That's what the vesting period is for, to ensure the team sticks around for long enough that the acquirer can figure out who is most valuable and make it attractive for them to stay.
I've definitely heard stories of people who wanted to sell their stock after being acquired, couldn't because of vesting/lockup, and were glad because it went up a lot in the meantime.
No, the assumption is that companies are more interested in cutting labor costs than productivity. Even if you screw up and need to hire back 50% of those you fired, you still cut the labor costs of the 50% still fired. And you can pretend to be a cool, thought-leading, "AI-native" company, which might be enough to juice your share price enough to offset any actual productivity loss.
Capital will always be in opposition to the cost of labor and want to make it as close to zero as possible, and AI is a plausible story for attempting that, regardless of the reality of AI efficiency.
It is amazing how that bit of corporate PR is still being quoted over 100 years later. In reality, Ford had huge turnover problems with his workers - one estimate is over 370% annual turnover. One way to help prevent turnover is to pay more, and it solved the problem. (Even so, the base pay was still actually $2.30 and to get the extra $2.70 you had to abstain from alcohol, keep your home clean, etc.)
The strategy for institutional investors is to invest in servicing the needs of the already rich, at the expense of investing in companies that serve working people. The former is much more profitable than the latter, and the latter is becoming less profitable over time.
No the assumption behind the statement and many others on this topic is not AI is more productive than Human + AI, it’s that 9 (or 8 or 6) humans + AI is more productive than 10 humans. No one is suggesting getting rid of all workers, but many are saying they can get rid of a significant percentage of them. It remains to be seen if that ends up being true but it is fundamentally different from what you are describing
I wholeheartedly believe that they could not have fixed it with 9,600 people months of work. They haven’t been able to fix it with many multiples of that.
> They haven’t been able to fix it with many multiples of that.
which may actually be the problem. I suspect that there is actually some ideal ratio that could be calculated of Input Fields / Dev, LoC / Devs, or maybe Unique Pages / Dev, or some mix of all of the above. Some of the metrics I hear out of places like airbnb absolutely blow my mind (>5000 engineers! wtaf are they all doing?!?). I can sort of see the #s at google, MS making sense given the breadth of the problems they are solving, but other places, not so much.
There was an interview with a lead tech at Uber about this some years ago, with the conversation starting with "why is the app so bloated!?" (in terms of megabytes) and his answer also answers your question:
The smooth and simple interface of the Uber app is the tip of the iceberg. His example was that their users don't (and won't) reinstall the app because they travel overseas. If anything, the time when you've just stepped out of an airport is precisely when you want the app to work smoothly!
The hiccup is that many countries have their own payment systems, Byzantine tax codes where this may or may not be displayed up front to the user (in various currencies and formats), there may be local laws around taxi-like services, etc... Some of those laws apply to areas smaller than a city, or may apply only to airport pickups, or the CBD area during congestion, so on and so forth.
The "core" app might be a simple thing that you can bang out over a weekend with an AI and a decent UI framework, but then you need to "draw the rest of the owl". Don't forget that there must be a matching app for the drivers! Different categories of drivers offering services that may be local to a region and totally absent elsewhere: rikshaws, tuk-tuks, taxi boats in Venice, and who knows what else!
AirBnB is very similar to Uber in this respect. They have to deal with about a hundred countries worth of law, often down to the state level. There's fraud detection. Customer support. Integration with travel agencies. Government-mandated reporting. Etc, etc...
You're assuming performance has been the core priority, or even a priority at all, and I think this is a bad assumption to make. I would estimate a much smaller number of people-months of work if I were you.
Dev users assume the only problem a product can solve is performance, when there is a lot more than that in reality.
Maybe in the past companies wouldn’t take the extra time for performance enhancements - but they’re apparently saying that AI is sooo good and speeds up work that they don’t need all of these extra people. So if their product was sped up it would enable their customers to work faster and lay off all of their extra employees (or just keep everyone and just do more stuff faster).
So are they doing this to make the product better or, as others have mentioned, they can’t innovate further and can’t grow their market so they need to cut costs.
They need to just clean slate start from skratch. I don't believe that code base can be saved.
AI means it's easy to copy any SAAS now right? so should be easy /s
I don’t think it’s under specified. You are clearly stating “I want to wash my car”, then asking how you should get there. It’s an easy logical step to know that, in this context, you need your car with you to wash it, and so no matter the distance you should drive. You can ask the human race the simplest, most logical question ever, and a percentage of them will get it wrong.
In addition to snmx999's point, you're also not specifying that you want to wash your car at the car wash (as opposed to washing it in your driveway or something, in which case the car wash is superfluous information). The article's prompt failed in Sonnet 4.6, but the one below works fine. I think more humans would get it right as well.
I want to wash my car at the car wash. The car wash is 50 meters away and my car is in my driveway. Should I walk or drive?
1. When do you want to wash your car? Tomorrow? Next year? In 50 years?
2. Where is the car now? Is it already at the car wash waiting for you to arrive?
I can see why an LLM might miss this. I think any good software engineer would ask clarifying questions before giving an answer.
The next step for an LLM is to either ask questions before giving a definitive answer for uncertain things or to provide multiple answers addressing the uncertainty.
The question does not specify where you or the car are. It specifies only that the car wash is 50 meters away from something, possibly you, the car, or both.
It could also mean there is literally no possible way to reach it, because that's on the other side of a river, and there is no bridge. You should still not "walk there, because come on don't be lazy, a bit of walking is good".
I don’t think he needs the experience on his resume lmao. He’s an experienced design professional that’s worked at a bunch of big name companies as a lead designer.
The US has shifted to becoming an authoritarian fascist state. It’s not surprising that people reference another prominent authoritarian fascist manifesto.
No, it’s not. The government, and laws by proxy, will never keep up with people’s willingness to “maximize shareholder value” and so you get harmful, future-illegal practices. Reagan was “maximizing shareholder value”, and now look where the US is.
you have to show this 'future-illegal' action is harmful first by demonstrating harm.
That's why i used the sugar example - it's starting to be demonstrably harmful in large quantities that are being used.
I am against preventative "harmful" laws, when harm hasn't been demonstrated, as it restricts freedom, adds red tape to innovation, and stifles startups from exploring the space of possibilities.
I can understand that stance. The trouble is, with more power and more technology, more harm can be done, much quicker. This will become a freedom vs. survival issue, and by definition, freedom is not going to survive that.
and if the actions are deemed immoral by society then a few years later you will see regulation, PR issues or legal action
See early 2000s Google as a model for a righteous company and public perception of it as evil and subsequent antitrust litigation today, or what happened to companies involved in Opioid trade and subsequent effect on shareholders value
They are not big fans
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