It’s going to be a more common occurrence. If you’re buying a company in distress, you don’t really care about the common shareholders. You pay the employees you want to keep via guarantees.

This is especially true when you can use AI to code an almost good enough competitor for cheap.

Is photography an example? The painters (to misappropriate an analogy from Paul Graham [0]) had to content with photos that were as accurate at a fraction of the time. Painting lost much of its so called practical use, and even hobbyists were impacted by a much more efficient tool. And then photography became an art. And digital disrupted analog, and phones disrupted the rest of digital. Professional and hobbyist painters pivoted too, moving from capturing realism to abstract and symbolic styles. And hobbyist art continues in analog and digital photography.

Net - hobbyist programming will change, but not necessarily go away. It will morph into “what doesn’t this linear algebra machine see or know?”

[0] https://paulgraham.com/hp.html

No word on why. I don’t think that it’s their portfolio companies aren’t recruiting. (They’re in a lot of hyper growth companies)

It could be that they’re not effective being outside the companies they support. (I’ve had weak results from VCs saying “talk to this person”)

It could also be the nature of recruiting has changed. I would think that the “your AI talks to my AI” would increase the value of referrals, but I’ve been wrong before.

Iceland had a debt crisis from 2008-2011. Part of the issue is the currency is small relative to global markets, so investments/speculation/shocks from elsewhere have an outsize impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932011_Icelandic_fi...

To be fair it wasn’t just Iceland? It was a global crash. At least that was my perception at the time.

But we recovered from it very quickly, and is often talked about. But we had currency exchange restrictions for quite some time to fix it. It worked.

Yes. For Iceland it was different than the Mortgage crisis elsewhere. (It was currency gambling)

Yes. Especially true when the results are unpopular, and contrary to the internal message.

“Accenture tells us we have 50% more middle managers than our peers” or “Bain tells us our customers don’t like us despite the internal CSAT scoring”

Also a single person for the board to hold accountable. In essence the individual that represents the company to outside groups.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Other working cultures have adopted committees as the top. Is is the dominant form in US shareholder capitalism.

The original post is surely satire.

> The original post is surely satire.

Yes, they say so at the bottom of the page.