6 ms·

It's interesting to me how entitled the employees come across as. Minecraft was making millions, but they were only getting a regular salary. (Aside from luxury

• aaron_m04 11y ago
  In my experience, early employees at startups don't usually just work from nine to five. They usually _do_ make large time sacrifices. I would say that early employees generally _are_ entitled to a fraction of the profits.
  • devbug 11y ago
    In Minecraft's unusual case, it was already seriously de-risked when the first few employees were hired. The additions however, did keep the momentum going, and deserve a cut for that. Jeb immediately comes to mind.
    • jakejake 11y ago
      I'd agree it would have been nice to have given at least some stock options to employees. The $300k bonus for staying 6 months, though, is a lot more than what one should expect to get when joining a startup. (Zero would be the usual amount because most startups fail)
    • phn 11y ago
      They signed a contract. They made a deal to work without having that kind of cut. We can enter in the sympathy realm after this, but no one was entitled to anything. If they didn't like the job, or felt underpayed, they should've done what everyone else does: Try to find a comfortable solution with their company, and if that doesn't work, leave and find a better job.
      • Frollic 11y ago
        I see you are part of the "written word only" style of ethics. This is where you declare only those things prohibited by written law or contract to be unethical, and then grant inventive persons the status of geniuses when they find new ways by which to exploit you.
        • phn 11y ago
          I am not, and despise exploitative use of law. I believe human behavior is so complex, that defining what is acceptable or not in paper for all the possible cases is borderline impossible. Written, clear laws have their place, as does human judgement. That being said, it really seems clear in this case. Compensation for work is one of the things defined at the beginning of a work relationship, comfortable for both parties. Minecraft was already big when anyone was hired, I assume that if any extra compensation besides salary was expected, it would be asked for when the work started. Disgruntlement seems a bit out of place, and seems to be used in the piece to adorn a non-story. Plus, note that my course of action would be talking to your employer to try and find a solution that works, not just "suck it up".
  • matthewcford 11y ago
    Unless they are getting paid below a fair market rate, I don't see why this would be the case. Plenty of jobs require more than 9-5 hours.
    • mentat 11y ago
      Except that fair market rate has been depressed by collusion and shady hiring practices almost universally.
    • InclinedPlane 11y ago
      A: Fair market rate hasn't been fair for a while, due to non-poaching agreements. B: Nevertheless, "fair market rate" typically includes gaining equity over time at a company. More equity the younger the company is and the more it is growing while you're working there. If you work for "fair market rate" at Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. you get stock grants, stock options, the whole nine yards. If you work for "fair market rate" at an up and coming startup you'd expect to receive stock as well, and in comparatively larger chunks.
  • debaserab2 11y ago
    They are entitled to exactly what is in the contract they signed and nothing more. Who would join a company on an assumption that they have equity if it's not written into the contract?
• phillmv 11y ago
  Some thoughts: 1. My understanding is that by the time Minecraft _utterly_ blew up they had a full fledged company going. Some people were probably there from the "a million or two" to "hundreds of millions" of dollars transition. 2. Notch didn't really have a lot of risk going. He wrote a game and it blew up and he hired people off the preorders. 3. Notch got lucky. It's not clear that he's an especially savvy business person, or manager, or etc. He owned most of the IP, but… he had an idea that was waiting to happen, and then it went supernova and infected the minds of most children in the western hemisphere. If you sacrificed nights and weekends to get the thing to ship, and massaged it into production, and wrote most of the code, and strung most of the deals together, and basically made it work beyond a crashy demo… and it was all just dumb luck anyways, I think it's perfectly natural, human reaction to be resentful that your boss made an insane killing when he rage quit and didn't share much of it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ tricky to navigate
  • marknutter 11y ago
    > Notch got lucky. Lucky that he made a product that millions of people were willing to pay hard cash for? Luck is a funny word, and it can be used to dismiss people's sacrifices and hard work too easily. If I plunk down 1 dollar to buy a lottery ticket and I win the jackpot, that's very lucky. Sure, I sacrificed a dollar, but that has very little impact on me. The risk is low. If, however, I plunk down a couple million dollars to buy lottery tickets and I win, it's less lucky because my chances of winning are greater and of course my risk is much higher. In spending his time working on Minecraft when he could have been doing any other number of things he was putting the equivalent of the amount of money he could make working for someone else down on the table as stakes. Sure, there's an element of luck, but it doesn't mean he doesn't deserve to reap the benefits of his risk having paid off.
    • Sharlin 11y ago
      It was a hobby. Something he did for fun, as a leisure activity. Life is not about working, and for most people leisure time is not fungible with more work.
      • 11y ago
• AaronFriel 11y ago
  You forget that the employees are also taking a risk. A Fortune 500 is stable, and steady work can be found in many city hubs. Startups are sometimes spread quite afar, Mojang was in Stockholm, and are not always likely to survive. While Notch was "rolling in the dough" there was no guarantee that it would continue indefinitely. That risk is why employees, especially early employees, feel like they should get some equity. It's a trade-off: they are accepting a percentage chance that they are joining a company that could fail, but there's also a chance it could be wildly successful. The difference between equity and wage represents an assessment of risk and riskiness. And, of course, offering lower wages and higher equity shares creates positive incentives for employees to go above-and-beyond and ensure that the company is not just a mild success, but a multi-billion-dollar-buyout success. This is opposed to the perverse incentive that wage-only compensation creates, where a buyout potentially means losing your job. After all, if you weren't valuable enough to deserve equity, you may not be the talent the new company was seeking to acqui-hire. In this case, it is almost certainly the case that any Mojang employee would have better off foregoing all wages in exchange for a small amount of ownership. With hindsight biases, I suspect every Mojang employee would say they'd be willing to give up some wages for some equity. But before the acquisition, it was nowhere near clear that the company was worth $2.5 billion, so I wonder how many employees might still be willing to take that offer. So, like I said, trade-offs. I think the tone at the end of your post represents how a lot of founders might look at it, and I realize it's hypothetical. But stepping back from the situation, there are complicated incentives involved in wage and equity compensation, and balancing those as a founder or an employee can be difficult.
