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I really fear for startups and OSS these days. The co-founders are arguing about 30k's worth of shares. The reality is that with their talent they could earn th
by albertgoeswoof 5y ago
I really fear for startups and OSS these days. The co-founders are arguing about 30k's worth of shares. The reality is that with their talent they could earn that *per month* at FAANG.
Who is going to build the next generation of tech, if everyone is sitting at cushy remote jobs building ad-tech?
- nyellin 5y agoOSS founder here! (At robusta.dev - kubernetes stuff) Funding is very good these days for OSS startups, especially related to kubernetes and cloud. That said, I wouldn't recommend that anyone become a founder for the cash. It's just not worth the stress. The thrill of inventing something, finding product market fit, building a team and product from zero, working on the GTM... Worth everything I own and more. Would pay to do it.
- hutzlibu 5y ago"Would pay to do it." If you can afford to work for free or even paying for the privilege to work, than this is very good for you, but not helpful for anyone who needs to make a living first. But thanks for providing a counter example, that there is indeed money in OSS.
- bsedlm 5y agovc funding is a pattern by which autonomous entities made out of money (better known as investment funds) take over your property and wind up controlling "your" (but really their) company but I'm just paranoid
- WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
- akvadrako 5y agoI think it will be self-correcting since those cushy jobs pay well enough to let you quit while being financially secure, so they need to pay even more to keep people, compounding the situation. If you want to build innovative things or contribute to society, the best strategy right now seems to be dividing your time between (1) making a lot of money and (2) making no money. That's what I've been doing for a few years, doing about 6 months freelancing followed by a year of personal projects. If I were to go back in time it may have made more sense to spend 3-4 years at a FAANG then 10 years independent, but I also worry it may have changed my perspective.
- Gigachad 5y agoI thought about this, but then thought why would I spend my savings doing the same thing I do at work only to be making no money and have a wave of whinging users furious I didn’t fix their pet bug. When I could instead spend that time sitting on a beach sipping martini’s.
- sandruso 5y agoI think it’s about makers gonna make mindset. If you like building things you spent all time building things. Sipping martini’s may be fun for the first week.
- nonrandomstring 5y agoThat's fine in a truly affluent laissez-faire society that we've enjoyed through the 80s and 90s and some of this century. But here's what might happen when the good will and good faith of free labour that supports the machine is pushed too far. A little fictional retelling of "The Golden Goose" for our time [1] [1] http://techrights.org/2022/01/21/peak-code-before-the-wars/ http://techrights.org/2022/01/21/peak-code-before-the-wars/
- bsedlm 5y agobut it's not about making cool new things that everybody is interested on by this point the issue is maintaining boring old stuff everybody depends on maybe that's what happens to most (google for example), from being a cool new research program in search and document analysis to just another company trying to make money to keep up
- npteljes 5y agoThis always have been the case, I think. If not with IT then with other jobs in the world. Teachers and healthcare workers have been criminally underpaid, and yet they don't all quit. Which really sucks but shows that the issue is not that simple.
- luciusdomitius 5y agoOh. It is that simple. Start with stomaching the thought that if they were quitting, they wouldn't be paid slave wages :) J. Peterson had a very very good talk about holding your ground and why some people fail at it.
- Gigachad 5y agoLink to the talk?
- young_unixer 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbgJiprNoM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbgJiprNoM8
- Synaesthesia 5y agoPeople are motivated by more than just money.
- npteljes 5y agoThat's exactly the point I wanted to make. Which is why there's no need to fear for OSS - there will be plenty to develop it anyways.
- waplot 5y agoNo offense, but it's hard to monetize FOSS operating systems. I've yet to see a scalable business model. All FOSS OS's rely on either donations or consulting/support for revenue. There's just no money to be made there, unless someone comes up with something innovative.
- ununoctium87 5y agoRedHat?
- dwohnitmok 5y agoMy impression is that RedHat is basically the only company to pull off the open source + paid support model. All other open source companies I know of either use open core or paid hosting. Are there are any other companies like RedHat successfully thriving off just paid support? If so which ones? If not why not?
- yyyk2 5y agoSUSE is another one I'm aware of. Some projects also fund themselves off support, I believe cURL does it.
- dwohnitmok 5y agoRight I totally forgot about SUSE. But I'm not really counting cURL because that's just one person right? The challenges faced by essentially a 1-person freelancer are quite different than a larger company. Or is cURL now a whole company at this point? EDIT: I see you mean this as a separate category of just "projects."
- andrey_utkin 5y agoThe curl guy has joined a company. https://curl.se/support.html https://curl.se/support.html
- blaser-waffle 5y ago
- ealexhudson 5y agoI think worse than that, lawyers are now involved. Given the cost of retaining counsel, the likelihood of either of them getting $26-30K out of this now seems remote. One or both need to smell the coffee, and realise this is a great path to both walking away with nothing...
- dogleash 5y agoI don't get why "lawyers getting involved" is cast as such a big deal, either in the one partner's tweet or here. Like yeah, bringing in a lawyer can signal there's about to be a nasty fight, or if they're drastically unequal parties it's often a power move by the bigger guy. But if (as claimed) it's for something like drafting a contract to formalize a deal that's already been negotiated to near-completion, it's a no-brainer to have one. That's a few billable hours for peace of mind that the transaction was handled thoroughly and correctly.
