It’s actually not difficult to believe at all in my opinion.
They had 105b plans prepared, filed and approved by outside entities. You can see in the SEC documents and company filings all of the sales were pursuant to those plans, which are also commonly done to cover tax obligations throughout the year due to the vesting of stock.
KPMG passed SVB’s audit and several top financial firms had SVB’s default risk at around 2.5%.
The executives didn’t expect a “run on the bank” and those longer-term assets had been underwater for awhile & the financial market knew but expected they would be fine when they came to maturity.
They booked a loss to shift funds into shorter-term securities with higher yields to hedge and hindsight is 20/20 but they should’ve hedged sooner.
Overall, I don’t believe there was anything nefarious here & if we dislike the 105b rules, as many do, that should be the outcome of this review - that they need to change.
Same - wasn’t an employee but used it often in ~2013-2015 timeframe. I’m pretty sure the valuation was many many many multiples of any sort of revenue based metric, wasn’t it?
I read it the exact opposite way. Google sees the writing on the wall that this is coming sooner rather than later to the US so with a “bit” more work they can have their common components of the phone be manufactured as OEM parts essentially & provide that direct line to iFixIt.
They give great pricing to iFixIt and there you go, the margin they may lose on the phones through this is off-set to an extent via the common parts they’re now supplying.
They also know if they don’t provide the parts, which is to say they need to produce the top 5-10 components in a single fashion instead of an assembly line, someone else will so they seem to be getting ahead of the game.
They are actually modeling the car industry because folks are insanely specific about wanting OEM parts to the extent you have to specify in many contracts you can use OEM or equal quality 3rd party parts.
There are even some warranties (which cost more) that specify they will only use OEM parts so Google probably also sees they can charge a premium for “OEM” similar to the auto industry.
My father has been working in COBOL since the 80s, and his “reference” books are literally a couple of 4” 3 ring binders that he’s assembled over 40 years now of coding.
Everytime the bank tries to switch away from COBOL they run into problems ranging from code latency to lack of support for certain features in the new language among other issues thus far.
I really don’t know what the banks that run cobol mainframes are going to do as most have ignored the Father Time problem where cobol programmers aren’t getting any younger and the language, in my opinion, is miserable compared to the “magic” of newer era languages.
My pops also has made less money then I did as an engineer at a tech co with 3 years experience so banks aren’t valuing the work these folks do very much either.
I’ve told my pops he can do consulting once he retires and make a killing because there’s gonna be a major shortage of cobol folks and a massive amount of mainframe code out there that needs maintenance or a transition into a newer era language.
Edit:
- The author is wrong here
“If you need to change old programs, hiring experienced programmers and teaching them COBOL is the cheap part.”
There is not a surplus of developers or entry level folks willing to learn cobol over another entry level language, so it’s not cheap and it’s not “easy”.
>> There is not a surplus of developers or entry level folks willing to learn cobol over another entry level language, so it’s not cheap and it’s not “easy”.
Wrong, there are literally 10,000s of former cobol developers due to decades of offshoring. I know of several thousand in from one local company alone. Go look for these job listings, you won't find them because they're all offshore.
Offshore isn’t a realistic solution, the quality & language barriers that come into play significantly slow down any sort of production cadence compared to in-house.
Pre-Covid the cost of just getting my “specific doses” of the compounds I needed was $850 with insurance. Regulations changed apparently and they couldn’t reuse the same combo of like pollen, cat/dog etc so each client needs a “custom” formulated dosage.
Add in the $10 doctor visit co-pay 2x / week when getting the shot, that’s $80/month already.
So $960 + 850 is $1910, so I’d save $710 using these drops instead of the shots.
Pretty harsh and uncalled for feedback that’s not constructive at all.
Calling them scumbags because of their T&Cs instead of asking for why they have such language in there is counterproductive in any civil conversation.
Maybe there’s precedence they’re following or it was an overzealous lawyer writing it and they haven’t taken a second look because you know, getting a business off the ground is hard work.
