dennisbalon

My dream is to find an no-code instrument for creating and managing of various dashboards. Something really simple and powerul with various messenger and other interface plugins.

My list is which may be not quite cheap though: 1. wireless headset: not to big do it does not cover you head while on the video call, but big enough and comfy so you can listen to music and hear some bass.

2. wireless charger for you phone so you dont have to plug the wire everytime you return from kitchen

I think there is a lot of legal limitations and rules in different countries. But I am talking just about a team and the wish to part with someone.

I am sure there are a looot of top companies that are hard and stricts and fire fast. At the end of the day does not matter what the reason is, it is all about performance of today and future.

Very food comment!

When I was saying about immediate firing I never meant you should be an idiot and have no idea why you even hired.

You can make fast actions and fire fast only if you know why are you doing that which is a result of why and what for you even hired someone.

Do you mind if you disagree.

I`ll give you an example. We had a team of devs and I guy I know has joined us as a QA team lead. They guy was really cool, very comfy to be around with etc and etc. But problem was that he never really got the job done done.

I made a mistake of trying to help him for way too long, trying to figure out better tasks, better approaches.

At the end of the day I fired him. And guess what, this showed him he finally had to start doing something that noone would be puching him towards to - he started a little firm that ourganized mountaint trips.

Fully agree here. Firing is absolutely much more important to the health of the organization than hiring. Firing is cutting on the error opposite to continuing living with it.

Search my name on LinkedIn and decide for yourself. You dont sound like a person ever hiring or firing in your life to me.

THANK YOU for such a great reply with examples. Let me comment each point. But first of all I`d like to say that my secret suace for succesful hires and fires is: instinct + process.

1. Racist guy. Heh. I had experience working with such people, key thing here for the hiring side is to understand if that hardheadedness is sign of being just dumb or maybe overconfident beause that person in questions has actually reasons to believe he is so good?

2. Stubborn guy creating bugs. For stubborness is a big red flag. I had guys creating lots of bugs despite having the knowledge not to create. Twice in my experience serious talk did help and they became nearly perfect core team members. It`s all about our personal judgement on how much time we want to invest into all of this.

3. Immeddiate red flags. Once again, I meant different immediate red flags. Something like a day of watching the person trying to do a pull request and the way he is working with CTO comments, the way he talks to others, the way he behaives and you are like hey... I made a mistake hiring him...

Mostly agree here.

But dont you remember stories from your life when you met people that telling from all your experience would not improve on performance? Or say you dont have time to teach anyone life or work ethics?

Managers are here to save everyone time I guess. Firing very often is saving everyone time.

Can we agree that I as the CEO and owner of the company can fire anyone without explanations but only if I fulfill my obligations of covering the pay 2 weeks upfront etc.?

Bottom line can I fire someone simply if I dont like them? Thats a question for the next Ask HN)))

Thanks for your reply. I have a few thing to say.

Reading your comment I realized that you are more than I connecting together the decision making part of firing someone and actual action to be made.

I was taking about red flags. Like stealing something which is found on cameras, like making a fight etc.

But I also meant such signs as: person is not able to fulfill the task in a week and you see all the signs that it wont start improving, or say someone is late to the office starting the first day and the overall communications show you that this wont improve.

I am talking about signs that you as a manager find and make the final decision and does not matter if it took you a week or a minute.

Working with people and letting them know upfront that something is wrong is a separate thing. I am strong believer that sometimes it is just waste of time.

Disagreeing is cleraly valuable for some but rather hard to accept for “FB commenter” types.

Thanks again for your time!

I have been actively hiring for the last 15 years of my life. And running two startups for the last 13 years. I know what motivation is better than many other managers out there.

And I am sure many people attend work not only for money.

Problem is that many who work in outsourcing do the opposite - they attend work, to get money, to exchange it for goods and comfort.

So in this picture there is not much place for "being proud" and respecting the project you are on.

Right, this is an actual reason why someone may have friction working with TS and it is better not to choose that developer.

But still the question stands. Like imagine we compare web game dev with JS vs C++. Obviosuly you need to plan much for testing and QA engineers need to be more skilled when we talk about C++.

And also I as a PM will plan from the start that using JS and corresponding framerworks might limit me in what I do.

Same thing here with TS vs JS. The question stands :)

I tend not to shoot myself in the foot. But good advice. Thanks.

Or remove all letters mentioned in the domain of HN from my keyboard.

Hey! You are right about newbies ignoring what the HN was initially created for. I agree, my bad but to my excuse 3 outher submittions I made were pretty much according to the HN standards I believe.

Thanks for such a thought thorugh reply, the point about comments exactly something I wanted to hear.

