That’s why, and call me unethical, I never do more than necessary at work. Never help outside of business hours, never engage with rich bosses. Switch every 2-3 years to new places. Maximise my income (in real money, not imaginary stocks) while trying to work the minimum.
For dreams and craft, I have my side projects.
As an engineer if you are gonna be a rank and file employee you need to do it for your own reasons. I think the main good reasons to do it are:
1. It's relatively chill and you value the stability. You deliver competence from 9-5 then go home to your family or some other thing that's more important to you than work.
2. You really enjoy the pure engineering side and find meaning in the technical artifact you're creating. Probably it's open source and has some value/community outside of your employer.
3. You're gaining valuable experience that you can later leverage into something else. Probably you're in the first 5 years of your career.
If the main thing driving you is growing a business, and you don't directly own (not options or RSUs or whatever, actual real equity) a significant slice of it, you are very likely misdirecting your energy.
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It sounds like the staff here thought they were in case 2, but they were not. I think that the article explains the reason why nicely: the thing they were building was not part of the commons.
For now it can work better to be a contractor and have your 'meaning' be a positive reputation in your industry.
More like being a medieval blacksmith. You don't mind what you're making, but you're known in your village by the quality of your work.
Which promptly imploded, taking stolen charity donations with it.
When a builder builds a house, or a doctor mends a broken arm, the community has one more home and one less broken arm - and the community is left richer even after the builder and doctor have been paid.
That house will be keeping a family warm and dry 20, 40, 100 years into the future, and the patient will be using that arm for the rest of their life.
I can see how a person with a job like that could take pride in the fact they've contributed to their community, in addition to the fact they've gotten paid.
Of course, a lot of jobs aren't that way, but have tricksy bosses who will try to convince you they are. Which is what it sounds like happened in Komoot's case.
There’s nothing you can do that makes you irreplaceable, even if you’re the only one in the world that can do it.
It’s fine if you want to stay in your happy place as the only one that can do X and then keep selling them on the value you provide and how you’re doing big things. But, nothing lasts.
Don’t burn out, but sitting on your ass is a bad strategy.
The recipe of success is also to do a little bit more (15%) than your colleagues, be reliable and punctual.
That's not unethical at all, in fact I think that's a highly intelligent strategy to look out for the little guy (namely you) in the bear pit of tech capitalism. Anyone buying into the "we're more than a company, we're family" schtick is just another sucker to be worked remorselessly to line the pockets of the VPs and C-suite.
My previous employers included me in their Director/VP meetings, and the family schtick evaporates pretty quickly when they start talking cuts. One VP in a meeting, quite literally, proposed laying off an entire team of veteran engineers (most with young kids) and the very next thing that came out of this doucebag's mouth was "are we ordering in some lunch?". They do not care a whit about you and once you realise that then you should just look to yourself first and foremost and forget accepting below-average salaries just for some "mission".
They will happily kick you to the curb for any of the following reasons, which I have personally witnessed in the past few years,
- Their pal is looking for a job that's currently occupied by someone else. So they fire and hire.
- They want to deflect blame for their own failures, so they fire a bunch of folks who had nothing to do with the failures.
- They want to appear 'ruthless' to the CEO, so fire people to enhance their own image.
- They do a clear out of their previous incumbents staff once they replace someone and bring in their own crew.
There's also the argument an abundance of cynicism - as well as being occasionally aimed at a misjudged target (eg you work for bosses who do try to do the right thing) - is corrupting to the self and wider society.
This remark is specially apt with regard to the leitmotiv of TFA; one sees, indeed, an entirely different picture when the goal of an organization is something else than growing and making profits.
Is this "we are a family here" for the people that don't fall anymore for the "family" con?
It was shitty. Pretty much all services were terrible since people just did the minumum.
I've noticed US going down this path for a few years now and I can't figure out why in the frigging world would you cheer on towards such horrible society.
All the best places I've lived at were great because people cared about the jobs and other work they did.
In very infrequent cases can you achieve any noticeable (for society) results without being part of a large org.
They may not be known beyond their local communities, but they have impact on society. Most of them are contend with that. If you’re looking to change the world, then that’s likely not good enough, but then again, if you’re looking to do that it’s unlikely that you will achieve that as a rank and file employee in a corporation.
