22 ms·

On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

287 points by gregoire 4y ago

brundolf 4y ago
Maybe I'm cynical, but I just assume some version this happens to every company at some point in their growth. Like the author I would jump ship at this point, but I don't think I'd be caught off-guard by it
draw_down 4y ago
The only thing they actually mention doing at the company during all that time was the union drive. Did they create products? Features? Internal tools? Design guides/system? Any actual work? Or just agitating for a union that their coworkers clearly did not want?
- incanus77 4y ago
  Yes, major contributor who touched many parts of the company's core technology. Source: I overlapped with them for the first 7 of those 12 years, back to the <20 employee days.
- awhitty 4y ago
  Saman worked on many things at Mapbox, most notably to me is the interface for Studio [0], which continues to be an impressive expression of a really advanced set of features for map design. He also explicitly mentioned a stint as an engineering manager at the company in the post- maybe you didn’t catch that? Or maybe you don’t consider management to be doing “actual work”? If you think the latter, maybe consider organizing at your own workplace? [0] https://blog.mapbox.com/behind-mapbox-studios-new-look-874c156395fd https://blog.mapbox.com/behind-mapbox-studios-new-look-874c1...
xyzzy4747 4y ago
In my opinion you’re hired somewhere to work there and be productive, not to unionize. Workers who join companies and then try to subvert the entire system are a cancer to the org.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  That employee had been at the company for a dozen years, it's in the very title of the article.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  I agree that union organisation work is not _work_, it's not what people are paid to do, and it should therefore be done on personal time. However, employers are in a position of significant power over their employees, and unions represent a way to balance that power. I think this is a broadly positive thing that I think employees should be in favour of, and that I think the best employers would also be in favour of.
  - roguecoder 4y ago
    IANAL, but my understanding is that it is illegal to treat unionizing differently than other social activities. If a company wants to ban unionizing on company time, they have to ban all non-work related socializing. If people are allowed to talk about movies & video games, they are also allowed to talk about unions.
  - draw_down 4y ago
- mikkergp 4y ago
  One way conceptualize many companies is that they're just the id of senior execs measuring their genitalia against one other, why shouldn't workers get to participate?
  - xyzzy4747 4y ago
    The workers can make their own company if the terms of their employment don’t make them happy.
    - roguecoder 4y ago
      Or they can organize, as is their legal right, and renegotiate those terms together. Even if you aren't unionized, it is your right to get together with your coworkers & advocate for better working conditions.
slively 4y ago
Here is the same story again. Sorry to hear about the inevitable ending, but glad they got to experience a good work culture for a time. At some point I hope we can shift the union discussion from just benefits and wages (which are not the biggest problems for SWE), to workers having a say in how a company operates. The idea that investing money garners complete control of a company is not healthy for the company or society at large. Workers risk more for the company and know more about what makes it succeed.
- erlich 4y ago
  Most startups fail. Why burden them more? There are plenty of stable jobs out there at big boring companies. You can’t have your cake and eat it.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Why do you assume that unions, or some other form of labor power, would burden startups? In fact, why do you assume that they might not lead to fewer startups failing?
    - erlich 4y ago
      Different incentives. If a company fails, employees would be disappointed but can go get another job pretty easy. For investors they lose a lot of money. Employees have less to gain+lose. A collective of employees is not going to make better decisions than management. And if there are some who would, then they should be moved into management. I only see the impact a union could have on improving morale and staff retention and therefore productivity if management/owners didn’t value it enough. These are things management are measuring and factoring in to their decisions. If management/owners are this bad then there isn’t much hope for the company. And without a union management could simply provide autonomy to have the same effect. If Union force needs to be used to get mgmt to do the right thing for maximizing profits, it’s not really worth it.
      - Apocryphon 4y ago
smm11 4y ago
- mikl 4y ago
  Thanks for lettings us know. Your ignorance is inspiring. /s
- incanus77 4y ago
  Appropriate, since they haven't heard of you either.
mikl 4y ago
> Over the next few years, Mapbox tried to find success in a variety of industries: journalism, social media, travel, ect. We never hit numbers that were big enough for our investors. In the process, we abandoned our focus on Open Source and Open data. Then, as is the case with many mapping companies, Mapbox shifted focus to the auto industry. My fear of loss of control fully materialized at this point. I’m a lifelong bicycle commuter, and I think cars are unequivocally bad. I wish people better understood what taking VC money means: trading control for money. While employees might _feel_ the company is still theirs, that’s only true to the extent that they hold majority control of the board of directors. It’s certainly possible to take VC money and keep your original vision intact. But only if your original vision works well enough to keep your shareholders happy. Failing that, the board will push management to compromise with the ideals as much as needed to get a return on investment.
- secondcoming 4y ago
  It also means getting your monthly payslip. Not a minor thing.
  - julianeon 4y ago
    I sort of disagree - and I think most VC's would too. The point of VC funding is not to pay salaries, really. If you squint it seems close enough, but it sets a terrible precedent that most VC's wouldn't want: looking at venture funding as how the company pays its bills. That's a natural way to read your statement - but also counterproductive & undesirable. The point of VC funding is to take a profitable business and allow it to scale. Ideally the company could turn $1 into $1.25, before funding; that is, ideally it's making money. It should be able to pay some bills. The VC funding is helping it to make more money, faster, and shortening the loop from sales -> payment -> expansion. It's helping it to leapfrog its competitors. That's what that money should be doing. But what if it hasn't found product-market fit? Well, it's still not good to look at the VC's as "where our money comes from." That source is supposed to be customers, and you never want the focus to stray too far from there.
    - 4y ago
iamleppert 4y ago
Blame your leadership for creating such a bloated company that the only thing to satiate investors was to sell out completely to auto companies. I interviewed at Mapbox at one time, a ridiculous 3-day interview at their SF office where lots of PM's and managers were buzzing around hosting meetings, giving the perception of getting stuff done when in fact it was even clear to me, an outsider, that nothing was being accomplished. I found the product to be lacking and the team to be outsized for the quality and depth of the product. The core business appeared very weak and on VC life-support.
- mourner 4y ago
  With this much saltiness, it's not hard to guess the result of that interview :)
  - chipotle_coyote 4y ago
    It’s possible to interview at a company and decide that it’s not for you, and frankly I wish I’d done that more often over the years. I used to be more inclined to ignore the little voice saying “aren’t these warning signs?”, accepted the offer anyway, and quickly realized the little voice had absolutely been right.
    - mourner 4y ago
      Oh, nothing wrong with going with your gut and paying attention to the warning signs. But, "I briefly looked at these people from afar and immediately concluded they all only pretend to work and never accomplish anything" is just ridiculously arrogant.
- urschrei 4y ago
  I can’t speak to the organizational problems you saw, but when you consider the quality of software that Mapbox was producing before the failed union drive – Mapbox GL JS, Rasterio, Shapely – what you’re saying is nonsensical. The latter two libraries have of course left Mapbox, along with their creator, and continue to see high-quality new features, but Mapbox GL JS is still so much better than anything else that I continue to use and pay for it, even though my friends and acquaintances were the people who quit after Mapbox management torpedoed the union drive (note: I’m relying on the current NLRB complaint against Mapbox here: https://www.nlrb.gov/case/20-CA-283393 https://www.nlrb.gov/case/20-CA-283393) and I hope that one day I’ll have an alternative.
tarkin2 4y ago
