things, there are a lot of personality issues.

> It takes in incredible amount of work, risk, investment etc. to 'get something up and going' - with all of the parts working.

So.. it's fair if the people who did all the hard work ask for some form of participation? If all it takes to duplicate a product is money and the people with know-how, than the capital is a rather marginal contribution?

And I am deliberately talking about know-how, and not IP here. You cannot apply copyright to the knowledge of your employees.

It's fair for employees to ask, it's fair to be told know.

"You cannot apply copyright to the knowledge of your employees. "

? Absolutely you can, legally.

But the issues is just as much moral one.

The owners put it together and paid for the employees to make all sorts of mistakes etc..

It would be shameful if they did that.

All of that said I don't think that's the case.

I mean, you can call it IP theft, I can call it wage theft. The article quotes one of the devs as saying they had "unpaid milestones", which reads an awful lot like the "major publisher" he didn't want to name for legal reasons had violated the one term that mattered: the part where they pay for the game.

The lesson to take away here, for management, is that you can't get away with everything forever. Whether you view the actions of 2015 as IP theft or just desserts, the fact remains that it wouldn't have happened if the team had A) gotten paid and B) gotten the terms they asked for. I'd be demanding a better deal, too, if my publisher mysteriously forgot to pay for a milestone.

The lesson for 'management' is get better contracts and don't invest and develop people who will walk out with your stuff.

Item 'A' is a bit more reasonable, people not getting paid is bad.

But item 'B' is not. Sorry, you don't just get to ask for a better deal after the fact, because it finally worked out and now in 20/20 hindsight you want a cut.

But why not? Why shouldn't there be a process for renegotiating a contract? Especially in cases like this, where the employees are still producing things for the management--I would understand if you were renegotiating JUST on an existing product, because renegotiating on a deal that's already over makes the deal drag on unnecessarily, but these people were probably working on a new game while talking about renegotiating their contract. They weren't just talking about their compensation for the game they'd already finished; they were talking about compensation for every game they'd make in the future with that publisher.

Black Isle is another great example. Interplay was going under and selling off any IP of value to get some cash out of the end of the road. The staff, seeing the writing on the wall, quit more or less en masse and started Obsidian together. The name is even a bit of a pun- Obsidian, a black volcanic glass, is what you might expect a Black Isle to be made from.

> That studio owner literally made a billion dollar mistake by not simply being fair early on to the team. Never, ever, treat a team that has achieved rare success as replaceable cogs. If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want.

That wisdom applies to that specific industry. In gaming, the people you hire are the asset. However the same doesn't apply to all industries. Sometimes people are more and sometimes less replaceable. If you are running a fast food chain and manage to piss all your employees, yes, it is likely a problem, but if you hire new people and fix your behaviour it is likely that the business will continue to run as usual.

If that's true (your statement, not mine), this just means that compensation fast fast-food employees get is completely fair.

Not at all. It just means that there is a larger pool of employees qualified to work in fast food.

Sometimes people are simply forced to take jobs that are not adequately compensated.

"The workers are easily replaced" and "Their compensation is fair" are two different statements.

It's exactly the same statement. Fair cost of something IS the opportunity cost of buying the same thing from someone else.

Well, it depends on your definition of "fair". You're going by the market definition -- but the market definition of "fair" is often quite unfair by other definitions.

Considering that markets exist whenever 2 or more individuals gather, without regard to any other factors… it’s pretty much a fundamental force like gravity. In fact even ant colonies experience market forces so it’s practically impossible for it to not exist.

Does it matter if a lot of folks have different definitions of gravity?

> Considering that markets exist whenever 2 or more individuals gather

In the most general sense of "market", this is not wrong. However, you're talking from the point of view of a rather specific market theory. That market theory is not a fundamental force, it's just one of many ways of doing things.

It also has a very narrow definition of "fair", which makes sense within its own world, but I would argue is not generalizable outside of that world.

What's the 'rather specific market theory'? As far as I understand that is the dictionary definition of a market. Here's Meriam-webster:

market, noun, often attributive

mar· ket | \ ˈmär-kət \

Definition of market (Entry 1 of 2)

1. a(1) : a meeting together of people for the purpose of trade by private purchase and sale and usually not by auction (2) : the people assembled at such a meeting

b(1) : a public place where a market is held especially : a place where provisions are sold at wholesale a farmers' market (2) : a retail establishment usually of a specified kind a fish market

2. archaic : the act or an instance of buying and selling

3. : the rate or price offered for a commodity or security

4. a(1) : a geographic area of demand for commodities or services (2) : a specified category of potential buyers the youth market

b : the course of commercial activity by which the exchange of commodities is effected : extent of demand the market is dull

c(1) : an opportunity for selling

(2) : the available supply of or potential demand for specified goods or services the labor market

d : the area of economic activity in which buyers and sellers come together and the forces of supply and demand affect prices

Markets are absolutely nothing like fundamental physical forces like gravity.

Read David Greaber.

If I had a gun to the head of everyone in town, and everyone in town mysteriously agrees to sell their labor for free, does that mean that cost of labor is fair?

There are circumstances outside of the price which affect the fairness of the price.

>> That studio owner literally made a billion dollar mistake by not simply being fair early on to the team. Never, ever, treat a team that has achieved rare success as replaceable cogs. If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want.

What prevented them from offering bad deals that are common today? Some examples I've seen:

- give lots of equity, but vesting over long timelines

- give no refreshers, if people leave, they lost lots of unvested

- stay private for a long time...equity is almost unsellable and theoretical only

- give lots of equity, but lag on salary and save big

- give lots of equity, but leave people with huge unfunded tax liabilities if they want to leave company

- give "lots" of equity which is worthless if people actually saw the cap table

I dont feel any of the above are good practices, but they are common practices for equity theatre

When I had a job with similar “incentives”, my comment to coworkers was that it wasn’t quite a carrot-on-a-stick, it was the promise of a picture of a carrot-on-a-stick.

Thank you for the term "Equity Theatre"!

I agree 100% with much of the sentiment here that creators deserve respect and a cut of the spoils

At the same time, it really depends.... I'm pretty confident that there are very few engineers at FAANG that can't be replaced. I'd also expect there are very few engineers at Epic, Activision, Blizzard, Naughty Dog, Sony, Rockstar, Ubisoft, Valve, etc... that can't be replaced. Sure, if 30%-70% of the team left on any particular project it would probably die, but at least for AAA titles, there's usually no one person responsible for that title's success? Or maybe there is but it's limited to a few key people and not every person on that team.

IF you're at some indie firm with 5-15 people that's probably less true.

I mostly made this comment because in 1983 most games were made by 1 to 3 people max. By the end of the 80s there weren't many games that had more than 20 people on them and usually they took less than a year to make. It was only in the mid 90s that we started getting 30+ people teams trying to fill a CD with data and it arguably wasn't until the 2000s that we had games that it was common to teams of 30-100+ people multiple years to make.

I see stories like this a few times.

But oftentimes management ask if the project will be completed at all. And yes, the project will be completed.

But the real question to ask is often:

Will it be completed on time? On budget? With the same quality level?

And this is a complete different story.

If you take the truly non-performing folks, well sad to say you can probably get rid of most of them and improve performance.

Otherwise, get rid of any engineer and the minimum impact is 3-6 months code and culture familiarisation before they get up to speed with your particular application/code base/equipment. Can easily be more than a year - especially with some of the big systems.

So yes there is an impact on business performance, and a highly damaging one, far more often than is realised. Companies compete - and companies go under and get replaced, all the time.

>get rid of any engineer and the minimum impact is 3-6 months code and culture familiarisation

On a big project, say 100 devs over 3 years, 6 man months is 1/600th of the work, so a single person is replaceable and it's not even noise. If the replacement takes 6 months to get up to speed the replacement is certainly not a very good developer, even on the biggest projects. At that size, there's lots of small side projects, testing groups, and the like, so there should be plenty of smaller pieces to work on, and some on those small projects are always happy to jump into the main work, not needing 3-6 months to be useful to it.

This is not highly damaging on any but the smallest, shortest projects. And even there people move around all the time and don't destroy projects.

>If the replacement takes 6 months to get up to speed the replacement is certainly not a very good developer

I think you're mistaking 'becoming a contributing member of the team' for 'contributes at the level of the developer that left'.

Often the person leaving has not been that good of a contributor due to wanting to leave, while a replacement is new and likely more inclined to work hard.

On a big team, people fit a bell curve, and most likely those leaving are not going to cause much harm (otherwise no big project would get done - all have people coming and going over the lifespan of the codebase).

Most developers working on products, not just at FAANG, can be replaced but it's very costly.

You need to find a developer in the specific niche he was competent. Not easy because there is a shortage of developers. Then he needs to get up to speed with the stack and the processes used in the company.

So in theory yes, engineers can be replaced. In practice it's costly, with no guarantee of getting the same productivity, and the process to find someone will leave you with one person less for many months. When you have competent engineers that you want to keep, the last thing to do is to play the "I don't need you anyway" card.

Blizzard lost their entire RTS staff to Frost Giant and will likely never release another RTS again. Sure they can probably survive on lootboxes for Hearthstone and Overwatch, but it's not the company it was. Even WoW is basically dead and is just rehashing with classic. Diablo got turned into mobile lootbox garbage as well, and it's too early to tell if Diablo 4 is going to follow the same path, but I wouldn't hold out hope on it being a critical success.

Large game companies have now essentially become casinos.

