
How I survived being a $220k/year intern - nodivbyzero
https://matt.sh/commit-this
======
tracerbulletx
I don't understand people who write things like this. If you're unhappy leave,
if you think the corporate culture is wrong, either participate in fixing it,
or get out. I honestly can't stand people who self righteously sound the alarm
about how they can see all of the things wrong with everybody else. It sounds
especially childish when you are making so much money.

~~~
HarryHirsch
Rachel had something about fixing corporate culture recently (hint: you
can't), and sometimes really you can't leave. Some are shackled to their jobs
through their visa, others because of healthcare needs (their health insurance
has favourable terms, and they need to care for a family member), and others
because of the nature of the industry (university faculty comes to mind,
especially post-2008).

The fact that you are paid does nothing about the _ennui_. You clearly never
held a no-show job before.

~~~
gist
Insider club here? Who is 'Rachel'?

~~~
rachelbythebay
Hi?

~~~
yownie
hiya rachel. you good?

------
deanCommie
Something smelled fishy, so I did a bit of follow-up. This dude is leaving out
a huge detail to make his employment troubles be a pivotal problem when...it's
not.

Let's footnote a coupleo f his "Story of Pivotal The Employment"

> Hired

To contribute to Redis

> All My Work Is Owned by Another Employee? What?

The primary redis maintainer, not a pivotal employee?

> Let’s Organize Instead of Being A Hobby Project

Let's misrepresent the philosophical position of the OS project maintainer on
the best way to move the project forward.

> Two Days of Work to Clear 4 Years of Issues Ignored By The Creator Because
> Laziness

A bunc hof those issues have fundamental problems that the creator explicitly
drilled into and explained
([https://github.com/antirez/redis/pull/1906#issuecomment-5145...](https://github.com/antirez/redis/pull/1906#issuecomment-51452143))

~~~
Aeolun
I don’t understand. Does the fact that the author of the project in question
is antirez change anything about the authors experience?

~~~
itronitron
Given that they were tasked to contribute to a very popular open source
project, the author may have been able to get past their perceptions of
mismanagement at Pivotal. But part of their complaint seems to be that they
were not able to contribute as much as they wanted. Different people adapt to
such a situation in different ways.

~~~
Aeolun
If Antirez was an ‘employee’ at pivotal at the time, and was apparently very
hard to work with (of course we only see one side here), them I can sort of
understand the authors frustration.

If Pivotal hired someone to contribute to Redis who then wasn’t actually
allowed to contribute, that’s even more silly.

------
omerbensaadon
I work for the "Labs" (Services) portion of Pivotal and I've seen this guy's
stuff on HN before...

Can't comment on what non-services teams are like at Pivotal but the services
organization is pretty spectacular.

Pivotal's got problems just like every other organization does, but this guy
seems to be mad as hell and blowing things a _bit_ out of proportion.

~~~
dehrmann
> but the services organization is pretty spectacular.

Overall, the org looks decent on Glassdoor.

~~~
quadrifoliate
Separately from this specific case, Glassdoor is a very imperfect way to
evaluate an org. Companies will encourage employees to juice the reviews
([https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/22/companies-gaming-
glas...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/22/companies-gaming-glassdoor-
reviews-to-look-better-investigation-finds/)).

Anecdotally, Glassdoor will often remove negative reviews for paying employers
by giving flimsy excuses like "They are against the 'Community Guidelines'"
(something that's so broad it's impossible to hold them to specifics). The
"features" they advertise for paying employers are all above-the-board though.

~~~
jonahss
Adding another anecdote, I worked for a company which paid Glassdoor to remove
a bunch of negative reviews. The score jumped from 2 to 4 overnight and a
bunch of well-written negative reviews disappeared.

------
rvz
Some people would be happy if their first job was to be at a customer service
desk or even stacking files for experience with a decent salary in order to
get their foot in the door to a internship at a FAANG company. Where as here
we see a very arrogant developer paid top dollar for a less demanding role and
yet still complains about their employer and chose to work there for over
three years.