It sounded like unionisation was an attempt at pushing back the ills of VC funding, especially taking back some control of the company’s direction, rather than concentrating on fairer pay and working conditions. I support unions but I’m not sure I support them controlling the direction of the company: most of the time the business people, frankly, know best about profitability. The whole story reinforced the idea that if you build a company with value but no profits eventually you either abandon it as a business or give control to VCs, and if you had any emotional or political investment in the company you will be disappointed.
- jenny91 4y ago
  Maybe there is a middle ground? Surely VCs will fight tooth-and-nail against it since it's clearly taking away control (and some ability to extract profit) from them. For instance in some countries with stronger unions and better labor conditions the union often has a board seat and so can advocate and don't have by any means control over the directio of the company.
  - tarkin2 4y ago
    Yeah definitely. My comment came from my understanding of what the author wanted the union to do rather than how unions could operate. As an aside, I’m slightly skeptical about unions in the US. The US’s economic model seems to be based around innovation and unions arguably make making decisions slower and more difficult. If you look at Germany’s economic model, one with very strong employee protection, it seems largely based on pre existing industries. Yet the US’s seems more based on innovation and failing fast. And German political culture seems more consensual compared to US political culture. Of course, this doesn’t mean I don’t think unions are possible or a good idea in the US—for certain industries I think they could alleviate the US’s problems—but I just doubt they’ll readily get government backing, support or favorable legislation in the short term.
    - jenny91 4y ago
      I agree, too strict labor regulations around e.g. firing/letting employess go certainly would hinder some of the innovation hapening in the US and especially tech. Though maybe there is a flavor of unions that recognizes this and pushes for other things e.g. proper treatment of contractors, or osme slight input in direction, etc? I think the US is screwed for unions mostly because to unionize you basically have to join one of the existing huge unions none of which are run very democratically or transparently; as well as the huge anti-union sentiment and misrepresentation of what unions could be. But those things are nigh impossible to change...
bambam24 4y ago
jenny91 4y ago
I'm saddened by what happened to Mapbox. It's such a recurring pattern of organizational transformation: from a small "mission-driven" group building cool shit that starts taking money (and pressure from investors) and slowly erodes their past core values, changing into a faceless money-making machine subservient to some huge market or industry. In that process most of the original opinionated crowd will slowly rotate out and the more "career"/bureaucratic types will prevail and take over. Maybe unions and workers having more control could curb it? But in such a late stage it sounds almost impossible to achieve. Cars are certainly a problem, but technology has by and far been a great thing, and I would question whether the gaming is really such a positive industry in the end either.
- NelsonMinar 4y ago
  Unions and Mapbox is a very sore topic and now the subject of a NLRB lawsuit for firing the union organizers. https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/mapbox-sued-firing-union-organizers https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/mapbox-sued-firing-union-... But the union drive came far too late to help the larger problem. The big change happened in 2017 when Softbank invested $164M into MapBox. In retrospect it was far too much money with too many expectations. And with the ugly side effect of salting the earth for any other map startups. It only got worse in 2021 when MapBox's attempt to go public via a SPAC failed. They're plodding along now but it's hard to see what a good final outcome is going to be.
  - chx 4y ago
    This is not the first time I see Softbank as a net negative. Too much money loosely controlled. Is there an example of Softbank doing good?
  - Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
    > And with the ugly side effect of salting the earth for any other map startups I'm unsure on that. Mapbox built a bunch of good tech (mostly around vector tiles), open-sourced it, and then lost interest in smaller customers in their rush for the petrodollar. This has been genuinely great for bootstrapped map businesses. You can easily list a dozen who are using .mvt tech right now and making a good living out of it. True, it wasn't good for Mapzen. But I can't weep too many tears for something funded with Samsung Accelerator magic money, much though they did hire one of the smartest teams in the business - Softbank vs Samsung is not a battle I can bring myself to care about. I 100% agree with you that Mapbox went too far, too fast. But on balance I think their trajectory has (unintentionally) been good for wider mapping tech.
johnny313 4y ago
> Here’s some advice as a jaded start-up veteran: business models and investment terms are kind of the only thing that matter. Even if you’re a lowly designer or engineer, you must understand what your company needs to do to be sustainable. This is a key observation. Every incredible team and inspirational idea eventually has to make the unit economics work. The longer it takes for a leadership team to realize this and prioritize it, the more difficult it is for people (ICs and managers) to internalize the changes that need to be made. Worst of all is when the shift happens because runway is getting short, and "get rich quick" projects become the focus instead of building a good product. > ...you must understand what your company needs to do to be sustainable. It very likely is different from what they’re doing now, and may come with unexpected ethical compromises. This sounds like a difficult situation, but is certainly something people should think about. Things can get weird when a company is running out of money.
Brystephor 4y ago
I interviewed at MapBox within the past year. The team I was interviewing with gave a pretty bad outlook. Essentially it was everyone had left and they're trying to keep the lights on until they can hire enough to do new work. To be clear, I did receive an offer and passed.
tschellenbach 4y ago
VC funding enables the high salaries in tech. You can definitely be bootstrapped and work 4 days a week, you'll just have a hard time earning your current salary.
- fny 4y ago
  Once all of this unwinds, tech pay is going to get really ugly.
- mulligan 4y ago
  VC funding enables the high salaries in startups and that is because those startups are competing for talent against high margin, highly profitable other companies which can afford to pay very well.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Those startups are competing with other startups and ultimately VC money. There's significantly more tech talent out there than the business problems that can be solved profitably with said talent. When the VC money runs out and the "growth & engagement" engineering playgrounds close up shop we're going to see a massive readjustment. We're in the beginning of it now.
tiffanyh 4y ago
> A company like Mapbox hadn’t ever unionized before, so it seemed like an exciting experiment Call me crazy, but taking such a drastic move as unionizing shouldn’t be trivialized into just being an “experiment”. EDIT: why the downvotes? Why not simply reply with your thoughts so that we can have a thoughtful discourse.
- roguecoder 4y ago
  Unionizing isn't "drastic": it is the norm for most trades in the United States. Any individual union is basically just you & your coworkers crowd sourcing employment lawyers you wouldn't afford individually. Until Boeing got taken over by finance people, the Boeing engineering guild had spent decades being a book club. It is only when things go wrong that unionization significantly changes how we work.
  - tiffanyh 4y ago
    > “crowd sourcing employment lawyers” How is that not drastic? You’re own words are saying unionizing is to bring in lawyers to be used against your employer. EDIT: to answer your question below since I can’t reply. No, it’s not drastic for a company to have lawyers. A company needs to ensure they are staying regulatory compliant, not breaking laws and de-risking company … that’s what the lawyers are doing.
    - roguecoder 4y ago
      The company has lawyers: is that drastic?
    - chipotle_coyote 4y ago
      “It’s not drastic for a company to have lawyers” is probably the point that was being made. It’s not drastic for a company to have lawyers; it shouldn’t be drastic for a union—or in this case, a union organizing effort—to have lawyers as well.
      - tiffanyh 4y ago
woevdbz 4y ago
