While you were there, how much was Valve still an "anarcho syndicalist" paradise? When you say projects were cancelled, was that because the teams working on them decided to stop (since everybody there is supposed to be their own boss) or was it a decision that came from the top down? Just curious how close Valve still is to its roots -- or at least the popular mythos of them.
In theory, employees are allowed to (supposed to, even) work on whatever they think is valuable. In reality, you should be working on whatever the people around you think is valuable or you're gonna get fired really quickly. (Fewer than half of new employees make it to the end of their first year.) This usually means doing whatever the most senior people on the team think is important, both because they should know if they've been there for a while, but also because they wield enormous power behind the scenes.
The problem with a company with no defined job titles or explicit seniority is that there is still seniority, but it is invisible and thus deniable. An example: in my first few months, I was struggling to find a good project and a very senior employee (one of the partners, actually) took me aside and recommended I leave my current team since my heart was clearly not in it and take some time to think about what I really wanted to do, or else I'd get let go. I took his advice seriously, came up with a couple ideas, and then approached him a week or so later to pitch these projects. He got _angry_ at me, stressing that he's not my boss, and that it showed a remarkable lack of initiative that I'd ask someone else at the company what I should work on. So: he has the authority to fire me (or at least to plausibly threaten to fire me) but the moment that authority would mean any responsibility or even the slightest effort to mentor someone, he's just another regular Joe with no special role at all. Similarly, there's no way to get meaningful feedback because nobody really knows who's going to be making the performance evaluations. Sure, you can take advice from someone who's been there for ten years, but if they're not included in the group that's assembled to evaluate you then their guidance is worth nothing.
I worked with some very smart people there, but it was the most dysfunctional and broken work environment I've ever witnessed.
The problem with a company with no defined job titles or explicit seniority is that there is still seniority, but it is invisible and thus deniable.
In groups of humans operating in "communal" mode, this invisibility of the hierarchy is by design. It's not the top brass that's doing it. It's the "will of the people."
> In reality, you should be working on whatever the people around you think is valuable or you're gonna get fired really quickly. (Fewer than half of new employees make it to the end of their first year.)
>I worked with some very smart people there, but it was the most dysfunctional and broken work environment I've ever witnessed.
Sounds like it. It sounds like a complete vacuum, void of any responsibility. Rife with cowardly management and lack of direction, I could only imagine...
I don't think I have ever read any employee account that's made me want to work in the games industry.
There's been plenty written on Valve's somewhat rare management system and how it works/doesn't work. Just do a HN search for valve and you'll find some explicit ones, and likely good discussions in more than a few in the discussions on submissions about Valve that are about other things.
Just as a side, the way Valve works is quite unusual in the games industry, most studios are more traditional with better defined roles and hierarchies.
> Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not
now.”
...
> The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.
> "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" is an influential essay by American feminist Jo Freeman inspired by her experiences in a 1960s women's liberation group that concerns power relations within radical feminist collectives.
It may sounds naive, but what on your opinion would have been the result if you'd knock on the CEO's office door, asked if he has 10 minutes to talk to you & then earnestly and honestly (but as diplomatically as you can) have told him exactly that story?
> I took his advice seriously, came up with a couple ideas, and then approached him a week or so later to pitch these projects. He got _angry_ at me
Isn't it an environment for creating ideas, rallying people around them and then leading them?
If you're new with fresh ideas then you can directly go and try to do that because formally there is no boss. You only have to fight the informal hierarchy.
Your boss reports to his boss. He can deny responsibility and blame his team, but normally if he has the power to hire/fire people that's still his problem.
From what I've heard about Valve, it sounds like there's a class of people that can fire you and therefore force you to do things, but you are still directly responsible if things go wrong. So the high-level people have power without accountability, and the low-level people have accountability without power.
That doesn't sound like a bad deal if you enter with a lot of political capital (maybe you are a world-renowned expert or friends with Gabe Newell). Doesn't seem like a particularly great place to work for everyone else though.
So, Valve is a terrible company bogged down by incompetent middle managers, just like many other terrible companies run by incompetent middle managers. The only difference is that at Valve their official title is "co-worker" instead of "boss".
Well, it can help if your boss's job description says they're responsible for your performance. Theoretically, that's why they're given the power to fire you in the first place.
Not really the company's fault here. Policies like this exist because candidates have and will sue the shit out of you for any flimsy accusation of discrimination they can cobble together.