> I'm pretty confident that there are very few engineers at FAANG that can't be replaced. I'd also expect there are very few engineers at Epic, Activision, Blizzard, Naughty Dog, Sony, Rockstar, Ubisoft, Valve, etc... that can't be replaced. Sure, if 30%-70% of the team left on any particular project it would probably die

The thing is these two things are linked - one engineer leaving and 30-70% of a team leaving. The quantity of who leaves does not matter as much - a project may be able to handle 70% of consultants, interns, junior and regular programmers leaving, but might die if the 30% (or 25%, or 20%) leaving is entirely senior/staff/principal.

One of the lead programmers who has been at the company for many years leaves. He is friendly with some of the other senior programmers and says he thinks the company is slowly going downhill, and he got a new job with better money, and with a saner schedule, work environment and work-life balance. Maybe one of the other senior people leaves for the company he left for. Then other senior people start leaving.

It's like Steve Blank's essay about how a company deciding to start charging fifty cents for soda led to an exodus of its best senior programmers. One lead leaving can be a catalyst for others leaving. So they are in a sense irreplaceable.

If a company is an oligopoly like Verizon/AT&T or the like, then they are privy to revenue and profits they don't have to compete for, and for companies in that situation people are more replaceable. Not for companies that have to be competitive though.

And let’s not forget that the great Woz and Jobs were once Atari employees who left to start a new company called Apple.

Or it could have been caused by the whole video game crash of 1983 and not four employees leaving…

i thought there was an industrywide videogame crash in the early 80s that was blamed on the atari consoles being too open. (everyone was making cartridges, even companies like ralston-purina, quality fell under the flooded market and consumers gave up).

my understanding is that this gave rise to nintendo's tight control over developer licensees while atari was sold off and pivoted to home computers (specifically the st line) under jack tramiel.

The story is more complex than that, Atari split in 2 (the games company and the consumer electronics company) and neither really exist anymore (and haven't for a long time now). But basically yes - they never replicated the success of the VCS and arcades stopped being a major part of the industry in the 90s. All of Atari's biggest hits were in the 70s and (early) 80s.

it's really complex, and quite interesting!

"Video game crash of 1983 - Wikipedia" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

Atari collapsed under its own weight because of some pretty profound mismanagement, which led to massive layoffs. (you mentioned in another comment that engineers “left in an avalanche.” The word is “layoff”) There were plenty of extremely capable designers and engineers (and researchers) who were let go in a very short period of time, people who had not gone off to do their own thing. Atari was big.

If anything, other companies making good games for their platform aided them, and they were famously bad at seeing that. Engineers leaving to develop Atari software didn’t move the needle in terms of their collapse. Not giving individual credit on games is a tiny footnote in the book of things Atari management did wrong.

I’d read that Kassar actually compared the programmers with towel designers, having come from Burlington Industries (a textile company) himself.

Famously, the Traitorous Eight left Shockley to found Fairchild Semiconductor. This was essentially the origin story of Silicon Valley.

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

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Power-Law-Venture-Capital-Disruptio...

Shockley inadvertently by being an asshole created more wealth for more people possibly than any other single person.

Shockley deserves as much credit for the creation of that wealth as the wind deserves credit for an amazing photograph of a beautiful summer sky.

How do you figure? He invented several kinds of semiconductors he assembled the team that went on to found an entire industry. Much of that wealth could have been held onto by him, had he been less of an ass.

People didn't leave over equity, or pay, they left because he was an asshole. Without him being a jackass, his company might have invented the things later invented at Fairchild.

Are you suggesting he was intentionally an ass to drive people away so that they could create something even greater? That truly is some 4D chess business.

You can get credit for mistakes all the time. Go speed past a cop, even by accident (distracted), collect your ticket and your credit for making the roadways a bit more hazardous and your police station a bit more wealthy.

He didn’t have to intend for them to leave to get credit for being the asshole that made them leave. :)

"At the time of his death, he was estranged from most of his friends and family, except his second wife, the former Emmy Lanning (1913–2007). His children reportedly learned of his death by reading his obituary in the newspaper."

Well, that says a lot.

Not to mention: "Shockley became widely known for his extreme views on race and his advocacy of eugenics". Sounds like a terrible person.

The question is whether we tolerate assholes for their inventions and brilliancy? What material damage his asshole-ness has caused compared to the benefits he provided to the world? It is quite overwhelmingly clear.

My take is that these are the people that herald the western civilization. The misfits, the weirdos and the, yes, assholes.

They have almost zero chance to convince everyone of their twisted views of Eugenics or what have you.

I am afraid, we've created a society where these people are shunned and IMO it is an overall net-negative. A lot of people in GNU org can be borderline fascist/communist/insert-extremist-movement.

Shockley is the exception to the 'tolerating assholes' rule, he was far enough outside the rails that he was largely shunned by his peers, subordinates, and everyone else.

But not Stanford University, where he continued to teach other students and be a professor until his retirement, and on whose website Shockley still prominently is posted: https://engineering.stanford.edu/people/william-shockley

So perhaps there are communities smack dab in the heart of Silicon Valley startup ecosystem that do tolerate even the most extreme assholes, still. It seems personal asshole-like behavior is tolerated or ignored in lieu of their "other contributions".

That is like attributing the Big Bang to why inflation is at 8.6% currently.

Well, inflation[0] did in fact start shortly after the Big Bang.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)

PBS has a great documentary about silicon valley that goes into some of this.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/silicon...

Did Shockley die though?

Shockley Semiconductor, the company? Yes, it eventually closed because of this. It took a decade of them floundering, but it did happen.

OK. Close enough!

I worked for a company big enough to be in the HN headlines (sorry, have to stay somewhat anonymous) where development virtually stalled for a couple years after a mass exodus event. The CEO went on a rampage and fired some people on the spot for something they weren’t even responsible for, which destroyed the already fragile morale and created a steady exodus of good talent over a couple of years.

It didn’t kill the company for several reasons, but primarily because:

1) The company had enough momentum, revenue, and cash in the bank that they could go on hiring sprees to replace everyone. The new hires had a lot of churn when they realized what was going on, so they just kept hiring until enough replacements stuck around.

2) Many of the employees who didn’t quit saw this as their opportunity to rise through the ranks and fill the voids. They weren’t wrong and it paid off for many of them in the form of rapid promotions and advancement. The CEO became more hands-off as he realized his micromanagement wasn’t helping, so they basically inherited a slightly better situation.

After this experience, I don’t really see a developer exodus killing any big company with good momentum and decent cash reserves. As long as a company has cash flow they can spend their way into hiring replacements as long as it takes.

Extremely similar situation happened to me at a startup.

I honestly, can't believe how many companies I've seen that have had the problem with new hires churning really quick.

When I lived in the UK, I saw one company that was like that. When I moved to Berlin, it's pretty much been like that at most companies. Various reasons from the tech being crap, the culture being crap, or managers being crap.

While the company normally survives for a while, since if you have the cash you can survive for a while no matter what. The company never really reaches it's true value. Most do end up being acquired by a competitor for very little money or going out of business.

Ah yes, the companies with bimodal tenure distribution; it's either 3 months or 13 years, and nobody with 3 years. You either accept the bullshit and stick around, or you get out of there fast.

So the good ones left when they realized what was going on and the mediocre ones stayed.

I, being Deaf, would have been forced to stay with the mediocre ones because interviewing is difficult for me.

I am lucky that I don't need a job now.

Don't they accommodate you knowing that you are deaf?

Granted, I don't know where you're situated, and from what I hear the hiring process in the US is sketchy, but this sounds like an easy problem to fix, if it's even a problem at all.

I’m not deaf but have other impairments and most companies literally don’t even know what to do, it’s like an alien just showed up on their doorstep. In my experience most of the time if you’re disabled you’re just quietly looked over.

It's just plain discrimination. If you have to equally skilled people, do you pick the one where you need to make special accomodations? Probably not, even if you are free of prejudices or other malicious thoughts.

As I’ve posted my story below, I also wanted to point out that I was uniquely Deaf, but nonetheless a rockstar programmer then.

Interviewing is hard. Notably Google’s digital interviewing where they insist that they call you for an interview. I aced all their backend questions so they kept trying to call me until I insisted that I call them. Then it went silent. Their loss.

This approach doesn’t leave us Deafies a whole lotta time to arrange for an American Sign Language interpreter to come and sit with us before the phone rings.

Can you play audio explaining the situation asking for a call back number or email?

I imagine this situation comes up frequently and not only with hiring.

My lawyer advised me not to reveal my handicap during any interview process. it really is about the skillset.

It becomes a bonus for the company if HR finds out, but not necessarily for the line management.

Problem is Google does not segregate such sensitive info (race, sex, handicap) between the hiring team and its HR.

Google, however, elected not to use email and I am unwilling to reveal the real reason for me calling them directly … much less by email.

I see, it seems like choosing to not reveal your handicap during the interview process is a major challenge to getting the accommodations you want during the hiring process.

Also not sure how google HR could firewall obvious disability from the hiring team if they are at all involved in the interview.

if and when the design team of Google hiring are not made up of HR personnel, it could be construed as a violation of Federal labor law. It becomes a violation if the hiring (non-HR) team are privy to sensitive info of applicants. and if HR design team and hiring (non-HR) team are one and the same playing fast and loose with privilege info, many lawyers will be all over this.

Of course, I am unwilling to find out because my priorities lies elsewhere but if and when I learn of the next Deaf applicant that got turned away because of lack of direct call support, then my priority of my legal team will change.

Federal law says accommodation must be made … after the hire. No need to tip your hand earlier.

I think you are grossly misinformed.

>when the design team of Google hiring are not made up of HR personnel, it could be construed as a violation of Federal labor law.

There is nothing illegal about the design team participating in or even running the hiring process.