It sounds like OP wants to be a part of the kind of social change that fundamentally cannot exist independently of politics but trying to enact it without. A single company, especially one that is not generating monopoly/oligopoly profits and is still dependent on funding, is not really able to: unionizing creates a steep competitive downside on the capital market that is not offset by enough employee retention benefit to be worth it, and that alone creates existential risk for the whole company. Long term, it simply helps another competitor to come up without a union. Systemic problems need systemic solutions. It saddens me a bit that people want social change so much but dislike politics so much more that they take up the wrong fight, and then retreat to something like making videogames, which frankly as an industry has an even worse track record than tech in terms of respect for its workers. I hope OP changes their perspective and fights a wider fight, either on behalf of a party or of a larger union.
- afandian 4y ago
  It's surely not that bleak (at least, not everywhere). And it doesn't have to be remotely about 'politics'. My old employer made the leap to employee-owned and they seem to be going from strength to strength. https://torchbox.com/careers/employee-owned-trust https://torchbox.com/careers/employee-owned-trust
  - woevdbz 4y ago
    Right, that works until you need more funding (unless you can raise from employees, but that also has consequences and limits). I'm guessing that Mapbox is angling for an acquisition or more funding at some point.
    - afandian 4y ago
      Yes staying true to the rhetoric about 'making the world a better place' does preclude certain future states. But that rhetoric can be true, actionable, and not incompatible with profit. Just saying here's an anecdatum about a money-making business that said the same kinds of things and is doing very well for itself.
    - 4y ago
jamiequint 4y ago
prescriptivist 4y ago
A lot of negative sentiment about Mapbox in this thread. I have been prototyping a (native) app powered by Mapbox -- would it be a bad idea to hitch oneself to their ecosystem?
- Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
  Don't hitch yourself irrevocably to their SaaS. Make sure that, if your app becomes successful, you can swap out for Maplibre (the open-source fork of Mapbox GL) and an alternative provider such as Thunderforest, Geofabrik, Stadia or Maptiler. Mapbox have a lot going for them, but your app's success shouldn't be dependent on one company's tariff.
- Fordec 4y ago
  I'd suggest reading their terms of service and licensing model. They changed it on their 2.0 version and it stopped being right for a lot of use cases, either for financial, privacy or legal reasons. Make sure it fits for yourself also.
reocha 4y ago
Does anyone know why tech companies tend to be so hostile to unions? I'm not sure if its due to the large amount of venture capital invested or other reasons.
- roguecoder 4y ago
  Because unions could increase wages, stop the scams companies like to pull with options, and push back on under-staffed expectations of the impossible. Companies benefit by taking as much of the profit for themselves as possible, rather than doing right by their workers. Some of that pressure comes from VCs or shareholders, but even in private companies it takes a rare founder to put a worker's interests ahead of their own.
- pm90 4y ago
  I get the impression that a lot of Software Devs buy into libertarian philosophies. I think this is changing though. There’s a lot of people working in tech and with the kind of abuse that’s been reported (ahem, Amazon) we might see that change.
- int_19h 4y ago
  All for-profit companies are hostile to unions, because unions reduce the amount of economic rent that they can extract from their employees. Tech companies can afford to be more vocal about it because a significant number - arguably, the majority - of their employees genuinely believe that they would do worse with unions (regardless of whether it's actually true). I think at least in part this is because much of tech is in US, which has widespread "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" syndrome in general, but especially so in tech.
- eldavido 4y ago
  Only 11.6% of US employees are unionized (straight from the US bureau of labor statistics), FYI.
thinkingemote 4y ago
There are some mapbox employees replying to comments here. I think some appear to be defensive of their employer, but if there are some who are in agreement with the article, I can't tell. It's hard to know one way or the other. Might be nice for employees to identify themselves. Personally I was intrigued with the formation of the union and knew that many of their employees were quite liberal: The company evolved from something called Development Seed - basically a progressive humanitarian and development focused company. It is different from most SV companies. And based on open source and open data. Them stopping key open source projects and charging for use of just their mapping JS library (not data usage, any use of the code anywhere) was shocking. I'd love to hear from an original principled humanitarian employee on what happened to the company and/or them. Maybe money is better. Maybe they left? We don't hear much about the union at all. We assume from the usual SV unions that it was all about identity, inclusion and diversity but perhaps it was more about this conflict of their humanitarian roots and money.
donohoe 4y ago
Is it fair to say that MapBox is moving into auto services? Or to put it another way, is it not a good idea for me to move to a different provider for basic mapping services?
- lmc 4y ago
  > Is it fair to say that MapBox is moving into auto services? It seems so https://www.mapbox.com/fleet https://www.mapbox.com/fleet https://www.mapbox.com/dash https://www.mapbox.com/dash https://www.mapbox.com/navigation/ https://www.mapbox.com/navigation/ Perhaps that's just their 'thing' for now and their core mapping/viz work will continue - I hope so as it's great tech and still relatively open compared to other cos.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  That's where the money is. Otherwise, Mapbox provides a lot of relatively low value commodity services. You can get maps from them but there are lots of competitors for that. You can get libraries from them for rendering those maps. But they are now closed source and have been forked by others (maplibre seems popular) and also there is some competition: leaflet, overlay and proprietary things like Here, Google and Apple maps. The big money is helping big corporations (including automotive) with advanced use cases around logistics, very detailed 3d maps, gis, etc. So, that's increasingly what they are doing at the cost of the business that made them big (shipping good quality openstreetmap based maps and OSS software). They are now very similar to Here, Tomtom, and a few others. The latter two used to be mostly about consumer navigation products for in cars but that is now a commodity business that got disrupted by Apple and Google just bundling it with their phones (actually Nokia started this by giving away Here maps 14 years ago). Mostly if I'm in a rental car with tom tom / here maps built in, I end up using my phone with Google Maps instead. Just easier for me. Both will get me from A to B. I don't pay for it directly. That's no longer a viable business model. We are currently using maplibre with Maptiler.com as our maps provider. We may have to switch maps provider for some of our customers (our German customers are picky about where their data is hosted). Maplibre has been pretty solid for us. Last year when I had to pick a library, I briefly considered Mapbox and then noticed all the activity around the newly created maplibre fork (and the reasons it was created) and went there instead. All the commit activity happening there is no longer happening around mapbox. That's the value Mapbox lost by going closed source. So unnecessary and short sighted.
_9hey 4y ago
Key takeaway: investors ruin startups. It’s that belief that still keeps me from going that route even while working through a regular career for several years. If the project succeeds, well you’ve already sold it to the people who ru(i)n the world. Bootstrapping is so expensive but you diversify power in tech. Don’t sell out!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hutch120 4y ago
Like many others no doubt, I invested heavily into the mapbox-gl-js library (pre 2.0). I was able to build amazing value on top of that library including a routing voice navigation app for an aged care facility that is used to this day 24/7/365. It was a very sad day when they changed their licencing model to lock in vendors and I had to walk away from that investment of my time and effort. Luckily I had also worked and contributed to OpenLayers and Leaflet, so with significant effort was able to move my clients to those platforms. I guess we now have some more insight into why this occurred. > "In order to use most Services, you must register for or authenticate into a Mapbox account. When you use our application program interfaces (APIs), including our SDK Registry/Downloads API, each request to an API must include one of your account's unique API keys."
- Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
  Out of interest, is there a reason you can’t switch to Maplibre, the open source fork?
  - hutch120 4y ago
    I remember looking at that fork when the whole licencing thing went down a couple of years ago, but it was unclear how much, if any support it would have. Looks like the project is doing ok.
- worstestes 4y ago
  Are you familiar with MapLibre? It’s a great project. It’s an open-source fork of Mapbox GL. I’ve only used the JS variant myself but there’s definitely a native one as well.
