I often see people say “JS is unstable,you’re always rewriting your code for the latest and greatest framework” and I always wonder where do you work? If I told the people I report to I can’t deliver that for you because we’re rewriting the app, I’d be out of the door soon.
The JS ecosystem is like any technology ecosystem, things change over time but you don’t have to chase the trends, be pragmatic about what you follow and trust me your life will be golden.
There was a time between 2015 and 2020 when framework fatigue was a real thing. People were jumping between angular, ember, react, vue, and if you were unlucky enough to choose react, Crazy Mad Scientist Dan Abramov was telling you YoureDoingItWrong(TM) every other tuesday and prompting everyone to rewrite their app in shame (even though they wrote it the way that was trendy LAST tuesday).
> In reality, it's almost always resume-driven development
This is what drives me crazy. I’ve been at my company for a couple decades. I want stability and long term health of the company.
The resume driven development isn’t even from the engineers, it’s from the leadership. An IT leader gets hired from the outside, starts a big project that will look good on the resume, then midway through the project, they are just far enough to try and call it a success and leverage it into a new position. Now we have a leadership change in the middle of a giant foundational shift of the infrastructure. The new leader comes in and does the same thing. I don’t see how a company can survive this long term. It creates such fragility. People like me, with little interest in job hopping, aren’t looking to resume build. I’m looking to have the company’s operations run smoothly so customers have a reliable service, so we retain them as customers… and for a little peace and stability myself. These resume building leaders make that difficult and seem to actively work against the long term health of the company. They aren’t interested in the next 10-20 years, they are only worried about their next job in 3-4 years, with no concern for the mess they leave behind.
I hope this is just a trend and it dies soon. The needless stress it has brought into my once simple life has been rather unpleasant.
It may be resume-driven, but that's the state of the world. If you fail to keep your team members and attract new ones as the team needs to grow, you are fighting a losing battle.
I didn't see many needless ones, but I've seen many team members not wanting to hear about any change. It's hard enough to push a greatly needed change through management. Maybe there are places where they do it just for fun.
The people I report to are the ones telling me to rewrite the same thing every other year on a new platform and stack. It drives me mad. Challenging these ideas risks my job.
For things they don’t care about, I am using very basic tools that have worked for the last 10+ years and will likely work fine for the next 20 years. This allows me to solve new problems instead of continuing to solve the same problem over again. At least that’s my goal. In reality, it allows the tools I need (but management doesn’t care about) to “just work”, freeing me up to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic for them. All of this is for internal tools. We’re just raising operating costs on things that have 0 impact on revenue. I don’t really understand the vision.
In 2017, I met modern frontend. In a few hectic months, I had to learn AngularJS, Gulp, Grunt, and some CSS improvement system (LESS or Sass or something). Then I moved on to Angular and worked with it for a couple of years. For the first time, it actually started to feel worth it. But what a churn in the beginning. Angular 2, 4, 5, 6, and I think up to 9 all dropped while I was still working with it.
Since then, I’ve mostly worked with React, which is blissfully productive and unexciting in the best way possible as long as we prevent people from pulling in CV-padding material like Redux.
Over the past few years, I’ve been hired into places where I’m once again upgrading codebases written in AngularJS (yep, it still exists), Elm, and jQuery. Everything gets rewritten to React, and after that we can hire people right out of school to maintain it (as long as we keep the CV-padding libraries out of it).
I guess this is a long-winded way of saying: even if you’ve been lucky enough to work in a place where people made good technical decisions years ago, and work in a place that treat their devs well enough that someone who still remembers how it works cares to work there —not everyone’s that lucky.
Each team has production access to their own services, access to each services is managed via a custom solution integrated with GitHub. Requesting access to a service will requires the relevant service owners to approve the pr, you can also delegate access via this repo aswell if you want
It’s a chrome extension plus mobile companion app that adds social commentary to Netflix (We’ll add support for other streaming services later). Reason for building this, was well we had an idea so why not build it :)
Have launched it with friends and family and got positive reception. Won’t see this making any money but the process of going from idea to reality has taught us a LOT.
