throwayit

Honestly, the best thing Snap can do to control their destiny is gut headcount by 2/3. If they bring their costs down so they aren't burning cash, they still have a highly engaged user base that is stable with decent advertising revenue. If they aren't burning cash like a wildfire, they can have some time to think strategically to build better user growth and engagement. Spiegel needs a strong COO like Sheryl Sandberg to put realistic controls on expenses.

As it stands now they are basically pulling a Twitter.

3% quarter over quarter growth on a product that is supposed to be still in growth mode is pretty bad. Compare this growth rate to Facebook's when it was was a 200 million DAU and it is not much at all.

Add in their enterprise value to revenue ratio and its a very sad story.

I think the major issue with your line of reasoning (which I mostly agree with it) is you are assuming wealth distribution. I mean, yes it is in our economy's interests to make it easy to steal talent.

However, do economic gains flow to Americans? No, not really because we don't have socialist systems in place to distribute the wealth gained from "stealing talent". So yes stealing talent is good, but it really only benefits corporate shareholders and upper class Americans. The unhappy Americans who are voting for "America First" don't see the gains from startups and tech companies; they are geographically isolated from these companies and even if they lived in California (or any other tech center) they lack the skills to be employed.

So essentially in my view you have a conflict of interest. It is in the best economic interest of the country to be able to attract talent. However, the US is a democracy and unless the economic gains are spread across the entire population, this will not satisfy, "we the people"

So we have really two options in response 1) implement socialist systems to spread wealth to the population or 2) go isolationist to insist that wealth only flows inward

It's embedded in American culture that socialism is bad which is why #2 has been the chose solution.

Our company has a culture of making it a part of the dev owner (or product owner's) job. So as part of shipping a feature / epic / task you are expected to create and update documentation. The added benefit is when someone has a question you point them to the document and make sure they read it before scheduling a meeting.

Our company uses Confluence and I highly recommend it. I think it does a very good for keeping your documentation "fresh" because:

* It's easy to search and find things

* It's easy to be notified of updates

* It's easy to comment & edit (for both non technical and technical members)

* It's easy to create quick documentation through the Q&A product and use the wiki for longer documentation

The main cons I've found with Confluence is:

* The general UX is weak (this is the case across all Atlassian products in my opinion)

* The markup language is not markdown

* The edit & save UX is a bit too heavy, your changes don't get saved automatically but rather it requires a separate button change. So documentation changes are a bit slower than something like Google Docs

Despite these cons, Confluence has been great for us. However, in order for any tool to work there also has to be a cultural shift. Our company is very good about:

1) Keeping knowledge not silo'd in brains of devs or other tools. So whenever I ask any senior dev a basic question like "How do I get unit test coverage?" they will immediately link you to a confluence Q&A answer or if one isn't created they will give you the solution and immediately ask you to create a confluence question.

2) Not spreading knowledge across other tools - any process, decision, design, etc. is required to be in Confluence. Any thing in Slack, Email, or Google Drive is immediately asked to be moved into Confluence.

If these heuristics are terrible, shouldn't these companies just throw away applications at random? At least this way you don't delude yourself in believing your heuristics are rational.

what about farmed fish though?

I actually find refactoring legacy code to be one of the most challenging things I do at work.

While I definitely wouldn't want to do that for all 40 hours of work I wouldn't classify refactoring as "remedial".

I think the OP wanted to make clear that domestic creditors far outweigh any foreign one so saying "biggest creditor" was a deceptive statement.

I am going to focus on US centric problems. Here are the two areas I think Americans could use the biggest help:

1) Personal finance - Americans across the board lack basic financial competency. This effects the US across the board, people take on too much credit card debt, school debt, etc. This problem is across all classes (lower, middle, upper) - Americans do not understand basic things on how to budget, how much debt they can take on, how credit cards should work, how to invest, etc. We need financial education happening at the high school level so that the next generation of Americans don't make the same financial mistakes we have (taking on too much school debt, using credit card as loans, not taking advantage of employer 401k, buying houses you can afford, etc)

2) Diet / Eating - If you look at the list of the most common sources of death for Americans, almost every issue is linked to lifestyle (diet, smoking, alcohol, etc.). Our diets have spun out of control; Americans lack basic knowledge on what is healthy or not. I've had many friends who struggle with weight issues who lack even basic knowledge of how calories work, what their daily needs, what are necessary nutrients, etc.)

The value of a company is not equal to it's revenue - that doesn't make sense. To give an example, let's say someone offered to sell you a magic bean which caused $10 to appear magically every year. Would the bean grower sell it to you for $10? Probably not unless they needed cash immediately, since they could make $50 from the bean in 5 years.

Instead value of a company is the perpetual value of the cash flows to the buyer. The problem is for startups we have very little idea what their cash flows will be in the future. Their revenues could be anywhere, we have no idea what their costs will be (how many sales people do you need, how much R&D, etc.), etc. So because of that valuation becomes a very imprecise art.

Outside of the cash flow approach, another approach for valuing a company is to consider future buyers. Suppose you have a magic bean that returns 50 cents each year in perpetuity. However, the magic bean is called MagicBeanAI and since AI is hot you know you can sell that bean for $50 to someone else. In this case you would be willing to buy it for <$50 regardless of MagicBeanAI's cash flows. This is what happens when markets start to behave irrationally. Eventually people realize they don't have any more suckers to sell to and their MagicBeanAIs value goes to almost nothing. This is essentially a market crashl; google "tulip mania" for more examples.

Big typo! I meant Dropcam, which was doing extremely well before it joined Google and then had a lot of issues with its integration with Nest.

Yes! As a former Googler, Google has a terrible track record with hardware companies: Motorola, Nest, Dropcam, Boston Dynamics, etc.

I don't see this as going anywhere.