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A lot of the people I respected from Heroku went there, glad they got a chance to use their skills to build something useful and profitable; glader still that t

by jbm 2y ago

A lot of the people I respected from Heroku went there, glad they got a chance to use their skills to build something useful and profitable; glader still that they got their payout. Sadly I echo your sentiment about the future, as someone who has heard second-hand about the quality of work at modern Redhat. I am wondering how many more rounds of consolidation are left until there is no more space to innovate and we only have ossified rent-seeking entities in the IT space.

nomat 2y ago
our current economic model kind of depends on the idea that we can always disrupt the status quo with american free market ingenuity once it begins to stagnate but maybe we have reached the limits of what friedman's system can do or accounted for.
- buxtehude 2y ago
  The American market is highly over regulated and most market libertarians would argue it hasn't been "free" in a long long time.
glenngillen 2y ago
Heh at “got their payout”. HashiCorp IPO’d at $80, employees are locked up for 6 months. This sale is at $35.
- shreezus 2y ago
  Wow IBM got quite the discount!
  - dudus 2y ago
    The stock was at $31. The $80 level was just shortly after the IPO. They paid fair market price
- busterarm 2y ago
  They IPO'd in 2021.
  - glenngillen 2y ago
    Yes. And many of the Heroku employees you speak of would have got RSUs that owed taxes on an $80 basis, been trading far below that for most of that time, and now have a maximum expected value of $35. This is not a pay day for many people. Anybody who got a pay day were those that could liquidate in the IPO.
    - epolanski 2y ago
      Yeah okay, if you had 0.15% stock you're still out with $ 10M. Smaller and bigger percentages will be different but that's retirement money for hundreds and hundreds unless you pretend to live in very high CoL area. Also, most of them will likely have to keep working thereyears before cashing out some other millions likely.
      - hobs 2y ago
        What? What's their strike price? If they are above the sale price their return is 0.
        esprehn 2y ago
        RSUs are regular shares, folks with options would have a different story.
      - glenngillen 2y ago
        You've misunderstood my point. RSUs became taxable at the $80 stock price for many. Depending on where you're based that could mean you owe(d) anywhere from from $22 - $38 per share in taxes. At the top end of that range, if you're still holding any stock, this acquisition has just permanently crystalised a capital loss for you. There's no upside that gets you above what you owe/paid in taxes. There are many many people who made a loss on this, even before the acquisition announcement. Also I think your ownership % is way off. There's a pretty small group of people, most of them the earliest employees + execs, who would have got out with $10M. HashiCorp currently has thousands of employees and would have churned through thousands more over the years.
mogwire 2y ago
It always amazing me how people play telephone with Red Hat and how bad the quality of life is post IBM. When they show the service awards they don’t even cover 5 years because they don’t have all day. If it was so bad then you wouldn’t see engineers with 10, 15, or 20 years experience staying there. They already got their money from the IBM purchase so if it were bad then they would leave. Oh but they don’t innovate anymore. Summit is coming. Let’s see what gets announced and then a live demo.
- MajimasEyepatch 2y ago
  > If it was so bad then you wouldn’t see engineers with 10, 15, or 20 years experience staying there. They already got their money from the IBM purchase so if it were bad then they would leave. Every big, old, stagnant company is full of lifers who won’t move on for any number of reasons. The pay is good enough, at least it’s stable, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t, yada yada yada. There are people in my life who work in jobs like that. They will openly admit that it sucks, but they are risk averse due to a combination of personality and family circumstances, so they stick it out. Their situation sucks, and they assume everything else sucks too. And often, because they’ve only worked in one place so long, they have a hard time finding other opportunities due to a combination of overly narrow experience and ageism. The movie Office Space is about exactly the sort of company that is filled with lifers who hate their jobs but stay on the path of least resistance. (I know absolutely nothing about working at Red Hat, so I’m not trying to make a specific claim about them. But I’ve known people in this situation at IBM and other companies that are too big for their own good.)
  - steelframe 2y ago
    > they have a hard time finding other opportunities due to a combination of overly narrow experience and ageism I too know several lifers at IBM. One thing I've realized is that staying loyal to a company over several years won't save you from ageism. Your best defense against ageism may be to save more than 50% of your tech income for about 20 years, then move into management and build empires until the music stops.
- 2y ago

by jbm 2y ago

nomat 2y ago

our current economic model kind of depends on the idea that we can always disrupt the status quo with american free market ingenuity once it begins to stagnate but maybe we have reached the limits of what friedman's system can do or accounted for.