No , not really a lot of the time people are trying to tackle problems that have taken years to solve in other languages which isn’t easy and is why you see stuff abandoned. This project is also pretty similar to https://github.com/antoyo/relm which is an active project.
> There IS risk to the employee; they now have a real loan outstanding and 100% personal recourse, so if the common stock becomes less than exercise price, their personal assets are on the hook
I can't see why it should be illegal. People take on debt to buy assets all the time. But this is just so irresponsible and immoral; I really doubt the leadership is actually running a sustainable business; and I'm also starting to seriously doubt there was any credibility to the whole YC/Stripe boys club thing.
1. Ryan (was) the CEO, and can pressure employees to buy stock (or let them go because they aren't "committed" enough).
2. Ryan loses nothing if the company fails (his personal loss has probably already been covered since the first VC round), but each employee is left with a mountain of debt.
3. It's just bad advice. I know plenty of people who took out loans for stock; and I would never recommend it; it's incredibly risky especially if it can destroy you if it fails. If leadership plays so fast and loose with other people's money, you have to question how well they are doing their job.
Borrowing against one's shares shouldn't be illegal. Companies lining up recourse financing for their employees should.
How were the terms of the loans chosen? Who knew who was and wasn't participating? How was it ensured this wouldn't factor into personnel decisions? How were/are the people setting the strike prices of options segregated from the people setting the terms of the loans? There is too much already loaded onto the employer-employee relationship, we don't need to add lender-borrower to the damn mix.
(Side note: the $300 stipend for financial advice is laughable. You couldn't even get a lawyer to review a fraction of such an instrument for that amount, and yes, I'd put recourse loans against private shares in the risky as hell bucket which should absolutely be legally reviewed.)
The strike prices of options are set based on a 409A valuation.
These are "cashless" loans, which are recourse for tax purposes (so that the IRS respects this as a true purchase of shares, in order to start people's LTCG and QSBS clocks). The terms were likely very favorable, i.e. set with an interest rate equivalent to the AFR. This is not a situation in which the company is trying to make money as a lender.
This is no riskier than deciding whether or not to exercise your options, which typically employees have to decide within 3 months of leaving a startup.
The risk is not in the terms of the loan, but in whether the employee wants to exercise and lay out the cash (or the promise to pay the cash); in each case, it's an investment decision to decide whether it's worth it given that the stock is risky and could eventually be worth zero.
Note that all these issues are driven by tax rules, and generally not the startups. Startups are damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Every type of equity has pros/cons. If it's an immaterial amount of money, the employee should be a big boy and just decide whether or not to risk the cash. If it's a material amount of money, the employee should really be speaking to their own advisors, which if they have a material amount of equity, they should be able to afford to do.
If you can’t afford to buy your options, but take out a personal loan to buy them, that must have been a riskier approach than just buying them if you had the cash, no? The leverage increases the personal risk at least as I understand how that works.
Unless there was an agreement to forgive the loans if the options go underwater, which I haven’t seen reported here.
It depends on what your future income stream looks like. If you're a 22-24 year old software developer, getting to take on low-interest debt in an inflationary environment is a great deal. It's losing money on the stock that is the problem here.
If it requires predicting the future isn’t that by definition riskier?
The potential outcomes if you spend money you have are that you recover your money (break even), lose the money, or make a profit.
The outcomes if you take a loan are that you break even, make a profit, or acquire a debt that you by definition weren’t really able to afford in the first place (or you would have just used the resources you have to fund the exercise).
I feel sorry for anyone who was hoping they were young and had tons of upside potential, who now needs to service a loan that they will never see a corresponding asset for, who is about to face a quite difficult job market for juniors.
>Companies lining up recourse financing for their employees should.
Wait the companies set these loans up? I thought they were just going to a bank and getting something akin to a personal loan or some other 3rd party collateralized loan.
