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Comment by deanmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

When employees are underpaid (see Windsurf), HN be like: investors and C-suites take all the gains, off with their heads!

When employees are generously (and proactively) compensated for the financial milestones of the company, HN be like: it’s a bubble, it’s irresponsible, investors are fools, off with their heads!

I applaude OpenAI and its investors for approving these moves. Even if it’s a bubble, sharing some of it with employees “before it bursts” is a noble action. I worked in startups where management kept employees in complete illiquidity until full wipeout inevitably happened, while many senior folks were able to take some off the table in targeted secondary transactions.

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I really dislike these types of comments as they don't really contribute to the conversation. Beyond generally going against HN's rules, they don't really highlight anything meaningful or represent an actual cognitive dissonance.

Forums are composed of diverse sets of opinions and perspectives. When you get a lot of opinions together, opinions change - some of which can be explained simply by randomness.

I like comments like theirs because they spark introspection from the individual people that do have that have cognitive dissonance

It's the most upvoted comment. I'm curious how it goes against HN's rules?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Perhaps, it's not strictly against the letters of the guidelines - but I've always found these types of comments against the spirit of the guidelines. I'd largely say they go against the spirt of a few rules, especially: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes."

They're low effort, generic, populous comments that do little to contribute to the discussion.

I'm guessing you didn't get invited to the meetings where all of HN gets together and decides how to comment on the topic of the day.

This is that meeting

Different subsets of commentators I think.

I don't often comment on HN in either of these cases but... I think aspects of both things are true.

There is a serious AI bubble right now and also it is the norm in the startup/VC world to fuck over regular employees.

I'm happy for any normal people who got 1.5M here. But even in this case I believe this has more to do with weird poaching politics (and hype building) than it does being legitimately altruistic.

Humans are complicated. They see the unfairness of the windsurf situation, and then they see the unfairness of their own situation.

> Even if it’s a bubble, sharing some of it with employees “before it bursts” is a noble action.

the bar for being noble is just low. or maybe I should interpret noble has the noble class in the history, that actually describes it well.

At either extreme, both are a problem, off with their heads!

Oh yeah, I heard of that "HN" guy. He's got so much unresolved cognitive dissonance.

Both of these scenarios could be framed as “evidence of high variance”. Given that human societies as all levels of scale generally thrive under low-variance scenarios, it’s not surprising to see the general category of “high-variance” scenarios critiqued by the community.

The reasons people point to a bubble has nothing to do with who is getting paid.

You realize of course that you are also on HN and thus this apparent dichotomous behaviour applies to you as well? I imagine you have some reason for why it doesn't and I think you'll find that it can just as easily apply to everyone else.

What are the odds this was upvoted to the top by OpenAI? 5 minutes of Hacker News clicks is pretty low-cost PR, and it reads exactly like PR.

Any normal post "applauding a company" for trying to not get its employees poached would be downvoted, and all the replies are negative too.

While I clearly cannot control who upvotes my comments (though what you suggest seems completely nuts IMHO), I can genuinely say this is coming from an ex startup employee who has seen, and been subject to, many startup equity shenanigans (my comment history very likely touched on those over the years), so I will always applaud companies that generously compensate employees and not only senior management/investors.

Startups I worked before, who lost talent due to FAANG poaching (myself included), did not even have the business acumen to fight that, which would have been trivially possible by offering some liquidity at their “inflated” valuation. Instead, they kept those liquidity opportunities gated to senior management and investors. So I am applauding the difference in behavior here.

I don't doubt your comment is legitimate, your account predates OpenAI and there's no way an OpenAI corporate account is writing about colonoscopies.

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