It may seem over the top, but my feeling is we as a society need to stop accepting, excusing or even applauding behavior like this for our own good. This should be a stain on their names for the rest of their lives and the rest of society might consider treating them as outcasts.
I know this is an extremely unpopular position to take on a platform where half of the people dream of creating a company, pretending it is the mission of their lives, just to sell it to the highest bidder and live a life in luxury after. Everybody has to watch out for themselves they would say. If your goal is to leave the planet worse off than before that is the sure way to do it. This is a model for a society of sociopaths who kill everything good and it is time we start putting up some resistance.
It is weird, but I do not trust the app any more in planning routes either. Sometimes i have the feeling bugs in the planning part already appear. The stability of the service for sure decreased.
Also there are more nag screens about the premium offer (dude I paid for the other great offer already!).
Very unhappy with this. I hope the komooters build an alternative. I’m happy to support them. I know that eventually I might get betrayed again.
For today I planned another route with komoot. If somebody knows an alternative? I like the komoot user photos because it gives an impression of the (gravel) roads. Plus the suggested routes and the planning ux are great. Im stuck with komoot for now.
I have used brouter.de as a GPX editor instead of going on site to the route, and used Umap on OSM.ch to upload a GPX:
https://brouter.de/brouter-web/ http://www.vintagemtb.org/maps https://umap.osm.ch/
Planning routes can be easily done offline with desktop apps. Don't even start with mobile use, I have never seen a web based tool where you could plan a route by tapping on a smartphone screen without pulling your hair out of desperation.
In OsmAnd~ just remember to fix the track to existing paths, otherwise OsmAnd~ routing engine may have difficulty to guide you. I've never dig into it, but it looks like there can be a small offset between the GPX and Osm map.
In combination with downloadable map tiles, I can plan and ride my route completely offline which saves battery and keeps things running in the more rural areas.
The route planner is really nice. I actually plan all my routes in the smartphone and export to gpx if necessary because it's the most comfortable way to do it.
What I also really appreciate is, that it's not a subscription based payment model. So you pay once for downloadable tiles etc. and for the app and can just use it without worrying about updated terms etc.
BUT, and that's a major BUT, the version is deprecated and will be ended soon in favour of the subscription based locus map 4. I don't miss anything in locus map 3 and don't see any benefits. I'll just hope the app will work as long as possible without official support.
However, it really sucks for employees. I know a guy who joined Komoot a few weeks before the sale, and who was among 80% fired right after the sale finalised. They've been negotiating the terms of sale and hiring people simultaneously -- that's just insane.
Having said that, if someone just joined before the sale and is laid off, they should get a generous layoff package similar to longer term employees since they may have just quit a job to go there and are now back on the market.
[0] a) For instance Komoot's exports for GPS head units were not accurate enough to be as helpful with picking/finding faint/overgrown trails b) RWGPS UI makes it a bit easier to work with OpenStreetMap's inaccuracies. c) Its auto routing seems to consistently work a bit better than Google's if I want to ride on a roads where car drivers are less likely to try and kill me. (not sure how well Strava does this)
To assume otherwise is foolish and naive. That’s simply not how employment works.
It is in Europe - one or three months are the standard notice periods I believe?
I agree that insane isn't exactly the right word for this. More like "assholish" -- this person has just switched jobs, and now they have to go through all this stress over again. This could have been easily avoided.
If this is the case, I'm just gonna sit on my ass this week and take my paycheck. If there is no long term assurance, why should I even try?
Never believe a company that you are part of a community if the content you create for them cannot be exported and published somewhere else. I am especially sceptical if someone says they never sell.
The only way to stop owners pulling the rug underneath all this community given content is by keeping the content open source. Promise the users you will do best with their data by keeping it out in the open so that if you don't, someone else will. Keep the door ajar.
Unfortunately this is another "if we all just" solution that humanity seems unable to do.
To use the full potential of AlpiMaps you need to generate your maps. I can generate them but i dont have the fundings to host the maps on a server (would need a lot of space and computing power to regularly generate maps per country, per regions ...). Instead i explain how to generate the maps for any region you see fit.
Also AlpiMaps has a very small user panel right now so it had many bugs i am sure (especially on iOS which i dont use daily). I am though 100% willing to fix/improve/add any feature. Just share/explain on github.
