I remember when I sat in an interview for a position at marchFIRST in Melbourne, Australia. And when it came time in the interview for them to ask "Have you got any questions for us?"
"Yeah, look this is kind of awkward, but I've seen marchFIRST mentioned quite a number of times on this website called fuckedcompany.com... Is that indicative of any issues I should be aware about?"
"Oh, don't worry about that, thats just our american parent company"
"Oh great"
So I accepted the offer, worked off-site for 3 months, and then marchFIRST went chapter 11.
Should have paid more attention to that damned website.
It was like the Tres Comma club, but tackier.
marchFIRST was a Nasdaq traded public company whose peak stock
price reached $52. By the time the company filed for
bankruptcy, it traded for pennies ($0.16 on March 28, 2001).
Translation: "don't worry about that, that's just the company you are applying for"
In the first dot-com boom, many companies went public before profitability. So anyone could see how much cash they had and how fast they were burning through it. I just calculated how much time they had left until cash went to zero. That's the "death date" listed. It was embarrassingly accurate.
Any thoughts to share the code which you used to analyse edgar? :)
Downside was written in Perl, in 1999. There's a system in there to parse financial statements written in HTML for humans, but it's for HTML 3.1 and was never updated.
I used to get hate mail from CFOs over this.
?Having said this until US interest rates rise or unless a white swan event occurs (I am Australian so all swans are black here) the music will keep playing and the everyone will keep dancing.
But there are other differences now too. You can't simply ridicule anything anymore. Back in 2000 we could point to a company trying to sell designer kitty litter on the Internet and laugh at how stupid it was and how greedy and full of hubris the founders were. Now, everyone's trying to "change the world" and empower everyone and "enable the sharing economy" and, well you can't criticize that without sounding like a big meanie. There are a lot of web sites out there that are simply never going to be businesses. They have their runway to burn through, and once it's done, they'll be blogging about Their Amazing Journey as they get acqui-hired. But when you point this out, you're just being negative--you're a jealous wantrepreneur.
Maybe this is an old-timer's "get off my lawn" rant, but I preferred it when it was OK to poke fun at things that you knew were ridiculous.
It came off as an old timers rant, but I still enjoyed it :)
Maybe we strayed a bit too far from the "greed is good" 80's. There's nothing wrong with starting a business to make money.
It's more pervasive than just dotcoms though. I see the same things we stuff like solar roadways or hyper loop is criticized.
We are all Steve and this time will not be different.
Rather, it was a reference to the fact that in the last few years, any time someone suggests that we might be in another tech bubble, there's always someone waiting to point out how "this time it's different", because now the web is mature and all the stupid startups are not really as stupid as they seem (not like in the first dot-com bubble).
Actually, it's a bit of a double entendre in that sense -- even the first dot-com bubble was rife with statements about how everything is different now, and we're in a "new economy" and all those "old economy" concepts like revenue and profit are totally obsolete. Plus ça change...
Do you think it would take off if I would do it for real?
Should we poll the community in an "Ask HN" thread to see if people want this?
So, it can sometimes be difficult to get a proper read on signal. However, it seems to be among the best data source out there.
I would take glassdoor with a grain of salt.
today there is https://www.thelayoff.com/ ; well, it is similar but not quite the same...
is useful if you are working for a company with a rich history of layoffs, it allows to check for recent rumors on the subject.