Every company has problems and you don't have to stay there even if you hate
everything under the sun about them. Perhaps he was too focused on hate-
watching his company's culture to even think about quitting.

------
unlinked_dll
I get the sense that the author is somewhat toxic in the workplace and his
managers didn't have the power to fire him, so they gave him as meaningless a
job as possible to get him to quit.

I'm also surprised he isn't more concerned with anonymity. I know if he
applied for an open role at my current company, based on this post he would
not be hired.

------
chrisseaton
> I worked from home for three years with a $220,000 salary, traveled a total
> of six times, two SF, one Seattle, three to Europe, and contributed
> thousands of lines of features/fixes/optimizations to high profile projects,
> all the while never being granted responsibility greater than what you’d
> give a middle school intern.

But... that all sounds like a lot of responsibility doesn't it?

~~~
watwut
None of it implies responsibility.

~~~
chrisseaton
> contributed thousands of lines of features/fixes/optimizations to high
> profile projects

What's more responsible than pushing code to a high-profile project?
Responsible for the product's performance, security. Responsible for what the
customer sees and experiences. Responsible for keeping their data safe and
guarding the company's reputation.

Responsible enough to be allowed to work independently from home.

Responsible enough to travel the world representing the company in-person.

~~~
DuskStar
My reading was that those were to open source projects the company didn't
control.

~~~
chrisseaton
Contributions required by paying customers as a result of a commercial support
contract.

If he's pushing to Redis he's responsible for the integrity of probably
billions of dollars worth of data. That's a _massive_ , _international-scale_
level of responsibility, in the name of his employer. That's huge
responsibility!

~~~
sixstringtheory
And to boot, he has a portfolio of work he can show potential next employers
instead of it being blackholed in a private repo forever.

------
avip
The only interesting thought I've had while reading this pretty mundane post
is "man am I happy to not be working with that dude".

~~~
danw1979
Right. A guy who'd give up fifty grand just so he was free to write a rant.

~~~
nmca
It's actually 50k of time off (not made clear other than in the contract at
the bottom), which is not exactly the same thing.

~~~
VectorLock
What does "50k of time off mean?" They were going to give him vacation time
accrued or something else?

~~~
nmca
irrc 50k at the rate of his salary until he got a job, may be mis-remebering.

~~~
VectorLock
Oh so they were going to pay him 50k to sit on his butt for X amount of time.
I don't know if I would really consider that leaving money on the table,
personally.

------
baryphonic
I think "Matt" thinks he's a bit cleverer than he is. It's not clear what he's
talking about.

He also uses the word "fraud" ad nauseam. One place I worked actually used
Pivotal Tracker, and I found it worked pretty well from the end-user
perspective. Wasn't ground-breaking software or anything, but it at least
worked. I could see my tasks at a glance a lot easier than with, say,
Basecamp.

Just another person with an axe to grind.

~~~
autarch
For what it's worth I think Tracker is a very small part of the overall
Pivotal business. I think their main focus is their cloud computing products.

I love PT and I've used it for 6+ years at my last two jobs.

~~~
dosethree
Yeah I’ve used PCF and their open source stuff a lot, and i’ve never had an
issue with their stuff not working. Pair programming and TDD lends itself to
code that works well and is pretty well documented. No complaints

------
creddit
Blog posts like this are usually best interpreted as the bitter ranting of an
ex-employee who was let go. The author himself was semi-notorious (possibly
still so?) in the Redis community for being a bit of a self-serving demagogue
(to put it nicely).

Generally speaking, if an individual was a remote, WFH, IC employee whose
manager didn't even talk to them for a year, they probably don't have the
working knowledge to do much critiquing of the company at large.

It should also be noted that Pivotal was acquired by VMware for ~$2.7B.