I am not often on HN so if you have any question please use github
If users are contributing the content of the app, it seems they should have a way to hold the owners accountable.
Alternatively if Komoot was a worker co-op a sell-out would only be possible with consent from the employees. Consumer co-ops (where users can vote too) are also an option but with more caveats.
Unless you already have large interested parties "bribing" (not technically of course) the group of controlling members tends to be a weakness of anything crowd sourced.
Especially since it is rarely cut and dry. If the finances aren't working out is it better to sell and keep the site online or not? Are intrusive pop ups begging for donations a better option? There isn't a singular true best option.
IMO non-profit or charitable status is a must for sustainable, open, community-driven projects. One of the dumbest takes I often hear is "this for-profit corporation was good and kind before financial capitalism came along". Financial capitalism was always there, the for-profit corporation is pretty much a pure product of financial capitalism. Don't believe any for-profit startup that tells you it is all about the social mission, it is not. Even if the company is European.
Easiest? Pay yourself a nice fat salary and use most of the rest of the money to hire “nonprofit management companies” which may or may not be you or your friends in a cheap costume.
> Unusually, none of the employees held stock in the startup
Sigh. Even with equity I’d question tying your purpose to the company like that. Without equity it’s just very silly.
A for-profit company, owned by a few founders, takes your data and provides no data licensing terms or contractual guarantees. It’s legally speaking their data. Everyone else has basically no legal rights to anything on the ”platform”.
Then they attract both employees and users due to their good mission, ”we will never sell”. Surprise! They sell and leave everyone hanging.
From a EU perspective I get it. This is upsetting and surprising even. But from a US perspective this is just business as usual.
That privately owned data is a pile of gold that grew by the day, eventually big enough to buy out even the most passionate and stubborn founders. The company was never what the author expected it was, even before the sale – it was a projection of what they wanted it to be.
I applaud the efforts to fix the business model and lack of data sovereignty. The more people that ”wake up” and understand the flaws of current system, the better chances we can fix it.
I once applied to their job listing. I adored the idea of working there. Now all I can think about is "I'm glad they rejected me"
For example, Evernote was losing money on server costs and after almost 20 years of existence did they really need a generous free tier to build up a user base? All that BS had to do for Evernote to make a profit was nerfing the free tier.
For instance it took until about 2010 to confirm that we were already headfirst into the Garbaceous Period by 2005, but it was just not that obvious at the time.
Before you know it the Enshittocene crept up without fanfare but the type of extinction it foments might not have been possible without the decline in conditions that came before.
At least in the US, if you tell me 'We'll never sell out' and I take a job with no equity because of it, that's a verbal legal contract and I have grounds to sue if you then sell out.
In theory, at least, our legal systems discourage/prevent this sort of lying and backstabbing. In practice, perhaps not.
Much of the article is waxing poetic about the commons and the corrupting influence of monetization and capital, yet the main thrust against genAI is training on data from walled gardens and expanding access. As far as I can read it, it's a fairly pro-capital angle as well, in that a nonprofit AI outfit who was training on copyrighted data would also be vilified. Seems incompatible with the rest of their article. But I suppose one has to have a strong stance against AI these days.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Copyright walled gardens/publishers are some of the most flagrant examples of walling off the cultural commons. It's also necessary in order to support livelihoods of individuals, but it can incentivize "bad" behavior like changing the mission in order to pursue mass appeal and profit. Likewise, completely disregarding the fact that 150 employees is something that is funded by growth isn't a fair representation of the whole story here. A group of hikers doesn't magically create a service like that from thin air.
Maybe what the author is trying to advocate for something like a corporate structure with capped profit? Regardless, their arguments need work.
The task was to create a React app with no other dependencies other than vanilla Leaflet, which would allow you to draw routes on the map, and it should allow you to export the route as a GPX. I had 8 hours to do it.
They kept shitting over my solution for a good hour on the call for god knows what reason. Snarky remarks the whole time. If you're so dissatisfied, there's no point unless you take joy in doing so.
Knowing better today, I should've just thanked them and left the meeting.
E.g. in Switzerland there's the free official Swiss Topo app with all the official maps incl. all the trail data. Can easily create/import/export tours.
I am therefore thankful to the old Komoot Team and I'm sad for them.
There should be a tracker specifically for this.