jjmorrison 4y ago
Thinking that organizing a union to change the direction of the company is an exciting experiment is really irresponsible. All the paycheck everyone at the company is getting needs to come from somewhere. You do not have the right to bet everyone's paycheck on an exciting experiment.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  What happened to disruption, innovation, experimentation in this industry? What happened to move fast and break things?
  - jjmorrison 4y ago
    Then start a company and choose to make that experiment. Don't shove it onto someone else's.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      That's not how it works. If there's interest in a union in a company, the employees have the right to make the case for it, and then they vote on it. Sounds like the company in the OP tried to quash that right. Why do owners have the sole right to determine whether a company should undertake that experiment or not? And beyond the legal and moral implications, you still haven't addressed my core critique: Silicon Valley tech startups claim they can change the world and disrupt everything. Yet when it comes to the subject of labor relations, they default to some sort of Victorian Era fear of workingman unions. There's an inherent fear that unions are unworkable and malevolent. That just completely clashes with tech's belief in its infinite innovation. Even if past unions didn't work in America, why be so afraid of building a new one?
astrange 4y ago
> Then, as is the case with many mapping companies, Mapbox shifted focus to the auto industry. My fear of loss of control fully materialized at this point. I’m a lifelong bicycle commuter, and I think cars are unequivocally bad. They ruin cities, contribute to environmental decline (even electric cars!) and kill people. All these things are correct except for the ruin cities part - that’s a US city planning problem. Japan, everyone’s favorite high public transit country with a lot of demand for maps, has a higher car ownership % than the US. They just discourage using them for personal trips and commutes via small roads, toll highways, expensive parking etc. But once you’re a family or want to go somewhere low density and take some luggage, it’s hard to beat them. What it looks like to me is this guy wanted to work at a geospatial PBC but didn’t know such a thing existed.
- siraben 4y ago
  > Japan, everyone’s favorite high public transit country with a lot of demand for maps, has a higher car ownership % than the US. They just discourage using them for personal trips and commutes via small roads, toll highways, expensive parking etc. Do you have a reference for this? From a precursory search it seems the US has a much higher car ownership rate.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Looks like I remembered it wrong. Still, it’s quite high and more than Australia/Canada. https://internationalcomparisons.org/environmental/transportation/ https://internationalcomparisons.org/environmental/transport... (2015) The UK having the highest transit mode share (in 2014) is a bit surprising.
    - aikinai 4y ago
      These stats all look wrong for Japan at least. I’ve done research specifically into Japanese transportation modes in Japanese using authoritative sources and the real stats are more in line with what you’d expect (i.e. more public transportation, more biking, less cars). I can’t grab the sources right now, but might try to come back and add them later.
erlich 4y ago
This is such a crazy and enraging read. If you don’t like your job, go join another company. It’s not as if devs don’t have plenty of high paying choices out there. Especially for a startup that had struggled to find market fit, the last thing they need is a union. Companies are not democracies and setting up a union is a hostile action. It basically says: here are the things we want and if we don’t get them we all stop working. If you want to run the company differently go setup your own company or buy some shares.
- sclv 4y ago
  Yes, companies are not democracies. That's why we need unions! That's the only way to exercise our collective power to negotiate with the employer on more equal terms. When we negotiate individually we also say "here are the things we want, and that is our condition of work." There is _always_ a conflict between what employees want, which involves wages and conditions, and what employers want, which is getting the most work while yielding the least in wages and conditions. Unions in tech are as possible and necessary as unions anywhere else. Nothing about being it tech makes us "special" and the whole mythology it does only serves to keep us from organizing and solidifying our conditions and strength.
  - erlich 4y ago
    The market sorts out wages and conditions. I will assume you are not talking about developers because they have so many choices at all different salary ranges that are higher than many other industries. Contractors in minimum wage roles would be the only candidate for unions.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      You must not have heard about the situation at many large video game studios. Can be pretty dire there.
  - andrewmutz 4y ago
    Why are unions necessary at tech startups? From my experience, these companies pay and treat their employees very well.
kfox2010 4y ago
Trying to understand how in the same short form piece we get: > "I still bristle at the word “career”. Not for me." And then end it with: > "The skills and connections I developed at Mapbox set me up for a smooth and satisfying career transition." So do you have a career or not?
- sangnoir 4y ago
  I once bought a brown/bronze car at a discount. It was the ugliest color I had ever seen on a car, but I still drove it for many months. I really hated it, but what could I do? I couldn't afford another car, so I had to live with it every single day. I'm guessing author feels something similar about having a career.
talos 4y ago
I'm curious what the split was in Mapbox union organizing interest between Engineering/Product/Design/Data and Sales/Marketing/other go-to-market roles. Browsing the old union website (https://www.mapboxworkersunion.org/ https://www.mapboxworkersunion.org/) almost all of the supporters of unionization were on the engineering side of the house, much more than I'd expect if you randomly sampled the org for job titles. I wonder why that is?
worldmerge 4y ago
Just looked up mapbox after not checking it out for a few years. Oh wow, that's changed a lot :(
- numlock86 4y ago
  Same here. The last time I have used Mapbox was probably five years ago. Looking at it know I wouldn't even consider evaluating it anymore.
Helmut10001 4y ago
Kudos to the author for prioritizing of ethical and moral concerns.
tinco 4y ago
Odd story about MapBox, we used to be a customer, and their product was very solid so we were happy but we were using it in a 3d engine which was causing loads of map requests driving up the costs. We only had a couple users and the bills were already in the hundreds per month. So I contacted them to see if we could come to some sort of agreement. The person who replied had a familiar name, I didn't remember where I'd heard that name before so I googled it, and it turned out he was one of the 3 kids that sexually assaulted a drunk girl during a spring break. Even though their abhorrent behavior was caught on video and presented as evidence they got away with less than a slap on the wrist, and the girl suffered emotional trauma and dropped out of university. Definitely a heavy thing to have show up on the first page of your Google results, and I cross referenced with his LinkedIn it was definitely him, so I would expect him to address it somewhere. But nothing, never a public apology or even a statement, nothing from Mapbox. That was so crazy to me, surely whoever interviewed him did a minimal background check, and they just thought it was ok? It felt really off, so I found a different technical solution and never talked to them again.
worik 4y ago
"Fight for motives beyond profit." Sigh. Profit is good. Profit is necessary. Profit is not a great motivator IMO. It motivates, but alone it motivates the wrong things the wrong way. Money is my only motive available to me at the moment, and I am sad about that.
dougSF70 4y ago
When it is hard for worker-bees to transition to become manager-bees then unions are important and necessary. In any other business where worker-bees can become manager-bees then they should take that opportunity if they want to create change. Unions in tech businesses smack of entitlement, if you want to change the working conditions at [insert tech corp name here] then join management otherwise leave. Small companies change as they evolve. Noble ambitions are set aside in favor of profit (rightly so). With that, early employees may well feel the firm they joined is not the same firm they are working at. In which case they should leave because the boat has already sailed and there are probably a 1000 more compatible candidates willing to work at the company. I hear non-profits pay incredibly well and do amazing work.
rahulnair23 4y ago
Always jarring to hear the claim > Technology is fundamentally neutral It is in the same way guns are fundamentally neutral. You can't view it without context. Include that and it is clear that tech (or guns) isn't neutral at all.
Estherloven 4y ago

