VexXtreme

> I think this advice is cutting your nose off to spite your face.

Ah, the standard phrase used when people try to get you to work against your interests.

The rest of your post amounts to: "Doing the imprudent thing X worked out for me this one time, so everyone should do it."

> So, the sales organisation managed to "create" $400k of "value"

Yes, it's called "fraud".

That makes sense if you're a 3rd world immigrant, because the value delta between your old life and your new life is immense. For someone born in a 1st world country, it makes little sense to compare their situation with that of a 3rd world denizen. Reference points are subjective. I take issue with the way my government collects taxes and how it distributes them. I don't care how Africa or India are doing.

You are entitled to your sentiment, but calling people and their approach to life "toxic" is a good way to alienate them and dismiss what you have to say. There are many ways to run a business, and I've run teams that have shipped multi-million dollar software entirely remotely, with minimal face time and non-work related socializing.

There are plenty of companies that manage their work in a way that minimizes the human component and maximizes the technical utility of their engineers (judged on productive output alone), almost in a way that makes the human component and all it brings with it (unreliability, politicking, emotional outbursts, backstabbing, you name it) irrelevant. In fact, my ideal company reduces face time to close to zero, because that's the only reliable way to eliminate politicians, bad actors and people who try to game the system using social skills and emotional manipulation. A nice side effect of remote work is that it automatically creates that sort of environment, unless you go out of your way to change that (but then the remote work model is probably not for you).

>renders you to be a piece of quite primitive carbon-based technology.

The fact that you don't know how to manage engineers in an entirely meritocratic, non-political environment, says more about your management abilities than anything else.

I've been in a similar situation and all I can say is I feel you. I've become very distrustful and suspicious of people in this industry, especially the fast-talking "we're changing the world" kind.

Ultimately, if people want to renege, they will renege. Unless you have a ton of money and energy to throw at lawsuits, it's better to structure your deals in a way that clips your potential downside (e.g. work on a retainer basis, don't accept stocks in lieu of cash etc).

I don't see it either, but I guess people can justify whatever they want to justify.

And Bitcoin.

> Based on my experience I am 100% convinced that people that can't find joy in the happiness of others should remain single and even more important: never, ever have kids.

As a counterargument, I've seen a few people turn into complete monsters once their kids were born. Their justification was "I have kids now and I'll do literally anything for my family, fuck everyone else and their needs." (paraphrased). It's all fine and dandy until the instinct for survival kicks in.

What if you value your consciousness and the here and now more than the idea of your DNA staying alive well after you're dead?

To me, my consciousness is my identity (myself). The body is just a vessel for it, and once it craps out, and takes the consciousness down with it, I couldn't care less about my DNA (a bit of a tautology, but you get the idea).

A counterargument would be that it's harder for a big government to change direction easily, once decided and set in motion. Wrong decisions can compound because it's easier for a large organization to stay its course, even in the face of increasing harm, as evident by the Vietnam war.

Possibly, due to a lack of long term stability and job security. When every round of financing results in a different VC installing its own people in the company and shaking things up, I don't feel comfortable betting the life and wellbeing of my family on the fact that some 24 year old "product manager" is going to act rational.

In other words, they'd really need to pay me a lot more than an established company in order to offset my risk.

As I'm entering the fourth decade of my life, I have actively started avoiding any company that 1) self identifies as a startup, 2) employs less than 50 people, 3) is VC funded in any capacity. It's not because I have anything against them in particular, it's just that my risk profile has been changing together with my age, and I'm not really willing to put in the same crazy hours as 5-10 years ago in return for the right to participate in a de facto lottery.

Many experienced engineers I know feel the same.

You have fallen victim to the outcome bias. It is a mistake to attribute the quality of a decision to a specific outcome when the correlation between their determinants is low or unknown. In layman's terms, you don't know that it was her joining Google that led to this particular rise in Google's market cap. It could have been any other number of factors. Even simpler, what you said can be analogized to "I won the lottery while wearing this particular shirt, so it must be my lucky shirt".

Furthermore, statistics show that there is a positive correlation between companies rewarding executives in a bull market, and punishing executives holding the exact same positions in a declining market, thereby making luck and timing, not skill, a main determinant of who eventually makes money (the correlation between how well a company performs and the perceived skill of its executives was determined to be around 10-20%).

> I also generally don't like the idea of someone else telling me what my contributions are worth. By putting in all those extra hours, you're basically pinning all of your hopes on someone else's judgment. If they like you, then maybe you'll get that extra money.

He mentioned he works in finance. That whole industry is very hierarchical and based around strict pecking orders (and lots of koolaid drinking to boot). In many firms, you are always just "one project away" from being promoted or made partner.

I think you need to reexamine the meaning of the word "monopolized".

Having a single state-sanctioned business (and therefore backed by the threat of violence) is somehow less monopolistic than having a free market where the best service provider is rewarded by becoming the most popular and profitable one?