It's easy to get something wrong, but it's hard to get it right.

A broken clock is right twice a day.

You have to be right more than twice a day to lead a company like Stripe.

Bad metaphor. There are a million wrong decisions that could be made any time at any day, and only a handful of options.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone here express the sentiment that execs and CEOs are geniuses for leading a profitable company. If anything, it seems like it’s us engineers who like to consider ourselves brilliant, and that the simple-minded management should be so lucky to have us.

Of course the stripe founders are not absolved of blame. They made the wrong call.

But overall Stripe has A+ execution -- of which very little was luck -- and the founders deserve credit for that.

Yes and we really should be crying for the software developers who worked for slave wages and had no opportunity to save.

At least they did something useful and actually earned their pay.

Like creating a company that gives thousands of people jobs? Or creating infrastructure to enable millions of web based businesses the ability to mindlessly process payments? God, I miss the old HN. This place is reddit now.

Who built the railroads? J. P. Morgan, or the millions of people who worked for him?

Not surprising to see execs and founders on here patting each other on the back and trying to convince everyone that they deserve their millions because of how innovative they are all the "value" they create. Looks like the old HN to me.

I’m neither an executive or a founder. I’m just self aware enough to know that software engineers aren’t exactly starving.

Another entry in the decades-long saga: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=149257