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You nailed it: there is power in that mutual gesture - it creates a bond that pushes both parties to work through challenges instead of just noping out with a break up. There's a reason they call it "tying the knot".

Source: A 40-year old who has no interest in marriage and only saw it as an "antiquated social construct" when I was younger. I learned there's more to it.

They had already pivoted aimlessly after their first pizza robot business failed a few years ago; they've been on their last legs for a long time.

Good to know, thanks for sharing!

For startups, Levels.fyi is not a useful resource.

Hey Bryan - it's me, again (the poster).

The transparency is great and is clearly a value-add for candidates, IMO.

But the salary simply does not compete with HCOL Startup Senior+ Engineers (around 20- 40% lower than Staff level).

That said, Oxide is in a unique class of startups that can still hire strong talent despite this pay deficit (whether due to an exceptional product, team, technical challenge, or other rare attribute). I know a Software Engineer who just took a 25% pay cut to join a construction analytics SaaS startup because he has heard his brother (a Surveyor) complain specifically about problems this company's solving!

I was actually completely unaware of Oxide's or Bryan's existence until yesterday - I had no clue they were both known on here, let alone so popular!

I'm just an HN user who was browsing jobs, found this one that listed the exact salary (with this link to their philosophy) - I had never seen this approach before and wanted to hear what HN felt about it.

This is roughly the Senior (5-10 YOE) salary range at Bay Area startups post-Series A.

Staff-level or higher starts at around $230K and occasionally reaches $275K.

The salary data comes from researching roughly 250 Bay Area startups. I'm personally defining startups as some combination of: Series A - D, founded post-2015, less than 100 Engineers.

Thanks for explaining! For future reference: would it have been OK if the post had the same title, but I left the URL box empty and placed the URL in the Text box along with a few sentences for context?

I'm sorry for any trouble I caused here. I have no affiliation with the company, but just came across this company/its post and thought "Interesting! I wonder what HN readers will think."

I'm with you. Those standards still make sense to me; don't need to think twice or stress about it.

This is very polarizing and seems to be a cultural issue. Americans and westernized cultures are appalled at its selfishness, while many Asian cultures are accustomed to this totally normal and expected part of the closer family unit.

You can contribute far more to a 401k or Solo 401k if you're employed or self-employed, respectively.

We don't know the context though. Some people are responsible and have kids when they're doing fine financially, but then unexpected hardships happen. They don't deserve to be blamed in hindsight.

Thanks for pointing me to these - I'll check them out!

Thanks for taking the time to explain!

You're somewhat stuck anyway for companies that don't post jobs.

Good news on this front. I have manually compiled a limited tech stack DB for roughly 5,000 US startups over the last decade (limited because it only has Frontend and Backend languages/frameworks for each company). Much of this data is current too, thanks to the 2021 boom in jobs. And the majority of startups either share their technologies in job descriptions by simply listing them or alluding to them, with fun statements like "we welcome skills in Python, Ruby, or JavaScript/Node.js (but Ruby would be ideal)." It's big tech companies that are more likely to be vague, because you could end up being hired into one of a multitude of product groups using different technologies.

On a side note: the second Ruby example is one reason scraping will be insufficient, and why language-specific job seekers pull their hair out using most job boards. If you search for Python positions, that Ruby company will pop up because it has the word Python.

If this was a viable idea, then I'd really need to get deeper into the stack (i.e. "preferred" experience with technologies like AWS, RabbitMQ, Spark, etc). This is crucial, allowing a hiring manager or recruiter not just the data to hit the basic requirements in candidate sourcing, but exceed them by delivering those "pluses." But I digress. Perhaps I would wait to see if this idea even has legs before committing to the time investment of digging for these "secondary" technologies.

Actually, disregard my question - I decided to just do the Apollo Basic trial and view the Technologies in the Advanced Search.

It's limited to cloud providers, as you mentioned, and just a few other tools (only one or two being tangentially related to the tech stack data needed for the idea presented it my post).

It's a bummer, because I would like this product to already exist!

I'll give it a shot - thank you!

Very interesting. And the same with other technologies, e.g. what companies use Rust or Vue.js?

Well, you lost me. I just went over to Maltego and it seems to be an investigations tech company (forensics, security, threat intelligence).

How do you use this to find a company's tech stack?

I didn't know this - I thought they were just sales prospecting tools with tons of features, but nothing involing to finding company tech stacks.

Do you have experience working with these products and seeing its capabilities in finding the technologies companies are using?

Thanks.

You're right. I forgot to mention that it'd be useful for job seekers, e.g Rustaceans, click that box ad find your companies!

Question: how would tech sales people use it? I'm not familiar enough with the field to know their use case.

This is really helpful feedback, thanks!

Yes, keeping it updated is a hard job, but it needs to be done regularly.

Can you elaborate on the sense of proportion problem?

And as far as enough companies, can you give me an example of a specific search you might conduct and how many results you'd expect?

Thanks!

Great point, thank you. However, I think this leaves out many companies - those that don't have job postings.

I think a job board like startup.jobs would solve this by creating a job archive - then it would be prime scraping material. But it's only a job board with (mainly) current jobs.

Thoughts?

Good to know, thank you!

I'm in a similar situation:

You're super fortunate in that you at least have those short-term "best programmer" phases (especially in an industry with high pay and high demand for your skills).

My advice: use your ability to make yourself indispensable. Then you can lay out the terms and call the shots.

I use excuses for my long term absences because the stigma of my severe mental illness is too high. But if you perform well and deliver as promised, it doesn't even have to come up...

As far as explaining away the need for long absences, I personally keep it simple and vague, and Positive: that experience has taught you that you're happiest and most productive working on this bizarre schedule. It can even create a little "eccentric genius" aura and the illusion of confidence. Just be careful not to take this too far and enter jerk territory. They're still going out of their way for you, so gratitude & humility are important.

I'm very sorry to hear what you're going through. I understand it and it's incredibly difficult, but really admire that you're looking for ways to fight and work throughout it.

It's understandable, as talk therapy is basically useless against untreated Schizophrenia. Unlike other mental illnesses, a tether to reality has to be created first - and that can only be done chemically/biologically through medication.

Psychotherapy requires a relationship; relationships are built on trust. The psychologist simply cannot complete against the will of the patient's reality (their untreated persona/thoughts). Not even their loved ones can, and doctors are complete strangers (and when it comes to those whose symptoms include paranoia, doctors are in fact the enemy). It's a fool's errand until an effective medication regimen is underway.

That's salary. Total compensation is significantly higher.

I always find this interesting! It takes digging to get the answers, but there are a few resources out there to explain some of it. I can't think of them off the top of my head, sorry :/

For example; yes, Rails or Django is common to rapidly whip things up at an early-stage startup.

Data Science and ML companies will lean towards Python because it's the main building block of their product. No hard and fast rules, of course; you'll often see Scala at these companies too, given it's relationship with Spark.

Anyways, I'm always trying to understand and seek out the answers to the exact questions you have.

I started working on this about 6 months ago and was having success manually curating a list of hybrid startup engineering jobs in the US. But policies were hard to decipher at so many companies (some job descriptions are straightforward, but others are super vague) that I didn't feel my data was reliable enough.

When I was finally able to get past that noise and create a decent-sized list, Omicron hit and remote/office/hybrid policies blew up, yet again.

While it has improved, it's still in flux and I still can't get straight answers from many HR leaders.

I would love to provide this service when things stabilize a bit more.

That makes sense and is a great approach - I really appreciate the helpful advice!