HN user
Lure fishing "cast and retrieve" as opposed to waiting is very common and not at all just a bass thing fyi. Maybe it has something to do with the particular species here in mid east coast Australia but fishing stores have tons of space dedicated to lures.
I remember fishing as a kid, my dad would be bait fishing while I lure fished because bait was super boring.
Buying drugs off the internet.
Sure, I understand where the risk is coming from. I don't understand where the unfairness is coming from.
How is that an unfair playing field? People being rewarded for productive risk taking is one of the fairest things I can think of.
As far as I remember the big short doesn't though.
If good means experienced/senior, which is what the people pulling those numbers in are, then yeah I certainly don't think startups are anywhere near competitive with big companies for talent. I don't think they really need to be, or should try to be.
If you're 15 years in at Google then yeah, no shit you shouldnt take a job at some hinky dink no name company. You're severely demoting yourself. You wouldn't go wait tables at a restaurant and expect the compensation to be competitive with your software engineer salary. Your skills aren't that useful to the restaurant, they wouldn't make anywhere near enough money from you for it to make sense.
Senior level big software company employee vs startup employee is like that but on a less extreme scale. You're more useful to them than you are to a restaurant, but you still have a lot of skills and experience that it doesn't make sense for them to pay for that it does for a big company.
Its on me for not specifying and making assumptions, but imo when talking startup competitiveness it should be focused on fresh grads or those with a couple years experience in industry but not necessarily at big tech. That's where startups are going to find their cost effective generalists, and its where I think the compensation is "a little low and relying on past reputation".
Also, with good devs making $400-500k/year at bigco, I think it needs to be kept in mind that those numbers are with a lot of their compensation being in stock and big tech stock having risen a lot in the last decade. Someone whose compensation at Facebook happened to turn out to be $400k/year would have been getting signed each year for far less.
Using those numbers would be like evaluating startup packages as if theyre guaranteed a large ipo.
As for startups getting funding right from the start, that means they're being funded based on founder credentials rather than the qualities of the business. If you have those kind of credentials and use them to start a company then your opportunity cost is likely huge. That's the founders additional risk there.
Founders don't work many more hours per day than early employees at x100 less than early employees. They work many more months/years before earning an income at all.
By the time the employees start to get hired, a large part of the risk and work that a founder does to earn their hopeful future fat stacks has already been done.
Now, are startup compensation packages a little low and relying on the money making reputation of past decades? Sure. That doesnt mean there isn't a world of difference between working hard on something that has a decent amount of vetting for below market rate, and working hard on working that's almost certainly not going to pan out for zero dollars.
Hi
Paperwork and forms are 0% of what you should be doing. That's just basic accounting stuff that should be generic and cheap for them to handle if you're just one guy doing consulting. It shouldn't take up any of your energy or be a cognitive burden.
It's hard to say what you should be doing because it's hard to get a read of what you have been doing to begin with. Which may actually be because you weren't doing anything? Like have you just been sitting around in an office trying to deal with minor bureaucratic issues like forms all day every day? Where did the $50k go?
A company is just a way to describe a legal entity that you create to do money making activities within. What money making activities did you start out planning to do? How did you plan to get people to pay you for them? Which actions have you taken to get people to pay you for them? Which aspect of that do you think is holding you up.
It's very concerning that you don't speak at all about things like "I keep adding features instead of just releasing" with regard to a software product you had decided to make or "I get meetings but never any interest once they find out about my rates" on pursuing consulting contracts. Instead choosing to talk about forms.
I highly recommend just getting a junior developer position somewhere. You'll be alright. No reason to kill yourself even if financial failure was a reason to kill yourself. Programming is an in demand profession and having that skill puts you ahead of a lot of people who may have more money in the bank, but far less earning potential.
If you struggle with making yourself actually do work when left to your own discretion, so you can teach a class fine but put in front of a code terminal find yourself day dreaming or whatever, look in to an ADHD diagnosis as well as productivity methods based around lists. I have to plan my day out with ver detailed todo/checklists otherwise I sit around doing fuck all.
Sure. Attach a price tag to it.
I believe the commenter was criticising the concept not agreeing with it.
You do that because its not an either/or decision, and the bidding nature of digital advertising means the lower effectiveness will be reflected in what you're paying. You can be paying a premium for people searching to buy gardening gloves, a little bit for people reading gardening stuff, and then a pittance for people that may be related to gardening in some fashion.
You're extrapolating based on your own actions rather than measuring the result. The results say that if you show gardening gloves to enough people at random, you'll eventually get some sales. Everything else is just narrowing down "random" a little bit.
