4 ms·
Not really. Borland could have issued attractive stock based retention packages to the employees they wanted to keep, and forced Microsoft to acquire the compa
by zepto 5y ago
Not really. Borland could have issued attractive stock based retention packages to the employees they wanted to keep, and forced Microsoft to acquire the company or go away.
This was on Borland for not adequately valuing their staff.
- duped 5y agoBorland was losing over a hundred million in revenue while Microsoft was offering seven figure signing bonuses. There's no way they could have paid more than what MS was, since MS was using their war chest to kill the company.
- xchaotic 5y agoas the op says - they could have issued stock instead of real money
- duped 5y agoEquity schmequity, and we don't know what Borland did or didn't offer to keep people around. We just know MS offered more.
- zepto 5y agoWe know for sure that Borland didn’t offer enough. And we can reasonable speculate that they didn’t offer a significant ownership stake.
- speedgeek 5y ago"Stock Instead of Real Money" is my new band name. So much meaning in just five words :)
- bitwize 5y agoI call equity "Bison dollars": https://youtu.be/Shxiy7l5b_4 https://youtu.be/Shxiy7l5b_4 It's only worth anything if the world-domination plans go off without a hitch.
- FpUser 5y agoAnders got 3mil signing bonus. Hard to counter that.
- zepto 5y agoEasy - give him 4 mil in equity. On the other hand if the company doesn’t have good prospects, then indeed there is nothing you can do.
- FpUser 5y agoPersonally I would rather take cash.
- zepto 5y agoYou would likely think differently if you cared about the product and had invested time in developing it. Having said that, there is no evidence their developers felt differently to you.
- FpUser 5y agoI do almost nothing but develop products. However as product becomes mature I start looking for new things to do. Also maintenance of mature product requires different type of people, not inventors.
- zepto 5y agoObviously this isn’t how Anders Hejlsberg, who invented and then ‘maintained’ C# for a decade thinks about things.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoa million dollar signing bonus? Is there documentation of this?
- zepto 5y agoIf they were losing a hundred million in revenue before their best employees were poached then we should thank Microsoft for saving these people‘s careers.
- ConcernedCoder 5y agohow do I upvote a comment more than once?
- guessbest 5y agoI remember hearing rumors that microsoft would pay some developers $1 million a year and tell them to just take a vacation instead of work at borland.
- rootsudo 5y agoMan, 1999 sounds wild.
- llampx 5y agoLong term this kind of practice is bad for engineers the same way Wal-Mart driving other retailers out of town with low prices due to their size was bad for small businesses and small towns in the 90s and 00s.