Companies didn't create these policies arbitrarily and unprovoked. They became necessary because of some people who took advantage of the legal system to get settlements. It's in the company's best interest to protect itself from frivolous lawsuits, so it's better to be safe than sorry.
Which isn't to say that there aren't people who actually are discriminated against, but in this example it's not a company "discarding" someone as much as it is covering its bases.
This fear is overblown in my opinion. If people really want to sue then they will sue based on the fact that companies hire H1Bs into the position that they applied for. Then the company would have to prove not that the H1B was the better candidate but that the American was not qualified. Who decides on that qualification? Well a judge/jury based on the job description. If your resume matches those qualifications and it's truthful then you may have a case. I think that is a bigger risk than giving feedback. Giving objective feedback may actually help you since you communicated the specific lack of qualifications. However, I do think that you can implicitly derive the feedback based on the interview questions anyway.
I worked for a company who was sued because a candidate told us he was the second coming of Christ. We didn't really address it, and ended up not hiring him. He used The fact that he mentioned it as grounds for religious discrimination.
He didn't win, but we still had lawyer costs and what not. It is not an overblown fear at all.
If he sued with representation this illustrates another point. His lawyer took on a stupid frivolous case, probably because he also needed the money.
I think the real problem is that people today are on an economic treadmill. That need to survive economically is what make people willing to put up with all the other things.
This is exactly it. The thirst for the dollar makes us more willing to swallow bullshit with a (feigned) smile. But what can we do about it? That's the worst part. To dismantle the machine requires the coordination of a significant number of cogs.
Or you simply avoid consumerism, do your best to improve your situation, and try to hit the $50k/year point where its practical (in much of the US) to retire early if you are willing to live on a living wage rather than an inflated middle class lifestyle.
Something like 27% of the country could retire by 45 if they were willing to make the sacrifices necessary.
You don't have to be so extreme as to live off the land. If people would just love below their means and save, they wouldn't be in an absolute crisis the moment they lose their job.
Given that we have material wealth 5-50 times higher than most people who have ever lived, virtually all of us.
Given that we are on a status treadmill with legally created artificial scarcity -- well, I still don't think it should be that hard, but apparently it is.
People also act like everyone has access to good lawyers or ones that would take on a case like this. The aforementioned 'lying in business' part comes in to play here where instead of 'we don't hire [race x]' it's 'The candidate did not meet the qualifications' or some other bullshit excuse.
It would take some hard evidence for me, the unemployed or in the less powerful position, to really make a go of proving I wasn't hired because of some discrimination.
The fear of blackballing on the employee side for many things and the fear of lawsuits (which, when you sign on at employer, typically includes some language about arbitration these days) on the employer side are overblown, I agree, and makes everyone cut throat.
I want to make enough to pay for rent, food, and have some time off to chill. Your company wants to stay and business and make money. Let's make a deal that benefits us both.
This goes for firing too. I've seen people who were categorically under performing try to bring lawsuits claiming discrimination upon firing many times.
Correct in most cases but if they put an identical job title out at an identical location, they are still vulnerable so you have to pick someone a grade more junior or a grade more senior to replace them.
True, but.... A company can (does) decide how much time, energy and money to put into protecting its executives. There is a strong trend that all business decisions are made because execs desire for self preservation makes them prioritize legal safety over every other consideration, including productivity and innovation, not just over being humane.
>> I am not even allowed to tell a candidate (another human being that probably NEEDS a paycheck) why I didn't hire them and what they can do to improve their viability.
> Policies like this exist because candidates have and will sue the shit out of you for any flimsy accusation of discrimination they can cobble together.
I thought that it was the other way around. You need to have always ready the reasons why a candidate has been rejected and give them on request. Otherwise, they can sue you as your reasons are not clean and transparent.
But, I guess that this depends on the country's laws.
The reason is simple: "We've found a candidate who is a better fit" although that is, in my experience, due in no small part to the fact that we've never not been able to fill a position.
Conversely, one company I worked for did have us provide candidates thorough feedback, though that was only for those who didn't pass from a code challenge to an interview. Perhaps the hiring managers have them feedback, I'm not sure.
