5 ms·

I agree. Ownership is underrated. Perhaps one of the biggest incentives out there

john_yaya 5y ago
Thank you for saying this. I’m currently an engineering manager at a “fun” and “interesting” company in SV, and I absolutely hate it. It took me a while to figure out why - but in retrospect, it’s pretty obvious. Writing Jira epics and doing code reviews for someone else’s vision is, for me at least, deeply unfulfilling, no matter how ambitious that vision is.
- gugagore 5y ago
  I'm assuming you have some ownership in the form of stock, and I'm wondering how that factors into it. Can you imagine a vision that would be easier to get behind, even if it originated with someone else?
  - john_yaya 5y ago
    I do have some RSUs, but no real way of knowing how much they’ll be worth, if anything. I don’t get to see a cap table, nor am I privy to the investors’ term sheet to know what their overhang is. Stock options used to be an enticing form of ownership, now it’s a crapshoot: you’re gambling that you won’t get screwed. But all of that is beside the point. When I (and presumably the original poster) are talking about ownership, we mean the sense of originating and creating the thing we’re building, not just owning the material benefit from it.
    - apercu 5y ago
      "Stock options used to be an enticing form of ownership, now it’s a crapshoot: you’re gambling that you won’t get screwed." I've had options and equity and RSU's and all sorts of things. Even diluted but still owned 11% of a company when I exited. In 25 years of tech and startups I have probably received about $30k total in compensation related to equity. Odds are you will be screwed.
      - fossuser 5y ago
        Not sure if you’re not in the Bay Area, but for a counter point many (maybe most?) of friends I know have had large payoffs (though not always with options, sometimes RSUs) - it does require some risk taking (holding onto them longer, not just immediately liquidating them, sometimes exercising options and floating that cost/tax until exit). These payoffs range between 500k and $20M for people I know well with more clustered in the 500k-2M range. Higher level people I don’t know super well easily clear 50M+, this isn’t just one company exit event either *. Equity should not be underrated. * FB, Snap, Google (RSUs), Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Tesla etc.
        apercu 5y ago
        You are listing companies that in several cases have been around for decades. I was really thinking about the startups I have been involved with. I have never worked for a FAANG and have never had desire to. Also, the odds of 95% of HN readers actually getting a half a million dollar payout are probably extremely low. My guess is most will have my experience. If you like working at Facebook you also don't have to give up compensation for equity, so you will get a decent salary, not give up market value comp for equity and then never be made whole. :) I value equity a lot. Where I work I have 100% of the equity.
        john_yaya 5y ago
        Thanks again for sharing your experience and perspectives on all this. It’s emboldening me to go indie and start my own company rather than chase the mirage of stock options.
    - mvp 5y ago
      Ownership is one thing. If the company believes in a cause and everybody in the company is truly working towards that cause, it may be equally, if not more, fulfilling. Does your company work on a problem or cause that you believe in?
    - MagicWishMonkey 5y ago
      Options have always been a crapshoot with the odds heavily stacked against you.
  - zippergz 5y ago
    At any sufficiently large company, the connection between my work and the stock price is loose at best. If you're an executive, it might be more direct. But in the public companies I have been an employee of, I have never felt a shred of motivation from this stock-based "ownership" in the sense of a true belief that doing better work will make that stock be worth more. In the aggregate, yes, but individually, no.
- Guid_NewGuid 5y ago
  This is what inspired me to write this: https://d22qefpbdavdoz.cloudfront.net/#let-me-work https://d22qefpbdavdoz.cloudfront.net/#let-me-work We're working the wrong way across the industry, developers are being cut-off from the processes they are instrumental in. None of it makes any sense and it's soul destroying.
  - nivenkos 5y ago
    I agree with this completely. It goes both ways too, like companies that try to keep business analysts and strategists completely separate from the database and data generation specifics.
sdevonoes 5y ago
> Ownership is underrated You meant perhaps overrated? At least in my experience so far in the tech industry, in all the companies I have worked for they always praise "ownership" as in: "as an engineer you own a product from conception to development to deployment to maintenance"... but they never talk about money. There is nothing like "If the company goes well and since you own part of it, here you have a bonus!" Nop, at least in Western Europe is not like that. You behave as if you must own the company, but you get no benefits at all; so basically: work more for the same money.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  I think your observation confirms that it's underrated. The people who don't talk about money use a weird notion of ownership where it means responsibility, but doesn't seem to mean benefits. Marx is turning in his grave. Ownership that OP means is about having the agency to be part of the whole picture: responsibilities, work, challenges, and results.
  - kthejoker2 5y ago
    I just read Arnold Schwarzenegger's essay in The Atlantic (full disclosure: 110% agree) ... A thing that stood out, when Arnie spoke out against people using "freedom" as justification for not getting a vaccine or wearing a mask, he said > Many people told me that the Constitution gives them rights, but not responsibilities. They feel no duty to protect their fellow citizens. I see a direct link betwen the decline of capitalist equity and civic responsibility. As you say, there are no benefits, and therefore no agency. The generations Arnie holds up as exemplars of civic virtue also had higher tax rates, stronger unions, and a much heartier social safety net.
WJW 5y ago
Perhaps, if it is actual ownership and not the fake modern ownership that gives you the downsides but not the upsides. Whenever I hear that term I get reminded of the discussion from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550975: > Jordanpomeroy on Nov 16, 2019 > I find ownership to be motivating. Good leaders inspire me to own results, but also empower me to own the “how”. When I do not own the method of obtaining success, I do not feel like I truly am responsible for success. The truth is, with more complex work, good leaders realize they’re at the mercy of those that do the work, because of the complexity only the people actually doing the work have complete understanding of the system. Therefore, the best card to play is to be very clear about the desired outcome, including the whole strategy and context behind it, and hope the team owns it all. > paulriddle on Nov 16, 2019 [–] > It's funny how carefully you're stepping around financially rewarding people who do the work. It's like you know your status does not allow you to own the money generated, so you're settling for owning the results, the process, the method, the responsibility, the all. You are weak. A bit harsh towards the end perhaps, but paulriddle does make a valid point on actual vs fake ownership.
chubot 5y ago
Paul Graham has an essay somewhere where he describes Robert Morris (creator of the Morris worm, kernel hacker, professor at MIT) as the FreeBSD sys admin for ViaWeb :) That is, probably the "most overqualified" sys admin in the world, because he was owning the whole problem. ---- The OP's post is related to the motivation for my work on https://www.oilshell.org/ https://www.oilshell.org/ -- I found that shell solves important problems quickly and effectively. In contrast, in 1999, in college, I worked an an autonomous underwater vehicle project that didn't work very well. In 2021, I still think that autonomous vehicles don't work very well. I also have a Erdos number of 3 due to a 2016 publication on deep learning, but that was mostly due to shell scripts as well. The publication has thousands of citations but I'm unsure if it will ever be useful. The author of Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud bravely stated that publications from the same group (Google Brain), with common co-authors, are bullshit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27331807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27331807

