pragmacoders

Every generation throws off the ideals of the generation that came before.

Parents monitor their kids for a combination of:

1. Worry about the outside world. Justified - but monitoring location doesn't make it any less likely that they'll get hurt.

2. Worry about their child doing something they consider dumb. Again - justified. They will absolutely do something you consider dumb. But monitoring your child won't make then agree with you and won't stop them from doing something you don't like. The tighter the grip, the more they'll fight and the more they'll resent you for making them fight.

Parents like to think that this resentment will go away when the child is older. It doesn't. Many of you probably resent something your parents did when you were younger. But it does become less intense with distance - like everything else.

Anywho - Monitoring teenagers doesn't actually help anything. Monitoring younger children might make you feel more safe, though.

You could devote your whole life to the pursuit of knowledge and still not have a good understanding of the world.

That is how I'd justify the fact that 12 years of access to education is not enough.

> Going from owning 1% of a 1M company to owning 0.5% of a 2M company isn't unfair. The extra value comes directly from the new shareholders investing their money.

If this we're true, investors wouldn't be adding things like dilution protection to their contracts and special stocks that have further liquidation protections (and potentially voting rights) wouldn't be the norm for non-employees.

Investments are not one-to-one exchanges and employees take up most of the personal risk in the exchange due to lack of any protections as well as lack of a (personal financial) safety net if things go wrong.

Though I agree with you in that whether this is fair or not has nothing to do with what modern companies will do.

The reason that employees do not get these protections and rights is because they lack the leverage to demand them from the people who make those decisions within the company.

The shares given to investors often have dilution protection and guarantees as to when the company can sell and what minimum compensation will be given to them if that happens.

They also have protections such as "If the company dies, we will have first claim to any assets of the company"

The reason this is not offered to employees is a combination of fear (if we're being generous) and lack of incentive (the employee often has little leverage and no legal representation to look over contracts).

The end result being - if you have the capital, you have the leverage.

If you're in this position, also be aware of whether you're being offered stock options or stock.

It's a little heartbreaking to watch years of equity disappear, in the company you built, because you don't have a year's paycheck worth of savings lying around to buy your options before they expire.

I think that your evaluation of the employee not entirely understanding the toll it has taken on you, is fair. Sympathy and empathy only go so far.

One thing I'd suggest is - In this description, you've emphasized the hours put in.

That's fair. You work hard and feel that this deserves compensation. But - if you were following that logic - your first 2 employees SHOULD combine to have more stock than you. You certainly don't put in more man hours than 2 employees put together.

Nor are you likely paid for the risk you take. You could hire an employee that drops out of college or otherwise risks their future opportunities. They will likely not get as much stock as you.

The thing that you could probably emphasize is how core to the success of your company your contributions are.

It is not a given that your contributions are worth your compensation (compared to the developer).

On a similar vein, one could argue that parents are the people who contributed the most to the success of their children. While you could argue that this is logistically true - in practical, the conception is a very small part of what makes the child successful. What's important is what comes afterwards.

So - It might be true that you work hard. But I'd recommend you fall back on to the value you bring to the table, when justifying your compensation.

If the first employee had left their college, family, or country to join the startup - would they have gotten as much stock as the founder? How much risk must the first employee take on in order to be compensated at the same level?

On the same note - the lack of a paycheck says nothing about the risk of a founder. A founder may very well start with more money, more opportunity, or a bigger safety net than any future employees.

The lack of a paycheck also doesn't tell us anything about how much the founder's skills and creative input contributed to the success of the company VS the first employees.

If they both have been there since the beginning, it is very possible that the company would similarly not exist if the first employees hadn't joined. So "The company couldn't exist without the founder" could also hold true for "The company couldn't exist without the first employees".

I think it's an interesting question - should you be compensated for your contributions to the success of the company or should you be compensated for the risk you took on in working for it.

I feel as though most founders would agree with being compensated for your contributions to success. Though most founders also wouldn't give their first employee's a similar cut of the reward, to themselves.

Startups don't tend to be fans of tying their own hands in terms of what they can do with stock.

To be fair - investors are also not fans of that. Potential investors will look at how shares and stock options are distributed and determine if it will allow them the flexibility they need in future fundraising/buyout efforts.

To go against this (investor interest and personal flexibility) founders would both have to have strong conviction and KNOW they won't need to rely on pleasing VCs in the future, for the company to survive.

This goes against how startups are currently built.

I might be oversimplifying this - couldn't companies that want to take part in the parallel world set up local sensors around their building to estimate position to a much more accurate degree?

I'm thinking along the lines of "Want to be a Pokemon gym? Place these devices around your public space and we'll overlay our AR reality while people are there!"

What happened to innovation? Innovation on privacy isn't possible?

The only way we can assure that cryptographic algorithms are in fact secure is to subject them to public scrutiny over many years.

Perhaps the only way to ensure that machine learning algorithms are not racist, harmful or biased is to have access to both the algorithm itself, the trained model, and the data that created it.

Algorithms can be biased. Data can be biased. Trained models can be biased.

We can't trust the government or companies to prove that a cryptographic algorithm is secure and we can't trust the government or companies to prove that an algorithm is unbiased and unharmful.

Well the idea would be that companies would be forced to actually figure out how to properly clean data or forced not to use it out of public pressure

I'm curious what a solution like "All Machine Learning algorithms, and the data that taught them, must be open-source and easily accessible by the public" would look like.

It'd allow for public scrutiny at the algorithms that run our lives. It'd essentially mandate thorough vetting of how anonymous and/or biased the data being fed into these algorithms is.

Which would be interesting