PS: the code challenge we gave was carefully put together so as to both be reasonably quick to complete for a skilled developer, but be vague enough in requirements to not have a single answer that could be copy-pasted from a Google search. For anyone who didn't pass, I'd typically write two to three pages, focused entirely on objective metrics, and online resources for further learning should the candidate choose to apply again in the future. We didn't use it as a binary yes / no test, but to inform the discussion we would have in the in-person interview assuming the candidate had a sufficient level of skill.
> I thought that it was the other way around. You need to have always ready the reasons why a candidate has been rejected and give them on request. Otherwise, they can sue you as your reasons are not clean and transparent.
"We found someone more qualified. Thank you for your interest."
It would be valuable if a 3rd party solved the problem of feedback minus the liability. Could be a business there. No idea what that would look like though.
I can name at least two established companies (FB and SpaceX) that will tell you why you were rejected. I 100% respect when companies are willing to do difficult, potentially perilous stuff like this.
The problem is that it could be a slippery slope with no transparency, oversight, or recourse.
First, it's creepy that a company I paid money to for a game is actively scraping the internet trying to associate my Blizzard-Activision account/identity with other online identities. What if they get it wrong?
Second, there's nothing preventing them from taking action based on subjective aspects. What if the employee reviewing my "behavior" is racist and bans me because they figure out I'm black? Or because I posted a political video they didn't agree with and deemed "toxic"? What happens if a Blizzard employee decides to dox someone as a form of punishment?
There's no way they have enough properly trained and ethical support people to have any real checks and balances to prevent abuse.
Sure, initially I would hope (for their sake) that they're only considering in-game or game-related posts/content, but once these tools exist it's only a matter of time before they are abused, or they see how far they can push things until there's a financial backlash.
> The problem is that it could be a slippery slope with no transparency, oversight, or recourse.
There's actually a very simple recourse: don't pay them any more money or play the game. In this case, Blizzard is definitely more afraid of making their customers unhappy and turning off their funding, then the other way around.
Which is part of the reason why they have been very slow to act on some of this abusive behavior to begin with: players blame other players for abusive behavior, but they blame the company when they get banned.
Save up a lot of money and build a large network of contacts with whom you have a reputation for being a badass...then you will have no fear of repercussions for speaking out frankly about things.
Eventually it will go to your head and you'll be viewed as a brash, arrogant, out-of-touch upper manager who throws their weight and ego around without appreciation for the repercussions of their horrendous misinformed decisions.
You either die a hero or live to see yourself become the problem.
> In fact quite the opposite since it just got a massive tax revenue increase.
Nah, they capitulated and accepted a far lower rate than they should have received otherwise if Apple (and companies like them) weren't permitted to play these shifty legal games.
If the U.S. gov was really looking out for its own interests and the interests of its citizens, it would have closed these loopholes years ago and told Apple to go pound sand going forward.
Pay your taxes or get slammed with massive fines and be barred from selling product in the U.S. until your tax bill is paid.
Not many markets can afford their products, see how they like it when the country whose resources and laws allowed them to become so successful becomes off limits to them.
I find it odd that you start from a position that assumes that the federal government has a right to Apple's money. It was basically an attitude like that on the part of the British that led to the American revolution in the first place. If you want a health economy with strong labor demand and robust wage growth, we need to start from the opposite position - the federal government must avoid taxation for all but the most essential services and cut out everything else. If individual states wish to have more services, let them tax and spend for their local populations. At least that way if businesses and people don't like it, they can leave without leaving the country.
> a position that assumes that the federal government has a right to Apple's money
I'm starting from a position that assumes the government is entitled to the prevailing tax rate that was law at the time the income was earned.
A tax rate that existed during a time when Apple became the world's most valuable company. It wasn't a colony with no representation suffering under a tyrannical monarchy that was leeching it like a parasite for the enrichment of an elite class. They ARE the elite class.
In fact the opposite is true. Apple benefited from all the services paid for by other tax payers (security and military, infrastructure, legal system, etc) and avoided paying their fair share using legal tricks and loopholes.
The result wasn't "fix the loopholes" it was "give the finger to the American people and government until we get someone elected that will change the rules in our favor"
I'm not saying government is the answer to all problems. Far from it. But there's no question Apple exists and is as successful as it is in large part due to the favorable environment America provides to business...and part of that environment exists due to things paid for with taxes. Never mind the ridiculous wealth inequality that is only continuing to grow in the U.S...this road leads to oligarchy.
