People of all stripes are extremely willing to embrace ideas that justify their own personal benefit. A rich person might be more likely to believe in trickle-down economics because ultimately it enriches them — but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a false belief. An American might sincerely believe that gun proliferation is safe, because the information they process is filtered by their biases as it’s important to their cultural identity.
So when your stock options will pay out big from the company’s success, or even just if your paycheque depends on it — you’re more likely to process information and ideas though the lens of your bias. It’s not just being a gullible true believer tricked by the company’s elite — you’re also just willing to interpret it the same way in no small part because it benefits you.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” - Upton Sinclair (1930's ?)
It's only really an issue if you get tricked by a facade or indoctrinated into a cult. For companies that are honest the dynamic is perfectly fine
Probably is more ti employees than the general public, but it is even more targeted to the growing number of lawsuts against the conversion, since the charity nonprofit’s board is required to act in the interest of its charitable purpose even in a decision like this.
It is directed at defeating the idea, expressed quite effectively in the opening of Musk’s suit, that “Never before has a corporation gone from tax-exempt charity to a $157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon—and in just eight years. Never before has it happened, because doing so violates almost every principle of law governing economic activity. It requires lying to donors, lying to members, lying to markets, lying to regulators, and lying to the public.”
Firefox spend a ton on pet projects to boost careers. Now the core product lost most matketshare and is not what people want.
Wikipedia collects a ton of money and wastes it on everything bar wikipedia (mostly salaries and pet proje ts).
There are those charities where 95% of collected money is spent on own costs and only 5% reaches those in need / the topics that they should solve.
Control over non profits is a joke. People in charge respond to nobody.
I usually feel like these statements are more about the board members and C-suite trying to fool themselves.
The double edge of most companies insulating employees from the actual business is that beyond the maintenance cost employees don't care that the business is doing well because, well, it doesn't affect them. But what does affect them is abandoning the company's values that made them sign on in the first place.
No, this is an artifact of insisting that people pretend to be true believers during interviews.
After I was fired from a position doing bug bounty triage on HackerOne, I applied to be a bug triager on HackerOne. And they rejected me, stating that my description of why I applied, "this is identical to the job I was already doing", didn't make them feel that I saw their company as a calling rather than a place of employment.
First being a non-profit, then taking Microsoft's money, then ditching non-profit status to a for-profit organization and now changing definitions of "Open" and "AGI" to raise more money.
It is a massive scam, with a new level of newspeak.
I hadn't explicitly said to myself that even for a modern company OpenAI maybe has a particularly fond relationship with this Orwellian use of language to mean its opposite. I wonder if we could go so far as to say it's a defining feature of the company (and our age).
Having spend the better part of my life in Silicon Valley my view has been gone are the days of mission. Everybody just wants RSU
You could tell employees they will build software to track lock up immigrants, deplete the world of natural resources, cause harm to other countries and if their RSUs go up 99% will be on board, especially if their H1b is renewed :)
Most people don’t care.
OpenAI is doing this show because if they don’t they are more vulnerable to law-suits. They need to manufacture a narrative without this exact structure they cannot fulfill their original mission.