I agree, HN much more feels like a silent resource of knowledge and knowledgable point of views. WHen reading FB I rarely even open comments myself.

And I agree there are way to many goody-positive as you said sites with pure flood instead of highly valueable on average posts.

Thanks again for your reply. I value your time a lot.

I dont mean that unicorns are results of perfect coding. But thats an all different topic :)

Thanks for such a balanced answer.

For MVP I believe no-code is perfect if possible.

Heh... your examples are very extreme...

In my last two startups I had people over 40 working those long hours. A lot of contractors I know are lazy young guys that want the buck with minimum fuss.

Most contractors are experience ex-startupers - this sounds statistically incorrect ;)

Thanks for the answer. Now I get a bit better idea when it comes to saving time/resouces.

Another thing seems to be clear is that TS devs need to be more skilled. So interchanging them might be of a slight issue.

What do you think?

Thanks for your answer but this is about TS. I am meaning to find what are the benefits for me as a project manager? What consequences positive or negative I might experience?

Bthw, you mention this - "The goal for every outsourcing is to make your product great because only in that case they can upsell you and make more money."

And would you please allow me to disagree here. In the esence you are more than right. The core of the business model for an outsourcing company is exactly that - increase the incoming flow of returning clients.

But again from my experience. The best oursourcing client is the one that does not very clearly knows what he/she wants and also is early paying for rather unhumble estimates and hour reports.

With all my experience I am a "bad" oursourcing client. Why? I know exactly what I want, I can be a true technical partner to any dev team and as a result I can challenge their decisions and critisize in case to much time is spent.

As I said, I am far from a perfect oursourcing client. So by end of the day in my experience outsourcing teams just tried to dinifsh the work no matter how spaghetti code they produce and "get rid of me".

Again, there are always exceptions but please hear me out and see that I am talking from my experience.

Also, I have checked out datrics.io and I can say if your personally were in outsourcing for many years - chances are you were that rare exception.

Have a great day :)

Do you mean that by oursourcing we support 3rd world countries? If so here I absolutely agree but as my personal experience shows finding a good outsourcing partner no matter from what country - is a complicated task.

All in all much better to find someone who will spend night hours sitting at a desk next to you, catering about the project and feeling that personal responsibility.

Big big downside of hiring developers who are far far away - very low personal sense of responsibility in most cases.

Right! Exactly! But would you agree that when you are working in an oursourcing company and projects change sometimes a few times per month - you are less motivated to think about being proud compared to just submitting the hours in time?

Let me try to clarify myself. I am not saying that by definition a salaried imployee has any benefits compared to a good contractor. People are different and in my own experience I had amazing contractors, like e.g. our current DevOps which is just amazing despite working only 30+ hours poer month with us. But he is an exception.

I am just saying that at the end of the day from my experience it is much easier to find more caring and willing to think deep abour the project from among full time employees compared to outside contractors some of which may not need to remember your name since its "just a 160 hours project".

I agree that my experience is result of my choices only.

Great point about feeling proud. I think we are we are talking about same thing here here - like from my experience most of the guys working in startups and doing their own projects were concerned about being proud of the work done much more then other guys just doing another set of tasks for someone they`ll never know.

Again, I am talking about the "avg temperature across the hospital". Like there are so many details here but all in all I see more caring people in startups than anywhere else.

I wont argue about individual characteristics being the key.

But for myself as a rule I defined that salaried team members are in most cases more motivated for a long successful releationship and care about the project more.

Also, lets not forget that when we are talking about doing a startup, core members need tobhave more motivation than just a wire trsnafer at the end of the month.

Best practices for motivating startup team members are not anything new.

Thanks for detailed PoV.

Let me share an example with you. I have been in software dev for nearly 18 years by now. I am pretty good at creating detailed, structured and well thought through docs for developers.

Now, last year we have experienced a need to outsource two moderate size projects. With great attention to documentation and general dev flow.

Bottom line, despite we did get more or less working results at the end of the day I was not satisfied with the quality of the work done.

The best guys we could interview and get to work with us still showed less confidence, less of engineering thinkin, less of everything than guys who worked in my teams. Ever.

Like litterally less professionalism! And I believe that is ok but it is what it is.

Professionalism and true caring about the product is not core compentenct that is needed if you are part of the outsourcing company. Why? Just because that is not what earns money at the end of the day.

Speaking about US, Germnay, Sweden etc. - guess I would agree that while living in those countries it makes more sense to find good outsourcing Partner which wont happen from the first try anyway.

But as the time goes the more I flex towards doing tiny stuff like MVP etc with outsourcing teams.

Never the less recent years have showed growth of no-code instrumenta which I would personally prefer much more over any outsourcing team if we are talking about super simple projects.