swingbridge

From what I was told employees did well but not anywhere nearly as well as some of the numbers that had been initially tossed around (e.g. In regards to the contest winner that got options for signing people up). There were a lot of people that had to get paid before the employees got their cut.

That said no matter how you slice it, it was an impressive deal considering the company itself was burning cash like crazy and failing badly on their original mission of going head to head with Amazon. Well done to the team there. Only time will tell if saving Jet was ultimately a good move for WalMart.

The company's financial fundamentals are terrible. The only thing holding the value up is fluff and hot air. If people get less excited by that the price goes way down and that's what happened today. If people really really lose excitement the price will fall like a rock since there's no typical financial fundamental circuit breakers (like P/E ratio) to stop the thing from just going down down down.

Um, I think there's a difference between "hey we keep running out of coffee... we need a better coffee system" and "I think we have an abusive work environment."

Mostly a result of regulations that make it difficult for companies to get rid of people (either because they're not good or the company needs to shed staff).

I've seen this sort of thing backfire a lot in Europe where well intended regulation causes far more harm (both to individuals and the economy of the country) than good.

Was in a meeting not too long back where major investments were being discussed and the places to invest where on the table (with jobs at stake). Long story short some regulatory monkey was saying "this ref prevents this, you'd have to do that" and such for a location in Europe at which point the execs in the room basically just said "fine, we just won't invest there... if they want to have silly practices we'll just put the jobs elsewhere." And they did.

I'm no Republican but the concept of regulations killing jobs and hurting the people they intended to help is a very real thing.

Twitter probably gets more free PR (with the news about famous people tweeting) than just about any tech company out there. It's sort of found its niche as a nano-blogging platform for people others like to listen to. It's never going to get to the true social network like Facebook and others have achieved, but that's fine.

The issue is just that's it's a very bloated company. I still question why Twitter isn't just like 100 people in a basement somewhere. Their revenue isn't great but it's also not terrible--it's their costs (which is mostly people related) that's complete out of whack. In my interactions with the company they always felt very bloated relative to what they do.

This. I am endlessly frustrated with display manufacturers think that I want to do all sorts of "smart" stuff with my display. No. I want it to display a nice image for the stuff I want to plug into it, that's it!

Setup a new TV for a family member recently and the instructions basically wanted me to Bluetooth pair my phone to the TV so I could set it up. I was like you have to be $&@!ing kidding me. Power, volume, input select. Just give me 4 buttons and that's it and I'm happy.

This seems like technology in search of a problem, and they've chosen a problem that already has a solution--just ask. God forbid we speak to each other.

This is old and has been out there for ages. Regardless it's still one of my favorite simple communications of a concept.

Without knowing the total number of shares it's hard to know what you have. You also need to know how your options will be treated under various scenarios: company goes public, company is sold, company is acquired, company gets more funding, etc. In general employee options get the short end of the stick in most of those scenarios. One can still make out well, just usually not as well as they had thought/hoped.

At the end of the day one must remember that more often than not options don't work out the way one hopes. They're used as a cheap form of comp since it's just paper to the company. They can provide a nice bonus under the right scenario but be very cautious about accepting options in place of proper compensation at your full value (e.g. cash in the bank). More people than would care to admit it accepted options in place of cash for their base comp and lived to regret it.

Negotiate proper comp up front and only accept options as part of the icing on the cake. If they can't pay you properly then you have serious reason to question if this thing is a "real company" or just a bunch of hyped up fluff with a valuation that could vaporize overnight--making your options completely worthless before you even knew what just happened.

In my, completely unscientific but likely not that all inaccurate, observation SMBs are pushing hard on Facebook. Twitter is dead and people don't waste their money adversiting there. Google is still there but it's become such a mess that the difficultly of getting high rankings combined with the much less precise targeting (compared to say Facebook) has made it a lot less attractive recently.

Reasonably priced debt is issued with the expectation that most recipients will succeed and access to it is generally limited to entities with a stable business model already.

VC money is mostly issued with the expectation that most recipients will fail and it's priced accordingly.

A strongly performing 'real' company (i.e. one with a strong profit stream) will nearly always prefer debt to VC money in the same way a strongly performing public company will issue bonds over selling more shares--the later tending to be for companies in trouble.

I'm quite a techno geek but when it comes to notes I've never given up good old paper and pen.

Neat project.

No, they are profitable. In fact AWS is wildly profitable.

Perhaps, but we are still a long way off from fully self driving cars actually giving rides to replace taxis at scale. It's not clear how Uber gets from here to there without continuing to lose many billions per year... at which point the whole self driving car thing will be largely a commodity that others could easily run themselves.

Right now Uber is really just proving that if you burn billions and billions you can create a "market" for your "product." It has yet to show that it's a real company with long term prospects. There's a difference between losing money because you haven't hit scale (when Facebook was losing money in the early years) and losing money because you're at scale and just undercutting everyone to show you can make "revenue" or by investing in "innovation" that everyone and their brother is doing and doing it better than Uber.

The very fact that "preparing for 8 months for a Google interview" is a thing highlights all the things that have gone wrong at Google and their widely panned bad recruitment practices.

The process has become about recruiting people that are good at the silly process and not about recruiting the best people. Probably OK if Google is in 'megacorp looking to feed more skillled cogs into the machine' mode (which it mostly is), but unlikely the process finds the person that builds the next Google.

"Record rates" just means "more than before" but it can be, and likely is, still just a small number that's mostly noise in the data so far as Apple is concerned.

There's no question Google no longer attracts the best of the best talent. Hopefully that's not news to the folks at Google.

Very good points and picked up on some accurate stereotypes that often appear in business.

This comes across as sour grapes from Slack.

Also, if you want to talk about "open solutions" then make your own solution open.

Academia has long used post-docs as sources of cheap labor. Good for them for finding a strong path into greener pastures in the private sector.

These things go in cycles, but right now I sense a strong desire to get out of the mess that is often found in academic science.

Simulators are great for training on emergency scenarios that can't easily or safely be done in a real airplane, or practicing and learning new avionics or systems but they shouldn't be a substitute for real flying experience. This is a bad decision.

There are laws in New York City that say (with good reason) that you can't just turn your home into a hotel. New York is simply enforcing the law.

If Airbnb really has the public support they claim then it should be easy to change the law. The reality is a lot (likely vast majority) of New Yorkers really don't want the status quo to change. The politicians know this and hence why they took this path.

Excellent!

I think it's more like she's been banned by regulators from running a lab and given their history no sane person would purchase such services from them anyway... but you know, details.

Have had that happen a lot with USPS. When I asked the mailman about it he said "Oh yeah I don't like carrying that scanner thing around so I just scan all the packages back at the post office and then we'll deliver them in the next day or two." Sigh.

The whole merger of Skype with Microsoft's legacy products (Communicator and Lync) has been a disaster. Lync was a solid product in the corporate world. Now I dread getting a Skype meeting. I can't remember the last time where I've been on a Skype for Business meeting where at least one person wasn't having serious issues. They took a solid product and made a mess of it.

Twitter is being judged negatively by the business community and elsewhere because, simply, it's a terrible business that's losing money hand over fist.

I consistently fail to understand why the present company isn't just 75 people in a basement somewhere. If that was the case they'd be raking in cash and Twitter would be considered a smashing success.

As the article points out theres a big difference between addresses being allocated and addresses being used.

Being an Excel jockey was "cool" in the 90s and 00s but all the cool number crunching kids are much more likely to be using something like Jupyter Notebook, R or homebrew command like stuff these days.