seem_2211

I think the equity situation is bad, and only going to get worse. FAANG stocks have been on an absolute tear and VC firms have got more money to deploy than ever before.

If I were to bet on it, I think we'll see the tech industry move to a model that mirrors the financial world, with fixed year end bonuses, and no equity opportunities. That's what this thread is basically advocating for, even though right now it means working at Google and getting options.

$1b+ Venture Funds and employees getting generous equity grants don't match. I don't think VC is going away as an asset class anytime soon, and I don't think fund sizes will be dramatically (3-5x) smaller.

If anything, I'd say it's probably for the best for the average person working in tech. Most startup options aren't worth anything, and are highly illiquid.

I think you've hit the nail on the head as to what's causing this.

1: FAANG companies have had a great decade in terms of stock prices which means employee options are enormous in terms of dollar value (even if salaries aren't huge on their own necessarily).

2: VCs are pumping much more money into the ecosystem, which destroys the equity play for employees. When companies are raising $100m Series C rounds, it changes the cap table in a brutal way. Cap tables ultimately add up to 100% which means someone has to be diluted.

A relatively recent example of rapid infrastructure building (in California no less!) can be found with C.C Meyers.

"Proclaimed a “Local Hero,” Clinton “C.C.” Myers was lauded on the cover of the July 1995 issue of Comstock’s magazine for “working miracles in heavy construction.” Three big projects by C.C. Myers Inc. cemented his legacy: rebuilding two bridges in Watsonville after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake; reconstructing the Santa Monica Freeway after the 1994 Northridge earthquake; and rebuilding a stretch of Interstate 5, including a bridge, near Coalinga after the 1995 floods. He was equally famous for the efficiency of these projects — 55 days in Watsonville, 66 days in Santa Monica and 21 days in Coalinga — and the huge bonuses he earned for finishing projects early."

https://www.comstocksmag.com/article/still-going-strong-catc...

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-04-06-mn-42778-...

I think both things can be true at the same time. San Francisco is an amazing place to work in technology (in my view, nowhere else comes close). But the municipal government is also a complete cesspool of inefficiency & corruption.

I'd make the argument that something like Calpers is quite different to a college or hospital endowment.

Calpers has a huge deficit, whereas Harvard has far more than they're likely to ever spend (especially considering the fact that colleges with the largest endowments also attract enormous donations from wealth individuals).

But do they? Some of these LPs (especially college endowments) are so large that they are the tail that wags the dog.

I don't agree. Users are hostile to their own comfort, with the vast majority of travelers focused exclusively on price. Air travel has never been cheaper, and a less comfortable seat is a big part of that tradeoff.

Wack that a hospital doesn't insure health insurance... bet it's a non profit at that.

Criminal.

> And it required me to effectively make the best possible decision at all times. One thing I find interesting about your question is the implication that fallibility in someone's decision making process means they deserve poverty, and all the horrible shit that comes with it (like housing and food insecurity, and even bring forced to contend with dangerous conditions during pregnancy).

> I am no less fallible in my judgement today than I was when I was broke, the difference is that today I can afford to make bigger mistakes.

Nail on the head. People with money make just as many (if not more) mistakes with their cash than people who are struggling on minimum wage. They just don't feel it the same. Most people posting on HN aren't going to struggle to pay their bills if they go for coffee today, or even everyday this month.

100%. One of the things you that happens when you have an emergency fund is that emergencies don't happen so often. This isn't the case when you're trying to get $3.50 to last till payday.

I'm not advocating for any specific policy change (although I think minimum wage should be raised and indexed to inflation), but rather am talking about cultural changes that need to be addressed.

Broadly, as a society, we want people to have jobs that pay them enough to survive, and with enough margin to do other stuff. Not everything can (or should) tie back to economic value. Otherwise we end up cutting off our noses to spite our own faces, as we focus on the short term rather than the long term health of a wider community.

More than anything, we want to reward diligence, professionalism and effort, in whatever form that might take.

It seems like the struggle for people in these jobs is mostly around the consistency in hours, and the miserly low pay. Both of which are deliberate choices by the firms that employ them.

To some degree, serving the "customer" by cutting labour costs to the bare minimum (as a way to minimize the cost of everything), means we create an awful existence for the people who depend on these jobs for a living. The tyranny of their lives is dictated by a consumer base who constantly demand lower prices and will shop elsewhere to save a dollar or two.

I worked in a supermarket for four years, but it was part time, while I was in High School and in my first year of University. I didn't need the money in the way someone working full time needed it. I was given consistent hours every week.

Working retail for a modest wage (say $25 an hour), with consistent hours would be a really great career for a huge swathe of the population. Lots of people (myself included) enjoy interacting with people all day.

A lot of more traditional professions have a better balance between physical work and mental work (skilled crafts, engineering in the traditional sense, or being a doctor all come to mind). Modern knowledge work doesn't have enough physical movement involved.

I wouldn't like to do it full time, but sometimes I wish I could spend 20% of my time doing something enjoyable but menial like stacking shelves. I think I'd hate doing it full time, but one day a week? Practically sounds like fun!

My first job was working in a supermarket, on the register and collecting the trolleys. You got a break roughly 90-120 minutes. You REALLY miss one / notice when you're running late.

Now I work in an office. It's nothing to go 4-6 hours without stopping. But of course I can stop and pop out for a coffee or a snack, or lunch whenever I want.

$4 extra an hour would change this woman's life (and a lot of other people like her). $4 extra an hour.. I don't think I'd notice it.

Many of us are SO SO fortunate, we can't even begin to imagine how good we have it.