>HR design team and hiring (non-HR) team are one and the same playing fast and loose with privilege info, many lawyers will be all over this.

There is nothing illegal about this either. You have to show discrimination took place. Many companies separate some roles simply for additional legal protection.

>Of course, I am unwilling to find out because my priorities lies elsewhere but if and when I learn of the next Deaf applicant that got turned away because of lack of direct call support, then my priority of my legal team will change.

You weren't turned away. You refused to tell them you needed direct call accommodation, and then act like a victim when they didn't know. Do you expect them to read minds? Do you expect them to accommodate every possible request from applicants without need for explanation?

If you go to court, google will show it's HR policies and process for accommodating applicants that notify HR of their needs. They will point to applicants that asked for accommodation, and all the times HR provided it. They will then point out the fact that you or the next similar applicant did not inform them, and explain to the court that they are not mind readers.

That was on the advice of my lawyer.

You, however, probably need to consult your legal team.

This type of discussion is typical. If all goes well, no worries, Signed Language is so beautiful, how can I learn to sign? and so on. If there are problems, Deaf people are used to rough treatment. And if they complain they are told off not to be so sensitive, that what they say is not correct, or they get the silence treatment.

It seems there is something like an impedance mismatch between Deafies and Hearies and sometimes the sparks fly furiously.

C'est la vie.

C’eat la vie.

That is strategic advice, not advice on the law.

If the intent of hiding your disability is to prevent possible discrimination during the process, you are defeating the intent staying quiet and guaranteeing the application fails.

IMO they did nothing discriminatory.

Sure. They’ve neglected to mention accommodation in their hiring website.

That … was on the advice of my lawyer.

Meanwhile, this:

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/accessibility/googl...

It's not possible to have a Signed Language interpreter around you all the time. Or did you? If not, how did you communicate with your coworkers?

When I was working in companies I just lipread and talked German, and it worked mostly fine except meetings. But a few years ago I realized that lipreading is too hard for me, so I now avoid that. Recently I got interrogated by the police but they put up an additional computer monitor for me to follow the notes. I declined the offer of a Signed Language interpreter because I was not sure whether the interpreter really knows the correct legal terms. The monitor was very helpful. I caught many little misunderstandings this way like I said, he wanted to void the ticket himself, but the minute taker wrote, he wanted to buy the ticket himself.

Anyway, I am lucky that I don't need to work in companies anymore being semi-retired.

This is kind of my experience as well — lots of times these management mistakes manifest as opportunity costs, which means there might not be much in the way of visible costs. This means that there's often little consequence to the mismanagement, and the organization can absorb the problematic consequences as long as they have sufficient outside reputation and/or resources to attract a critical mass of new hires that will just flow with that dysfunction, or the poor management goes away for other reasons.

The continued success or longevity of an organization doesn't say much about how it's functioning, mostly because it doesn't address how much better it could have been doing or who is not in the organization.

Sounds like many dysfunctional startups, many of which have impetuous CEOs who have been handed far too much VC money and have far too little management experience. Just take a look at what is / has happened with DataRobot.

i havent actually done this but just pointing out that with 55k HN karma and 7 years of HN comments, you're pseudonymous at best :) maybe if youre far enough from the company i'd give it like 5 years statute of limitations before you can start naming and shaming?

Zynga?

The wedding photographer/videographer business I discussed in another thread last week. All his employees quit and he went under.

I've personally been involved with more than one general contractor going under. When I was a young carpenter, I followed my best friend from job to job and contractor to contractor. When he walked off a job, the rest of us followed. He and I and a group of Dominicans (from Dominica not the DR) put more than one GC out of business because we'd walk and then we'd tell everyone we knew that they shouldn't work for said GC.

When I became older and my friend moved away, I took his place. It was so satisfying leaving a job and then receiving a phone call from the client a few days/week later asking me and the crew to come back and finish with promises that the GC would be out of the picture.

It's incredibly difficult to find skilled tradesman in the Caribbean that will show up sober each day and perform quality work. We always had the long end of the stick.

Link to the wedding business comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32740708

lol that's a delightful story

Sounds like the archetype of "being a manager means being angry at people. business knowledge optional"

It also sounds like an untrue story. You can find photo/video editors all over the internet. As a photographer I'm spammed by the Chinese ones every week. Looking at their portfolios, they aren't even bad (though I don't know how real their portfolios are).

> It's incredibly difficult to find skilled tradesman in the Caribbean that will show up sober each day and perform quality work.

There's a lot to unpack in that sentence. Care to elaborate?

I know nothing about the Caribbean, but I can tell you about middle America. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about having a job foreman for the home renovation/whatever project tell them “so-and-so had a beer at lunch, but they’re good. Do you mind?”

FYI, that’s a trap. If there is a jobsite accident that afternoon, you are liable for allowing someone who’s been drinking to work.

I will echo this and share some context.

The biggest challenge I've had is that trade schools and certifications are inconsistent, so it's not easy to vet candidates; a lot of hiring is intra-island, requiring significant up-front investment in people without knowing that they'll work out; and equipment and regulations (especially electrical) are highly variable, making it hard for a crew to deliver consistent quality.

That context gives a lot of room for crews and contractors to take advantage of inexperienced project managers and investors, and since the corrupt teams aren't brought back they tend to be the ones which are available for the next gig. When you find a great team you treasure them and even find work to keep them busy and happy between projects.

It's actually a remarkably similar dynamic to H1B engineer mills in the US. Many H1B engineers are brilliant, the best of the world looking for a challenge in America. But many are pawns in outsourcing meat markets.

Eh, it’s not exclusive to the Caribbean. Construction is hard work and my experience is people who work it tend to drink (more).

Im from the Caribbean.

Having just overseen a construction project in rural Spain,...

workers show up sober, that's not the problem. Problem is they are not trained in the trade.

Never heard of vibrating concrete. Or curing times.

Setting pillars by 'eye', not even using a plumb line.

Carpenter delivers the doors unfinished. These are outside doors.

Door lock mechanism installed wrong, such that the door locks (once) but cannot unlock.

The painter was decent, but his background was as a Venezuelan helicopter mechanic. Left Venezuela for economic reasons.

Workers showing up without the basic tools for the day's work, so had to supply them myself. Obvious stuff like blades for the angle grinders.

Oh, and coordinating supplies and work, nah, not really a thing.

Many construction crews in the islands consist of a combination of European and US expats and Dominicans with a few Haitian laborers thrown in.

On all the islands I worked on, it was rare to find people actually from that island who were capable of that kind of work.

The Dominicans and the Haitians were fine, but the US and European guys mostly treated it as one big vacation. They would stay out all night partying and then come to work and do just enough to not get fired.

As another commenter mentioned, those guys knew they could always find work elsewhere even if only temporarily because skilled trades were in high demand. So they could quickly move on until they burned another bridge.

I was on one job in Antigua where the project managers were able to avoid this completely. They flew in hundreds of people from Indian and had them live in a “tent town” where they never left except to go to work each day. No alcohol or drugs allowed.

Myself and two others were flown in to install all the cabinets and other mill work. With the except of the stone guys from Turkey, we were the only non Indians on the entire project.

So they flew in labor and kept them in a pen without freedom or anyway to get home in order to ensure they did quality work. That sounds a lot like slavery with extra steps.

It was a British project management firm and it was the first and only time I ever experienced anything like that. It wouldn't be the most ideal situation for me, but they seem eager and happy to be there.

I don't believe it should be compared to slavery since they chose to be there and they were paid well for their time. I don't imagine there was any other way to house that many individuals on Antigua. There certainly weren't enough hotel rooms or condos available during the tourist season.

They had quite a bit of authority as well. I was on site for less than 5 minutes when one of the safety guys made me leave because I did not have steel toed boots.

> It was a British project management firm and it was the first and only time I ever experienced anything like that. It wouldn't be the most ideal situation for me, but they seem eager and happy to be there.

What was the name of the project management firm? I am curious how you determined that they seemed eager and happy to be there.

> I don't believe it should be compared to slavery since they chose to be there and they were paid well for their time

How much were they paid?

I'm not going to dox myself by revealing the firm; I believe I was the only American on site at the time and I was certainly the only one performing millwork installation.

I determined they were happy and eager because I spent each evening with them eating and watching soccer. I was down there during Christmas, and Liat airlines happened to go on strike so I was stranded there for 3 additional days. They made me feel very welcomed. I would spend the evening with them and then walk the ~2 miles back to the small house that was rented for me.

I don't know how much all of them were paid, but the framers were making a weekly salary of $750 IIRC (or so they claimed) and that was beyond a decent wage 15 years ago. Especially considering all of their expenses were paid. I flew down there on my own with all of my personal tools, did most of the work to secure a temp work visa on my own, and I only pulled in about $1250 per week back then for work that required quite a bit more skill than rough framing.

> I determined they were happy and eager because I spent each evening with them eating and watching soccer. I was down there during Christmas, and Liat airlines happened to go on strike so I was stranded there for 3 additional days. They made me feel very welcomed. I would spend the evening with them and then walk the ~2 miles back to the small house that was rented for me

In my opinion, this reminds me of a course I took about ethics. Slave owners and slave traders would say their slaves were happy because they would sing while working and play games like jump rope and hopscotch. The owners would also say their slaves loved them, especially the ones that were 'house slaves' that tended to be young women. A good example of that would be Thomas Jefferson and the underage child, Sally Hemmings who had his children. More recently Qatari companies caught using indentured/slave labor to build the FIFA stadium made similar remarks about their 'workers'.

Thank you for sharing your experience. It convinces me that people can easily find ways to convince themselves everything is fine.

