They literally never claimed this was accurate and even said their methodology could be wrong. Nothing in the contract says anything about bots. They don’t have to prove anything at all.
I think that’s a little much. Definitely was estranged from his dad and it seems for good reason. No evidence his alleged childhood wealth funded his adult businesses.
Founding doesnt matter as much as making them as viable as they are today. Seems to have a knack for something, either PR, hiring others, repeatedly betting the farm, slamming his head into a wall etc. whatever it is its on average working.
His companies create thousands of jobs and pay billions in taxes, capitalism seems to be doing its thing very well. (Yay global reduction in poverty!)
Friends who have worked with him say he is very sharp and extremely relentless and hard working. I don’t think he’s a pure confidence man. I do wonder if he has had a bit of a mental break in the past 5yrs or so.
Musk seems like a smart guy who got overconfident and out of his area of expertise and made a series of incredibly stupid decisions. Pretty much every legal and financial professional without a vested Musk related interest seems to think similarly. Matt Levine has been lights out on this topic. Everyone knows his bot claims are just FUD to try and weasel out of writing a check he no longer has the guts to cash with current valuations.
Prediction: They settle for a couple billion OR Musk buys them at a slight discount to the currently agreed price. Maybe $49.69 because he is a clown?
Salary is not a "sign of respect" it is an indicator of how the company makes money and values software engineers. Software companies have software margins other companies... do not. Software engineers want to work at companies where software is the product because:
1. They get to contribute more to the success of the company
2. What they built typically has real users
3. They are valued and get paid commensurately with the near infinite leverage they bring to the company.
4. They get to work with other like minded software engineers.
5. There is probably an established career path for them if they perform well.
Good engineers typically ALREADY work at a place they enjoy. The market is too competitive for good talent to put up with any BS whatsoever. You are trying to get them to leave a good place for another hopefully better place. However, there is risk because they don't know your company/have to trust you a bit. You MUST compensate for this risk.
My risk premium is easily a 25-50% salary increase. Which means I need a job to pay about $100-200k more or have significant high probability upside (IPO etc.) for me to jump all else equal (passion products maybe an exception).
If you waste my time with a job ad that doesn't tell me up front what to expect I will:
1. Not accept your interview request or offer.
2. Will flame your company throughout my entire network.
Also if you want me to do a "take home" anything that will be $500/hr with a max of 4 hours spent.
If your RSUs are significantly devalued due to a price drop most tech companies will just give you a supplemental refresh to bring you back up. You might not be 100% whole to your target total comp but nobody is letting good engineers take a 35%+ cut to TC (65% to stock) because if they do they will lose their top talent.
If I am a strong engineer and my comp gets cut by a 65% reduction in share price and I am at a BigTechCo then I can probably pretty easily:
1. Move to a peer company in regards to comp (Meta, Goog, Twtr, Msft, uber, airbnb)
2. Get a signing bonus of $40-100,000+ To do so
3. Get a new hire set of RSUs with a valuation at the current share price vs my previously underwater ones (which if the whole sector has gone down will probably work out really well for me long term).
TL;DR total comp at the elite/liquid RSU level wont go down much.
It isn’t someone’s personal/unique suffering that I am invalidating. They are saying that we are having uniquely depressing times _in general_ which if you take a brief look at history is laughably invalid.
We have it way better than almost any period in history and are profoundly unhappy.
Also, we always like to think we will be happy “once I have…X” and then we get X and say well actually what I need is Y.
Most unhappiness is driven by vanity and desire (a bargain you make with yourself where you chose to be unhappy until you get something) to be better than our peers.
Until you can be content with nothing you wont be content even with everything.
If people can be happy in concentration camps we can be happy in dead end office jobs. They cant stop us from being happy.
They are merely a way to understand what the rest of the team is working on and to make sure you have the resources you need to do your job without having to interrupt you later or are you having to interrupt somebody else later it takes 15 minutes and it often saves hours of wheel spinning.
That is a fair point, a friend is working on ChromeOS tooling for testing/deploys and seems to be able to move fairly quickly and his work has large impact internally but not millions of users directly, also less coupled to a multitude of internal services.
Just to push back a bit, the promise/allure of software engineering is that you can have massive impact with a small dedicated team. Eg. WhatsApp had ~20 employees and was delivering more messages than the global SMS system.
The problem with personal projects is they almost always lack the scale, complexity, or real world constraints/drivers that real work does. Helpful to feel like you're actually building something but it is kind of boring to build things without a team. I really do enjoy learning from others with different approaches and learning from pairing and mentoring more junior developers and having to explain why we are doing things. There are just so few repetitions at BigTechCos that its hard to get that there.