I was so naive when I joined my first startup. When we were purchased, it came to light that the main guy never got around to signing my stock option agreement. He is a fucking mensch and signed it after the fact.
At my first startup, the share option terms and conditions had a clause allowing the company to arbitrarily change any condition in the contract. Of course we signed it and didn't think much about it. At the IPO this clause was very predictably used to extend all the employees'[1] vesting schedule to many years after the IPO event. By that time the options were worthless because the company was acquired in a fire sale.
[1] Naturally by "employee" they didn't include the founder or members of his family who worked there.
That sounds like it wasn't a contract in the first place. Doesn't it have to in some way bind both parties to be considered a contract?
I would almost think that a lawyer would be able to convince a judge that that "contract" was written so adversely that the "arbitrary change" clause should be struck, since the rest of the contract is essentially illusory if it remained.
Sure, but if it got into a courtroom, the judge would probably be apt to rule in favor of the party that didn't write the contract, so I would guess that rather than invalidating the entire contract, they would strike that provision. Not a lawyer though, so who knows.
I think I left when I was 25 or 26, and I was in no position financially or otherwise to start legal action. That was 20 years ago and you live and learn.
Wow. Did they implode while the employees gave them the finger as they walked, or did it take a while? (This matters a lot to the remaining shareholders, since there is usually a post-IPO lockup to protect new investors).
Seriously, I can't figure out why this doesn't immediately escalate into noisy public events that tank the stock before the founders cash out (e.g., strike / unionization).
I helped an ex of mine work through the negotiations of an executive pay package. Everyone that's been around upper-management is fully aware of this and works clauses into their contracts to prevent it. It's such crap.
That is an interesting thought! I wonder if he did undertake some risk. I just emailed him, as I never properly thanked him. Maybe if he emails back I'll ask.
Also he negotiated a year off of our traditional 5-year vesting (at the time anyway) in the salt mine that is Microsoft, though he was never to take a position there himself.
I see no end to liquidity event horror stories. I'm so lucky.
I haven't seen many start-ups that didn't break the law in some way or another. Sometimes out of sheer ignorance and other times out of expedience. Hell, Airbnb and Uber are built on breaking the law.
"The problem with Perl is that it tends to be a different language for every programmer."
Exactly. Larry Wall cited an analogy somewhere: if you want to know where to put walkways on a new campus, wait until pedestrians have worn trails into the grass and pave there. Perl docs repeatedly makes jokes along the lines of, "it does what you want, unless you want consistency. Bottom line, Perl was designed without predictability and consistency in mind. This makes it blazingly fast for development by one person, but the administrative overhead between multiple programmers balloons.
Because of a natural inclination to reduce the number of characters one uses, as you get comfortable with Perl you start taking more and more shortcuts. A singular moment in my long career occurred when I opened some old Perl code after leaving the language for a time. I stared for a long moment, dumbfounded. It was as if an alien had visited my computer and overwritten my code with what Wall has affectionately described as "line noise."
Also, I was awed by the feature set in Perl 6. I don't think any language outside of Lisp, C, and Smalltalk has had such profoundly new ideas. Pronouns in Perl 5 are still unique to my knowledge after 20+ years. Wall is wildly imaginative.
Perl is what made me realize, in the mid-90's, that OO is largely just a marketing term. A sufficiently powerful language provides whatever portions of OO you need a la carte.
Fiske's Cognitive Miser theory: "The theory suggests that humans, valuing their mental processing resources, find different ways to save time and effort when negotiating the social world." (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_miser) Such an indictment that this "science" can debate these topics with a straight face.
As Feynman said: "We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science."
From Wikipedia: "Her four most well-known contributions to the field of psychology are the stereotype content model, ambivalent sexism theory, the continuum model of impression formation, and the power-as-control theory."
"Recently, Fiske has been involved in the field of social cognitive neuroscience. This emerging field examines how neural systems are involved in social processes, such as person perception. Fiske's own work has examined neural systems involved in stereotyping, intergroup hostility, and impression formation."
I presume you speak Russian then? If so did you learn anything about the quotation? I Googled it just now and found... this page.
The best jokes defy explanation to some degree. A good example: the de facto definition of 'chutzpah' is, "To kill your parents and then ask the judge for clemency because you're an orphan." Not only is it funny, it's also the best available definition.
I feel gratified that you mentioned this. Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" obsesses about apartments. I suppose this is because financial opportunities were otherwise constrained. In this story at least cheating seems to have been the norm.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, fashion is so ugly it has to be replaced every six months. Though the Metropolitan Museum may be my favorite place on earth, I find a good portion of NYC to be repugnant. Nowhere have I seen such spineless obedience to trends and fashions. Many residents seemingly can't put on a tee shirt without worrying over it endlessly, and express a self-congratulatory air when they've gotten that tee shirt just right. They are delighted to wait for 1.5 hours to get a burrito because it's the right burrito, and the right line to be in to buy one.
Hearing this guy say "my body is not my own" made me twitch and I had to stop.
The difference between them and rabid football fans is a matter of degree, not quality.
Is your position that "food critic" is not a legitimate job, or that there is no value in NYT restaurant reviews?
Once you admit there is, then by definition someone's job involves a lot of eating. I think that's pretty much all he meant by saying that his body is not his own. If anything, the better comparison is with football PLAYERS, who also make bodily sacrifices in the practice of their chosen profession.
Experience proves that food critic is a legitimate job, and sure there's economic value in restaurant review. However in my utopia it would be a low-key affair. Zeal for watching men play a game or eating seems debased to me.
The remark about "my body is not my own" seemed unduly melodramatic.
Character buys a unique, abiding respect.