Points like this:

> At the other end, you have employees who create your products being treated
> like unwanted interns because development and engineering isn’t given
> recognition for generating revenue. Obviously only sales and executives are
> money makers. Developers are just an unneeded, low skilled, interchangeable
> burden reducing your profits because they have non-commission-based
> salaries. Why not just fire all your developers then sell what they made
> without fixing or improving anything—wow, infinite profit!

Coupled with him making $220k/yr in salary (no mention that I saw about
equity) doesn't seem to gel. The entitlement is strong with this one.

~~~
perlgeek
> It should also be noted that Pivotal was acquired by VMware for ~$2.7B.

This doesn't mean much. Both Pivotal and Dell were controlled / belonged to
Dell at the point of the acquisition, so this was more of a Dell-internal
restructuring than an acquisition on the open market.

That said, I agree that the OP is way over the top to be taken seriously.

~~~
vxNsr
Wait, so how much did Dell buy it for?

~~~
pavlov
I think GP poster means “both Pivotal and VMware were owned by Dell.”

IIRC Pivotal’s stock price collapsed, it didn’t seem to have much of a future
as a public company, and so Dell consolidated it into VMware to save face.

~~~
vxNsr
gotcha, I looked it up, apparently EMC spun Pivotal out from an internal dept,
but still maintained a majority stake in the company, then Dell bought both
EMC and VMWare, and at some point Pivotal went public, but then I guess due to
poor performance the price dropped so dell had VMWare buy it all back.

I'm guessing that's what OPs referring to when he says that the customers and
investors were the same, probably most of their customers were other Dell
companies.

------
lawlorino
> contributed thousands of lines of features/fixes/optimizations to high
> profile projects, all the while never being granted responsibility greater
> than what you’d give a middle school intern

Am I being a bit dim or did they immediately contradict themselves here?

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
A lot of people, I suspect including the author, consider "responsibility" to
exclusively mean the power to tell other people what to do.

------
fancyfredbot
Being paid a lot of money for not having any responsibility sounds good to me.
This guy sure seems angry about it though.

~~~
herenorthere
also giving up a $50k severance package doesn't sound as exceptional when
you've already collected $660,000 from them. Yeah it's still a lot of money,
but apparently being able to promote his blog with anecdotes from Pivotal was
worth the $50k to him...

~~~
bootlooped
It makes me suspicious of a person who passes up $50k because they would
rather write a rant on their blog. What type of personality does that?

Sure the agreement was one sided, and maybe it even had questionable legal
basis and would be unenforceable, but guess what, so do many other contracts
consumers sign every day, and those don't usually net us $50k!

~~~
throwawayjava
_> passes up 50K_

If the author had another job lined up already, the severance package wasn't
worth much of anything -- it only paid out until he had a new position. So,
probably closer to passing up $0 than to passing up $50K.

Still a bit of an annoying personality. If you know you won't get any $ from
the severance package, just send a "thanks but no thanks" message to the
person off-boarding you. Don't harass some poor corporate lawyer 2 years of
out law school with inane demands for preferential terms on the severance
contract for an individual contributor.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
I think you're giving the system too much deference here. If an individual
contributor is important enough that the company wants to give them a gag
order, they're important enough to ask for preferential terms about it.

------
throwaway13337
It was hard to get at the main bullet points from the rant.

I found that what he did - his job description as he put 'Matt as a service'
\- to be reasonable.

Support, bug fixes, documentation, and development. It would be nice to see
more companies have someone completely own a small piece.

Often when I contact developer support, I talk to someone who clearly does not
know anything about the product I'm talking about. It would have been nice to
talk to Matt at that time.

Conversely, having the developers directly talk to customers gives them more
visibility to how their products are being used. This is both fulfilling and
enlightening.

------
masklinn
Should be tagged [2017]: while the article itself doesn't have a date, the
next in the series ("How Dumb Must You Be To Work For Pivotal in 2018?")
notes:

> Previously (December 2017): Pivotal Empolyment 2013-2016

~~~
Thorrez
Also here[1] it's listed with the date 2017-12-16. It's confusing that the
article appears to have 3 titles: "Commit. This.", "How I Survived Being A
$220k/year Intern", and "A Senior Developer Who Couldn’t Commit Code". Also
obviously confusing that the article page itself is undated.

