USNetizen

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm leery of apps that say "proven security and compliance" and then don't offer any obvious details, or proof, about what that "compliance" is. ISO 27001, SOC2, what?

42 employees, or thereabouts. Biggest driver of revenue was focusing on an industry that buys everything in bulk - services, software, you name it. The federal government. It took two years of laying groundwork to get our first few contracts then took off from there. Biggest mistake we made was twofold - one, hiring too early in the beginning (we used a small amount of debt initially paying salaries for "overhead" people, like marketing, sales, consultants, etc., that simply didn't work out or were far too inexperienced) and, two, giving a substantial amount of equity to someone who was intended to be a cofounder type but was a paid employee, didn't put any money into the business (but took plenty out), and didn't have the mindset of an entrepreneur. Key lesson: choose your partner(s) and employees wisely.

Having done the same thing myself (bootstrapped a services company from $0 to over $8M/year in revenue in 5 years and grown a SaaS product from $0 to ~$800k ARR in 16 months completely bootstrapped), you can go into debt for a short time while bootstrapping, but generally not 3.5+ years unless you are independently wealthy or have a retirement nest egg you've been saving for a few decades you're prepared to liquidate.

At some point your access to capital dries up when banks see your level of risk increase. You might be able to survive moderate losses for a year or two and cover it with personal debt financing, depending on how much money and access to capital you have personally, but 3.5 to 4 years covering losses with personal debt is REALLY pushing it. You're most likely talking several hundred thousand dollars at that point even for a small startup.

And $1M ARR is only enough to support a team of 9 if the average salary being paid is around $50k-$55k/year (or if 2 or more people aren't even drawing a salary). Which makes sense because, in their blog, they describe hiring someone for marketing that was much less "senior" - i.e. cheaper - and not being happy with it. Taxes, fees, registrations, legal/accounting, benefits (if any), insurance, hosting, technical infrastructure, etc. can easily eat up over $300k/yr for a team of 9 - not including direct payroll.

Any organization that reaches a certain size will encounter things like this. The larger an organization gets, the more the productivity level tends to regress towards the mean. So, people with higher productivity will likely feel unfulfilled and people at the lower end will still feel inundated. It is both a mechanism of success and a detriment to such organizations. Successful because it standardizes things, ensuring more consistent quality and productivity overall - the end goal, after all, is to eliminate uncertainty as much as possible in daily operations. Detriment because, pertaining to the the consistency of quality and productivity, it tends to regress at a lower level.

The salaries tend to be higher simply because these large organizations are typically much better capitalized, not necessarily because the people that work there are that much better than everyone else. This is why a lot of high performers tend to strike off on their own at some point in their careers - dissatisfaction with mediocrity. But then their own companies, if successful, grow to a level where, once more, productivity and quality regresses towards the mean and they find themselves in a self-created bureaucracy as the organization matures.

Am I the only one where "dark mode" interfaces really screw with the eyes?

The current environment is nothing like the dot-com boom. The dot-com boom/bust was driven by public markets, whereas now the public markets are the ones who are filtering out the wild valuations now before it gets out of hand and throws the country into a recession like it did last time.

I was genuinely interested in this but saw some issues in the pricing. The "starter" is for "up to 100 users" but then the "Organization Wide" plan is for 500 users and over. What happens in the gap between 101 and 499 users? Also, Office 365 integration is only available for companies with over 500 users, which makes it not really useful for me - I want (need) that integration, but would only have about 60 users. So, for those reasons, I had to pass. Everything else looked great, but there is a huge gap in features and pricing for small to mid-sized companies not yet at the 500 mark.

So....like Disqus but open source then?

Absolutely agree. We as a society have put so much emphasis on earning a college degree that people are attaining worthless ones at too high of a rate and finding themselves buried in debt with no way to pay it off.

It doesn't help that basic financial literacy isn't taught in grade school anymore, either. Too many times, a graduate's first lesson in managing finances and debt comes in the form of a default notice from a lender.

The other problem I see here is that the whole mentality of being able to run away from your problems is, well, problematic. These things will only get worse if you don't address them. What they don't apparently realize is, one day, they're going to want to come back to the U.S. for one reason or another just to find out that their mound of student debt has grown into a mountain of defaults which prevents them from even holding certain jobs, getting credit, finding housing, and basically functioning comfortably in society.

Not true. 23% of all government money goes to small businesses. Over 30% in certain agencies and up to 60% in some. Like I've been saying here, you need to take the time to learn the market because if you don't, you will just believe it is stacked against you when it really isn't and is actually more friendly to smaller companies than certain commercial markets.