I wonder what can be generalized from this experience to empower workers in other industries. My guess is that the tradesmen you worked with have negotiating power because they can find another GC. That relies on there being many competing companies. That can only happen in industries with low start-up costs and small economies of scale.

Railway operation has huge start-up costs and large economies of scale. I think a long term solution depends on the nationalization of track or at least the separation of train and track ownership, with track operators required to provide nondiscriminatory access. Not gonna happen but one can dream.

Again, all guesses, but I'd like to hear what someone more knowledgeable has to say

Borland. I worked there up until the mid 90s and then was recruited by Microsoft. They picked off all the great talent leaving barely any competent engineers left. I alongside a ton of other engineers were wined and dined and given a hell of an offer we couldn't refuse. It was insane, I should write a book honestly. I miss those days, it was the wild west of tech.

I'm curious if non-competes were a thing at this period of time. I'm not sure if something like this could happen today (although I'm sure it still happens).

Non-competes have been a thing for centuries, but California banned them in 1872.

which is awfully convenient that amzn and microsoft (and uber?) are based in washington state where this doesnt apply

Noncompetes are pretty toothless, even illegal in several jurisdictions. Even then, a company with money and clout to poach talent like that can also stand up for you if your failing ex-employer chooses to lash out.

>Noncompetes are pretty toothless

Not true. They’re illegal in California, but in other US states where they are legal they can be quite toothful. I have seen several ex-employees of my prior company get sued and lose.

It became a silent doctrine to just leave a two year gap on your public LinkedIn after working there. If you put anything in that period (the length of the non-compete), you were at risk of the CTO suing you for fun if he thought any of the scope your prior work overlapped with your new role. Fun stuff.

In texas they must have a geographic nexus in them, so if you move from Austin to Dallas, its often void.

They are also illegal in most European countries.

They're not illegal in Germany, but the legal requirements are so onerous (50% salary paid for the duration of the non-compete) nobody does it. I believe it's similar in France.

They can be done in Germany if they are very limited in scope, basically if they don't make it harder to find your next job. But it's a fine line, and if a court decides you stepped over the line it's as you described. Nobody sane would put it in a standard contract below C-level.

Yep,same in France, and they have to be geographically limited.

Interesting, as given most of my clarification talks with Betriebsrat, I thought it wouldn't be valid in court, unless they can prove you are doing some kind of industrial spionage like working in exactly 1:1 competing product.

I think Massachusetts has similar rules these days (after long-running opposition from some major employers). However, while 50% salary definitely makes a company put skin in the game, it's not a panacea. And, from an employee point of view, how many people will be comfortable with taking 50% salary (with no benefits, bonuses, or RSUs) to hang out for a year? Sure, some younger folks might see it as an opportunity but it may not be such a good deal for someone supporting a family.

> benefits, bonuses, or RSUs

"Benefits" isn't really relevant for Germany but bonuses and RSUs (though again, nobody in Germany gets those) are figured into the 50%.

Pretty much everyone I know would take such a contract; programmers make 1.5x-2x median salary to begin with even in Europe, and it's "don't compete", not "don't work".

In Massachusetts at least I think it's strictly salary which could probably represent 25% or less of your total comp. And yeah, you can work but there's no guarantee you would be able to work for another vaguely related software company, for example. I know people who wanted to go off on their own as consultants and did indeed have to take a year off.

> In Massachusetts at least I think it's strictly salary which could probably represent 25% or less of your total comp.

Then for most people this holds true they're making like $100k/year and $300k/year in RSUs? "Uncomfortable" taking a year with _no work_ for "only" $50k after that? I mean, come on. If you want to top it up, flip burgers a couple days a week.

Do you have a source on this? I am currently looking into the limitations on non-competes.

Not really, other than having discussed this issue several times with the union people throughout the years, and knowing for sure that in countries like Portugal, this is definitly not a thing, given how we jump between companies.

Nope. They're just in legal practice way more limited in scope. It has to be with a company that actually competes with the company you left.

Notice the most.

They are illegal for pretty much all but the board members, and even then the salaries must be paid to enforce it.

They are not illegal in the UK although there are some limits in time and space. You might still end up out of work for 6 months ore more. Worse they are sometime applied to relatively unskilled jobs.

The one in Poland is fun. You can bar someone from working in the same field for quite some time but you must pay them 70-80% (I don't quite remember how much but something like that) of their annual salary during that time. Which means that most of the people proposing this kind of deal are clueless ans greedy businessmen who think they found a perfect leash for their employees but what's actually happening is that they find out far too late that it's binding them and not the employee.

They're not illegal. They're just generally unenforceable.

And, even if you don't end up losing after being sued, many people won't roll the dice if a threatened with a suit because they'll probably be out big bucks even if they win. Better to just take a year off; I've known people who have done so when they've been in a situation where a prior employer was likely to sue.

> >Noncompetes are pretty toothless

> Not true.

Sure, if you delete the "in several jurisdictions". But when you read the entire sentence, then what I said is correct.

I wonder what makes a company poach like this vs do an aquihire

Cost, surely. Paying for 10 engineers is much cheaper than paying for them and the IP they helped produce over the years, especially if you're not interested in that IP.

Poaching can be done quietly and cheaply, acquihires get everyone publically.

I suspect this would work in a lot of cases if you can find out who the key engineers/strategy people in the company are. But working that out is probably the hard part.

If you have the money an acquihire guarantees you get everything. But then you still have to work out who those key people are after the fact and make sure you keep them happy.

Aquihires can be very destructive.

You end up with either the whole company, or you piss off the people that you wanted when you fire their co-workers. It also pulls in an almost complete graph of employees who are isolated from the new parent company.

Its much better to pull off the people that you want, and get them to join willingly, as they tend to adopt the culture/learn better when in isolation.

Cuts both ways. You also get a fully functioning, self-contained team or 10. That can be attractive.

Aquihires are really only a thing when the target is a start-up with little revenue and limited growth prospects. At the time, Borland was a real company with many products and paying customers.

The majority of Borland products completed directly with Microsoft products at the time. If Microsoft had done an acquisition then they would have sunsetted most Borland products anyway so it would have been a pointless waste of money.

Cisco poached all of the server sales team from HO when they launched UCS. This caused a major problem within Cisco because that HP sales team (and engineers) were so absolutely atrocious that it ruined Cisco internally for almost 10 years.

Buying a company to get 10 key employees is a lot more expensive than just making 10 really lucrative offers. For Microsoft in particular it left a competitor with a storied history rudderless. So it makes Microsoft's offering look even better in comparison.

If you approach people one at a time and make them personal offers that they accept, you can be pretty sure you end up with people who want to work for you and have at least some initial loyalty and desire to stay. If you acquihire then you end up with a lot of people who feel like they've been forced to work for you and will be looking for the quickest possible exit.

I’d enjoy reading more in this very thread, if you don’t feel up to writing the whole book right now :)

Edit: Fan of Borland products in the 90s!

I think that's how Anders Hejlsberg (creator of C# and Typescript) joined Microsoft?

You know someone works in programming if their name is Anders or Tobias

I know of a Tobias who ended up working as an analyst-therapist before switching to a successful acting career.

the world's first...

I know one who got turned into a hawk and couldn’t turn back.

Animorphs huh. I read a few books a long time back, but then recently read about how the series became quite twisted towards the end. Younger me would probably have enjoyed it.

Yeah, the author killed off most of the characters at the end, which was surprisingly realistic. More than one of the heros (and one of the villains) was a programmer too.

He got a new start.

There are dozens of us

He also had a brief foray as a director ...

Didn't he switch to performance art first?

I think he did a few commercials before that - the one about the fire was quite good.

Successful author too. Very supportive, loving wife. Model of a perfect marriage right there, imho.

Don't know a Tobias, but I've heard of a Saibot. He was pretty much a noob.

Very two dimensional person as well. Or at least he was 20 years ago; perhaps he's improved himself since.

He blued himself later on, so...

What

The Spotify office had an Anders of the week.

A quick search in Norway's bureau of statistics shows that Anders had a big bump between about 1975 and 2000, peaking about 1985, when about 1.5% of boys were named Anders. I believe it was a top ten name that entire period. I don't have stats for Denmark where Hejlsberg is from, but I don't think the name is any rarer there.

There are a lot of developers in that generation.

Tobias is a less popular name overall, but had a much sharper spike around 2000. 1.5% of Norwegian boys born in 2003, the peak year, were named Tobias.

Those guys should be the just entering the workforce about now.

Anders joined later as a couple of ex-Borland people kept pinging back on him, he mentions this in a few interviews.

https://behindthetech.libsyn.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-craf...

Thanks, that was a great listen

I should write a book honestly.

Please do! Turbo-C 1.5 and Borland C++ were two of my all time favorite programming tools.

I just got done reading Commodore, A Company on the Edge and would love to read about Borland/Microsoft back in the day.

I’d read this book!

The color scheme I use for vsc++ still mimics turbopascal/turboc++ from the mid 90s.

The nostalgia I feel for QBasic as my first programming experience as a kid is followed very closely by my nostalgia for Turbo C++ 3.0.

Was the "Microsoft limo parked across the street waiting for people to come out on their breaks" true or just a rumor at the time?

Not too long ago, I worked for a pre-IPO "startup" with ~2,000 total employees. Over the course of a few months, the core of engineering (based in Bay Area) was gutted by a FAANG, out of retribution, because said startup had poached some key employees from the FAANG. After I left as part of the exodus wave, I learned there was an "unlimited" $30+ million dollar extra budget for hiring employees from the startup, lol.