buxtehude 2y ago
The American market is highly over regulated and most market libertarians would argue it hasn't been "free" in a long long time.

glenngillen 2y ago

Heh at “got their payout”. HashiCorp IPO’d at $80, employees are locked up for 6 months. This sale is at $35.

shreezus 2y ago
Wow IBM got quite the discount!
- dudus 2y ago
  The stock was at $31. The $80 level was just shortly after the IPO. They paid fair market price
busterarm 2y ago
They IPO'd in 2021.
- glenngillen 2y ago
  Yes. And many of the Heroku employees you speak of would have got RSUs that owed taxes on an $80 basis, been trading far below that for most of that time, and now have a maximum expected value of $35. This is not a pay day for many people. Anybody who got a pay day were those that could liquidate in the IPO.
  - epolanski 2y ago
    Yeah okay, if you had 0.15% stock you're still out with $ 10M. Smaller and bigger percentages will be different but that's retirement money for hundreds and hundreds unless you pretend to live in very high CoL area. Also, most of them will likely have to keep working thereyears before cashing out some other millions likely.
    - hobs 2y ago
      What? What's their strike price? If they are above the sale price their return is 0.
      - esprehn 2y ago
        RSUs are regular shares, folks with options would have a different story.
    - glenngillen 2y ago
      You've misunderstood my point. RSUs became taxable at the $80 stock price for many. Depending on where you're based that could mean you owe(d) anywhere from from $22 - $38 per share in taxes. At the top end of that range, if you're still holding any stock, this acquisition has just permanently crystalised a capital loss for you. There's no upside that gets you above what you owe/paid in taxes. There are many many people who made a loss on this, even before the acquisition announcement. Also I think your ownership % is way off. There's a pretty small group of people, most of them the earliest employees + execs, who would have got out with $10M. HashiCorp currently has thousands of employees and would have churned through thousands more over the years.

mogwire 2y ago

It always amazing me how people play telephone with Red Hat and how bad the quality of life is post IBM. When they show the service awards they don’t even cover 5 years because they don’t have all day. If it was so bad then you wouldn’t see engineers with 10, 15, or 20 years experience staying there. They already got their money from the IBM purchase so if it were bad then they would leave. Oh but they don’t innovate anymore. Summit is coming. Let’s see what gets announced and then a live demo.

MajimasEyepatch 2y ago
> If it was so bad then you wouldn’t see engineers with 10, 15, or 20 years experience staying there. They already got their money from the IBM purchase so if it were bad then they would leave. Every big, old, stagnant company is full of lifers who won’t move on for any number of reasons. The pay is good enough, at least it’s stable, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t, yada yada yada. There are people in my life who work in jobs like that. They will openly admit that it sucks, but they are risk averse due to a combination of personality and family circumstances, so they stick it out. Their situation sucks, and they assume everything else sucks too. And often, because they’ve only worked in one place so long, they have a hard time finding other opportunities due to a combination of overly narrow experience and ageism. The movie Office Space is about exactly the sort of company that is filled with lifers who hate their jobs but stay on the path of least resistance. (I know absolutely nothing about working at Red Hat, so I’m not trying to make a specific claim about them. But I’ve known people in this situation at IBM and other companies that are too big for their own good.)
- steelframe 2y ago
  > they have a hard time finding other opportunities due to a combination of overly narrow experience and ageism I too know several lifers at IBM. One thing I've realized is that staying loyal to a company over several years won't save you from ageism. Your best defense against ageism may be to save more than 50% of your tech income for about 20 years, then move into management and build empires until the music stops.
2y ago