That's true in places like India, but not really in the U.S. I own a company that does government contracting and have never "paid someone off" or done anything remotely "corrupt" but we have been wildly successful nonetheless.

There are NUMEROUS mechanisms for oversight and redress at every level - but the typical commercial-focused company doesn't understand them, so they don't research or learn what they are and just give up thereby developing a very misguided interpretation of the system akin to what you believe it is like.

But the bureaucracy is sometimes for good reason (usually driven by Congressional mandate). What people need to do is learn to work within (and around) the bureaucracy. That's key to the government market. There is a reason for the way it is, and you need to learn to work with it instead of fighting against it.

I'm not sure you're understanding really how the system works, which is exactly what I was pointing out in my statement. I never said "guaranteed" - I said "stable". There is ALWAYS risk of losing the customer and the government can terminate at any time for almost any reason. But if you perform, then you can maintain the same customer for a decade or more.

This is how the system works and it works this way for a reason. There is more accountability in the government market than people realize - moreso than in most commercial transactions even.

The problem isn't that the process is really broken (though it is in many ways) - the problem is that too many companies fail to understand there is a major difference between government and commercial markets. Two totally different mindsets.

Yes, the sales cycles in government are a lot longer (2 years is at the extreme end though, 3 to 6 months is more average but with a lot of caveats) and yes, there are a lot of rules and regulations that don't exist in commercial deals (FAR, DFARS, etc. etc.) - but at the end of the day, you're talking about business-changing scale when you get awarded a decent sized government contract (millions of dollars over a period of 3-5 years on average or longer). You're talking about being able to grow to 100's of employees with just a half dozen or so government customers.

The problem here really is that people need to invest the time and energy into understanding the government market and they can't expect it to be like the commercial one. If you do this, then the payout is very much worth it (and, no, it doesn't require "deep pockets" but it DOES require relationship building, a strong commitment, and a lot of learning).

If you give up in frustration because "it's too convoluted" compared to the commercial market, then, yeah, it will never pay off and it will feel like everything is stacked against you. But if you stick it out you'll find yourself with some incredibly stable and predictable long-term revenue streams.

Then why does he says it's not worth it? You don't get rich being a later employee - I thought that was common knowledge. He's not getting rich, so he thinks working at startups aren't worth it. That's what I get out of this. He didn't take the same risks, so, yeah, he wouldn't get rich - that's my point.

I'm not sure I understand what the real dilemma is here of working for a startup. Being employee #15 is not the same as being in the first 5 hired. You don't take the same risks (or even do the same type of work), so there is obviously less reward when it's time to exit.

If you want to get rich, the best way to do it is to start a company yourself - but it sounds like the author didn't want to go that route after trying it. That's OK though, it's not for everyone. But I think the author needs to understand the risk-reward thing here a little better - you need to take more risks to earn more reward, and being the 15th hire at a company that has most likely already raised money is significantly less risk then being like employee #3. A lot of companies compensate their first handful of employees in equity a lot more than others because they took risks (and pay cuts) plus made contributions to the growth of the company that that employees #10 and after most likely didn't.

It still makes perfect sense to work at, or start, a startup - you just have to have the right appetite for risk and the right mindset for the varying types of work you'll be doing (compared to latter employees who can specialize more). You simply won't get "rich" without taking the risk and accepting that you have to broaden your capabilities beyond core technical skills to grow at a startup and earn your way to a nice exit package.

I tend to agree with the commentators on your post. I went the college route, but technically had a "trade school" experience first via the military - it gave me the befit of trying out a career field before I committed to a degree. I have family members who just went to trade school and comfortably clear 6 figures a year - they never even had a desire for college.

We need to stop stigmatizing trade schools and start realizing that college IS NOT a necessity for everyone, especially with recent debt loads people are taking on for worthless degrees (e.g. a top university near me recently removed all the math courses from an IT/cyber degree because students "were not enrolling in high enough numbers" - that would NEVER happen 20 or so years ago). "An expansive view of human knowledge" is not needed for someone who just wants to work as an electrician - which many people are perfectly happy doing. If they are happy with a trade, why force them into something they will be miserable in?

Even now, as an employer in a technical field, college degrees are virtually meaningless because most institutions utterly fail to equip their students for the workforce. We hire based on a combination of experience, personality, and certifications. Only if your degree is in a designated engineering field do we give it any weight at all but, even then, experience is still paramount.

These two things are not related. There is a lot more than salary and benefits that go into an hourly billing number. There is no way anyone would know for sure what salary they set unless we somehow knew their overhead, G&A, fringe and other indirect allocations.

They bill $X so I should get paid $X is not how the industry operates - there is so much more that needs to be considered here.

Anyone who has owned a company that specializes in services or even worked long-term as a 1099 could confirm this.