Yep. I rent a private office, and the lease is coming up next month. I'm not planning to renew.

It'd be interesting to know where the lines get drawn here. Private businesses are set up with a primary purpose of being self dealing (looking at what Adam Neumann did, and it's hard to argue that from the outset at least, it doesn't look that dissimilar to how a lot of private equity companies run).

> You see the effect a bit with Tesla where I'm sure Musk would love to focus on quality but has to rush things out to make decent quarterly numbers or risk going bust by not getting ongoing financing

"Tesla CEO Elon Musk ordered his employees to stop putting nearly finished Model 3s through a critical test before leaving the company’s factory in Fremont, California, according to an internal document viewed by Business Insider. It’s called the brake-and-roll test, and it ensures the car is correctly aligned. An industry expert told Business Insider that every automaker does this test to ensure quality and function."†

Tesla constantly make short term decisions that cost them massively down the line.

† https://www.businessinsider.com.au/tesla-elon-musk-orders-en...

There's a difference between performance and brand marketing. Bart advertising by Twitter/ Facebook is mostly brand marketing (not really tied to anything). A lot of marketing is about reminding you that a company exists.

Can't have a lot of engineering teams without salespeople or marketers though.

I live in the Bay Area now, but I grew up in Hamilton, New Zealand. I'm back home with greencard stuff at the moment.

On my parents relatively modest street houses are now selling for $850k. These were houses that cost $400-500k ten years ago. People simply do not make the incomes necessary to make these prices sustainable. I have one friend, of everyone I grew up with and went to University who's making north of $100k as someone in their mid-late twenties. Everyone else is making substantially less. Whereas in the Bay Area half of my friends are making $100k + (and often substantially more than that).

> Good school, healthcare and do actually matter, you know. So that the child has also middle class future.

Nail on the head. Virtue signal all you want, but I know that I'll be putting my money into making sure that any kids I have see a lot of these advantages.

While you are technically correct, the common man on the street so to say would say that property is where the returns would be (even if the returns have technically been 0% once property taxes, mortgage interest, insurance and repairs are taken into account).

Perhaps I should have been more precise: the perception is that the best ROI has been in the property market.

100% agreed. It won't end well, and politicians being politicians (and voters being voters), we're going to continue this mad show as long as possible, ensuing we get the worst possible outcome here.

The weird bit is that San Francisco prices make more sense than where I grew up (suburban New Zealand). Sure a house in SF might cost $1.2m but two people working in tech can expect to make $250-300k all in by their early thirties. That's only $200k more than a house in New Zealand, but you're working with an income that's easily 2x the size.

Reading this as someone who has moved from New Zealand to San Francisco, the parallels are depressing.

In New Zealand the price of housing has skyrocketed, and exists in a similar plane to Canada's housing market. We have the same issues of low productivity and relatively low wages as well.

There's a toxic cycle that's created. Boomers made all of their money in housing appreciation, and heavily encourage millennials to continue the cycle (which, taking the most optimistic view of it all, makes sense). But a house doesn't cost 2.5x your income now - it costs 8-10x. So you're married to a mortgage (which unlike America has its interest rate fixed for <5 years), have probably got a lot of your parents money invested as well (because you aren't earning enough to come up with a $200k down payment on your own).

Because real estate has 'proven' results, and the media make a lot of money advertising houses for sale, that's a lot of what you get told to do. As an individual you're so heavily indebted you can't afford to take risks, but at the same time, companies aren't trying to improve their productivity - because the best ROI has been in the property market. So wages suck too.

New Zealand is a bad place to be a young person. That's why I don't live there anymore. And I don't think I'll move back anytime soon unfortunately.

I don't agree. Coming from NZ to America, I am amazed at how cheap housing is (outside of a few select areas - California, New York and a few major urban metros), and the fact that you can fix your interest rates for the length of the entire loan. America has many problems - and California definitely has a housing crisis, but that's not true for the country at large.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with selling socks online, and I'm happy that someone is doing it, but you can't convince me that that is innovation worth celebrating.

My theory is that a lot of people read Zero to One, decided that spending more money than anyone else to build a monopoly is the best strategy (even if you work in an area with low barriers to energy), managed to find a VC fund with the same attitude (Softbank), and are now finding out that no amount of money helps you if you're selling dollar bills for $.50 over a series of years.

There has been disappointingly little success from all of Google X's many investment dollars. I think with the hundreds of managers, institutional knowledge and helpful infrastructure comes a bureaucracy that kills a lot of what it creates.

I know a few people who were put on the list of 30 under 30 a few years ago. Nothing particularly interesting has come from then since they won the award.

It's one of those things, where the more personal brand building you do (speaking, posting on LinkedIn to a degree, tweeting), the more of a negative signal it probably is, with a few notable exceptions (Keith Rabois for example stands out as a VC with a good track record, yet posts a fair bit).

I do sales recruiting. It's never the strongest startups, that are doing the best that have executives and VPs all posting content 24/7.

To that degree, I have a friend who is a personal trainer at Equinox, who essentially said the same thing in the health and fitness world - the people who are posting the most impressive work on social media, actually tend to have fairly lagging results in the real world.

Also, final point, it's not really 30 under 30, it's 600 under 30, and it's a bit ridiculous. You can't really compare someone like Kylie Jenner or Lil Uzi Vert or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with someone who runs a startup that sells socks online.

As a recruiter, there's an interesting relationship, whereby people use funding raised as a positive metric (oh yes, they raised $200m, this must be a good company!)

Even though the less they have raised, the more valuable your equity is likely to be. It's fascinating to watch.

I'll happily take the opposite side of that bet.