Lesson: Don't piss off FAANG execs, they can throw what amounts to unlimited resources against you.

Fortunately for the startup, it turned out they were massively overprovisioned and didn't really need all those intelligent engineers and executives. Startup ended up closing their Bay Area office and moving engineering to South America. The undead zombie corpse husk is still chugging along.

The startup still somehow went public during the pando, but the IPO eventually became an embarrassing flop. Turns out a business based on surveys isn't that lucrative, after all.

This is the first time I have encountered the word 'pandemic' being shortened to 'pando' either online or meat space.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

It appears to be pretty common.

There's 706 results, but a lot of them are "pando.com" or words unrelated to the pandemic

This is the first time I have encountered the word meat space.

It's a very dated expression

This is the first time I’ve encountered the word “dated”.

They're delicious with oatmeal.

I love the different words used. One of my favorites is 'the panny-D'.

> a pre-IPO startup that had engineering gutted by a FAANG (out of retribution, because said startup had poached some key employees from the FAANG). After I left as part of the exodus wave, I learned there was an unlimited budget for hiring employees from the startup, lol.

I was at a company that lost a lot of employees to a competitor. The founders ended up generating similar myths (supposedly based on information from trusted sources) to explain away the exodus.

The reality was that they couldn’t accept the idea that anyone would give their employees such large raises, so the only explanation they could think of was that it was some sort of evil retribution plan targeting them personally for something.

The reality is that FAANG execs aren’t going to spite-hire random engineers at exorbitant rates just to fight a petty battle. Even at FAANG scale, budgets are still finite and compensation plans aren’t approved in a vacuum.

I’d take that explanation with a huge grain of salt. It’s more likely that the company ended up on their recruiters’ radar and they simply offered the engineers FAANG market rate compensation.

I agree, on average it's not common. What's different in this case is I heard it directly from the horses mouth. The FAANG in question is a particularly frugal one, and they don't normally pay 2-5x market rate unless it's a special circumstance. That's why am sharing this story, life can be crazy! It can pay to keep an open mind, you never know what will turn up.

I'd love to drop names but it would be unwise. The decision maker executive is now an even bigger big wig at another BigCo, and they are still as huge of a douche canoe as ever.

Never underestimate the power (or fragility) of the human ego.

Also, El Fandango didn't hire the junky engineers. They poached all the best ones, and the average level of talent at the startup was quite high. The comp was so good that most of said engineers are still at El Fandango even today.

This sounds like a vulnerability in that company. So a group of their employees can leave to form a "start-up" and get more money by coming back?

Interesting interpretation, but very far from and not relevant to reality. The startup company brought in execs from BigCo who then recruited other key employees from BigCo, angering the dragon.

The dragon doesn't really give a shit about $30 mill, in the grand scheme of things it's less than nothing, especially when an "important" person's ego is in play.

Not tech-related but it happens with law firms, which are often Limited liability partnerships (LLPs). A notable example is Heenan Blaikie in Canada, which was the 5th biggest national law firm with offices everywhere in Canada with over 500 lawyers. The firm had its most profitable years right before it was dissolved in 2014, mainly due to loss of trust and infighting - partners started leaving the firm and taking the money they put in (which I believe had a snowball effect) and lots of partners lost their money.

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

OP here

def interesting to learn about industries that I'm not in. thanks for sharing

There was a very recent case where an emergency trauma center had to shut down because all the nurses left for another hospital for better working conditions.

It’s also common in rehab centers. You can’t take Medicare patients without a minimum staff count. If too many nurses leave, patients can’t be accepted and you end up bleeding.

Basically any job that primarily requires human capital.

That's a lot of hospitals in the US and Canada right now.

Turns out if you cut nurses' compensation and retirement match during the pandemic, ask them to work overtime due to understaffing, and then don't restore benefits or give them raises to match inflation after... they walk.

Who knew?

I could not imagine being a nurse or a teacher in the US right now. I wish they realized that they have the leverage and can go on strike. I imagine that's difficult for many of them as they most certainly need the income. A rock and a hard place. I always smile when I read about a nurse or teacher switching to a completely different career field and finding themselves more content.

My wife (ER/ICU nursing) walked away from a 25 yr career. She ended up in the kitchen of an upscale grocery store - still working with her hands for 1/3 the salary. (Granted, we could withstand the financial hit.)

She would still come home bone-tired after being on her feet for a shift - but much more interested in the work. Not having to deal with the public was another big benefit -the epidemic turned too many people into **holes.

Interesting factoid: "computer programmer" + "nurse" are one of the most common spousal profession pairings. Per a recent HN link/study.

Do you have a link to said study?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003986

Thanks, appreciate it!

I've put in a few classifications my job could fall under, and gotten RN for at least two. Perhaps there's just more nurses than people assume or realise?

Anyone have a link?

Could you link to the thread please?

That's my parents :)

Well I'm a data point then, also another colleague.

But despite our respective professions, I still get ignored when I'm sick, and she can fix her own iTunes problems 'cos I just don't have a clue.

Not according to https://flowingdata.com/2021/05/26/jobs-that-marry-together/

It's sometimes illegal for teachers to even go on strike. My area had an incident where striking teachers were arrested and taken to jail.

"The floggings will continue until moral improves"

Sometimes they win demands even when the strike is illegal. The 2018 West Virginia teacher's strike turned into a wildcat (unauthorized) strike but that didn't stop them from winning a 5% pay raise. It does depend a lot on community support and sympathy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_West_Virginia_teachers%...

Some states it's just illegal for teachers to strike at all, wildcat or not, or even to organize with unions.

A wildcat strike is always illegal in the US. Organizing a union isn't illegal in any state, it's about whether the union gets official recognition and official bargaining rights. My point was that it's possible to win even if you don't have those things.

In jail they won't come to work either. That sounds more like a scare tactic

It's less of a scare tactic and more of a way to punish and prevent teachers from organizing in the first place.

Didn’t the nation’s largest ever healthcare strike start today in MN?

They don't need to go on strike if there's an alternative employer available. They just need to quit. Going on strike turns these things from being focused on bad managers to focusing on intransigent employees. Leaving means the management needs fixing or changing.

I am not in nursing, but from what I have seen in corporate America: even when there is a lot of churn, bad managers always think everybody else is the problem.

Of course. But they don't assess themselves :)

In my experience, management tends to protect themselves and go up to bat for each other, especially when things can be blamed on their subordinates.

This isn't about blame, though. Even if for some reason you feel the need to care about blame passed around in a company after you've left, I would say it's still worse to strike when you can leave.

Unless you're suggesting that being blamed by management is intrinsically important and going on strike is going to be less blamed by management? I would just disagree with every aspect of that statement.

It's everywhere.

The Government in my country is working on a law prohibiting nurses from striking for better working conditions (incl. more staffing) and better pay. Most countries have laws already to ensure adequate staffing for emergency personnel, but this is going way beyond those type of laws.

That's gonna work awesome once all the nurses start quitting. I hope they do.

Or fire nurses and/or pressure them to quit for not being upto date on 3 or 4 vaccines. Think of how many hospitals would have stayed open in Canada without the vaccine cull.

Good riddance. I don't want antivax nutcases on my healthcare team. They picked the wrong profession.

It's insane to me that this got downvoted.

Medical exemptions are a thing. If you truly can't receive a certain vaccine, you should still be allowed to get whatever job you want. But I'm sorry, if you "don't believe in" vaccines in general, or certain specific vaccines that have - for reasons passing all comprehension - become extremely political, you should not be a healthcare provider.

There are many valid reasons for not wanting to take part in the covid vaccine experiment. The first long term studies are due in 2024. Whatever informed opinion you hold the studies haven't come out yet and you are taking a gamble. A gamble society encourages all to take and punishes those it can.

If you can't staff your healthcare clinic or hospital because you fired experience doctors, nurses and staff there is a lot of politics taking place and very little practical medicine.

Removing those experienced nurses created worse working conditions for the remaining nurses who quit due to crazy schedules. The new nurses are a net negative on senior staff who have to train them. Higher wages isn't going to help attract experienced nurses who aren't allowed to work.

The COVID vaccine decreases the severity of the disease's symptoms. Regardless of the other benefits, isn't that enough reason to get it? Firing some nurse who gets their opinions from Dr. Oz and has crystals in their bedroom is a net positive for the healthcare system in my opinion. I want my healthcare practitioners to be people of science, who practice evidence-based medicine, and are willing to change their opinions on a dime based on the most recent studies. I'm certainly not the smartest person in the world, but I've met several healthcare providers in real life who have refused the vaccine and let's just say none of them gives off the air of a mental giant.

Do you understand how insane you sound saying things like "the covid vaccine experiment?" Like some doctors just cooked up some crazy cocktail in 45 minutes and started sticking people with it on the street? Please.

Would you rather have a nurse who was a vaccine skeptic or no nurse? Honestly asking.

a 75 year old family member was prescribed Ivermectin for light Covid. I would rather no doctor. And family member has decided to seek a different doctor. Literally added a symptom.

Doctors and nurses are two different jobs.

Would you rather have a fireman who used a firehouse connected to a water source or a water hose skeptic who insisted on using an empty bucket?

That's a bad metaphor, given that the point in question (vaccination) isn't a treatment (water) at the time of severe infection.

Someone can simultaneously (a) be trained in critical care & (b) be a vaccine skeptic.

It's analogous to meteorologists who don't believe in climate change: yes, it's kooky, but it's also not the job they're doing.

No nurse. What other kind of bad advice will they give me?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there exist people who are vaccine skeptics and are trained to a higher skill in life support than I am.

I try not to judge people completely based on a single characteristic.