It's a cashless loan. If you have options that cost $10,000 to exercise, the company lets you pay with a promissory note (promising to pay the $10,000, plus minimal interest set at the IRS's AFR). This is effectively the same as the company loaning you $10k, and then you hand it back over to exercise, but the cash does not change hands.
If you were to get a private loan, the interest would be much higher.
The company does not want to be in the business of making loans, but this is a way to allow the employee to exercise upfront (and thus potentially get certain benefits, like in a good exit scenario, of having gains be subject to LTCG and not ordinary income), in the best way possible. But in a downside scenario, like the company folding, the person is on the hook for the loan just like if they had decided to exercise with their own money.
In that Twitter thread where the CEO originally announced the idea many people reported this happened in the dot-com bust. Private equity firms would buy the company and go after past employees for the loaned money.
Good advice I got from colleagues at a 2000 era company who took out loans to buy their options and cover the taxes when the stock was at $50/share and then watched it drop to <$1/share while they were in a lockout window. I worked with people who had 6 figure loans they owed on for worthless stock. Took years for the stock to recover.
This is me currently. Bought my options before IPO markets went bust. Gives me anxiety when i think about it. Just reading this comment made my heart rate go up :(.
I am not a finance person, but maybe you should talk to a tax attorney or tax planner. That kind of person may be able to offer some guidance on what you can do. Good luck and remember at the end of the day, it's just money and you can recover no matter what.
Why would they have taken out a loan to buy their options? If the options are vested you can just sell them and pocket the difference between your strike price and the buy offer. If the options weren't vested you can't buy them anyway and you would still have the same strike price when they did vest.
Sell them to who? Are there any secondary market sites still running. Otherwise, you're cold calling investors. I tried to sell my shares in a startup to cover my six figure tax bill and couldn't find a buyer even with the company's CFO helping me.
The OP I was responding to was clearly talking about a publicly traded company - "the stock was at $50/share" and "Took years for the stock to recover." They could sell them to anyone who wanted to buy them and clearly people did if it was going up.
To answer your question, yes there are still companies that facilitate the secondary market for pre-IPO options, Forge/Sharespost is the one that immediately comes to mind.
All those markets are currently dead. Been searching high and low on all those sites for my options but all the sites went completely quite last 3 months.
In this case, the company had gone public, so they could have sold. Bolt is a wholly different story. I think the employees back in 2000 had one window where they could sell where the stock was at a high value. Many of them passed it up, expecting it to go to 70.
In 2015, I talked to ESO fund for some fintech options I had where I couldn’t cover the tax when I quit (stock wasn’t public). I was very satisfied with my dealings with them. Ultimately, they pulled out on the deal. That was a pretty strong signal because, low and behold, that pre-ipo stock tanked in a month too. Luckily, the lessons I’d learned from the earlier stories helped me to walk away from those options. It was a tough, but ultimately good decision.
It's all luck and timing. The company I couldn't sell the shares to cover my tax bill was acquired for nine figures a year later and I had all my stock because I couldn't sell it.
Short answer: greed. They didn’t want to give up any shares. To pay for the tax they owed between strike price and current market value, they should done a cashless transfer and sold off a portion to cover the taxes and then held the remaining for a year to get capital gains tax treatment. I think ultimately they didn’t think the party would end. I had some coworkers there who had sold stock when they could and were thought of as leaving money on the table because the stock can only go up. Those ended up being the smart ones. But hindsight is 20/20
> Short answer: greed. They didn’t want to give up any shares. To pay for the tax they owed between strike price and current market value
Greed by the taxman.
It would be a non-issue if the tax authorities collected the tax at the point those shares are converted to something else, or used as collateral to a loan. But to tax them without any ability for the employee to extract value from them - especially relevant for privately listed companies with glacially illiquid stock - is abhorrent.
But instead the taxman has to always be the first to eat the pie. Even if that pie never turned into anything real.
In the UK it is horrid- share options of any meaningful value are taxed at ~%63 (including all hidden National Insurance taxes) and it could be years before you can cash your shares, if at all.