287 points by gregoire 4y ago

Maybe I'm cynical, but I just assume some version this happens to every company at some point in their growth. Like the author I would jump ship at this point, but I don't think I'd be caught off-guard by it

draw_down 4y ago

The only thing they actually mention doing at the company during all that time was the union drive. Did they create products? Features? Internal tools? Design guides/system? Any actual work? Or just agitating for a union that their coworkers clearly did not want?

incanus77 4y ago
Yes, major contributor who touched many parts of the company's core technology. Source: I overlapped with them for the first 7 of those 12 years, back to the <20 employee days.
awhitty 4y ago
Saman worked on many things at Mapbox, most notably to me is the interface for Studio [0], which continues to be an impressive expression of a really advanced set of features for map design. He also explicitly mentioned a stint as an engineering manager at the company in the post- maybe you didn’t catch that? Or maybe you don’t consider management to be doing “actual work”? If you think the latter, maybe consider organizing at your own workplace? [0] https://blog.mapbox.com/behind-mapbox-studios-new-look-874c156395fd https://blog.mapbox.com/behind-mapbox-studios-new-look-874c1...

xyzzy4747 4y ago

In my opinion you’re hired somewhere to work there and be productive, not to unionize. Workers who join companies and then try to subvert the entire system are a cancer to the org.

Apocryphon 4y ago
That employee had been at the company for a dozen years, it's in the very title of the article.
danpalmer 4y ago
I agree that union organisation work is not _work_, it's not what people are paid to do, and it should therefore be done on personal time. However, employers are in a position of significant power over their employees, and unions represent a way to balance that power. I think this is a broadly positive thing that I think employees should be in favour of, and that I think the best employers would also be in favour of.
- roguecoder 4y ago
  IANAL, but my understanding is that it is illegal to treat unionizing differently than other social activities. If a company wants to ban unionizing on company time, they have to ban all non-work related socializing. If people are allowed to talk about movies & video games, they are also allowed to talk about unions.
- draw_down 4y ago
mikkergp 4y ago
One way conceptualize many companies is that they're just the id of senior execs measuring their genitalia against one other, why shouldn't workers get to participate?
- xyzzy4747 4y ago
  The workers can make their own company if the terms of their employment don’t make them happy.
  - roguecoder 4y ago
    Or they can organize, as is their legal right, and renegotiate those terms together. Even if you aren't unionized, it is your right to get together with your coworkers & advocate for better working conditions.

slively 4y ago

Here is the same story again. Sorry to hear about the inevitable ending, but glad they got to experience a good work culture for a time. At some point I hope we can shift the union discussion from just benefits and wages (which are not the biggest problems for SWE), to workers having a say in how a company operates. The idea that investing money garners complete control of a company is not healthy for the company or society at large. Workers risk more for the company and know more about what makes it succeed.

erlich 4y ago
Most startups fail. Why burden them more? There are plenty of stable jobs out there at big boring companies. You can’t have your cake and eat it.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Why do you assume that unions, or some other form of labor power, would burden startups? In fact, why do you assume that they might not lead to fewer startups failing?
  - erlich 4y ago
    Different incentives. If a company fails, employees would be disappointed but can go get another job pretty easy. For investors they lose a lot of money. Employees have less to gain+lose. A collective of employees is not going to make better decisions than management. And if there are some who would, then they should be moved into management. I only see the impact a union could have on improving morale and staff retention and therefore productivity if management/owners didn’t value it enough. These are things management are measuring and factoring in to their decisions. If management/owners are this bad then there isn’t much hope for the company. And without a union management could simply provide autonomy to have the same effect. If Union force needs to be used to get mgmt to do the right thing for maximizing profits, it’s not really worth it.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago

smm11 4y ago

mikl 4y ago
Thanks for lettings us know. Your ignorance is inspiring. /s
incanus77 4y ago
Appropriate, since they haven't heard of you either.

mikl 4y ago

> Over the next few years, Mapbox tried to find success in a variety of industries: journalism, social media, travel, ect. We never hit numbers that were big enough for our investors. In the process, we abandoned our focus on Open Source and Open data. Then, as is the case with many mapping companies, Mapbox shifted focus to the auto industry. My fear of loss of control fully materialized at this point. I’m a lifelong bicycle commuter, and I think cars are unequivocally bad. I wish people better understood what taking VC money means: trading control for money. While employees might _feel_ the company is still theirs, that’s only true to the extent that they hold majority control of the board of directors. It’s certainly possible to take VC money and keep your original vision intact. But only if your original vision works well enough to keep your shareholders happy. Failing that, the board will push management to compromise with the ideals as much as needed to get a return on investment.

secondcoming 4y ago
It also means getting your monthly payslip. Not a minor thing.
- julianeon 4y ago
  I sort of disagree - and I think most VC's would too. The point of VC funding is not to pay salaries, really. If you squint it seems close enough, but it sets a terrible precedent that most VC's wouldn't want: looking at venture funding as how the company pays its bills. That's a natural way to read your statement - but also counterproductive & undesirable. The point of VC funding is to take a profitable business and allow it to scale. Ideally the company could turn $1 into $1.25, before funding; that is, ideally it's making money. It should be able to pay some bills. The VC funding is helping it to make more money, faster, and shortening the loop from sales -> payment -> expansion. It's helping it to leapfrog its competitors. That's what that money should be doing. But what if it hasn't found product-market fit? Well, it's still not good to look at the VC's as "where our money comes from." That source is supposed to be customers, and you never want the focus to stray too far from there.
  - 4y ago

iamleppert 4y ago

Blame your leadership for creating such a bloated company that the only thing to satiate investors was to sell out completely to auto companies. I interviewed at Mapbox at one time, a ridiculous 3-day interview at their SF office where lots of PM's and managers were buzzing around hosting meetings, giving the perception of getting stuff done when in fact it was even clear to me, an outsider, that nothing was being accomplished. I found the product to be lacking and the team to be outsized for the quality and depth of the product. The core business appeared very weak and on VC life-support.

mourner 4y ago
With this much saltiness, it's not hard to guess the result of that interview :)
- chipotle_coyote 4y ago
  It’s possible to interview at a company and decide that it’s not for you, and frankly I wish I’d done that more often over the years. I used to be more inclined to ignore the little voice saying “aren’t these warning signs?”, accepted the offer anyway, and quickly realized the little voice had absolutely been right.
  - mourner 4y ago
    Oh, nothing wrong with going with your gut and paying attention to the warning signs. But, "I briefly looked at these people from afar and immediately concluded they all only pretend to work and never accomplish anything" is just ridiculously arrogant.
urschrei 4y ago
I can’t speak to the organizational problems you saw, but when you consider the quality of software that Mapbox was producing before the failed union drive – Mapbox GL JS, Rasterio, Shapely – what you’re saying is nonsensical. The latter two libraries have of course left Mapbox, along with their creator, and continue to see high-quality new features, but Mapbox GL JS is still so much better than anything else that I continue to use and pay for it, even though my friends and acquaintances were the people who quit after Mapbox management torpedoed the union drive (note: I’m relying on the current NLRB complaint against Mapbox here: https://www.nlrb.gov/case/20-CA-283393 https://www.nlrb.gov/case/20-CA-283393) and I hope that one day I’ll have an alternative.