Is there a legal way to ensure that a company adheres to claims like "we won't sell"? It seems that trusting companies with their word without any underwriting is foolish
As a user, nothing much will probably change. You will still be able to share your personal data with the world.
It’s a little overreaching to say because users did this , they are responsible for making the company popular and then getting sold off to a make money for the founders and then these users are responsible for the blight of the employees (who were also “users” probably).
Vaguely reminds me of some company with the motto "don't be evil"
Your best bet to keep a social platform for a long time is a coop. You’ll never get investors, which is the point, but you also aren’t a foundation or a nonprofit with shackles (unless you get to OpenAI levels of creativity.)
So there's a system that needs to be reformed, it's not so much a matter of executives' personal attitudes.
(Transcript available, search for and hit the "transcript" button.)
I wonder how they'll do long-term.
No shit
> I’ll argue that Komoot is neither a moral failure nor an outlier but the capitalist system of value extraction working exactly as intended for the platform owners.
If it wasn't for Bending Spoons it would have been another private equity firm. It's not about them being particularly evil, it's about living in a system that makes their existence inevitable.
I'd say it's about time for the komoot folks to organize and create a coop and stick it to komoot. A coop would probably be even more compatible with the dirtbag lifestyle!
I don't think that's true. Not even sure what your point is
The only way to stop owners pulling the rug underneath all this community given content is by keeping the content open source. Promise the users you will do best with their data by keeping it out in the open so that if you don't, someone else will. Keep the door ajar.
Unfortunately this is another "if we all just" solution that humanity seems unable to do.
Not all the time, see the success of GPL software. But yes, each community has to relearn the lesson: promises don't matter what matter is whether the data are 'open' or not.
No long term goals, no guarantees for users, no job security, no ownership in a renters economy. Just take the data and make as much money with it as possible.
But that’s just one interpretation, perhaps it will have a happy end. If not, I’m sure there will be an app to fix it.
Then there is the obvious Geschmäckle of taking advantage of OSM (a free open source project) while not providing a way to give back to it. For example marking a bridge or path as no longer functional or existent.
The main feature of importance for me was a convenient way of visual representation of the trip on a map + being able to easily take pictures and have them added into the tour route visualization. This is provides for a really neat trip summary. Maybe someone has an app or service suggestion for such a feature?
> Couchsurfing, Reddit, Twitter, and many more were similarly komooted.
I'd like to add another company to the list: carpooling.com aka mitfahrgelegenheit.de
> Capital does not invent interesting new ideas like gravel and bikepacking. It swoops in from the outside to appropriate.
That seems a little warped. Bikepacking (isn't new) is as old as the bike and gravel biking is pretty much a capitalist rebranding of bikepacking. Selling the idea that you need a "gravel bike" to for bike packing. Pretending that the tried and tested way of laterally attached baggage is not good enough anymore and now has to be attached medially and you need those special tires yada yada
Something something paradox of tolerance. I don’t know exactly what type type of conditions should apply to open source data, but this shouldn’t be permitted by the license. I’m leaning more and more towards that permissive licensing (and their popularity) is basically destroying open source ”public goods”.
I’m not anti market by any means. You could provide a service and get paid for well… good service. The problem is the ”digital enclosure” where they own the data, and the social graphs. If the value of the service goes down, the value of their accumulated data remains, and can be sold as private property.
Now that copyright is near dead, due to the fair use loophole for AI, it’s getting much more adversarial, fast. Data will become much more fragmented again.
Strava has this.
https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/216917387-Addin...
The people who need the paid portion of the app are also likely enthusiasts, and in that light the pricing seems fair too.
In the past I switched to komoot from osmand because it produced better trail running routes. In both apps you set some anchor points to get a gpx, but osmand often sticks to the shortest path between them (often boring roadways) while komoot chose scenic trails where available. Also osmand heats up my phone significantly both then when doing pathfinding and when just drawing a complicated piece of terrain.
I recently discovered a new feature in the Strava subscription: you just "draw" a route how you like it and the app glues it to the nearest available track. Even though komoot may have resolved ambiguities better, the strava ui is just faster to get what you want, so I switched to it.