That makes it worse not better. If my wife were pregnant, I also wouldn’t have her go to a doctor who “didn’t believe in abortion” under any circumstances even if her life were in danger.

That's a strawman, because it's a directly impactful choice at the time of care.

How does a person's personal vaccination status, ceterus paribus, affect the care you're likely to receive?

Outside of, you know, directly asking them "Should I get vaccinated?" and being told "I wouldn't"?

> How does a person's personal vaccination status affect the care you're likely to receive?

Because it shows that they're not intellectually capable of making good medical decisions. The risk that the other medical decisions they will make are equally bad despite all evidence to the contrary increases.

As far as I've met people, there are three groups:

- Those who believe that anyone who doesn't vaccinate "isn't intellectually capable of making good medical decisions"

- Those who are opposed to vaccination because they believe in conspiracy theories

- Those who are are either pro- or anti- vaccination, but realize it's a complicated issue, with evidence-supported pros and cons, that other humans of reasonable intelligence can have different opinions than themselves about

Unfortunately, the first two groups tend to be the loudest and most religious about it.

Either way, just like I wouldn’t want a religious zealot who has convictions about performing an abortion while my wife is laying their bleeding, I wouldn’t trust the judgement of an anti-vaxxer.

One of my best friends who lived in Seattle whose wife did have complications during pregnancy. He told his doctor that in no uncertain terms if they had to make a choice between his wife and his unborn son, to save his wife’s life. They had to perform a c section early to save his wife. His son is healthy and thriving and he had a vasectomy soon after their child was born to not risk another pregnancy and they adopted a child.

He said in today’s climate. If he had lived in a state like Texas, he would have found another job and moved.

As the product of a reproductive therapy that certain people at one time would have banned, I can sympathize.

To me the big difference is whether they're "I should not be vaccinated" or "Everyone should not be vaccinated." The former doesn't always mean belief in the latter.

So I look at someone being unvaccinated more like choosing to wear a spinning propeller hat to work every day... it's weird, and it makes me judge you, but it doesn't necessarily impact your work.

As a health care professional, you choosing to be anti-vaxxer tells me a lot about your judgment in the field I’m seeking your expert advice and it probably means that you don’t care about coming to work with Covid and getting other people sick.

If you’re an anti vaxxer coworker, whatever. Your judgment about the vaccine doesn’t affect their ability to write good code. But if they were an Oracle fan…

That's a lot of assumptions about a person...

The vaccine isn't evidence-based science because it is experimental. You are part of a group of people who decided to take part and provide data. In 2024 when the first long term studies are due evidence-based medicine will begin. It is crazy you are unaware of this. Weren't you required to sign a form acknowledging these facts and allowing the government to become the custodial holder of these records?

On average the people not taking the vaccine are more tuned in, have more raw facts available and have made a serious decision by weighting the facts. Thinking that this group must be getting information from Dr Oz or some other political figure you are against and blinding following is shallow reasoning. They are not the part of society who would blindly follow what they heard on the news or what a popular figure thinks or what society thinks.

HN comments have really gone down hill in quality. I'm quite sick of reading the same tired talking points you put up over and over.

Your last ten comments are single sentences or something to enflame others or both. Are those the type of comments that are lacking?

For anything medical related it has always been like this.

This is what happens when 26 year old tech bros who type JavaScript into a computer for $300k a year forget that there are a lot of things about the real world they don't actually understand.

Anything related to medicine or non-IP law on HN is a dumpster fire.

Realistically, most things that are tech/tech adjacent are a dumpster fire.

The number of uninformed comments on inflation/monetary policy on here is exhausting.

Come on, that argument was valid for about two or three months.

Nowadays, the outcomes from the several distinct vaccines have given us ten times, a hundred times more data than needed for such decisions.

On average, people like you simply can't help mistake anecdotes for data.

This feels biased. Why is catching a disease that kills some people not gambling? I can understand why some people were concerned about this being experimental in the first month after the vaccine distribution started a year ago, though the vaccine had been pretty well studied already. Other mRNA vaccines have existed for decades and had long term studies. At this point, we’ve now done a massive global study and the vaccine has been tested more thoroughly than nearly any other vaccine on the planet. Odds of death with vaccine vs without have been pretty well and conclusively established to go down in the short term, no? Are you expecting there to be some kind of sudden mass side effect years afterward?

This is akin to my mechanic being anti oil change due to some conspiracy theories - I don't want them touching my car.

The car manufacturer states that the oil should be changed every 10k miles based on 100 years of research. The vaccine hasn't been through a long term study yet.

"There are many valid reasons for not wanting to take part in the covid vaccine experiment."

I will just ignore the full three phase trials on volunteers, because I am an antivaxer.

It would be one thing if the covid vaccine actually worked well, but it doesn't. It kind of works, but not especially well.

Even worse is people who actually got covid, yet they want them to get a vaccine, which is rather pointless for them. Places with that particular policy demonstrate they don't care about science, they care about obedience to authority.

It works well enough that the unvaccinated are grossly over-represented in the ICUs and in the death stats. You have to be particularly math illiterate to not recognize that the vaccine does, in fact, work.

For elderly people, sure. For younger? Not so much. It's not helping them very much. I'm not saying it's nothing, but it's not necessary to require it to work as a nurse.

The worst part, of course, is the short time that it works. I've seen places where if you got vaccinated 2 years ago, you are golden. Had covid a month ago? A pariah. That is not based on good science, that's just obedience.

You are spreading lies and disinformation.

> Almost All Teens in ICU With COVID Were Unvaccinated: Study

https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2022011...

> Third of teens hospitalized for COVID-19 need ICU care; CDC chief urges youth to get vaccinated

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/third-of...

> Throughout the periods of Delta and Omicron predominance, hospitalization rates remained lower among fully vaccinated adolescents aged 12–17 years than among unvaccinated adolescents.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7107e4.htm

> COVID-19 vaccines for kids: What you need to know

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...

> Over the past month, half of the children admitted to Advocate Aurora hospitals with COVID-19 were under the age of 5 years old … 25 percent of pediatric COVID-19 patients at Advocate hospitals are requiring care in the intensive care unit … “And I would say almost 100 percent of our patients in the ICU are unvaccinated”

https://news.yahoo.com/25-pediatric-covid-patients-icu-18403...

Shame on you.

You are misreading that study: Only 25% (299/1222) of the children and teens in the study were vaccinated, and yet only 7 deaths over 4 months in 23 states.

The conclusion is that the vaccine can work, and yet be unnecessary. Even with 75% unvaccinated, there were barely any deaths.

Kids simply do not need the vaccine.

Pay attention to how every one of the articles you linked simply glosses over the tiny number of patients admitted to hospital. Just because something works does not mean it's necessary.

And it's quite distressing to see how any criticism of vaccine policy is labeled as "lies and disinformation". Would you like to burn a witch next?

It's OK for someone to disagree with you, without you accusing them of lying.

And as I have found typical in these types of debates is the completely blind spot toward natural immunity. For some reason vaccine "pushers" seem to ignore that it even exists.

Tell me: Who is better protected, someone who was fully vaccinated 2 years ago, or someone who never was vaccinated, but recovered from covid 1 month ago?

> Kids simply do not need the vaccine

Oh for fucks sake.

> Almost All Teens in ICU With COVID Were Unvaccinated: Study

> Third of teens hospitalized for COVID-19 need ICU care; CDC chief urges youth to get vaccinated

> Throughout the periods of Delta and Omicron predominance, hospitalization rates remained lower among fully vaccinated adolescents aged 12–17 years than among unvaccinated adolescents.

If your health doesn’t allow you to get the needed vaccines and you are putting other people in jeopardy who are already more susceptible to death, you are just as unqualified for a job in the healthcare industry as I am of being a brain surgeon with cerebral palsy (I do in fact have CP) that leaves me unable to use one hand.

I'm sympathetic to your point, but if your problem is "We don't have enough critical care nurses to provide care", then maybe don't do things that turn away nurses?

Not saying it's acceptable or to be encouraged, but desperate times, lesser evil, etc.

So you're ok with incompetent nurses? Not me.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Easy to say that until people are dying because you fired desperately needed healthcare workers.

Across Canada they changed the rules and now Covid positive healthcare workers can now have direct patient interactions.

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/b-c-may-allow-some-covid-positive-heal...

Apparently they can fire people who won't get vaccinated, but are willing to have Covid-positive doctors treat patients?

Something doesn't line up. Apparently being unvaccinated is higher risk than actually having Covid?

What you said is not what the link says.it specifically says in appropriate places with appropriate protection when it is aympotomatic. You are projecting here. Nowhere does it say direct patient interaction.. in fact it says the opposite that healthcare workers who are sick (whether of covid or something else) should not be near patients.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-health-workin...

The Health Ministry confirmed in an email that it is possible for workers who test positive to be asked back to work, even if they have symptoms, but only in cases of "persistent compromise of access to services" and when all other options have been exhausted.

I cannot imagine how the healthcare can cost so much yet still somehow there is not enough money to pay people that run it decently

There's plenty of money. It's just not going to pay workers.

Have a link? Alway interested in these examples.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/us/thedacare-lawsuit-wisc...

^ is the only recent one in acute care I’ve heard of but it doesn’t really fit your other details (limited service line, multiple role groups, ambiguity around actual impact).

Printing press. The pressman that operated the largest press quit, fired, no showed, or whatever. Margins are already thin so losing just 1 press can be pretty devastating. A pressman, even a trained one, has to be trained since each machine is build to order. It’s not something you can post a job in Indeed and have a new employee after a week.