  • moron4hire 11y ago
    >> You forget that the employees are also taking a risk. I don't know how it is in most countries, but in the United States, an employee gets unemployment when they get laid off. A founder gets nothing when the company goes under. Also, I know of a lot of companies that consider self-employment the same thing as unemployment. I've made more money as a freelancer in the last 3 years than I ever made working for anyone, and I've produced more code in that time to boot, so I think it's been a pretty good measure of my productivity. But as far as your run-of-the-mill cunsoltoware company is concerned (and let's face it, the long-tail of such companies is the majority of places where your average software developer can expect to get hired), I might as well have been on a 3 year vacation. So IDK, seems like there are a lot more implicit risks to being a founder other than just "everything could go belly up and I have no retirement".
• mentat 11y ago
  I've never worked 9 to 5 at a startup. There are real sacrifices "just employees" make all the time to make the founder's vision real and to scale.
• logfromblammo 11y ago
  You're right. The 9-to-5 employees only sacrifice blood and sweat. The tears are worth so much more. Quite a lot of that previous argument rests upon the axiomatic assumptions about "fair compensation". I would argue that quite a lot of employees are not compensated fairly, and not just in software companies. The remainder rests upon axiomatic assumptions about the origins of company value. It's almost like you subscribe to the labor theory of value insofar as it benefits founders and owners, then shift back to price theory the instant it becomes a liability to them. Those are not mix-and-match. If you argue that your vast personal sacrifices entitle you to a vast ownership share in the work-product, you cannot then reasonably argue that lesser sacrifices, made after yours, should not result in lesser ownership shares. Likewise, if you argue that your ownership share is based on the fact that your contributions increased the overall wealth of the company by that amount, you cannot then reasonably argue that the folks who methodically replaced your hasty prototype with something scalable and maintainable should not also receive partial ownership. You may note from the article that great pains were taken to keep the Mojang line employees from quitting en masse. If they were not responsible for a significant fraction of the current value of the company, that measure would not be necessary. When you say "where the fuck do you get off...?" I feel it necessary to ask that you reexamine your premises. What you said treads very close to, "Fuck you; I got mine." And I also recognized several common misperceptions of management, such as the idea that regular employees bear no risk of loss when they take a job, and suffer less stress than owners and managers. In short, where the fuck do you get off discounting so deeply the value of non-owner employees? Does the fact that it happened to someone in their past justify that person doing it to someone else later?
  • serge2k 11y ago
    To quote Don Draper, "That's what the money is for". I think this is situation dependent. If you have people walking in and getting a normal salary, a reasonably good sense of security, and a good work/life balance then it's reasonable to expect that they would get less elsewhere. I'm not sure I agree with less being 0. Of course the opposite is also true. If you take a risk you deserve to get a share of the reward. Unfortunately a lot of people seem to view founders as magic beings who should be worshipped and get all credit for a company.
  • 11y ago
• blazespin 11y ago
  Everyone wants more money. That is the nature of capitalism. They should be applauded for rationally looking out for their self interests. Just as Markus and crew should be applauded for their ability to retain staff without having to share equity. As long as people are safe, aren't being abused, aren't starving and have a home to go to in the night I say let the game go on.
• kzhahou 11y ago
  LITERALLY (!!) blood, sweat, and tears. I am always amused when the founder glorifiers accuse employees of feeling entitled, and proceed to rattle off the list of sacrifices which they don't realize everyone in the company must make in order to have success. Companies are a team effort. Good luck getting to 100-million-anything with only the founders' sacrificies.
  • moron4hire 11y ago
    I literally have lost blood to some of my projects, but I have a hardware component to my tinkering.
  • irishloop 11y ago
    Sure. But they still stand the have the most to lose. If a company goes under, an employee loses a job. The founder loses... well... who knows. Everything they've put into it. The equity, the time, the money. All gone. That's the whole thing. As an employee, you agreed to the terms of your hiring. When the company I worked for was bought out, employees with 401K's were given a sizable (but hardly enormous) contribution to that as part of the owner's sale. We weren't owed that, but I did appreciate it. But it was never promised to me and I was paid for the work I did.
  • EarthLaunch 11y ago
    Yes, literally. Employees are not essential the way a founder is. That is obvious.
    • AndyKelley 11y ago
      No, not literally. The founder did not cut himself on the keyboard.
      • the_rosentotter 11y ago
        Blood = health. There's no question running a startup often takes a toll on your health to some extent.
• VikingCoder 11y ago
  I've received equity at most of the software development jobs I've ever had. For everyone, any offer must be compared against the other opportunities they have. > you can, and probably will, leave whenever you feel like it with no stress or loss And you can, and potentially will, fire your employees or make them relocate whenever you feel like it with no stress or loss. Everyone should get fired from a job they love, and get to quit a job they hate. It gives you a totally different appreciation for the nature of business.
• ahains 11y ago
  I have to admit that I don't really understand the spirit of some of the commenters here that feel that the rank and file employees were wronged. Every year my company has to decide how much bonus and equity to give me, if any, and I have to decide if I want to continue to work for them. If the work is interesting, my skills are growing, and the compensation is adequate, then I'll probably continue to stick around. If other companies offer me a sufficiently better gig then I'll leave.
• serve_yay 11y ago
  Wow, this comment is sooo crazy. I am really surprised to read it.