IMO the Strava UX overall is not pleasant, I don't like their business model, and this is the second useful feature in the subscription ever since heatmaps. But it's genuinely good and I'll stick to it until a better alternative comes around. I still pay for osmand though and I hope it survives. Strava doesn't work offline for one thing so the first thing I do is exporting the gpx to osmand.
I wonder why there aren't popular free/open projects that do what Komoot does. What they did above the contributions seem to be doable by a dedicated group or a nonprofit.
Honestly the best course of action is to let it die. $300M is enough money that losing the user base would be enough for similar things to stop happening.
(I've just commissioned a designer for a bit of a refresh, so it should get a _little_ more polished soon!)
Well, there are still costs involved (not just financial but also labour), and someone has to pay them. We are lucky to have a number of great open source and community-driven projects where people do contribute time and money to make data freely available to everyone, but it's not guaranteed. If there aren't enough people who are willing and able to contribute, or the costs get too great, the project will founder.
OpenStreetMap seems like it is already doing this to an extent, or at least is a good platform on which something like this could be built. Hopefully this saga encourages more people to contribute that way.
> I spoke with a few longtime employees in the aftermath, who described it as a rough and cruel betrayal. > > Komoot, to them, was more than a job; it was a mission and purpose.
If the data and the code is not open (and thus does not truly benefit everyone), and can vanish at a company's whim, it doesn't seem worth it.
> Many had accepted below-average salaries
I reluctantly accept to be paid less if it allows me to have a job that does not go against my values (but will leave as soon I as I find something paid better). What made Komoot so special that you'd accept below average salary?
I hope that, again, some initiative that values open stuff will save the day and make up for the void this event creates.
Just another example of degradation of trust within the western economies. Trust only money and you’ll be on the right side of history - unfortunately.
Trust, moral responsibility and kindness aren’t profitable - in terms of capital.
1. Bending Spoons (BS) is an itallian conglomerate, who is specialized in acquiring marginally-profitable software companies.
2. After an acquisition, BS attempts to cut the cost structure agressively. This normally involves massive axing of employees.
3. BS also raise the pricing agressively, which would shock long-term users.
4. Now the acquired compnay is cashflow-positive.
5. Using that cash flow, BS proceeds to acquire another company.
Based on this playbook, Bending Spoons has acquired Evernote, Remini, Meetup, WeTransfer, Brightcove ... and now Komoot.
So in short, Bending Spoons is a roll-up vehicle for software business, pretty similar to what Brad Jacobs (who founded United Rentals and XPO) has been doing for decades.
This stuff should be illegal. And f them for doing it.
Not monopoly money options, categories, valuations etc, but a guaranteed percentage of the entire price. The same privileges that the founders & C-suite has.
On a more robustly positive note, ongoing progress with solid legal frameworks for benefit corporations may address much of this. Such companies serve stakeholders instead of shareholders and have employee ownership as foundational.
Leaning back and declaring Capitalism as flawed isn't good enough. If you have property rights and ability to sell labor then you have Capitalism. Corporations are a new innovation that we can hone. Large, shared allocations of capital will continue to be needed for essential endeavors so we need to figure this out.
Now, don't get me wrong, it sucks majorly for the employees and it is painful; but particularly for the long-running ones, where is your equity? Komoot was once a startup, why did you accept to work there without equity.
Last but not least, indeed, never believe the bosses, unless you have (almost) the same end-game privileges.
Relying solely on "community" to build and maintain these spaces is equally unsustainable. I worry that people will look at this and think that the alternative is to reject all forms of businesses, when the problem is simply of scale.
If it’s not in the contract, it’s not something you should rely on.
The problem is legal suits over complex contract law are way too expensive for impacted people to legitimately seek enforcement in cases like this. Especially since courts hate non-monetary enforcement and so at best would allow some pittance of money as a replacement.
I started my biz because I wanted to make products that people love, that create value and timesave for others (specifically restaurants). I've always thought that if I do that and have a good time doing it the money will take care of itself.
I would be horrified if some PE firm rug-pulled our users and screwed our employees. Any such takeover would have to happen over my dead body.
When founders sell, it's rarely to end up making the same amount of money they would make if they kept ownership. And once you've sold you have no control.
There is no effing mission. Build, sell, get rich. That's the "mission".
I've been a long-time Komoot user; not anymore.
Being caught at a concert with the head of HR can be easily turned into a PR success, just add money.