Whether or not Apple/whatever was being shifty or not is a matter of opinion. The fact is, though, that nearly every other country already had a territorial tax system.
And Apple used bullshit rationale to hide their money in a territory where they did not earn their money. They tell Europe that all the innovation is from California, then tell USA that all the IP is owned by an Irish company.
If you or I decided we just didn't like the tax rate that applied to us and didn't pay our taxes for decades at a time on income we made overseas, what do you think would happen?
Corporations are treated as people only when it's convenient.
You and I don't have high-powered lawyers, lobbyists, loopholes, offshore accounts, subsidiaries, etc to hide behind.
This is an insult to every U.S. citizen...Apple wouldn't exist if it weren't for the U.S. and its tax-payers providing the environment that allowed Steve Jobs to create his company and become successful.
The rate they're being charged on this money is even lower than the new lower rate that they'll be charged on future income. Must be nice. Yay for corporate oligarchy.
True it seems we are getting the crumbs here falling between the cracks. But what is another realistic scenario? Tax them even more? Wouldn't they move to another tax haven. Why didn't that work so far, these tax tricks are not new.
The whole point is that earned income should not have to be repatriated to be taxed. If I as a citizen have a bank account in Switzerland that accepts my foreign income then I pay tax on that money in the year it was earned. The exact same rules should apply. Just because the bank account is outside of the US should not make a difference.
No other country taxes it's citizens this way. Do you think if a US citizen lives and works in Germany, they should still have to file and pay US income taxes even though they were living in Germany and earning a salary working in another country? That makes no sense to me.
If Apple pays double taxes on iPhones sold in Europe to European citizens, after Apple pays taxes to the EU, that's effectively a tax by America on citizens of the EU. The phones are made in China, shipped to Europe and sold to citizens of the EU for Euros, never having stopped on US soil, and being taxed in the EU. Why does it make sense for the US to apply a tax which effectively would amount to an increased tax on purchases by citizens of another country?
> The whole point is that earned income should not have to be repatriated to be taxed.
Agree. They used the double Irish paying basically no income tax there. Then were trying to move to Jersey (the island). This isn't new though and other companies were doing it. Is there any realistic short term hope that we'll finally close all the loopholes and the Apples and Googles of this country will start paying their fair share of taxes? Probably not.
But I don't see why not at least be happy with them paying some taxes and investing the money domestically? Yet everyone here is upset. It is not ideal, I'd rather have universal healthcare, basic income even, I'd rather these companies not be able to do these schemes and pay their fair share of taxes, but it is what it is, why not be happy for some positive thing happening.
My guess is that the path outside of the legislature doing anything is through the courts. Since corporations are citizens there must be some kind of constitutional law since human citizens don’t get the same benefit.
I haven't thought of the courts. It might be interesting to see what would happen. Fighting with a hundred billion dollar company in court is tough though. The have infinite legal resources basically.
And yeah, I see the point about it being considered a person but that is mostly what is called "legal fiction" (it is actually a technical term, not just me being silly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_fiction). And that only goes so far. Mostly to benefit the corporate entity not the society. I'd like to put some companies in prison for life for destroying the environment or poisoning its workers but it just won't work. It would be nice to see how far it would go though.
Probably not that but they could keep that even when their "profitable on paper" subsidiaries were spread around tax havens just like before.
But another interesting thing here is the interplay with EU countries. EU recently started to pay closer attention to Apple. Even forced them to look for a new place (they found Jersey I think). From my armchair understanding if they pay taxes in one place, say EU they might not need to pay it in US and vice-versa. Because of double taxation. As long as Apple was hoarding the money quietly and nobody could do anything it all good. As soon as EU started going after the money, it would benefit US to try to get to it sooner.
Whether politicians considered that or not not sure. But if they did, I can see them wanting to capture those taxes before EU got to them.
I for one am happy the part of them investing more in US. Don't see the reason people are upset about it.
If they bring the money back then inevitably they'd spend it back into the US economy either through direct job creation or buying things. If they do create jobs, the US gets most of its money from income tax, which would increase from the more jobs/higher wages. It feels like double dipping if we expect them to pay taxes on repatriating the money and then also taxing the wages that the repatriated money allows them to pay.
> If they bring the money back then inevitably they'd spend it back into the US economy either through direct job creation or buying things.