Thank you for saying this. I’m currently an engineering manager at a “fun” and “interesting” company in SV, and I absolutely hate it. It took me a while to figure out why - but in retrospect, it’s pretty obvious. Writing Jira epics and doing code reviews for someone else’s vision is, for me at least, deeply unfulfilling, no matter how ambitious that vision is.

gugagore 5y ago
I'm assuming you have some ownership in the form of stock, and I'm wondering how that factors into it. Can you imagine a vision that would be easier to get behind, even if it originated with someone else?
- john_yaya 5y ago
  I do have some RSUs, but no real way of knowing how much they’ll be worth, if anything. I don’t get to see a cap table, nor am I privy to the investors’ term sheet to know what their overhang is. Stock options used to be an enticing form of ownership, now it’s a crapshoot: you’re gambling that you won’t get screwed. But all of that is beside the point. When I (and presumably the original poster) are talking about ownership, we mean the sense of originating and creating the thing we’re building, not just owning the material benefit from it.
  - apercu 5y ago
    "Stock options used to be an enticing form of ownership, now it’s a crapshoot: you’re gambling that you won’t get screwed." I've had options and equity and RSU's and all sorts of things. Even diluted but still owned 11% of a company when I exited. In 25 years of tech and startups I have probably received about $30k total in compensation related to equity. Odds are you will be screwed.
    - fossuser 5y ago
      Not sure if you’re not in the Bay Area, but for a counter point many (maybe most?) of friends I know have had large payoffs (though not always with options, sometimes RSUs) - it does require some risk taking (holding onto them longer, not just immediately liquidating them, sometimes exercising options and floating that cost/tax until exit). These payoffs range between 500k and $20M for people I know well with more clustered in the 500k-2M range. Higher level people I don’t know super well easily clear 50M+, this isn’t just one company exit event either *. Equity should not be underrated. * FB, Snap, Google (RSUs), Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Tesla etc.
      - apercu 5y ago
        You are listing companies that in several cases have been around for decades. I was really thinking about the startups I have been involved with. I have never worked for a FAANG and have never had desire to. Also, the odds of 95% of HN readers actually getting a half a million dollar payout are probably extremely low. My guess is most will have my experience. If you like working at Facebook you also don't have to give up compensation for equity, so you will get a decent salary, not give up market value comp for equity and then never be made whole. :) I value equity a lot. Where I work I have 100% of the equity.
        john_yaya 5y ago
        Thanks again for sharing your experience and perspectives on all this. It’s emboldening me to go indie and start my own company rather than chase the mirage of stock options.
  - mvp 5y ago
    Ownership is one thing. If the company believes in a cause and everybody in the company is truly working towards that cause, it may be equally, if not more, fulfilling. Does your company work on a problem or cause that you believe in?
  - MagicWishMonkey 5y ago
    Options have always been a crapshoot with the odds heavily stacked against you.
- zippergz 5y ago
  At any sufficiently large company, the connection between my work and the stock price is loose at best. If you're an executive, it might be more direct. But in the public companies I have been an employee of, I have never felt a shred of motivation from this stock-based "ownership" in the sense of a true belief that doing better work will make that stock be worth more. In the aggregate, yes, but individually, no.
Guid_NewGuid 5y ago
This is what inspired me to write this: https://d22qefpbdavdoz.cloudfront.net/#let-me-work https://d22qefpbdavdoz.cloudfront.net/#let-me-work We're working the wrong way across the industry, developers are being cut-off from the processes they are instrumental in. None of it makes any sense and it's soul destroying.
- nivenkos 5y ago
  I agree with this completely. It goes both ways too, like companies that try to keep business analysts and strategists completely separate from the database and data generation specifics.