Thanks! Pretty concerning that a lot of hn commenters seem to be with the nytimes on this.
I'm the filthy saas salesman that should be tainting this place with their ignorance. Everyone else is meant to be more informed on these things so I can get a more educated perspective!
Non-developer here. Can someone check my understanding of this situation for me please.
Facebook or any other website has information that ideally only I should have access to. I don't visit Facebook hq with my id in hand to get it, I use a computing device to talk to their computing device. they don't really know if it's me using that device, just that it knows information only I should have (password). The device is also my choice, they just provide general instructions for talking to theirs, or rather just comply with standards. Meaning html or whatever the total information sent from browsers and back again is called. Some browsers being difficult, they even have some code in there for them specifically. Mostly css for ie and mobile safari.
Because me visiting the Facebook building every time I want to see something or like something is ridiculous and something no one thinks happens, when these browsers request information as me they're then referred to as me, or my agent. So if data goes from Facebook to a macbook with chrome on it that knows my password, it's for all intents and purposes a two party relatiinship. No one sees that chrome, osx, my ISP, my router, my whatever; and goes "Facebook is giving data access to third parties!"
Enter mobile devices, or more accurately old mobile devices. Complying with those standards I mentioned above /html /building a quality full functionality browser is hard given their tech. They still want you to be able to use facebook, facebook still wants you using it, and you want to use it. So the device manufacturer and Facebook come up with a communication method they can use. Basically the same information sent and received as if you were using a browser and facebooks standard html, facebooks still just assuming you're on the other end because the device knows your password, but the syntax of their messages is different. Basically a more extreme version of having some funky css in there to make old IE work.
Terminology aside, am I on the right track? If so, what exactly is newsworthy about this? Is there a practical difference from a data security viewpoint between Facebook -> my Huawei phone -> me, and Facebook -> my Huawei phone -> chrome -> me?
If my user agent - the hardware /software I choose to use to talk to facebook - is hostile to me, I'm fucked either way aren't I?
Does those people being wrong mean anything from a moral /rightness / "getting screwed" perspective? I make mistakes like anyone else, sometimes pretty big ones to the tune of quite a lot of money. Wouldn't say I've been screwed though. I just fucked up.
you're right, people can't. If you want shot at a significant chunk of a multi billion dollar sale you start your own company. As the github founders did.
If you want up be paid $x a fortnight right from the get go then you get a job.
I don't see how the success of people who chose to do A means people that did B got screwed, just because they both worked on the same project. The decisions they made and context of their choosing to work on it were still different things each with their own pros and cons
Unless there was some more to it. Like share /options shenanigans that might not be legally fraud but fraud in spirit. No one seems to be saying that happened here though.
When you raise that money after four years of success, sure why not?
I didn't see a complaint.
Contracting or making your own apps?
Claques are nothing new. People have been rigging crowds for a very long time. It certainly doesn't seem newsworthy to me that tech is doing it.
Any action by anyone will be objected to by some if the audience is large enough.
Irrelevant. That's like asking why someone is moving a tiny car around a board while playing monopoly just because they had suggested poker for games night.
Someone can prefer the world be a different way while still participating in it as is.
I don't see what the sentence "its how the world works" has to do with "marketing is not evil". At least not for your argument.
Possibly just ignorant. Most people have never/will never be in charge of large budgets.
A normal consumer with a normal job is only really going to encounter the lower end of the field.
You were unable to access your notes or you were unable to access your notes through Note plan?
How expensive are your staff? These all sound like wins or at least not losses to me given that even unskilled staff are super expensive compared to these things.
Microwaves are like what, $100? Couches? Another couple hundred? Whiteboards? Probably within the realm of $100 there again for a few of them. Food for one person? Stupidly cheap compared to a salary as well.
As long as getting these things could foreseeably have made only the one person who requested them even slightly happier, it seems worth it.
Standing desks are pretty expensive, I'll give you that. I have seen them used a fair bit though so having them might eventually pay off. Also staff might still feel better about having them even if they're not using them.
I'm surprised to see basically only books on how to be better at making software. Nothing on negotiation or other soft skills like that.
Do people generally just not value things like negotiating? Or do you just not think a book would have helped younger you?
If theyre hidden, how do you know they're there?
I am tall. If I visited a hypothetical land where they spoke English with the exception that the word "tall" now means "a rapist" I would avoid using the word. Not because of any height related shame but because I don't want anyone thinking I'm a rapist.
You can be proud of the term as per your understanding of it, but if you use it as a description of yourself then you're relying on people sharing that understanding. From my experience that's often not the case.