I'd guess they wanted to hold the stock for 1 year after exercise to qualify for long term capital gains, but this would likely trigger AMT. Not sure if this has been the case back in the day though.
> Therefore, we made sure to give every employee ample time to read about the pros and cons of this decision, including learning about all the risks in the business, and we gave every employee a $300 stipend to consult a financial advisor during the implementation process.
I understand making things illegal to protect people from being swindled because they don't know any better, but if you made decision even after consulting a financial advisor that's on you.
It’s kind of different when that decision is saying to your boss “Naww, I don’t think I’m going to take the offer that the CEO was bragging about on Twitter. I guess I just don’t believe in the company enough.”
It may not be perfectly valid, but it’s very easy to see how someone could feel like they didn’t really have a choice if they didn’t want to sabotage their position and future at the company.
That’s quite a stretch. They set up a plan you’d have to opt into. They don’t stand around waiting for a rationale from everyone who didn’t take them up on it. You still have your options so you’re not telegraphing a lack of faith in the company. It’s absurd to think management is going, “gee, Joe didn’t take this potentially risky option after the consultation. He’s not a team player.”
That is not at all a stretch and is slightly offensive that you used the word “stretch” here given what that word is supposed to mean. This is a perfectly valid concern where many people will be pressured into complying.
Except if you don’t take the loan, you are still betting big on the company by staying around for stock options. There is zero reason to think this shows lack of faith in the company. This is on the level of thinking you’re going to get fired if you don’t buy a red BMW because all the execs have red BMWs and got a local dealer to offer a good deal to all the employees.
$300 won't cover the cost for a qualified advisor. Even if you'd get a tax professional to make the math for you for that money (the one I use charges $350 for a phone call, ymmv), getting a lawyer to go over the terms of the loan would be $1000 at minimum.
i guess they probably doled it out as "file an expense report" stipend rather than cash or some voucher, that could lead to some awkward conversations w/ management...
It was an option, not a requirement. There are pros/cons to doing it, but it was ultimately the employee’s decision. I’m sure the risks were well disclosed. The issue is >50% of employees don’t understand any of it, no matter how well explained and disclosed.
It is not enough to disclose the risks. You can not allow your employees to do this unless at the minimum you can demonstrate that they actually and fully understand those risks and you give them access to ALL the numbers you have
I would bet money Bolt disclosed financial statements and all material information as part of this offer.
The risks here are not rocket science. If the most recent round of preferred stock financing was $100, and your exercise price is $20, the risk is that if the stock ends up being worth less than $20, it's a mistake in hindsight. You can talk all day about the risks, the numbers, etc. What's currently happening is macroeconomic -- inflation, fed tightening, asset prices dropping across the board, etc. This was not some Bolt-specific issue. People assumed it was more likely that the stock would be worth at least their exercise price (which still may be the case). A full half of the people this was offered to declined, because they were prudent and the risks were probably clear. The other half was probably optimistic, and also gambling on crypto and other startups at the same time.
With the preference stack it could take much more than a $20 price to break even.
It may not be rocket science, but this isn’t obvious unless you’re really savvy about startup deal structure, and all of the preference stack is disclosed.
I did the same thing once; early exercising my options in a couple batches as I had the money to do so, and filing an 89b election. Ultimately I had to borrow some money on a personal loan in order to exercise the last of my options as the value was starting to ramp fast leading up to the IPO.
Conveniently the CEO has bailed the sinking ship and publishes daily tirades against the "establishment" that is victimizing Bolt specifically every day.
The founder pushing employees to take such a reckless financial decision while presumably their only insight into many key business metrics is the leaderships rosy portrayal of them is unethically irresponsible.
At this scale/valuation of the company, it's probably a bad idea but hard to know at the time.
My understanding of US tax laws and options is that this sort of behavior is what you want for early stage startups. You allow early exercise, restricted vesting with the upside of paying no income tax now, only LTCG on vesting (+liquidity event), and potentially QSBS tax exemption if you joined early enough and the startup does well.