That is a misconception. It's not like they are storing dollar bills in warehouses on foreign soil. The bulk of the 'overseas' money is already invested, for a large part in the US. See page 49 in Apple's yearly report [1], to see how that money is currently invested: at the end of 2016 almost $42 billion dollars were invested in US treasuries, $131 billion in corporate securities. It doesn't say how much of those corporate securities are US companies, but it's probably the bulk. It's an accounting/tax fiction that it is currently 'overseas'.
Boy are you in for a shock when you find out the money that you spend, which you've paid income tax on it, goes to someone who pays income tax on it again!
> It feels like double dipping if we expect them to pay taxes on repatriating the money and then also taxing the wages that the repatriated money allows them to pay.
That is how our federal government constantly engages in double taxation. A corporation makes money + pays taxes, then pays employees who pay taxes. Those employees buy goods and services as well as have their own companies, all of which pay taxes on their incomes.
After five layers of this double-dipping, an initial million dollars only has $327,000 left, with the other two thirds having been paid in taxes (at an average of only 20%). Many people pay far more than 20% in federal taxes. The federal government takes in taxes most of every dollar this way.
Most likely they will buy back stock or issue dividends. They have to do what the majority of shareholders want with the money. If they don't they will be sued.
I get your point. Only caveat is corporations also create jobs and pay their workers, but you and I as individuals do not.
I know lots of Apple workers (directly or indirectly) are in China, but I wanted to point out why it's inappropriate to compare personal and corporate taxes.
> I get your point. Only caveat is corporations also create jobs and pay their workers, but you and I as individuals do not.
That's like saying the wheat creates work for the mill to make flour.
You can't have one without the other. Can we just get rid of the ridiculous notion that corporations provide more than the workers doing the actual work?
I don't think it is. If the > workers DOING THE ACTUAL WORK are able to provide more value than the corporation, then why are they working for the corporation instead of providing more value than the corporation by themselves; and paying themselves more than the corporation pays them? I think OP's argument could be an example of reductio ad absurdum.
The balance of power remains at the management level of a corporation, despite the fact that management hardly "does the work" that workers hired would be doing.
The same arguments applied to the peasantry of the feudal age. There are many more peasants than lords, but through an imbalance of power (military in the feudal age, and monetary in the modern age), the higher ups gets to claim the profits of the workers.
"Corporations are people, too!" as in, the people who hold their wealth in the form of corporations and generate their income from capital. Realize that it's not just an inane phrase, they are talking about themselves. They want to escape being taxed and they always succeed. Everybody else can pay, please.
What's incredible is that there are many more of regular people than these "people," yet regular people do not act cohesively to form a political bloc so they bicker amongst themselves.
Regular people own wealth in the form of corporations, too. Half of all Americans own stocks. Public and private sector pension funds own large amounts of stock. University endowments include stock investments and private equity. Sovereign wealth funds, such as the Alaska Permanent Fund, own large amounts of stock.
If we want to tax the rich, let's tax the rich. Let's not tax straw men that intermediate wealth for everyone, because that's what corporations are.
Half (46% in 2013) of all Americans owned some financial wealth, that's already counting indirect investments -- I believe this number came from a study by Ed Wolff. In the same year (2013), the bottom 80% together owned about 5% of the financial wealth in the US, under the same definition counting indirect investments (80%-99% owned about 50%, 99%-100% owned about 45%). So no, "everyone" does not benefit in the same way from corporate wealth and "regular people" (the bottom 80% seems like a pretty good proxy) have basically nothing to do with it, even in aggregate -- forget about per capita.
As for not taxing corporations at all and instead fully taxing dividends and gains, that's a different discussion with its own merits.
That’s kind of like saying that because I have a house on a tiny plot of land and my rich neighbor owns half the land in town, that property taxes don’t affect me. It doesn’t really follow.
It certainly woudn't affect you as much as your rich neighbour. And if the additional tax on land brought in more community services, you would be all for it, whilst your neighbour would be against (since he'd be paying a majority of that cost to fund said community service).
My point is that if you want to punish the other half of all Americans (including poor grandmothers living on pensions) as a means of taxing “the rich”—which is exactly what high corporate taxes do—that an injustice has been done. Advocating for the interests of a diverse half of the population is many things, but “elitist” is not one of them.
Apple wasn't breaking the law. Lawmakers were split and the majority simply didn't want apple to pay taxes. You can also hide your income from taxes if you are a business owning capitalist and not a commie laborer.