I've seen this happen, and the company end up in serious danger (and they still were down a pressman and flailing last time I heard.) Somehow the fact that everything is depending on pressmen doesn't affect the way management pays or treats them, though.

some people just can't see the value in other human beings, even when it's literally dollar value

A long time ago I was being trained on working a massive printing press for the local newspaper, quite the complex machine. Then they found out I was leaving for university in a month and weren’t too happy with having wasted time on someone who wasn’t sticking around.

Even the simple stuff needs constant attention so they didn’t end up with a major paper jam and having all the ad stuffers and delivery drivers sitting around waiting.

I once worked for a small but very profitable tech company. The owner pretty much had to sit back and rake in the money.

He was, however, a huge asshole and alcoholic. Wasn’t able to let it function without him. Went from a couple of million dollars profit to closed when I quit. He couldn’t find other devs. Tried to outsource it but just failed.

I quit because he tried to treat me like shit. Like he treated his other employees behind the scenes (the guy was very sneaky). So I left.

Then tried to offer me a cut but I wasn’t gonna partner with such asshole. There isn’t enough money in this world.

Last I heard he was trying to launch a similar product but failing horribly.

The product wasn’t complex but required specific knowledge of different things. So it was rare to find people with that knowledge who were also effective.

Now that the company is gone, have you considered using your experience to build a similar product in that space?

Yes, but it’s not what I want to do with my life. The journey is the destination.

You should post it in the next "idea" thread.

i mean, 2m a year passive income, that sounds like a pretty good space to be in. it doesnt seem like you have any particular loyalty to it and its closed so... what was the business? you dont have to name it, im just curious economics-wise what let this business exist on autopilot

It wasn’t passive income. The business was simple enough and he had managed to hire good people. It would run by itself pretty much. It wasn’t a typical startup. Just a small business that sold a software as a service.

The product revolved around making sales easier. The owner was a long time sales person.

thanks for the elaboration :)

My first job was in a company fully dedicated to milk the European H2020 projects' cow. Their business model was to offer the lowest budget on a series of projects and then have a bunch of interns like me do all the work on their own with very bad conditions (very few were actually even paid and we didn't have right for holidays).

At some point we all realized the profit the company was making with us and demanded better conditions, they rejected our claims and we planned to leave all at time they had to deliver the projects and get paid. Nothing got delivered, they didn't get paid and just went out of business.

You heard it here first - The Johns Hopkins Hospital. They would never admit their problems due to the culture, but I predict a devastating and irreversible brain drain in the next two years.

Could you please elaborate further?

not OP but work in healthcare. The culture of leadership in healthcare is frustrating. It's very political with everyone having their own agendas and fiefdoms. Cap it off with ever changing Govt regulations and you end up with a never ending cycle of audits, crazy ideas, and projects that go no where because the vendors are so far behind they don't understand anything. For the last year I worked on a scheduling system that got absolutely nowhere, a million $ investment in surgery center equipment that was not compatible with our current software, and the always fun rotation of passwords on over 1000 servers in 3 months that were mostly manual because the vendors all charge for an SOW to do that (oh yeah this is a YEARLY activity).

> always fun rotation of passwords on over 1000 servers in 3 months that were mostly manual because the vendors all charge for an SOW to do that (oh yeah this is a YEARLY activity).

Why do I smell Windows Server 2008?

NIST stopped recommending regular password rotation years ago. Why are mega corps still insisting on this? Security theater? Unknowledgable?

Yes and trying to find a bargain on staff.

“We’ve always done it this way so we’re not about to change”, or a customer somewhere has an audit checklist that mandates password rotations every 3 months.

I know of people stuck with such a moronic password change policy, and the new password can’t be the same as the last five or whatever. So they change the password five times in a row so they can keep using the same password over and over.

This kind of thing makes me so so so depressed about work. It’s overwhelmingly self inflicted suffering for no benefit, and it makes millions of people miserable for nothing.

MS has their guidance also not recommending password cycling: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

But he mentioned servers not users. If those are Windows Servers in AD env, LAPS exists: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=468...

MDs that don’t actually do doctoring tend to be very ineffective leaders and possibly just generally toxic. Not all, but there is a trend. I think it’s almost like how the best CEOs are a little sociopathic, something in med school or maybe the reason they go to med school makes them think they know everything and anything not medicine is trivial monkey work.

A company I was hired into during a big hiring spree to prepare it for going public wasn't very generous to the systems engineering team once the IPO happened (but hoo boy, those sales guys were racking up some money). Anyway, of the roughly two dozen SE and DB team, I know of only single person remaining a mere three years later (he's simply paid too well to desire to leave). Said company's stock price is less than one-tenth of what it was when we all started leaving, in my case because someone doubled my salary to do so, but for others it was similar good incentives versus nothing but more excess work if we'd remained.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a competitor buy them just to acquire their customer base and acqui-fire the current team.

I won't say shut down exactly, but I used to work for a small consultancy that was acquired by a huge corporate consulting firm (which made the news a year or two ago for a large contract they'd failed miserably on).

Within a year or so of the acquisition there was a trickle of departures that eventually turned into a mass exodus. There's almost no one left in the org who was part of the original company at this point.

So it goes. Many good engineers and companies spun out of that original one, and found greener pastures and new opportunities. Still, at the time, it felt like a massive waste of a group of truly talented people, to try to corporate-ize them and scare them all off in the process.

Except management who were made Partners I assume? Every time this happens, the good ones leave immediately, the ones looking at career progression stay for 2-3 years, and the shit ones stay for good, as they ultimately fail upwards into management if they don't get fired long enough.

Pretty much nailed it!

Not shut down but my company is one of the top 3 largest in its sector, but it's third place. It has failed to transition to modern IT practices over and over again. Important ICs generating millions in value keep leaving because IT at this company is so frustrating to work in. There has been so much turnover few projects can deliver on any sort of timely basis. The stock just is going to continue to get hammered as the effectiveness of the organization just slips and slips. It spends something like 2x on IT as its competitors and gets less for it. There's tens of thousands of IT employees so it's difficult to get a full read on things but within company wide slack it's clear things are not going well.

Name and shame.

I have the inverse story; factory workers picketing outside. First day the owner of the company walks up to them and explains: this company is worth $X. The terrain (land) it occupies is worth $10X. Please get back to work.

So if the factory is in business, the owner has an $11x asset. Otherwise, a $10x asset.

Seems like still in best interest to have employees for factory.

Yes, that's why he told them this - he prefers to be in business with employees. He's just telling them their negotiating position is very very weak, and their strike has no value.

That signals an extraordinarily inefficient use of land.

With land that valuable, and a land value tax/higher property taxes he'd have been run out of business years ago and replaced by one or more economically efficient companies.

Yes, but his statement that the land is worth 10X doesn't have to be true to be effective leverage in negotiation. Perception is everything, and casually dropping a "Eh, I don't really need you", and turning your back on a negotiation is often amazingly effective.

One of the reasons the company I just left is dying is they lost a bunch of employees that and a terrible tech plan.

I worked for company A, company A got merged with company B since they were both owned by the same mega corp. Company A and Company B were in the same industry but served different needs. They were both companies in the EV industry but one was aimed at drivers and the other aimed at charging station companies. When they did the merger, it seems part of the thinking was to get rid of the IT staff at company A. So obivously, they basically all left. Major issue was they decided to do a rewrite. So they ended up having a bunch of developers who didn't know the business, could barely read the old code, etc rewrite this company's application. Because they had no idea about it, they didn't realise how unrealistic the expectations were or even the fact it was a rewrite. It was framed as a migration. We move this app over here because we have the core features and we can just add on a few more. Except they didn't have the core features. They put the legacy system in to maintainance only and hired consultants to maintain it. Which led to it breaking down constantly and client demands going unmet. While that was happening all the business people started to leave. So all the people who understood how the business side of thing worked, had connections with clients, etc left. This resulted in all the strategies and plans that the company were making were based on a business world that didn't exist. They spent 12 months telling each other, they would do this and that and the industry needs this. Then when they released and went to market with pre-existing clients they found out all of this was nonsense and they needed to do all the stuff the old business teams were doing.

By the end of it, the mega corp that owned them realised they screwed up the company too badly so decided to sell. In the two years since the merger they had spent at least 30 million on the new platform. Spent 15 million before that on building it up before doing th merger. Originally bought company A for 8 million. Company B, I'm not sure how much they spent there but realistically probably a total of 40 million easily. It was generating profit too before it got merged with Company A. They tried to sell it for 400 million. Got nowhere. Reduced the price to 200 million. Nothing. Ended up selling it for 75 million while clearing the debts for the company with a "gain" of 50 million.

> I worked for company A, company A got merged with company B since they were both owned by the same mega corp. Company A and Company B were in the same industry but served different needs.

I thought at first that you were talking about Disney Streaming / Hulu

Not really notable but I know of this impacting local businesses in my area due to the labor shortage

* nursery where I buy plants couldn’t find laborers over this past spring/summer and decided to close up shop. It was a pretty big operation as they go. Owner was near retirement age and the land is probably worth 10x the business at this point so just decided to call it quits because he couldn’t do the basic stuff of caring for plants/moving them around.

* dog boarding/kennels/grooming seems to be hit very hard on labor shortage. The place I board our pets is at 50% capacity due to labor shortages, probably a downward spiral

* several/most restaurants in downtown area never reopened because of no staff

* I work for a healthcare company and we actually have nursing homes temporarily closed as mentioned as an example. We almost had to close a few of our ICUs with ventilators during peak Covid because we had no staff. In some cases, FEMA nurses actually came in to help keep it open. Anything with a mandated staffing ratio is challenging at the moment. It’s improving as Covid cases improve though.