I’ve seen a lot of folks come to Arizona during the pandemic, and I think more will move here. Outside of the summers, which aren’t that bad because you have A/C, and in the summer you’re an hour from being in the forest with pine trees and three hours from Flagstaff where it’s great weather year round (plus a ski mountain in the winter) you got a lot of folks from California coming & staying while looking at much more affordable housing & taxes.
Especially as Arizona has become more and more liberal/left leaning, you got less folks viewing it as hostile & enjoying the fact you have a lot of hiking/outdoor activities, rivers, lakes and camping all within a short driving distance.
I'm a transplant here, and I feel like I'm living in a weird post-apocolyptic nightmare with all the Trump signs and Trump flags on their giant lifted trucks. I really hope that this state can pull it's head out of Joe Arpaio's ass, and wriggle leftwards a little bit.
I think the weirdest and most noticeable thing is people riding motorcycles without helmets.
That said; yeah, the heat is not really that bad (it took me about 2 years to acclimate), and there are options for relief. Surprisingly, I think we get more rain in Arizona than in California (not this summer though), and winters are definitely much colder in Arizona than they are in California.
As another poster said, companies aren’t going to risk lose talent in troves if they enact a work from office policy.
When you got major companies like Twitter, google, Facebook, and others already saying WFH is a permanent option that’s put pressure on others to figure out how to make it work.
Talent is needed at many, many companies and if the talent is a.) needed and b.) good enough the company will make “exceptions” to the rule.
Enough companies make enough exceptions and it’s a mainstay policy.
Overall, the other part is that companies that now offer remote work as a permanent option may not have to pay SF salaries so that’s a bonus to the company. It’ll go both ways, the company can say I’m not requiring you to live in high COL area and we have an office in X city, we pay 10% above the market average of ~35-40 cities so they’re still competitive on pay (assumption being that most companies move to this model, FAANG may overpay still but that’s always been the case) so now what do you do?
As someone who has worked both in the Bay Area and outside of it, I moved here because of the job market, not because of the salary. I would take a salary cut any day to move away, but I want to stay with my current company AND keep access to the SF Bay Area job market.
Literally the only thing keeping me from listing my house right now and moving to a different area is that not enough Bay Area companies have committed to permanent WFH yet. Once that happens, I'm gone.
there is a huge difference, not only in the kinds of work you can put on your resume, but in the quality of co-workers, and what you can learn from them.
You can approximate that experience in some other areas (Provo, Boston, Austin, San Luis Obispo, etc) but a LOT of American cities are still technological backwaters, and there's nothing available but garbage jobs that will drain your soul and turn you into a code zombie.
Depends on the exact WFH environment. If companies go with permanent full remote option, then I'd pick an area with zero or low state income taxes, warm weather, and cheap housing. Las Vegas area, South Florida. Texas is interesting but I don't know much about the cities there, having never lived or visited.
If companies look like they're aligning on more of a hybrid model where you can WFH but they expect you to show your face in the office every so often, then I'd have to stick to $CA$ and maybe head out somewhere on US-50 between Folsom and Placerville, or maybe way up I-5 somewhere towards Shasta.
The other case is they didn’t want to deal with going through an IPO, got a great offer for their business and a major liquidity event for their employees.
Going public, despite profits made, really sucks the soul out of a company.
Twilio and Segment’s visions align pretty well so I think that played a role as well. Outside of golden handcuffs, a large portion of their employees are liquid immediately as opposed to an IPO with a 6-12 month lockup for employees plus the rise/fall of a stock price during that time.
All in all, I think they made the right choice to sell instead of going for an IPO.
They had 105b plans prepared, filed and approved by outside entities. You can see in the SEC documents and company filings all of the sales were pursuant to those plans, which are also commonly done to cover tax obligations throughout the year due to the vesting of stock.
KPMG passed SVB’s audit and several top financial firms had SVB’s default risk at around 2.5%.
The executives didn’t expect a “run on the bank” and those longer-term assets had been underwater for awhile & the financial market knew but expected they would be fine when they came to maturity.
They booked a loss to shift funds into shorter-term securities with higher yields to hedge and hindsight is 20/20 but they should’ve hedged sooner.
Overall, I don’t believe there was anything nefarious here & if we dislike the 105b rules, as many do, that should be the outcome of this review - that they need to change.