[1] [https://matt.sh/](https://matt.sh/)

------
Traster
I really feel the need to rebuke hacker news commenters on this. The number of
comments shouting "You made 220k! STFU!" is ridiculous. I don't care how much
you pay me, you don't get to treat me like shit. Once you reach a certain
salary a job is more about fulfilment/ego/interest/motivation than $$, there's
a reason we're not all whoring ourselves out on street corners for an extra
couple of dollars in the evening.

What the author is talking about is a real issue - there is a very significant
portion of enterprise (and b2b) software that basically adds little or no
value compared to a competitor. Often the money is made by leveraging
relationships with contacts in large corporations who frankly won't notice the
money is missing - and for a plethora of reasons are more incentivised to push
for buying something than to actually see the company succeed. I've personally
seen sales organisations pay hundreds of thousands to external contractors
when we had more competent staff literally sitting waiting to be asked to do
the work. Even then, there's a hell of a lot of software out there that isn't
difficult and isn't interesting, so the defining feature of who provides it is
what their sales organisation looks like.

The result of that dynamic though, is the engineering organisation can be
crap- because they're not where the company derives its value. Which might not
be what an software engineer wants to hear, but it's true. (as an aside, find
out what sales folks are paid at your current job - it's probably more than
you).

------
jcadam
> "I worked from home for three years with a $220,000 salary"

I stopped reading right there. I really don't want to hear someone in this
situation complain. Suck it up or find a new job - take a pay cut if you're
really that unhappy. I've worked for shitty companies for a fraction of that
salary.

Hell, It's taken me over 15 years to get to a salary even within spitting
distance of that amount - and I've never been able to work from home.

------
Stratoscope
> _I Passed Up a $50,000 Severance To Write This_

I wish he had taken the $50K. We would have all been better off!

(As noted in the article, the $50K severance would have been tied to a non-
disparagement agreement.)

~~~
jcadam
$50k to not write an alcohol-fueled angry screed on my personal blog sounds
like a pretty fair trade to me. I'd take it.

------
mamcx
If anyone is tired of getting $220k/year, i could take it!.

\---

I think sometimes developers have drink so hard the kool aid of changing the
world and all that, and if is not happening, then get sad. But why?

Maybe because I have a long time in this industry, but this is what I do: If
see an opportunity to improve things (without need to convince others) I do.
If need to convince others, and succeed, great. If not, but the environment is
okey, I keep going.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_I think sometimes developers have drink so hard the kool aid_

I think a lot of people just have no perspective. I'm fond of this movie
scene:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlHlKi2dATw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlHlKi2dATw)

------
zaksoup
> That’s okay though, just hand off the company to your bloated, slovenly,
> zero-posture assistant whose name literally means “I’m going to rip you
> off.”

This is where I got lost. I worked at Pivotal from 2014 to 2017. There's a lot
I can say about Rob Mee but this is just a bizarre and wrong attack given that
he 1) Founded Pivotal labs and lead it through the EMC Acquisition, 2) Was
responsible for creating a first-tier services company with a name to rival
Thoughtworks and a reputation that to this day bumps my resume to the top of
many recruiters' lists by virtue of just seeing "Pivotal" on it.

Edit: Quote from one of the prior posts in this "series".

> Future employers judge you on your past employment. Having any extended
> tenure at Pivotal on your CV is a negative mark against you.

I have absolutely not had this experience. None of my former coworkers have
had this experience.

On the other hand, people who write blog posts like these... might have this
experience.

------
betadreamer
No interns make that high of a salary. That means they value his work/skill.
It’s clearly a management problem but this is a hard problem. In fact it’s
different for everyone. Some people like well structured management and others
don’t. On top of that he was remote, which makes it even harder.

His rants are mostly in sales. Engineer ranting about sales is like Sales
people saying Engineers are pointless. (Btw both are very common perception).
Now that I’ve done both ends I can share that sales people are doing that for
a reason. At the end of the day, high end sales are all politics and you need
to be good at the game.

This type of rant is what interns do.