This is an area that was explored some years ago, but ultimately determined to have civil rights pitfalls. Crime reporting is only as good (or biased) as the humans that report and input the crime data. Therefore, crime "training" data for AI systems can be very biased and it might only magnify those biases more so using AI - a sort of self-perpetuating negative feedback loop.

Having worked in law enforcement at various levels (state and federal) in a prior professional life, I can attest to the differences in what gets reported and how based upon who was working or supervising and where they were assigned. Humans are simply not reliable reporters for this kind of data. No matter how hard we try to make the reports plain and standardized our biases, one way or another, will always seep in.

The University of Maryland (a fully accredited and well respected State school) has a completely online CS program (Bachelor of Science with an option for several minors and specializations as well). Having taken part of my CS program on-site (at other schools) and part with them online, I can say it is very comparable to other programs, quite rigorous, and you get a lot out of it.

You do lose out on some networking opportunities, but I was an older (military veteran) student anyway and couldn't stand the immaturity of most of my classmates while attending in-person class. I found the online ones more distraction-free. It will require quite a bit of discipline, especially in the mathematics courses, to get through it but it is definitely a great program and affordable at the same time.

Not if you want to design a site for any of the millions of government organizations out there who still require support for IE9+

That is true - a lot of software developers use a variety of tools so they can do more advanced things like track burn rates, project velocity, and such more quantitatively. Trello, on the other hand, is so easy that I've seen it used for everything from managing speaking arrangements to writing books. It has more of a mass appeal.

Your Secret clearance now expires sometimes within a matter of months of being off a contract or out of a job that requires it. OPM is cleaning up the clearances, and revoking millions of them. I've had employees go from active TS to "eligible" status (which mean no clearance) in a matter of a few weeks after their contract ended. That whole "10 year active period" is not true, at least anymore, unless you are in a position that requires the clearance for that whole period of time.

You're considered lucky to retain a clearance more than a month out of the service now, too. OPM is taking a tough stance on unused clearances and it has negatively impacted the job market for recently separated Veterans because the contracts that come out all require a pre-cleared workforce, which is a rapidly diminishing pool of people to pull from given that clearances are now being revoked as soon as someone gets out of the service or leaves their last position.

I feel like I've read this article before somewhere. Regardless, it's about 2-3 years too late. This "learn to code" stuff was all the rage up until about a year ago but has since died down a bit.

This reads very, very similar to a post I wrote (and also made it to the front page of HN) a couple of years ago:

http://blog.netizencorp.com/2014/03/30/working-rediculously-...

Sometimes they can explicitly tell you what margins you can make in a Cost-Plus type contract. The thing is, when they dangle a 5-year long $75,000,000 contract in front of you, you'll basically take any margin at all since the amount is so large that companies will work to undercut each other drastically and even work at a loss just to get the past performance, which is treated as an asset (like cash itself) in the federal market.

They can also audit you any time they want to determine the "reasonableness" of your pricing based on overhead, margins, etc.

This doesn't happen very often because, as a government contractor, you are subject to audit at any time and anything they deem unreasonable can make you non-competitive in that market.

The only time this (high margins) really happens is in the no-bid cleared (black ops) type contracts let by the intel community and such. Those margins can be huge, but it is because of the level of clearance and company expertise required to perform the work.

However, even in that case, it's not 10x. Maybe 30-40% margin, but not 10x.

This is exactly true. Not only in corporate taxes, but payroll taxes as well. So, literally, up to 35% of each contract goes back to the government in one form or another (whether directly or through overhead personnel salaries), hence the "buy American" thing in contracting with the government.

No, they don't. Not for federal contracts, which is governed by a whole different set of rules from the rest of commerce (the FAR vs. UCC).

Contracting with the government means you open your books to them, essentially whenever they want. They can audit you at any time.

There is no limit on the profit a company may take, though on Cost-Plus contracts the government may explicitly state the profit margin a company is allowed based upon performance metrics. The government CAN, however, audit your books for DCAA compliance on T&M (time and materials) and Cost-Plus contracts to ensure what's being charged to them isn't overly inflated.

On fixed-price contracts, however, companies can pull in 20-25% net margins sometimes. The average net margin on all contracts is between 8% and 12%. You can verify this by looking at the financials of the publicly traded contracting firms like Booz Allen and Leidos who are all in that 8% to 12% net margin range. There is no limit on these margins set by the government, however, just guidelines on what is "acceptable" to them to be included in your pricing (costs and profits passed on in the form of billed fully-loaded labor rates for hourly work).

It's actually more profitable for companies to do contractor-facilities (remote) work on a fixed-price basis, contrary to what people outside of the industry think.