QSBS cutoff is $50M in gross assets owned by the company, not $50M valuation. There are many cases where a valuation can be far above $50M yet still qualify. That said, I have no idea if Bolt would qualify here. FWIW financial services companies don't qualify for QSBS at all, so Bolt may fall under that
You missed one important insight: the founder pushing employees to buy shares. That's a red flag on its own. If your options expire, that's less dilution, so there isn't really an incentive to get employees to exercise other than raising funds and the appearance of internal confidence.
Responsible leadership will give you numbers, but leave you to make your own choice. Anything else should make you worry.
> if the common stock becomes less than exercise price, their personal assets are on the hook
Can someone explain what that may mean for the >50% of employees at Bolt that bought into this program, now? I'm really struggling to grok what my quoted sentence entails...
By taking part in this program, you are essentially taking a personal loan, partially secured by your stock options which will vest later.
If you don't happen to understand Stock options: At a later date you will have the OPTION to buy company stock at a set price (often referred to as a Strike price)
So some entity is lending you money because they know you have Stock options and presumably will be good for the money when they vest/mature.
Of course, if the value of the Stock at the point of your options maturing is LOWER than your strike price, you essentially have earned yourself the option to buy $4 apples at the price of $50 an apple. Eg: your options are worthless (beyond their ability to purchase shares which might not be buyable on a public market)
So since you took out a _personal loan_ you now have to pay it back.
EDIT: I missed one thing - you actually get to exercise _now_ if you take out this loan... This has slightly more upside because it means that you could have in theory, sold those shares for immediate upside on the secondary market and thereby have de-risked yourself. If you didn't, then you got hosed. You could also have a capital gains advantage by spreading the gains I suppose
I was struggling to understand why someone would take a loan against options rather than just sell them on the secondary market like you mentioned and I think the key difference is that you can't sell an unvested option on the secondary market but with this Bolt program you could take a loan against an unvested option which is unique and kind of bizarre. Who would underwrite such a loan and how is the accounting for it done at the company level? Also wouldn't they be taxed as income?
a lot of popular and semi-popular startups are hard for some VCs to invest in. So some of them like ESO fund (https://www.esofund.com) will give you money to exercise and pay taxes but on condition that they'll take a decent amount of profits when you sell the stock
These employees chose to take out a loan in order to exercise the options. These employees now own the shares that they exercised their option for _and_ a loan to pay back the amount of money spent to exercise. If the price of these shares becomes _less_ than the price spent to exercise the option to receive the share, then the value of the employees' shares is now _less_ than the price paid to exercise. This means that if an employee wants to pay off the loan, they first sell their shares, and then they're still on the hook for the remaining difference between the sale of the share price and the principal for the loan.
For the Bolt employees who took this deal, I feel bad...
This is insane to me. I work at a startup with a similar valuation and we bring in almost double that amount of revenue a week... and I think we're overvalued.
20x Price-to-Sales (P/S) multiple on trailing-twelve-month (TTM) revenues is actually on high-end of of sub-$20B SaaS right now -- it's just the new reality. Examples from public markets:
Cloudflare ($NET) TTM revenue is $0.73B and $16.9B marketcap (23x P/S).
DocuSign ($DOCU) TTM revenue is $2.1B with $15.5B marketcap (7.3x P/S).
UIPath ($PATH) TTM revenue is $0.9B with $9B marketcap (10x P/S).
Okta ($OKTA) TTM revenue is $1.3B with $13B marketcap (10x P/S).
I never cease to be amazed at how people value companies based on revenue and not profit. Revenue without profit numbers tell you nothing about how well the company is doing.
I'm not valuing my company solely by revenue, but it's easier to compare the values of startups by their revenues as a good chunk of startups are focused on growth and not profit - and thus aren't yet profitable. Will that start to change with the current macro environment? Probably. Was only trying to point out how out of wack valuations have gotten.
Investors in startups value a company based on the likelihood that they can pawn off a money losing company either to the public markets or an acquirer.
That doesn’t help now that the public market doesn’t have an appetite for companies that aren’t profitable.