~~~
robertlagrant
Interns also don't read articles properly.

------
booleandilemma
I survived a job that amounted to fixing keyboards for $35k/year but kudos to
you for surviving your $220k/year internship. I’m sure it was brutal.

~~~
robertlagrant
It's even more brutal reading articles properly and realising he wasn't an
intern.

------
highprofittrade
Damn I had an offer from them years ago. I should have took it. I don't mind
making that much for doing little that's plenty of free time for my side
projects....this guy could have used his time wisely and never complain about
it ...you can't force companies to be good employers or successful at what
they do obviously this company had major red flags you could have left quietly
long time and find a more fulfilling role ...otherwise shut up and take the
money and use that free time to do great things if you are capable

------
aprdm
> At the other end, you have employees who create your products being treated
> like unwanted interns because development and engineering isn’t given
> recognition for generating revenue. Obviously only sales and executives are
> money makers. Developers are just an unneeded, low skilled, interchangeable
> burden reducing your profits because they have non-commission-based
> salaries. Why not just fire all your developers then sell what they made
> without fixing or improving anything—wow, infinite profit!

Funnily enough I've worked in a company that did just that, they developed a
TV software that puts ads on the streaming of soccer games and the software
was 5 or so years old with no software team. They had a person who did support
and was there for a long time and would always have 2-3 developers on the
payroll who wouldn't stay more than their probation period. I left within 2
weeks but the company owner was very rich and seemed pretty OK with how things
were...

------
blondin
this seems old, but to be honest, the "work got boring" part is not unique to
the company described.

i have this nagging feeling that we have tons of issues, and overly
complicated systems created today because very talented and smart engineers
are being giving the most mundane tasks to do on a daily basis...

------
Dansvidania
Why is this at the top of HN?

------
1123581321
Can anyone elaborate on “and proudly brags about his criminal acquaintances in
the news”? It’s a bullet point in the section about, presumably, antirez.

------
techslave
> At founding, the company allotted about 13% of company stock for employee
> ownership.

Is this meant to be disparaging? it’s actually above average (of 10%).

Note that at each finding round, and as needed if you make too much money
(don’t spend money fast enough to require another round), you allocate another
chunk. The 13% isn’t fixed for eternity.

That’s like the first paragraph. It’s already clear author doesn’t understand
how companies work.

------
meddlepal
Sounds like a person who is really bitter. Good thing he wrote this as a
warning sign to all future possible employers or managers.

------
thosakwe
Imagine giving up 50 racks to complain about getting $220k per year. If you
don't want the job, I'll take it.

------
rossdavidh
While lots of organizations are not great, and some are even dishonest,
something about the guy's tone suggests the demotivator from despair.com:

[https://despair.com/products/dysfunction](https://despair.com/products/dysfunction)

------
iou
I worked at this company overlapping this time frame.

Although the post is emotionally-charged,it's totally on point.

------
quadrifoliate
I think everyone is hyper focused on the 220k number, which is not that
unusual for a VC-backed Silicon Valley startup.

Admittedly the article is a bit rant-filled, but I have also heard other
people say Pivotal is (was?) a bit weird, especially regarding taking pair
programming a bit too far (another blog example:
[http://mwilden.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-i-dont-like-pair-
pro...](http://mwilden.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-i-dont-like-pair-programming-
and.html))

I am a bit surprised at all the criticism of the author and saying that "I
wouldn't hire the guy because of this post". Consider the asymmetry of power
between employer and employee. Companies often put up self-praising blog posts
describing their perfect hiring process and how great they are, but often they
are a big messy hairball inside. In the US, people very rarely work up the
courage to criticize them, because they have mouths to feed, health insurance
to pay, and can't afford the expensive lawyers to combat the large companies'
legal teams. So we should encourage those who speak out, or at least not
punish them more for doing so. In fact, I think the only reason this person is
comfortable doing so is that they have probably enough left over from that
220k/year to be comfortable speaking out.