tarkin2 4y ago

It sounded like unionisation was an attempt at pushing back the ills of VC funding, especially taking back some control of the company’s direction, rather than concentrating on fairer pay and working conditions. I support unions but I’m not sure I support them controlling the direction of the company: most of the time the business people, frankly, know best about profitability. The whole story reinforced the idea that if you build a company with value but no profits eventually you either abandon it as a business or give control to VCs, and if you had any emotional or political investment in the company you will be disappointed.

jenny91 4y ago
Maybe there is a middle ground? Surely VCs will fight tooth-and-nail against it since it's clearly taking away control (and some ability to extract profit) from them. For instance in some countries with stronger unions and better labor conditions the union often has a board seat and so can advocate and don't have by any means control over the directio of the company.
- tarkin2 4y ago
  Yeah definitely. My comment came from my understanding of what the author wanted the union to do rather than how unions could operate. As an aside, I’m slightly skeptical about unions in the US. The US’s economic model seems to be based around innovation and unions arguably make making decisions slower and more difficult. If you look at Germany’s economic model, one with very strong employee protection, it seems largely based on pre existing industries. Yet the US’s seems more based on innovation and failing fast. And German political culture seems more consensual compared to US political culture. Of course, this doesn’t mean I don’t think unions are possible or a good idea in the US—for certain industries I think they could alleviate the US’s problems—but I just doubt they’ll readily get government backing, support or favorable legislation in the short term.
  - jenny91 4y ago
    I agree, too strict labor regulations around e.g. firing/letting employess go certainly would hinder some of the innovation hapening in the US and especially tech. Though maybe there is a flavor of unions that recognizes this and pushes for other things e.g. proper treatment of contractors, or osme slight input in direction, etc? I think the US is screwed for unions mostly because to unionize you basically have to join one of the existing huge unions none of which are run very democratically or transparently; as well as the huge anti-union sentiment and misrepresentation of what unions could be. But those things are nigh impossible to change...

bambam24 4y ago

jenny91 4y ago

I'm saddened by what happened to Mapbox. It's such a recurring pattern of organizational transformation: from a small "mission-driven" group building cool shit that starts taking money (and pressure from investors) and slowly erodes their past core values, changing into a faceless money-making machine subservient to some huge market or industry. In that process most of the original opinionated crowd will slowly rotate out and the more "career"/bureaucratic types will prevail and take over. Maybe unions and workers having more control could curb it? But in such a late stage it sounds almost impossible to achieve. Cars are certainly a problem, but technology has by and far been a great thing, and I would question whether the gaming is really such a positive industry in the end either.

NelsonMinar 4y ago
Unions and Mapbox is a very sore topic and now the subject of a NLRB lawsuit for firing the union organizers. https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/mapbox-sued-firing-union-organizers https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/mapbox-sued-firing-union-... But the union drive came far too late to help the larger problem. The big change happened in 2017 when Softbank invested $164M into MapBox. In retrospect it was far too much money with too many expectations. And with the ugly side effect of salting the earth for any other map startups. It only got worse in 2021 when MapBox's attempt to go public via a SPAC failed. They're plodding along now but it's hard to see what a good final outcome is going to be.
- chx 4y ago
  This is not the first time I see Softbank as a net negative. Too much money loosely controlled. Is there an example of Softbank doing good?
- Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
  > And with the ugly side effect of salting the earth for any other map startups I'm unsure on that. Mapbox built a bunch of good tech (mostly around vector tiles), open-sourced it, and then lost interest in smaller customers in their rush for the petrodollar. This has been genuinely great for bootstrapped map businesses. You can easily list a dozen who are using .mvt tech right now and making a good living out of it. True, it wasn't good for Mapzen. But I can't weep too many tears for something funded with Samsung Accelerator magic money, much though they did hire one of the smartest teams in the business - Softbank vs Samsung is not a battle I can bring myself to care about. I 100% agree with you that Mapbox went too far, too fast. But on balance I think their trajectory has (unintentionally) been good for wider mapping tech.

johnny313 4y ago

> Here’s some advice as a jaded start-up veteran: business models and investment terms are kind of the only thing that matter. Even if you’re a lowly designer or engineer, you must understand what your company needs to do to be sustainable. This is a key observation. Every incredible team and inspirational idea eventually has to make the unit economics work. The longer it takes for a leadership team to realize this and prioritize it, the more difficult it is for people (ICs and managers) to internalize the changes that need to be made. Worst of all is when the shift happens because runway is getting short, and "get rich quick" projects become the focus instead of building a good product. > ...you must understand what your company needs to do to be sustainable. It very likely is different from what they’re doing now, and may come with unexpected ethical compromises. This sounds like a difficult situation, but is certainly something people should think about. Things can get weird when a company is running out of money.

Brystephor 4y ago

I interviewed at MapBox within the past year. The team I was interviewing with gave a pretty bad outlook. Essentially it was everyone had left and they're trying to keep the lights on until they can hire enough to do new work. To be clear, I did receive an offer and passed.

tschellenbach 4y ago

VC funding enables the high salaries in tech. You can definitely be bootstrapped and work 4 days a week, you'll just have a hard time earning your current salary.

fny 4y ago
Once all of this unwinds, tech pay is going to get really ugly.
mulligan 4y ago
VC funding enables the high salaries in startups and that is because those startups are competing for talent against high margin, highly profitable other companies which can afford to pay very well.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Those startups are competing with other startups and ultimately VC money. There's significantly more tech talent out there than the business problems that can be solved profitably with said talent. When the VC money runs out and the "growth & engagement" engineering playgrounds close up shop we're going to see a massive readjustment. We're in the beginning of it now.

tiffanyh 4y ago

> A company like Mapbox hadn’t ever unionized before, so it seemed like an exciting experiment Call me crazy, but taking such a drastic move as unionizing shouldn’t be trivialized into just being an “experiment”. EDIT: why the downvotes? Why not simply reply with your thoughts so that we can have a thoughtful discourse.

roguecoder 4y ago
Unionizing isn't "drastic": it is the norm for most trades in the United States. Any individual union is basically just you & your coworkers crowd sourcing employment lawyers you wouldn't afford individually. Until Boeing got taken over by finance people, the Boeing engineering guild had spent decades being a book club. It is only when things go wrong that unionization significantly changes how we work.
- tiffanyh 4y ago
  > “crowd sourcing employment lawyers” How is that not drastic? You’re own words are saying unionizing is to bring in lawyers to be used against your employer. EDIT: to answer your question below since I can’t reply. No, it’s not drastic for a company to have lawyers. A company needs to ensure they are staying regulatory compliant, not breaking laws and de-risking company … that’s what the lawyers are doing.
  - roguecoder 4y ago
    The company has lawyers: is that drastic?
  - chipotle_coyote 4y ago
    “It’s not drastic for a company to have lawyers” is probably the point that was being made. It’s not drastic for a company to have lawyers; it shouldn’t be drastic for a union—or in this case, a union organizing effort—to have lawyers as well.
    - tiffanyh 4y ago

woevdbz 4y ago

It sounds like OP wants to be a part of the kind of social change that fundamentally cannot exist independently of politics but trying to enact it without. A single company, especially one that is not generating monopoly/oligopoly profits and is still dependent on funding, is not really able to: unionizing creates a steep competitive downside on the capital market that is not offset by enough employee retention benefit to be worth it, and that alone creates existential risk for the whole company. Long term, it simply helps another competitor to come up without a union. Systemic problems need systemic solutions. It saddens me a bit that people want social change so much but dislike politics so much more that they take up the wrong fight, and then retreat to something like making videogames, which frankly as an industry has an even worse track record than tech in terms of respect for its workers. I hope OP changes their perspective and fights a wider fight, either on behalf of a party or of a larger union.

