I have the chance to move from my engineering career (full-stack robotics, software engineering, cloud background) to assist a law firm as a patent agent in my respective fields. Has anyone made this transition who can offer some input on how that transition played out and what they learned?
I have no data to back this up besides trends I've happened to notice personally, but it seems that private companies with an established market and solid plan still aim for an IPO. Why is that? It seems to only abstract away the initial mission of the company to a board of directors who may not share the same goals, and lead the company towards a slow death as investors have their turn at trying to make what they can from it in the short term. Would a company like Google actually be better off now if it hadn't IPO'd and was still following it's mission?
To be fair, I have used the feature exactly once, but something didn't feel right afterwards. I dont want payment systems where I am doing something whose essence is not about getting paid. There are separate services where we can donate to developers if we'd like to, and developers who are seeking contributions can easily find and leverage those and link to them. Once the dominant open source hosting and sharing service financially inserts itself between its community of contributers, it becomes their financial interest to make more transactions happen between said contributers, and its easy to see GitHub becoming a payment system first instead of an open source community first. Private repos made sense; Sponsors sends chills down my spine about the future of GitHub and open source in general.