While I agree with you to some degree, we have the system we have. It has somehow survived through both tax-and-spend Democratic and fiscally conservative Republican administrations. It had to be fixed. So what say what you will about the current administration, they managed to get something done that even some of the most tax-hungry politicians in the nation previously failed to do.
> So what say what you will about the current administration, they managed to get something done that even some of the most tax-hungry politicians in the nation previously failed to do.
This is not terribly unique. We had a very similar (slightly more generous) repatriation tax holiday during the Bush Administration, in 2004.
The Democrats are tax and spend and the Republicans are borrow and spend. If you borrow and spend then you need inflation to eat away at the interest you are paying on the money. But you can only borrow so much and quantitatively ease (inflate) so much.
Also unique because a simple repatriation holiday is a far cry from restructuring our corporate tax code to make us competitive with the rest of the world from a tax perspective.
Really? Have you investigated how many countries on the planet tax their citizens and corporations making money in other countries?
The US marginal corporate tax rate is 38.92% compared to the worldwide average 22.5%. Until this recent tax bill passed, the US has had the 3rd highest marginal corporate tax rate in the world, surpassed only by the UAE and Puerto Rico.
The US federal government is greedy for cash not business friendly.
A higher theoretical corporate rate is largely offset by lower income tax [1]. In the end, income taxes are basically a business cost for any company with employees. On top of that, actual tax rates after accounting for deductions are much lower [2], and then you have lower sales tax: in Europe VAT averages around 20%, whereas in the US sales tax averages well below 10% - which is why European tourists are notorious shoppers when going to North America.
You can argue whether your dollars are well spent or whether there are internal disparities, but overall the US is hardly a tax hell.
> why shouldn't we teach people their position in life is largely predetermined?
Because it isn't and history is full of examples showing it isn't.
Circumstances (social, economic, etc) might sway things in certain directions, but in the same way we can't predict the weather a year out with 100% certainty, it's impossible to predict the course of a human being's life a year from now, let alone 10 or 20.
And that isn't even taking into account changing environments. Ask someone in the 1950's if Obama would become president and most would probably have said "no way"
It's also detrimental and discouraging to people even attempting to achieve their potential. It's like the photo of the horse tied to a chair by a rope. The horse only believes it can't move because it's been trained to think that is its reality.
Philosophies are really only important and useful in as much as they produce a certain result. History is also full of examples of those philosophies being used by the ruling class to suppress their "inferiors" in order to maintain their positions of privilege. Then you get things like the French Revolution.
Crowdsourceable? If you need a couple thousand users, would it be possible to run a marketing campaign, get pre-purchase commitments of $100-200, and give some rewards to early adopters? If you raise enough funding, you're good, if not, just cancel the campaign.
> Google Fiber works better when communities are connected together. So we’ve divided Kansas City into small communities we call “fiberhoods.” We’ll install only where there’s enough interest, and we’ll install sooner in fiberhoods where there’s more interest.
I have a gigabit connection, and regularly verify my bandwidth. It's usually not actually in four digits, but I see 800+ megabit on a pretty regular basis.
It amuses* me that the rural Northwest and Yorkshire Dales can get orders of magnitude faster yet cheaper broadband than my parents in suburban Manchester.
What's confusing about it? An open-source project gets started...dozens or hundreds of people contribute to make it what it is...then a relative handful go off and sell it, profiting off the hard work of others who never see a dime.
If you got a hundred people together to collaboratively build a mansion, volunteering their time and resources, with the implication that it would be something "open" and jointly built and owned by all...then flipped the house to a private company for $10MM and kept all the proceeds...that would seem a bit unethical, no?
That makes sense. I just don't usually hear that complaint about free software. Exploiting people's work for profit happens all over the place, but you're talking about exploiting work where there is explicit permission to exploit it. They are still releasing source, so if I hijack your metaphor, they kept all the proceeds but continued to build the mansion and give everyone with a phone the ability to instantly copy the mansion and make their own mansion-selling business if they want.
You can play the lottery ticket game and move on, taking your 2 years of vesting with you.
Only do this if you think you've set the company up for long-term success and it will still be successful even without you there.
Also only do this if you think you can make out better in the long-term (more money, more equity, equally sure thing elsewhere), otherwise just buckle down and ride out the remaining 2 years.
Unless you think your current company is trash, then just bounce.
