from Hacker News

On leaving Mapbox after 12 years

by gregoire on 6/20/22, 4:37 PM with 260 comments

by johnny313 on 6/20/22, 7:21 PM
> Here’s some advice as a jaded start-up veteran: business models and investment terms are kind of the only thing that matter. Even if you’re a lowly designer or engineer, you must understand what your company needs to do to be sustainable.
This is a key observation. Every incredible team and inspirational idea eventually has to make the unit economics work. The longer it takes for a leadership team to realize this and prioritize it, the more difficult it is for people (ICs and managers) to internalize the changes that need to be made. Worst of all is when the shift happens because runway is getting short, and "get rich quick" projects become the focus instead of building a good product.
> ...you must understand what your company needs to do to be sustainable. It very likely is different from what they’re doing now, and may come with unexpected ethical compromises.
This sounds like a difficult situation, but is certainly something people should think about. Things can get weird when a company is running out of money.
by jenny91 on 6/20/22, 7:15 PM
I'm saddened by what happened to Mapbox. It's such a recurring pattern of organizational transformation: from a small "mission-driven" group building cool shit that starts taking money (and pressure from investors) and slowly erodes their past core values, changing into a faceless money-making machine subservient to some huge market or industry. In that process most of the original opinionated crowd will slowly rotate out and the more "career"/bureaucratic types will prevail and take over.
Maybe unions and workers having more control could curb it? But in such a late stage it sounds almost impossible to achieve.
Cars are certainly a problem, but technology has by and far been a great thing, and I would question whether the gaming is really such a positive industry in the end either.
by mikl on 6/20/22, 6:26 PM
> Over the next few years, Mapbox tried to find success in a variety of industries: journalism, social media, travel, ect. We never hit numbers that were big enough for our investors. In the process, we abandoned our focus on Open Source and Open data. Then, as is the case with many mapping companies, Mapbox shifted focus to the auto industry. My fear of loss of control fully materialized at this point. I’m a lifelong bicycle commuter, and I think cars are unequivocally bad.
I wish people better understood what taking VC money means: trading control for money. While employees might _feel_ the company is still theirs, that’s only true to the extent that they hold majority control of the board of directors.
It’s certainly possible to take VC money and keep your original vision intact. But only if your original vision works well enough to keep your shareholders happy. Failing that, the board will push management to compromise with the ideals as much as needed to get a return on investment.
by woevdbz on 6/20/22, 8:48 PM
It sounds like OP wants to be a part of the kind of social change that fundamentally cannot exist independently of politics but trying to enact it without.
A single company, especially one that is not generating monopoly/oligopoly profits and is still dependent on funding, is not really able to: unionizing creates a steep competitive downside on the capital market that is not offset by enough employee retention benefit to be worth it, and that alone creates existential risk for the whole company. Long term, it simply helps another competitor to come up without a union.
Systemic problems need systemic solutions. It saddens me a bit that people want social change so much but dislike politics so much more that they take up the wrong fight, and then retreat to something like making videogames, which frankly as an industry has an even worse track record than tech in terms of respect for its workers.
I hope OP changes their perspective and fights a wider fight, either on behalf of a party or of a larger union.
by slively on 6/20/22, 6:16 PM
Here is the same story again. Sorry to hear about the inevitable ending, but glad they got to experience a good work culture for a time. At some point I hope we can shift the union discussion from just benefits and wages (which are not the biggest problems for SWE), to workers having a say in how a company operates. The idea that investing money garners complete control of a company is not healthy for the company or society at large. Workers risk more for the company and know more about what makes it succeed.
by hutch120 on 6/20/22, 11:30 PM
Like many others no doubt, I invested heavily into the mapbox-gl-js library (pre 2.0). I was able to build amazing value on top of that library including a routing voice navigation app for an aged care facility that is used to this day 24/7/365. It was a very sad day when they changed their licencing model to lock in vendors and I had to walk away from that investment of my time and effort. Luckily I had also worked and contributed to OpenLayers and Leaflet, so with significant effort was able to move my clients to those platforms.
I guess we now have some more insight into why this occurred.
> "In order to use most Services, you must register for or authenticate into a Mapbox account. When you use our application program interfaces (APIs), including our SDK Registry/Downloads API, each request to an API must include one of your account's unique API keys."
by erlich on 6/20/22, 11:59 PM
This is such a crazy and enraging read. If you don’t like your job, go join another company. It’s not as if devs don’t have plenty of high paying choices out there.
