Borland was losing over a hundred million in revenue while Microsoft was offering seven figure signing bonuses. There's no way they could have paid more than what MS was, since MS was using their war chest to kill the company.
If they were losing a hundred million in revenue before their best employees were poached then we should thank Microsoft for saving these people‘s careers.
as the op says - they could have issued stock instead of real money
I call equity "Bison dollars": https://youtu.be/Shxiy7l5b_4
It's only worth anything if the world-domination plans go off without a hitch.
"Stock Instead of Real Money" is my new band name. So much meaning in just five words :)
Equity schmequity, and we don't know what Borland did or didn't offer to keep people around. We just know MS offered more.
We know for sure that Borland didn’t offer enough. And we can reasonable speculate that they didn’t offer a significant ownership stake.
Anders got 3mil signing bonus. Hard to counter that.
Easy - give him 4 mil in equity.
On the other hand if the company doesn’t have good prospects, then indeed there is nothing you can do.
Personally I would rather take cash.
You would likely think differently if you cared about the product and had invested time in developing it.
Having said that, there is no evidence their developers felt differently to you.
I do almost nothing but develop products. However as product becomes mature I start looking for new things to do. Also maintenance of mature product requires different type of people, not inventors.
Obviously this isn’t how Anders Hejlsberg, who invented and then ‘maintained’ C# for a decade thinks about things.
Re:Ask HN: What Happened to Borland?
by AtlasBarfed on Friday December 10, 2021 @05:01PM
(#29515978)
a million dollar signing bonus? Is there documentation of this?
I remember hearing rumors that microsoft would pay some developers $1 million a year and tell them to just take a vacation instead of work at borland.
Man, 1999 sounds wild.
Long term this kind of practice is bad for engineers the same way Wal-Mart driving other retailers out of town with low prices due to their size was bad for small businesses and small towns in the 90s and 00s.
Re:Ask HN: What Happened to Borland?
by ConcernedCoder on Friday December 10, 2021 @03:21PM
(#29515005)
how do I upvote a comment more than once?
This was on Borland for not adequately valuing their staff.