~~~
hobofan
I wouldn't want to encourage anyone else to write such a rambling "speaking
out" blog post that you can't really take anything away from. There are good
ways to write such blog posts, e.g these accounts from an ex-Apple
employee[0], that nicely lay out what was going wrong. I tried to extract
similar information from this blog post, but failed, as it was filled with so
many detours, vagueness, and subjective name calling about the company in
general rather than an actual retelling on how he personally was supposedly
mistreated.

[0]: [https://techreflect.net/2019/12/10/aperture-senior-
qa-2004-2...](https://techreflect.net/2019/12/10/aperture-senior-
qa-2004-2005/)

------
j45
Having grown up in and around both, it's interesting how many people who
complain about mental jobs would fare in physical jobs that are far worse.

It's good to work thru your feelings, but for many people feelings are a
luxury, having access to opportunity to improve yourself in anyway is a
privilege.

------
traitsnspecs
The interesting thing to me is that they had an open-source support business
getting requests to buy their services, which the salesmen dropped because it
wasn't the most lucrative deal they could be doing. But presumably there's a
viable business in that particular type of support.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
In my experience, those kinds of support contracts are mostly valuable (and
mostly intended to be valuable) as a way to shove your foot in the door at
large companies. Often they're not valued at all, and exist just as a legacy
from when the company was younger and any sale was a good sale. It's not
surprising to me that an incoming lead whose first question is "what are your
prices" would be considered a waste of time.

------
shrimpx
This article takes “tech bro” to a whole new level of entitlement.

------
adultSwim
We engineers need to organize ourselves. We make piles of money for companies,
yet we are too often voiceless.

------
slazien
I wonder how widespread this phenomenon actually is, anyone has similar
stories to share?

~~~
themagician
Extremely, and not just in tech. Most people just don’t want to admit it
because most people need to feel like they “earned” their money. The reality
that many, even most in some companies, people get paid simply to maintain a
social system is a troubling thought for a lot of people.

You can easily work for a decade at some companies and contribute absolutely
nothing if you know how to play the politics.

------
techslave
title really needs the leading ‘How’ from TFA

------
hpcjoe
I'd comment, but if I did, I'd likely exceed the boundaries of my own
agreement with a different company.

------
throwlaplace
the weirdest thing to me about pivotal is that they require full-time pair
programming. how do people survive in that company at all? i can't fathom
being yoked to someone (literally) 40-50 hours a week.

~~~
DonHopkins
When working alone remotely from home, I simulate pair programming with a
methodology I call "The Stranger". I sit on one of my hands until it becomes
numb and tingly, and then it feels like somebody else is typing and moving the
mouse!

~~~
throwlaplace
lol I get the reference

------
astro-codes
fuck this was funny

------
kaiabwpdjqn
I find this post to be relatively unimpressive. He spends a great amount of
time complaining about how the company was shit in a way that implies he was
personally offended, but the title says he got a generous salary for little
expected work. It’s not clear to me why he is bitter about anything. I have no
doubt that the company was genuinely poorly run. His observations about
problems in the sales culture are likely true. But he could have left any time
and instead chose to stay there for 3 years. And I get that leaving a job
isn’t always an option for people but those reasons don’t feel relevant for
his situation.

Author reads as overly entitled and arrogant imo.