sdevonoes 5y ago

> Ownership is underrated You meant perhaps overrated? At least in my experience so far in the tech industry, in all the companies I have worked for they always praise "ownership" as in: "as an engineer you own a product from conception to development to deployment to maintenance"... but they never talk about money. There is nothing like "If the company goes well and since you own part of it, here you have a bonus!" Nop, at least in Western Europe is not like that. You behave as if you must own the company, but you get no benefits at all; so basically: work more for the same money.

rhn_mk1 5y ago
I think your observation confirms that it's underrated. The people who don't talk about money use a weird notion of ownership where it means responsibility, but doesn't seem to mean benefits. Marx is turning in his grave. Ownership that OP means is about having the agency to be part of the whole picture: responsibilities, work, challenges, and results.
- kthejoker2 5y ago
  I just read Arnold Schwarzenegger's essay in The Atlantic (full disclosure: 110% agree) ... A thing that stood out, when Arnie spoke out against people using "freedom" as justification for not getting a vaccine or wearing a mask, he said > Many people told me that the Constitution gives them rights, but not responsibilities. They feel no duty to protect their fellow citizens. I see a direct link betwen the decline of capitalist equity and civic responsibility. As you say, there are no benefits, and therefore no agency. The generations Arnie holds up as exemplars of civic virtue also had higher tax rates, stronger unions, and a much heartier social safety net.

WJW 5y ago

Perhaps, if it is actual ownership and not the fake modern ownership that gives you the downsides but not the upsides. Whenever I hear that term I get reminded of the discussion from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550975 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550975: > Jordanpomeroy on Nov 16, 2019 > I find ownership to be motivating. Good leaders inspire me to own results, but also empower me to own the “how”. When I do not own the method of obtaining success, I do not feel like I truly am responsible for success. The truth is, with more complex work, good leaders realize they’re at the mercy of those that do the work, because of the complexity only the people actually doing the work have complete understanding of the system. Therefore, the best card to play is to be very clear about the desired outcome, including the whole strategy and context behind it, and hope the team owns it all. > paulriddle on Nov 16, 2019 [–] > It's funny how carefully you're stepping around financially rewarding people who do the work. It's like you know your status does not allow you to own the money generated, so you're settling for owning the results, the process, the method, the responsibility, the all. You are weak. A bit harsh towards the end perhaps, but paulriddle does make a valid point on actual vs fake ownership.

chubot 5y ago

Paul Graham has an essay somewhere where he describes Robert Morris (creator of the Morris worm, kernel hacker, professor at MIT) as the FreeBSD sys admin for ViaWeb :) That is, probably the "most overqualified" sys admin in the world, because he was owning the whole problem. ---- The OP's post is related to the motivation for my work on https://www.oilshell.org/ https://www.oilshell.org/ -- I found that shell solves important problems quickly and effectively. In contrast, in 1999, in college, I worked an an autonomous underwater vehicle project that didn't work very well. In 2021, I still think that autonomous vehicles don't work very well. I also have a Erdos number of 3 due to a 2016 publication on deep learning, but that was mostly due to shell scripts as well. The publication has thousands of citations but I'm unsure if it will ever be useful. The author of Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud bravely stated that publications from the same group (Google Brain), with common co-authors, are bullshit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27331807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27331807