Especially for a startup that had struggled to find market fit, the last thing they need is a union.
Companies are not democracies and setting up a union is a hostile action. It basically says: here are the things we want and if we don’t get them we all stop working. If you want to run the company differently go setup your own company or buy some shares.
by thinkingemote on 6/20/22, 9:20 PM
There are some mapbox employees replying to comments here. I think some appear to be defensive of their employer, but if there are some who are in agreement with the article, I can't tell.
It's hard to know one way or the other. Might be nice for employees to identify themselves.
Personally I was intrigued with the formation of the union and knew that many of their employees were quite liberal:
The company evolved from something called Development Seed - basically a progressive humanitarian and development focused company. It is different from most SV companies. And based on open source and open data. Them stopping key open source projects and charging for use of just their mapping JS library (not data usage, any use of the code anywhere) was shocking.
I'd love to hear from an original principled humanitarian employee on what happened to the company and/or them. Maybe money is better. Maybe they left?
We don't hear much about the union at all. We assume from the usual SV unions that it was all about identity, inclusion and diversity but perhaps it was more about this conflict of their humanitarian roots and money.
by Brystephor on 6/20/22, 7:21 PM
I interviewed at MapBox within the past year. The team I was interviewing with gave a pretty bad outlook. Essentially it was everyone had left and they're trying to keep the lights on until they can hire enough to do new work.
To be clear, I did receive an offer and passed.
by tarkin2 on 6/20/22, 7:08 PM
It sounded like unionisation was an attempt at pushing back the ills of VC funding, especially taking back some control of the company’s direction, rather than concentrating on fairer pay and working conditions. I support unions but I’m not sure I support them controlling the direction of the company: most of the time the business people, frankly, know best about profitability.
The whole story reinforced the idea that if you build a company with value but no profits eventually you either abandon it as a business or give control to VCs, and if you had any emotional or political investment in the company you will be disappointed.
by sbussard on 6/20/22, 10:16 PM
Key takeaway: investors ruin startups.
It’s that belief that still keeps me from going that route even while working through a regular career for several years. If the project succeeds, well you’ve already sold it to the people who ru(i)n the world. Bootstrapping is so expensive but you diversify power in tech. Don’t sell out!
by tiffanyh on 6/20/22, 8:26 PM
> A company like Mapbox hadn’t ever unionized before, so it seemed like an exciting experiment
Call me crazy, but taking such a drastic move as unionizing shouldn’t be trivialized into just being an “experiment”.
EDIT: why the downvotes? Why not simply reply with your thoughts so that we can have a thoughtful discourse.
by tinco on 6/21/22, 4:56 AM
Odd story about MapBox, we used to be a customer, and their product was very solid so we were happy but we were using it in a 3d engine which was causing loads of map requests driving up the costs. We only had a couple users and the bills were already in the hundreds per month. So I contacted them to see if we could come to some sort of agreement. The person who replied had a familiar name, I didn't remember where I'd heard that name before so I googled it, and it turned out he was one of the 3 kids that sexually assaulted a drunk girl during a spring break. Even though their abhorrent behavior was caught on video and presented as evidence they got away with less than a slap on the wrist, and the girl suffered emotional trauma and dropped out of university.
Definitely a heavy thing to have show up on the first page of your Google results, and I cross referenced with his LinkedIn it was definitely him, so I would expect him to address it somewhere. But nothing, never a public apology or even a statement, nothing from Mapbox. That was so crazy to me, surely whoever interviewed him did a minimal background check, and they just thought it was ok? It felt really off, so I found a different technical solution and never talked to them again.
by iamleppert on 6/20/22, 6:53 PM
Blame your leadership for creating such a bloated company that the only thing to satiate investors was to sell out completely to auto companies. I interviewed at Mapbox at one time, a ridiculous 3-day interview at their SF office where lots of PM's and managers were buzzing around hosting meetings, giving the perception of getting stuff done when in fact it was even clear to me, an outsider, that nothing was being accomplished. I found the product to be lacking and the team to be outsized for the quality and depth of the product. The core business appeared very weak and on VC life-support.
by astrange on 6/20/22, 11:46 PM
> Then, as is the case with many mapping companies, Mapbox shifted focus to the auto industry. My fear of loss of control fully materialized at this point. I’m a lifelong bicycle commuter, and I think cars are unequivocally bad. They ruin cities, contribute to environmental decline (even electric cars!) and kill people.