- ac29 5y agoI think the point is they are fighting over only ~$50k (and some likely worthless equity), and involving lawyers could easily eat a majority of that money. And that's assuming they never go to court, in which case all of that money and then some will go to legal fees.
- dogleash 5y agoI may have miss-communicated. I was saying "lawyers involved" is not a meaningful demarcation point about costs. How the two partners choose to use those lawyers is. For example, again, involving a lawyer to draft paperwork to memorialize a contract you're already in alignment on is perfectly normal and a relatively light cost of doing business. But choosing to vindictively run up each-other's billed hours is the opposite. I'm sorry that my previous post wasn't clear that I was communicating the possibility space. That possibility space is important because in these kind of transactions, no matter how amicable or nasty, a lawyer is going to be involved to some extent. Therefore it's meaningless to talk about whether or not "lawyers involved."
- 5y ago
- api 5y agoWe get what we pay for. Nobody pays for high quality OSS but advertisers pay very well for surveillance driven adware. It’s tough for startups too but for different reasons. Startups doing interesting work can recruit top talent but they usually have to offer a good equity package too. Equity is tough since the supply is so limited in a growth company. If your startup is doing something that is boring as hell or worse adtech, the only option is to have a high margin business or a lot of VC to try to compete with the FAANGs on raw salary.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- antattack 5y agoIf the solution to keep afloat was to take 5% haircut than the money situation was not bad. Bigger issue is that apparently there's no agreement between the founders how much company they own and the value of it. Nice thing about OSS is that Elementary OS license is GNU GPL3.0 which means that project can live on if there's interest in it.
- aero-glide2 5y agoSuch projects rarely live after the founder exits. Take Solus for example.
- depressedpanda 5y agoWhat happened to Solus after the founder exited? It still seems to be available, and their latest release was in July.
- caddybox 5y agoApparently, most people on Reddit and HN feel that Solus lost its momentum after Ikey left. The relatively conservative development Solus is seeing with Josh Strobl et al. isn't sexy enough!
- allie1 5y agoI like how Elastic is making this work. Open source is no longer built/supported primarily by individuals (with a few notable exceptions). Most is done by large companies with monopolies, since they are the ones that can afford it. React is a good example. Linux/RedHat another. And it makes it easy to rely on them - you know React will be maintained. You know ELK stack will be around 5 years from now. You need a large margin to be able to give back to the community in this way, sustainably, for a long period of time. Unfortunately the open source activism movement got political at one point, and lost its charm to a large degree. I am not going to go into the question if that was right/wrong.
- belter 5y agoThere are around 25 million software developers in the world. Total number of software engineers in FAANG, is around 50,000 from the published number from those companies. So software developers just have to: - Have the time and patience to spend weeks to months practicing coding quizzes unrelated to their actual software engineering work... - Pass HR teams arbitrary filter definitions of what is a good university. - Pass the filters of random interviewers definition of cultural fit. - Hope the experience and knowledge of these developers, intersects with the knowledge of the developers driving the interviews on the days of their onsite. - Be able to put up with recruiters processes. So as to eventually be hired into a bubble representing 0.2% of that software set of 25 million, and get most of their compensation in flimsy stock options. Is that really easier or even a more interesting option, just to then spend your days maintaining the latest deluded take of somebody else JavaScript framework? :-)
- jplr8922 5y agoHello, I'm not a 'pure tech guy', but I know enough to do project management and challenge devs of tech choices given a business objective. I work at a startup for 50% of my normal wage. If the project fail, I simply go back to BigBankInc, work there 1 year or 2, and start again. Easy! Of course my personal budget and lifestyle are very minimalist, I basically sacrificed my hobbies for my busines project. However I am totally happy with this decision, it improved my mental health a lot. I attribute this kind of 'needs arbitrage' as an outcome of my meditation practice. Do note however that I do not have a family (yet)...
- est31 5y ago> The reality is that with their talent they could earn that per month at FAANG. You are making the mistake in assuming that the FAANG interview process is not based on a tradeoff: they rather send away many competent people than hire incompetent ones. Due to this, many people with deep technical expertise don't get into FAANG. Think of neuro divergent people. Someone like RMS would not ever pass the cultural fit interview. Think of people who know how to code well in the problem domain but can't do so on a whiteboard. Think of people who have the expertise but lack a degree. Yes, examples exist where such people made it into FAANG, but this doesn't mean that it's really possible for someone like them to make it into FAANG. Yes, many famous OSS people would be hired by FAANG in a heartbeat. But this isn't neccessarily the case for most folks in OSS. Also don't forget that you make 30k per month when in the USA. Quite many senior developers with "FAANG talents" work in lower dev income countries on proprietary software and for some reason don't relocate to the US. Often, a lot of OSS contributions come from them. Godot for example was founded by someone living in Buenos Aires.
- phkahler 5y ago> The co-founders are arguing about 30k's worth of shares. The company is in one of those situations where it is likely to either fail in the near future or get much more valuable. Like Ford in 2008 at $2, or AMD under $2 prior to their Zen architecture. Arguments about why someone cares so much about so little are equally valid on either side and are not terribly useful.
- rattlesnakedave 5y agoAs it has always been, innovation is made by lunatics on the fringe willing to work for little to no money because they are ideologically motivated. Also, don't discount the innovation happening at FAANG companies. They do a ton of heavy lifting on boring-but-important problems!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]