afandian 4y ago
It's surely not that bleak (at least, not everywhere). And it doesn't have to be remotely about 'politics'. My old employer made the leap to employee-owned and they seem to be going from strength to strength. https://torchbox.com/careers/employee-owned-trust https://torchbox.com/careers/employee-owned-trust
- woevdbz 4y ago
  Right, that works until you need more funding (unless you can raise from employees, but that also has consequences and limits). I'm guessing that Mapbox is angling for an acquisition or more funding at some point.
  - afandian 4y ago
    Yes staying true to the rhetoric about 'making the world a better place' does preclude certain future states. But that rhetoric can be true, actionable, and not incompatible with profit. Just saying here's an anecdatum about a money-making business that said the same kinds of things and is doing very well for itself.
  - 4y ago

jamiequint 4y ago

prescriptivist 4y ago

A lot of negative sentiment about Mapbox in this thread. I have been prototyping a (native) app powered by Mapbox -- would it be a bad idea to hitch oneself to their ecosystem?

Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
Don't hitch yourself irrevocably to their SaaS. Make sure that, if your app becomes successful, you can swap out for Maplibre (the open-source fork of Mapbox GL) and an alternative provider such as Thunderforest, Geofabrik, Stadia or Maptiler. Mapbox have a lot going for them, but your app's success shouldn't be dependent on one company's tariff.
Fordec 4y ago
I'd suggest reading their terms of service and licensing model. They changed it on their 2.0 version and it stopped being right for a lot of use cases, either for financial, privacy or legal reasons. Make sure it fits for yourself also.

reocha 4y ago

Does anyone know why tech companies tend to be so hostile to unions? I'm not sure if its due to the large amount of venture capital invested or other reasons.

roguecoder 4y ago
Because unions could increase wages, stop the scams companies like to pull with options, and push back on under-staffed expectations of the impossible. Companies benefit by taking as much of the profit for themselves as possible, rather than doing right by their workers. Some of that pressure comes from VCs or shareholders, but even in private companies it takes a rare founder to put a worker's interests ahead of their own.
pm90 4y ago
I get the impression that a lot of Software Devs buy into libertarian philosophies. I think this is changing though. There’s a lot of people working in tech and with the kind of abuse that’s been reported (ahem, Amazon) we might see that change.
int_19h 4y ago
All for-profit companies are hostile to unions, because unions reduce the amount of economic rent that they can extract from their employees. Tech companies can afford to be more vocal about it because a significant number - arguably, the majority - of their employees genuinely believe that they would do worse with unions (regardless of whether it's actually true). I think at least in part this is because much of tech is in US, which has widespread "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" syndrome in general, but especially so in tech.
eldavido 4y ago
Only 11.6% of US employees are unionized (straight from the US bureau of labor statistics), FYI.

thinkingemote 4y ago

There are some mapbox employees replying to comments here. I think some appear to be defensive of their employer, but if there are some who are in agreement with the article, I can't tell. It's hard to know one way or the other. Might be nice for employees to identify themselves. Personally I was intrigued with the formation of the union and knew that many of their employees were quite liberal: The company evolved from something called Development Seed - basically a progressive humanitarian and development focused company. It is different from most SV companies. And based on open source and open data. Them stopping key open source projects and charging for use of just their mapping JS library (not data usage, any use of the code anywhere) was shocking. I'd love to hear from an original principled humanitarian employee on what happened to the company and/or them. Maybe money is better. Maybe they left? We don't hear much about the union at all. We assume from the usual SV unions that it was all about identity, inclusion and diversity but perhaps it was more about this conflict of their humanitarian roots and money.

donohoe 4y ago

Is it fair to say that MapBox is moving into auto services? Or to put it another way, is it not a good idea for me to move to a different provider for basic mapping services?

lmc 4y ago
> Is it fair to say that MapBox is moving into auto services? It seems so https://www.mapbox.com/fleet https://www.mapbox.com/fleet https://www.mapbox.com/dash https://www.mapbox.com/dash https://www.mapbox.com/navigation/ https://www.mapbox.com/navigation/ Perhaps that's just their 'thing' for now and their core mapping/viz work will continue - I hope so as it's great tech and still relatively open compared to other cos.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
That's where the money is. Otherwise, Mapbox provides a lot of relatively low value commodity services. You can get maps from them but there are lots of competitors for that. You can get libraries from them for rendering those maps. But they are now closed source and have been forked by others (maplibre seems popular) and also there is some competition: leaflet, overlay and proprietary things like Here, Google and Apple maps. The big money is helping big corporations (including automotive) with advanced use cases around logistics, very detailed 3d maps, gis, etc. So, that's increasingly what they are doing at the cost of the business that made them big (shipping good quality openstreetmap based maps and OSS software). They are now very similar to Here, Tomtom, and a few others. The latter two used to be mostly about consumer navigation products for in cars but that is now a commodity business that got disrupted by Apple and Google just bundling it with their phones (actually Nokia started this by giving away Here maps 14 years ago). Mostly if I'm in a rental car with tom tom / here maps built in, I end up using my phone with Google Maps instead. Just easier for me. Both will get me from A to B. I don't pay for it directly. That's no longer a viable business model. We are currently using maplibre with Maptiler.com as our maps provider. We may have to switch maps provider for some of our customers (our German customers are picky about where their data is hosted). Maplibre has been pretty solid for us. Last year when I had to pick a library, I briefly considered Mapbox and then noticed all the activity around the newly created maplibre fork (and the reasons it was created) and went there instead. All the commit activity happening there is no longer happening around mapbox. That's the value Mapbox lost by going closed source. So unnecessary and short sighted.

_9hey 4y ago

Key takeaway: investors ruin startups. It’s that belief that still keeps me from going that route even while working through a regular career for several years. If the project succeeds, well you’ve already sold it to the people who ru(i)n the world. Bootstrapping is so expensive but you diversify power in tech. Don’t sell out!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hutch120 4y ago

Like many others no doubt, I invested heavily into the mapbox-gl-js library (pre 2.0). I was able to build amazing value on top of that library including a routing voice navigation app for an aged care facility that is used to this day 24/7/365. It was a very sad day when they changed their licencing model to lock in vendors and I had to walk away from that investment of my time and effort. Luckily I had also worked and contributed to OpenLayers and Leaflet, so with significant effort was able to move my clients to those platforms. I guess we now have some more insight into why this occurred. > "In order to use most Services, you must register for or authenticate into a Mapbox account. When you use our application program interfaces (APIs), including our SDK Registry/Downloads API, each request to an API must include one of your account's unique API keys."

Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
Out of interest, is there a reason you can’t switch to Maplibre, the open source fork?
- hutch120 4y ago
  I remember looking at that fork when the whole licencing thing went down a couple of years ago, but it was unclear how much, if any support it would have. Looks like the project is doing ok.
worstestes 4y ago
Are you familiar with MapLibre? It’s a great project. It’s an open-source fork of Mapbox GL. I’ve only used the JS variant myself but there’s definitely a native one as well.

jjmorrison 4y ago

Thinking that organizing a union to change the direction of the company is an exciting experiment is really irresponsible. All the paycheck everyone at the company is getting needs to come from somewhere. You do not have the right to bet everyone's paycheck on an exciting experiment.