All these things are correct except for the ruin cities part - that’s a US city planning problem.
Japan, everyone’s favorite high public transit country with a lot of demand for maps, has a higher car ownership % than the US. They just discourage using them for personal trips and commutes via small roads, toll highways, expensive parking etc.
But once you’re a family or want to go somewhere low density and take some luggage, it’s hard to beat them.
What it looks like to me is this guy wanted to work at a geospatial PBC but didn’t know such a thing existed.
by reocha on 6/20/22, 9:10 PM
Does anyone know why tech companies tend to be so hostile to unions? I'm not sure if its due to the large amount of venture capital invested or other reasons.
by talos on 6/21/22, 2:07 AM
I'm curious what the split was in Mapbox union organizing interest between Engineering/Product/Design/Data and Sales/Marketing/other go-to-market roles.
Browsing the old union website (https://www.mapboxworkersunion.org/) almost all of the supporters of unionization were on the engineering side of the house, much more than I'd expect if you randomly sampled the org for job titles.
I wonder why that is?
by tschellenbach on 6/20/22, 7:49 PM
VC funding enables the high salaries in tech. You can definitely be bootstrapped and work 4 days a week, you'll just have a hard time earning your current salary.
by Helmut10001 on 6/21/22, 4:06 AM
Kudos to the author for prioritizing of ethical and moral concerns.
by prescriptivist on 6/20/22, 9:04 PM
A lot of negative sentiment about Mapbox in this thread. I have been prototyping a (native) app powered by Mapbox -- would it be a bad idea to hitch oneself to their ecosystem?
by kfox2010 on 6/21/22, 1:29 AM
Trying to understand how in the same short form piece we get: > "I still bristle at the word “career”. Not for me."
And then end it with:
> "The skills and connections I developed at Mapbox set me up for a smooth and satisfying career transition."
So do you have a career or not?
by worik on 6/21/22, 6:57 AM
"Fight for motives beyond profit."
Sigh. Profit is good. Profit is necessary. Profit is not a great motivator IMO. It motivates, but alone it motivates the wrong things the wrong way.
Money is my only motive available to me at the moment, and I am sad about that.
by dougSF70 on 6/21/22, 8:07 AM
When it is hard for worker-bees to transition to become manager-bees then unions are important and necessary. In any other business where worker-bees can become manager-bees then they should take that opportunity if they want to create change. Unions in tech businesses smack of entitlement, if you want to change the working conditions at [insert tech corp name here] then join management otherwise leave. Small companies change as they evolve. Noble ambitions are set aside in favor of profit (rightly so). With that, early employees may well feel the firm they joined is not the same firm they are working at. In which case they should leave because the boat has already sailed and there are probably a 1000 more compatible candidates willing to work at the company. I hear non-profits pay incredibly well and do amazing work.
by brundolf on 6/21/22, 3:33 AM
Maybe I'm cynical, but I just assume some version this happens to every company at some point in their growth. Like the author I would jump ship at this point, but I don't think I'd be caught off-guard by it
by rahulnair23 on 6/21/22, 11:43 AM
Always jarring to hear the claim
> Technology is fundamentally neutral
It is in the same way guns are fundamentally neutral. You can't view it without context. Include that and it is clear that tech (or guns) isn't neutral at all.
by donohoe on 6/20/22, 9:30 PM
Is it fair to say that MapBox is moving into auto services?
Or to put it another way, is it not a good idea for me to move to a different provider for basic mapping services?
by worldmerge on 6/21/22, 3:25 AM
Just looked up mapbox after not checking it out for a few years. Oh wow, that's changed a lot :(
by jjmorrison on 6/20/22, 11:41 PM
Thinking that organizing a union to change the direction of the company is an exciting experiment is really irresponsible. All the paycheck everyone at the company is getting needs to come from somewhere. You do not have the right to bet everyone's paycheck on an exciting experiment.
by draw_down on 6/20/22, 4:43 PM
The only thing they actually mention doing at the company during all that time was the union drive.
Did they create products? Features? Internal tools? Design guides/system? Any actual work? Or just agitating for a union that their coworkers clearly did not want?
by xyzzy4747 on 6/20/22, 6:04 PM
In my opinion you’re hired somewhere to work there and be productive, not to unionize. Workers who join companies and then try to subvert the entire system are a cancer to the org.