Does anyone know how Basecamp is doing since it had its moment in the news?

Not really that worthy of note, but I worked at a small startup in SF in 2014 with 2 founders and 3 employees. We all quit within 2 days. It was uncoordinated and coincidental.

The founders were flabbergasted. I spoke with the others and the reasoning was the same. We were all very seasoned senior engineers, but the founders didn't trust us and handed us kanban tickets like short order cooks because they had PhDs. It was demoralizing.

I have a very similar story. Small startup, 6 developers, 4 other employees and 2 founds. They fired an employee for lack of output and then all but 1 developer left the company.

did the company survive?

Not really. The founders got acquihired. Basically a face saving operation. The company and product did not go with them so it was just a fancy hiring process.

To your example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, there were many nursing homes where staffing levels fell below legally mandated minimums due to employees quitting (or being out sick). A few shut down, but most continued operating and simply delivered substandard care to residents. In the worst cases local authorities sometimes sent in first responders or National Guard troops to keep the residents alive.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2767282

As “the” rockstar programmer fresh outta high school who started “the credit card at the gas pump” business, the entrepreneur too got too greedy and stingy with the payout despite me helping hiring the best development team … in 1980. And I was paid $10,000/month (1981 dollars), the least of all sr. programmers.

Platform was 8086, Motorola 6502, 16KB RAM, RS-488/RS-232, and assembly languages.

Surely enough, we broke away and and many of us joined Gasboy, Inc.

The budding star of a startup at many gas and oil conferences was then no more.

Had numerous offers (due to my networking of my business card being handed out at conference). Them recruiters were all initially shocked at my price tag but insisted then.

I instead went into 1980s primordial cybersecurity and never looked back.

40 years later, there is at least 6 of those credit card paypoints at every gas stations throughout the world.

And I am glad I did. I liked what I contributed to the safety of the computing world.

Off topic: And most designers are still an idiot, security-wise.

Honeywell after GE acquisition. They basically bought empty buildings at insane values given how fast the talent clears out

Could you expand on this? I thought the GE/Honeywell merger was blocked by the EU.

It’s from the Jack Welsh autobiography - GE ceo at the time. Basically bought it, didn’t have any lock in on employees, culture clash and subsequent exodus

I worked for a startup company where they stopped paying employees, management quit and offered to buy the company, owner refused, then everyone else quit. Like most stories like this it's a company you've never heard of and everyone moved on.

Almost never happens that way. If a business has customers, it is ALWAYS possible to find monkeys to staff it, no disrespect to monkeys.

Of course, in these cases, the monkeys are often incompetent in the context of operating the business, so customers leave (or die). And THEN the business shuts down.

Many businesses will indeed complain about not being able to find monkeys to staff the business. What they mean is that they are unable to find monkeys who will work for peanuts when other businesses are paying monkeys in bananas, or something they like more than peanuts.

This guy is pretty much correct - businesses are the value-generation machines, usually there will be someone, somewhere with the skillset to maintain its operation over time for the business owner. And usually they are paid little.

Seen this happen with some small businesses.

Irresponsible owners overleveraged themselves into situations where folding or bankruptcy were the only options once they couldn't afford their liabilities. There are a lot of companies that go under if for some reason their revenues dip for a long enough time.

> if for some reason their revenues dip for a long enough time.

Like COVID!

Unfortunately, strong and scummy/"well-connected" businesses were both rewarded during this period — for different reasons.

> if half the staff left a nursing home, it would be forced to shut down

This is only true when the rank and file employees have a relationship with the clients. National nursing home chains will be just fine if they churn through 50% of their staff. A local mom-n-pop business that runs because each of the employees has a strong relationship with the entire community will not survive the damage to reputation. Rank and file programmers are replaceable.

On the other hand, an artistic endeavor without the creative source will fail (see new Metal Gear games or new Star wars movies). A field that needs technical breakthroughs will fail unless you have the 1 of the 10 people capable of making that breakthrough happen. A small-ish company that relies solely on visionaries as their identity will die without the visionary (Jobs 1.0)

I can't think of many other companies where the rank-n-file are not replaceable. Slow death is always possible, but the above scenarios practically guarantee failure.

It's not quite "dying", but there is a pattern that is so obvious it's confounding:

> Small group of experts form Boutique Consultancy focused on specific technology (Cloud, SaaS Product, Framework, Open-source tool, etc.); Headcount = ~10 employees

> Experts start making referrals and mentoring analysts in specific technology; Slight diversification in offerings; Headcount = ~100 employees

> Boutique Consultancy makes major splash with huge client; Hire like crazy; Maybe accept additional investment; Headcount = ~300 employees

> Boutique Consultancy gets acquired by Global Service and Consulting Provider; Assurance that branding and leadership will remain; Buyers interested in "synergy deals"; Headcount = ~300 employees in +100,000 employee network

> Original experts and early employees take acquisition payouts and find/found new Boutique Consultancies; Buyers satisfied with acquired brand and customer base; Headcount = ~100 employees

Being on the hiring side of the engineering job market you do see the occasional companies imploding when their entire technical staff departs.

When it happens to post series-A companies it's usually just a team that leaves such as what happened when Bumble recruited the entire Barcelona-based engineering office of another company.

Lots of small companies have this, since they often don't have any crosstraining or internal documentation of processes. Once a person leaves (quit, died, sick, whatever) there is no one else who knows what they were doing or how it got done.

Perfectly preventable. Usually the problem is hot-potato management never makes sure the procedures and know-how are well documented.

It's basically the same mentality when they either not backup or they never test the backups are working.

I am curious about companies who survived/flourished despite seemingly key employees quitting or employees quitting en masse.

It happens all the time at small to mid sized startups. Some senior employees quit and form another startup. Their former company struggles to replace them and slowly dies, or becomes a small business.

Restaurants still have a hard time hiring. Many operate with reduced schedules, and some have closed.

Watching companies, like the ones you're thinking of, react the way you describe reminds me of listening to recovering alcoholics throwing their lives away. But it's too little, too late. Something has got to give, and you pray to God everyone keeps their lips shut and noses clean. Because if you think about, the situation is kind of a ticking time bomb! Hahaha.

Ubiquity. They're just a software zombie shambling on at this point.

Wait, what happened?

Just one example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/scqlg3/what_happe...

the software is basically unupdated for quite some time outside of their new cloud only inferior products, and i've tried reporting bugs to the support multiple times and every time they just are clueless, drop the issue entirely, or find some trivial way to argue its not actually their fault when it clearly is, like an on demand bgp crash under specific common private as peernig config as one example.

They had a wonderful product for the price point in multiple areas, and basically all their replacements have been inferior and often flaky.

This is just FUD unless you can elaborate and provide details

Do you mean Ubiquiti, the networking company?

Do you have any anecdote on human talent exodus causing a failure, or are you riffing on the company in general?

Relevant story based on your example:

During the early days of the covid lockdowns, before nursing home staff or residents were vaccinated, many staff quit en masse to work as covid test center staff. The hours were better. The job was less complex and less demanding. The pay was comparable.

Then when the remaining staff began to contract covid, they were down to a few core people working continuously to provide care. Many recently (and not so recently) retired nurses returned to work until they could figure things out.

There isn't much to learn about enterprise staffing here except that when the chips are down, people who are truly devoted to their jobs will go to extraordinary lengths to make sure it gets done.

I feel it's a pity these people are often (in my country) poorly compensated for the incredible effort they make.

It seems like most of the stories here are really about businesses shutting down because people didn't treat their employees well.

Artesian Builds

What happened?

Look for examples with organized strikes to get a sense of what that's like.

Hostess is a specific example where the union refused to budge and they shut down the whole company.

Intel.

There's a mathematical model for this. It doesn't require 50% leaving to destroy a company.

First you have Price's Law - half the people actually doing work rises with the square root of the total employee count. It's a variant of Pareto law. So as you grown bigger, the critical path of viable operation depends on fewer and fewer people per capita.

That group is also the group who first to see problems and least likely to put up with BS so they are the first to leave when things go downhill. The bigger the organization, the fewer people who need to leave to destroy it.

This is one of several dynamics that assure a role of startups and entrepreneurs because large companies can never be safe or stable or eternal.

Related to this: most startups last no more than 5 years but large corporations seldom live beyond 20-25 years. The handful of corporations that do are super rare and mostly living on borrowed time. Usually the only thing keeping larger companies around beyond 20-25 is one or a few very charismatic leaders/executives - as soon as they go, it comes crashing down. Hewlett-Packard is a classic example of this.

> First you have Price's Law - half the people actually doing work rises with the square root of the total employee count. It's a variant of Pareto law. So as you grown bigger, the critical path of viable operation depends on fewer and fewer people per capita.

Huh, interesting point. Natural conclusion is that as companies grow, they become more and more fragile to core people leaving.

Respectfully, I believe that your premise is flawed. The symptom may be qualified, good employees quitting and leaving the company unable to fulfill its obligations, but the root cause is the poor leadership that caused them to leave in the first place.

Probably not, you can always get a mix of less qualified people/contractors over the short term and build back up.

OP here

I think you are right, but only under assumptions that the market for talent is liquid (ei it's relatively easy to hire).

Counter example: What if you are running an AI company that is trying to solve self-driving and top 3-4 researchers quit? I'd argue that you don't really have a company at that point.

What if you are running an AI company that is trying to solve self-driving and top 3-4 researchers quit?

Worked at a company where something like that happened (although a different field). The company simply pivoted to a different but related area, hired new people experienced in that field and kept going in a new direction.

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