~~~
gregd
While I don't disagree with most of what you're saying, this idea that people
should (or can) just leave employment, needs to stop. This is not the way most
of the world works and many people are "stuck" in very shitty situations that
don't have many opportunities, out.

But with regard to the rest of your comment, absolutely. This guy is a knob.

~~~
chrisseaton
> this idea that people should (or can) just leave employment, needs to stop

I don't think this applies when you are pulling down nearly a quarter of a
million dollars a year - then I think you probably have quite a lot of freedom
to just walk out the door anytime you want.

~~~
Traster
It doesn't matter what your salary is, if you've got a big old mortgage and a
wife and kids then losing your income is _really scary_. What if the job
search takes longer than you expected? What if it takes much longer? He's
already remote working, that massively narrows down his options. It's not as
simple as just "get another job" and every day he doesn't have a job, bills
are piling up.

~~~
kaiabwpdjqn
I feel like all of those concerns are nullified if you just don’t quit your
job before lining up another... which is what people usually do.

------
rolltiide
> .... shady “customers, but also investors, but also customers.” It’s
> convenient having combo customer/investors. If quarterly numbers look bad,
> just ask your customers, who are also investors, to buy more services to
> prop up their own investment. After all, they wouldn’t want their investment
> decisions to look bad, right?

That's not shady, to me, it is a common practice and does take advantage of
the accounting practices that different stakeholders use. This is what all of
tech is doing with VC portfolios. That startup that delivers lunch to your
startup, do you think that was random? It is an incestuous movement of money
around VC portfolio companies to merely print higher revenue numbers so they
can sell them one at a time for 10x those revenue numbers.

Pretty much nothing is organic, so I can't make a distinction for this
particular practice. The market can bare it.

Honestly, it should be a _more_ common practice for market participants to be
taking pseudo-activist roles in their investments. Just because _you_ are used
to passive investments - and probably can't do anything else - doesn't mean it
is the best strategy for your portfolio.

Not making any opinion about the other problems with Pivotal, just pointing
out how this section isn't validation for the complaints.

~~~
throwsprtsdy
Just because it is common doesn't mean it's not shady.

And depending on what the "pseudo-activist role" entails, that could be a
massive conflict of interest. If a person at Company A is steering business
toward Company B because they have an investment in Company B, that could
easily conflict with their obligations toward Company A.

~~~
rolltiide
This

> so I can't make a distinction for this particular practice.

was meant to be a rebuttal to this

> just because it is common doesn't mean it's not shady.

so I think you walked right into it.

> If a person at Company A is steering business toward Company B

and that's company A's problem

------
adamrezich
There are a lot of interesting and useful takeaways from this article that are
being overlooked because of the jealousy of, "boy, I wish someone paid _me_
220k to not really do anything while working from home!"

------
soared
“jUsT QuIt yOuR jOb” -hn

With no second thought on any outside life factors.

~~~
chrisseaton
Someone who earns _nearly a quarter of a million dollars_ a year can probably
quit their job and continue to support themselves and any outside life factors
for several years if they want to.

~~~
dehrmann
The other doesn't seem to be in SF, but have you seen what a mortgage payment
is in SF?

------
slumdev
So much whining in this thread.

It is possible to make $220k/year and also be unhappy. Deal with it.

Beyond a point, money won't increase your happiness. Riding out a terrible job
where you're underutilized and overpaid because the job pays well isn't
"grit".

It's dishonest. It's opportunism. It's cowardly.

------
alexfromapex
Having worked for a strange startup with plenty of cronyism and nepotism, I
honestly think there needs to be some kind of government oversight to make
sure that executives aren't squandering investors' money or worse that the
investors are in on some kind of shell company.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
The point of private investing is that the investors get to do that kind of
oversight on their own. There's a whole world of public companies to work for,
if you're looking for government oversight to double check the investors'
work. (Although Pivotal seems to have been a public subsidiary for at least
part of the author's story.)

