He's not getting that for building fluff. Adam is walking away with 1.7 billion dollars because he fooled whoever is in charge at Softbank into getting into bed with him for WeWork and Softbank decided that that was an appropriate amount to pay in order to get rid of him.
I question the whole premise of this article. The use of "some" in the title also seems incorrect when just one person actually quit. The person also quit to go to an industry where all she has to do is charge rent, in other words, she quit to go do nothing. I think that another perfectly reasonable explanation is that her quitting had nothing to do with the stress of whatever '996' job she had. She quit because she didn't want to work.
It looks to me like, in general, the bigger a company gets, the more the "leadership" starts acting like they are running a hedge fund. The money becomes more important than the product. Then when the product is de-emphasized, the employees obviously lose their importance and then the "leadership" start treating them like cattle to be moved from grazing location to grazing location. I put "leadership" in quotes because they somehow tend to be managers, who never actually built anything, who are clueless about the nuances of the product.
"painful and I am embarrassed by many decisions that I have made."
This I get. One of the hardest mental blocks that I had to get around was thinking that it would be deeply embarrassing and triggering if I talked about my decisions and experiences. That I would be "found out" and "be exposed as a fraud".
It is quite the opposite. Talking about your experiences is extremely liberating. You can be who you are, you don't have to make anything up to fill in the gaps, and it is just in general much easier than worrying about conforming to some expectation. AND you will be much more interesting, because you have lessons to pass on that somebody else may find valuable and apply to their own lives.
Maybe that's the issue. For him, programming is an abstract notion. Whereas it's really just a practice. You work on it, figure out where you are being dumb, then go home and take care of other stuff.
This article makes no sense to me. It feels like there is something wrong with this dude and he still hasn't figured out what yet. I guess this article is for soliciting pity. But his real story seems extremely juicy. He should write about the details there. All of the interesting decisions and events that got him to where he is was glossed over in this article.
"My interest in computers and programming was more like an intense obsession. It affected my ability to focus at school." <- this makes no sense. To me, programming is an exercise in formulating a plan, executing the plan, and verifying the outcome. Every step requires focus. How do you "study" and "program" without being able to focus?
"Undiagnosed mental-health problems led to some fairly poor decisions." <- what health problems? what decisions?
"Relationship issues for a now twenty year old developer proved to be too much. Emotionally I was devastated when that relationship ended. It affected me and I had no one to help me through the emotional stresses of the situation. It affected my work. It affected my activism." <- Every sentence here is interesting. If he went into detail and wrote about this, it would fit the title and it would grab my attention.
I assume this is common knowledge