No long term goals necessary, no employee retention programs, no social responsibility. Just pure and beautiful monies in the bank.
But even as someone pretty left/liberal fully signed up to the open source gospel, I think the conclusion is unconvicing and rather handwavy:
> Promising projects such as the Mastodon social network, Matrix chat, and Pixelfed social photo sharing are reviving the diversity and abundance of the early, independent internet before it was enclosed by tech giants in the 2010s. More than singular platforms, the Fediverse represents a growing ecosystem of open protocols and distributed services that guarantee freedom of movement for users and data and push back against capitalist enclosure—a diverse and resilient digital commons.
No. You don't get performant consumer-level routing without lots of fast servers, and the Fediverse doesn't really have a way to pay for lots of fast servers. Ok, you can run hobbyist projects like Brouter on low-spec hardware - and don't get me wrong, Brouter is absolutely awesome in its own way, and for a certain type of cyclist it's all they'll ever need. But if you want something that appeals beyond the hardcore cyclist - in the way that Komoot does, and in the way that Google and Apple Maps do for motoring (and, increasingly, city cycling) - there has to be some sort of way of paying for the servers. "Open protocols and distributed services" don't fix that.
Entirely personally (and you would expect me to say this), my view is instead: support your local artisan. Your local artisan framebuilder will build you a fantastic bike. Your local artisan bike shop will repair it much better than a chain like Halfords will (or whatever your country's equivalent is). These guys aren't practising "enshittification". They're doing what they love, and being paid for it so that they can feed the family and pay the mortgage. Sure, maybe it's still "capital", but not in the same way that Bending Spoons does it.
So if you're happy going to an artisan bike shop, consider going to an artisan routing/mapping site, rather than a growth-then-sellout project. There are plenty of these - I'm obviously going to plug my own site/app, cycle.travel, but there are many others.
(Incidentally, I hold no brief to support Komoot - quite the opposite, because they've ripped off a bunch of my content - but the bit about "leeching off the open-source commons" is not entirely fair. Komoot developed one of the most popular OpenStreetMap geocoders, Photon, and released it as open source. They're paid-up members of the OSM Foundation. Sure, there's more they could do and some other companies do more, but it's important to recognise what they have done.)
Even as someone who thinks big private equity acquisitions tend to go badly, I’m not sure this article makes very good points. In particular, lots of blame is levied against bending spoons but not much against the founders, yet the founders arranged to not give employees equity, the founders reneged on their ‘never sell’ promise, the founders did not try to negotiate better severance for the employees that would be let go after the sale, and the founders set the business direction before the sale.
I do feel like there is something to the idea that one should be suspicious of some ‘social good’ messaging from companies as it can often be a way to allow or hide existing inequities, eg paying everyone the same (in cash but not equity) or claiming they don’t need equity as you won’t sell the company (except you do). Amusing that it is the relatively left-wing prosocial German startup scene where the workers get fucked over rather than the SF one though maybe this is outliers or startups choosing employees in Germany with things the other way around in the US.
I think the article also seems to misunderstand the emphasis on growth. The expectation is not for profits to continue growing forever. The expectation is that the growth will happen roughly logistically (until some outside force causes a loss/increase of market share), so under this model a slight slowdown in growth implies that the maximum is nearer, and this maximum has a big impact on the value of the business. If one is hoping to sell the business then maintaining growth is important because it implies something about the size of the market and therefore the valuation. It was the founder’s desire to sell for a high price (alternatively to try to gain network-effects advantage over competition) that drove the growth, not the existence of private equity firms.
Some other thoughts:
As a user, I don’t particularly care about the particularities of how employees in developed countries are treated. The company gets some choice in how it divides its equity and how much revenue goes to paying staff and in what proportions. These things tend to be negotiable for engineers working for software startups (maybe not in Germany??) and these employees negotiating themselves relatively poor contracts isn’t really something I blame on private equity.
I feel like the article implies that capitalism necessarily leads to the way that private equity seems to destroy the communities run by the companies it acquires but I’m not sure that should be true. It seems to me like it ought to be more profitable in the long run to be less destructive (though some of this can look bad to users if they see layoffs as a focus on growth is decreased or the removal of loss-leading products that users like for obvious reasons).
Since after all the only time private equity is interested in going public is unicorns.