So if retail investors aren’t interested in non profitable companies, there is no profit it in it for investment bankers to flip the stock at IPO to take advantage of a “pop” meaning that VCs are less interested in throwing good money after bad.
How have the former “unicorns” focused on “growth” fared in the last few years?
For instance DoorDash couldn’t make a profit during a worldwide pandemic when everyone was ordering takeout.
To do a proper net-present value calculation, you need more than just revenue & profit. You also want to know growth rate, gross margin, and capital efficiency.
I realize that I should have been more precise. I was talking about profit in the colloquial sense where profit = revenues - cost and not the GAAP meaning.
For instance, even when Amazon was “losing money” for years, they were using cash flow to expand. If they were running short of money, they could have just stopped building infrastructure. They had marginal profit unlike companies that are losing money on each sell.
> how people value companies based on revenue and not profit
Profit is a closer abstraction to cash flows (i.e. to the investor) than revenue, but it's still an abstraction. Investors looking at revenues and unit economics can sometimes--often--predict future profits and discount backwards, in the same way that a value investor can look at a company's profits and sometimes--less often, frankly--predict future cash flows from dividends or M&A and then discount backwards.
Profit isn’t an “abstraction”. If you bring in more money than you spend, it means that you don’t have to worry about a “runway”, nor do you have to worry about outside funding.
How can you have a successful business that spends more money than you make?
The term profit covers a number of metrics. All of them are abstractions. The number of assumptions that go into a GAAP profit figure is uncountable. Profit on a cash basis is less wiggly, but it's still--for valuation purposes--useful only inasmuch as it is an estimate of actual cash returns on the investment.
> you bring in more money than you spend, it means that you don’t have to worry about a “runway”, nor do you have to worry about outside funding
Lots of ways for cash-flow positive businesses to be running themselves into the ground. Garden variety is off balance sheet liabilities, though people certainly
> How can you have a successful business that spends more money than you make?
Nobody argued this, not for the long term. But there are loads of situations in which losing money in the short term is the long-term savvy move. (This literally describes all investing. You send cash out when you invest.) Valuation involves estimating the value of those future earnings today.
Amazon famously turned no profit for nearly 15 years. When you run a large business you can do things like reinvest what would have been profit into new projects. This is the whole point of a growth company.
Recognize that, simplistically, Profit = Revenue - Expenses, and that expenses is a dial which can be turned somewhat arbitrarily.
Amazon basically always had positive marginal revenue - unlike most of the startups.
People like to cite the one case where it worked and seem to be forgetting that most of Amazon’s profit comes from AWS. What are the chances that any of these startups are going to pivot to a competent different vertical to shore up their main business? That’s just like saying all you have to do is rehire the former CEO after a 10 year absence and become a trillion dollar company after almost going bankrupt.
And no Amazon did not use “excess capacity to jump start AWS”.
In theory you outspend all of your competitors such that they go out of business or otherwise lose out on the some network effect. At that point you flick the profit switch on and start swimming in pools of money.
I wouldn't like to guess what the success rate of this game is though.
So when will that tomorrow ever come for companies like DoorDash, Uber, Lyft, or the darling former much hyped unicorns?
It’s not a single point in time, most of those same companies who IPOd before becoming profitable recently are still not profitable and being punished by the market more than the market in general.
I don't think that's always true. If you are in that company, they almost certainly have exposure to the cost of those sales and the rate of sales growth, but also the cost to support more users. That gives you a good sense.
If you service has complexity and needs lots of hand-holding and is expensive to generate the sales, then it's harder to say what to do with sales numbers.
Unless you are in the midst of a best market where VCs don’t see a clear exit strategy where they can have a successful exit while the company still isn’t profitable. If you were a startup founder, would you really want to have to depend on continued rounds of funding in this environment?
This reminds me during the dot com crash, when employees exercised their options when the stock was sky high, so they had gigantic paper gains and big AMT bills. Then the stock crashed (like 99% and then some crash), so employees were not only left with near worthless stock, but they had huge tax bills with no money to pay them - and they were sometimes locked out of selling due to insider trading rules as the stock was crashing.