Apocryphon 4y ago
What happened to disruption, innovation, experimentation in this industry? What happened to move fast and break things?
- jjmorrison 4y ago
  Then start a company and choose to make that experiment. Don't shove it onto someone else's.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    That's not how it works. If there's interest in a union in a company, the employees have the right to make the case for it, and then they vote on it. Sounds like the company in the OP tried to quash that right. Why do owners have the sole right to determine whether a company should undertake that experiment or not? And beyond the legal and moral implications, you still haven't addressed my core critique: Silicon Valley tech startups claim they can change the world and disrupt everything. Yet when it comes to the subject of labor relations, they default to some sort of Victorian Era fear of workingman unions. There's an inherent fear that unions are unworkable and malevolent. That just completely clashes with tech's belief in its infinite innovation. Even if past unions didn't work in America, why be so afraid of building a new one?

astrange 4y ago

> Then, as is the case with many mapping companies, Mapbox shifted focus to the auto industry. My fear of loss of control fully materialized at this point. I’m a lifelong bicycle commuter, and I think cars are unequivocally bad. They ruin cities, contribute to environmental decline (even electric cars!) and kill people. All these things are correct except for the ruin cities part - that’s a US city planning problem. Japan, everyone’s favorite high public transit country with a lot of demand for maps, has a higher car ownership % than the US. They just discourage using them for personal trips and commutes via small roads, toll highways, expensive parking etc. But once you’re a family or want to go somewhere low density and take some luggage, it’s hard to beat them. What it looks like to me is this guy wanted to work at a geospatial PBC but didn’t know such a thing existed.

siraben 4y ago
> Japan, everyone’s favorite high public transit country with a lot of demand for maps, has a higher car ownership % than the US. They just discourage using them for personal trips and commutes via small roads, toll highways, expensive parking etc. Do you have a reference for this? From a precursory search it seems the US has a much higher car ownership rate.
- astrange 4y ago
  Looks like I remembered it wrong. Still, it’s quite high and more than Australia/Canada. https://internationalcomparisons.org/environmental/transportation/ https://internationalcomparisons.org/environmental/transport... (2015) The UK having the highest transit mode share (in 2014) is a bit surprising.
  - aikinai 4y ago
    These stats all look wrong for Japan at least. I’ve done research specifically into Japanese transportation modes in Japanese using authoritative sources and the real stats are more in line with what you’d expect (i.e. more public transportation, more biking, less cars). I can’t grab the sources right now, but might try to come back and add them later.

erlich 4y ago

This is such a crazy and enraging read. If you don’t like your job, go join another company. It’s not as if devs don’t have plenty of high paying choices out there. Especially for a startup that had struggled to find market fit, the last thing they need is a union. Companies are not democracies and setting up a union is a hostile action. It basically says: here are the things we want and if we don’t get them we all stop working. If you want to run the company differently go setup your own company or buy some shares.

sclv 4y ago
Yes, companies are not democracies. That's why we need unions! That's the only way to exercise our collective power to negotiate with the employer on more equal terms. When we negotiate individually we also say "here are the things we want, and that is our condition of work." There is _always_ a conflict between what employees want, which involves wages and conditions, and what employers want, which is getting the most work while yielding the least in wages and conditions. Unions in tech are as possible and necessary as unions anywhere else. Nothing about being it tech makes us "special" and the whole mythology it does only serves to keep us from organizing and solidifying our conditions and strength.
- erlich 4y ago
  The market sorts out wages and conditions. I will assume you are not talking about developers because they have so many choices at all different salary ranges that are higher than many other industries. Contractors in minimum wage roles would be the only candidate for unions.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    You must not have heard about the situation at many large video game studios. Can be pretty dire there.
- andrewmutz 4y ago
  Why are unions necessary at tech startups? From my experience, these companies pay and treat their employees very well.

kfox2010 4y ago

Trying to understand how in the same short form piece we get: > "I still bristle at the word “career”. Not for me." And then end it with: > "The skills and connections I developed at Mapbox set me up for a smooth and satisfying career transition." So do you have a career or not?

sangnoir 4y ago
I once bought a brown/bronze car at a discount. It was the ugliest color I had ever seen on a car, but I still drove it for many months. I really hated it, but what could I do? I couldn't afford another car, so I had to live with it every single day. I'm guessing author feels something similar about having a career.

talos 4y ago

I'm curious what the split was in Mapbox union organizing interest between Engineering/Product/Design/Data and Sales/Marketing/other go-to-market roles. Browsing the old union website (https://www.mapboxworkersunion.org/ https://www.mapboxworkersunion.org/) almost all of the supporters of unionization were on the engineering side of the house, much more than I'd expect if you randomly sampled the org for job titles. I wonder why that is?

worldmerge 4y ago

Just looked up mapbox after not checking it out for a few years. Oh wow, that's changed a lot :(

numlock86 4y ago
Same here. The last time I have used Mapbox was probably five years ago. Looking at it know I wouldn't even consider evaluating it anymore.

Helmut10001 4y ago

Kudos to the author for prioritizing of ethical and moral concerns.

tinco 4y ago

Odd story about MapBox, we used to be a customer, and their product was very solid so we were happy but we were using it in a 3d engine which was causing loads of map requests driving up the costs. We only had a couple users and the bills were already in the hundreds per month. So I contacted them to see if we could come to some sort of agreement. The person who replied had a familiar name, I didn't remember where I'd heard that name before so I googled it, and it turned out he was one of the 3 kids that sexually assaulted a drunk girl during a spring break. Even though their abhorrent behavior was caught on video and presented as evidence they got away with less than a slap on the wrist, and the girl suffered emotional trauma and dropped out of university. Definitely a heavy thing to have show up on the first page of your Google results, and I cross referenced with his LinkedIn it was definitely him, so I would expect him to address it somewhere. But nothing, never a public apology or even a statement, nothing from Mapbox. That was so crazy to me, surely whoever interviewed him did a minimal background check, and they just thought it was ok? It felt really off, so I found a different technical solution and never talked to them again.

worik 4y ago

"Fight for motives beyond profit." Sigh. Profit is good. Profit is necessary. Profit is not a great motivator IMO. It motivates, but alone it motivates the wrong things the wrong way. Money is my only motive available to me at the moment, and I am sad about that.

dougSF70 4y ago

When it is hard for worker-bees to transition to become manager-bees then unions are important and necessary. In any other business where worker-bees can become manager-bees then they should take that opportunity if they want to create change. Unions in tech businesses smack of entitlement, if you want to change the working conditions at [insert tech corp name here] then join management otherwise leave. Small companies change as they evolve. Noble ambitions are set aside in favor of profit (rightly so). With that, early employees may well feel the firm they joined is not the same firm they are working at. In which case they should leave because the boat has already sailed and there are probably a 1000 more compatible candidates willing to work at the company. I hear non-profits pay incredibly well and do amazing work.

rahulnair23 4y ago

Always jarring to hear the claim > Technology is fundamentally neutral It is in the same way guns are fundamentally neutral. You can't view it without context. Include that and it is clear that tech (or guns) isn't neutral at all.

Estherloven 4y ago