I had a smaller YC company pitch me something like this as an option for my stock comp - an RSA (restricted stock agreement, or "founder's stock"), where I put up all the cash up front, paid a big income tax bill in the first year, but then upside was all capital gains. I would technically own the stock but I had to sell it back for nothing if I left before it vested.
Turned out I left very early because the company wasn't doing great, in the current climate I think they're probably default-dead. All that cash is just gone.
See, generally speaking I don't think this is a bad deal.
I mean, I don't know the exact numbers / company profile. But I was in a similar situation 8 years ago. I could early exercise and I did. Estimating taxes was a pain (but a fun challenge too, lol). A couple of years ago they finally had a liquidity event and doing all these exercise shenanigans saved me a ton of money, so I'm glad I did that.
The business was doing well and I knew exactly what the risks were and I knew I could afford to lose that money. I joined early so it wasn't that much money to begin with.
I guess my point is that I wouldn't be too dismissive of early exercise / RSAs / etc — for the right kind of person / company it could be a great tool.
For what it's worth, this is how it works for founders too. The amount you pay is stupidly small (usually well under $100), since the strike price is essentially $0. There's no legal designation for founder when it comes to stock, so this person just got the same deal the founders did.
This is actually a great deal when the exercise price is low enough. You pay a nominal-ish amount up front to exercise early and all gains are LTCG. It is not a good deal in any situation where you’re not getting in close to the ground floor though, if the exercise cost itself is substantial.
I always found corporate credit cards to be similarly dodgy. Firms I worked at offered a "corporate" amex. The employee as card holder was personally liable for the debt, the employer had no liability. At the time these cards did not accrue any points either. And the corporate policy was typically "no personal expenses".
1) you must use corporate card for company expenses
2) you must not use corporate card for personal expenses
3) you cannot accrue points for use of corporate card
4) you are personally liable for corporate expenses on this card
I'm pretty sure amex was giving big perks to CFOs.
If you assume a limit of $10k per card and company (like the one I was at) had over 10k employees (though not all had cards) the amount is pretty astonishing and zero liability.
I once had an issue with Amex because I'd been travelling a lot and the boss was away and then slow to approve.
I've also used Miro. It's good for gathering information, but not so good for synthesizing/creating/collaborating on a design diagram that you can do with a whiteboard and marker. Maybe it can work better with a large tablet device--I haven't tried.
How often does your webpack setup blow up? We haven’t touched our configuration in a year and it still works perfectly fine. What complex things must you be doing for you config to not even last 3 months !!!
3 months might be (close to) hyperbole, but webpack/JS package management is a source of consistent pain. It sticks out like a sore thumb across my web stacks (PHP/WP, Ruby, Elixir) and its brittle complexity causes the most unpleasant dev experience I have to deal with.
I doubt it's my incompetence alone - npm is involved in over 25% of Phoenix's issues!
Can’t speak for the integration into non-JS ecosystems, but since I started using Create React App instead of rolling my own Webpack configs a few years ago, I’ve had approximately zero weird npm issues.
I maintain a Rails codebase and a Node codebase. We are using esbuild for Node / JS bundling, along with TypeScript. The Node project is much less of a headache than the Rails one, mostly due to TypeScript. We’ve also made an effort to minimize our dependencies. We have fewer npm modules than gems.
All that to say, Rails is fine. But Node is also fine, if you treat it more like Go (minimal dependencies, lean on the vanilla underpinnings).
Looks like they went full Amazon, by forbidding developers to work in OSS side projects. I cannot really believe it's that no politics talk only: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26944192
There's no way that Basecamp forbade developers from working on Rails related side projects. A good chunk of what Sam Stephenson has worked on recently has been instrumental to launching Hey, and Basecamp has long benefited from their association with Rails and influence over it.
The JS ecosystem is like any technology ecosystem, things change over time but you don’t have to chase the trends, be pragmatic about what you follow and trust me your life will be golden.