scottru

This is a lot of fun. Congratulations!

Agreed 100%. Our (informal) manual for consultants used to say something like

"The cupcakes in the break room are not for you. Most people will not care if you take a cupcake, but somebody will, and we will hear about it. We give you money instead, and we will certainly bring you a cupcake if you want one."

FWIW, this isn't the case at Google (or many other large technology companies). Google dictates the staffing agency markup (which is very limited) and audits for compliance.

This, among many other processes, has significant negative impacts on the quality of the agency that will work with Google on this sort of work - but it does help with cost control.

(Source: I ran one of these agencies, and Google was a past client.)

This could be because of the manufacturer, or it could be because your father is older than you. There's a small amount of actual data (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/info-by-product/pfizer..., which just talks about injection site pain) and anecdata/implied wisdom (https://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/info-2020/...) that says that older recipients are dealing with fewer side effects than younger recipients.

It's answered (I believe) right below the chart: "Importantly, the data does not solely include TEUs arriving in a particular week. It also includes TEUs arriving in prior weeks that the port expects to handle in the stated week."

In other words, it includes the backlog that's building up. "Expects to handle" isn't the same as "can handle." That's going to go up until the backlog is cleared.

(There is data that could prove me right or wrong, but the article doesn't provide it.)

just wanted you to know that I found your site about a year ago (somehow?) and have always loved it. Nice work!

Based on the most active thread here, I think this article has accomplished its goal, which is to lead (smart) casual readers to believe that the congestion and associated delay are due to increased exports to the US because of the predicted increase in consumer spending. (This is a trade publication that wants advertisers for people who want to buy more freight! Demand is a great reason why!)

In reality, I'm almost 100% sure that the real reason for the congestion is referred to in the one sentence from Hapag-Lloyd - which is that port workers in SoCal have been decimated by COVID. The massive spike of COVID cases in Los Angeles County that started ~11/1 and really hit hard by 12/1 (discussed many places), which has disproportionally impacted both POCs and workers in heavy-labor industries, is certainly impacting the supply of workers to offload and process. I've heard this anecdotally from two friends who run freight forwarding companies in SoCal.

It's also worth noting that the logic around shipping ahead to predict a generic increase in consumer spending doesn't play out. Planning for a single date (Halloween costumes, Christmas toys) - of course, ship it as close to the deadline as you can, but don't f'ing miss it. But for a rolling, undated, potential increase in spending? In a world of relatively fast manufacturing, ~4 weeks to get your items from the Shenzhen terminal to offloaded in Long Beach, and with storage costs being exponentially higher in the US than in China - it makes zero sense for what will be a diffuse wave (optimistically!) of consumer spending. No major manufacturer/retailer produces that far ahead of unproven demand, and no smaller one can afford to do it (and it's not like you can get money for this).

This is a staffing shortage, pure and simple. It's not going to get better for a while.

[Added 30min later]

BTW, I didn't see this before I posted, but Ryan Petersen (CEO of Flexport) shared on Twitter today

"Yesterday there were 800 COVID-19 cases amongst the 9,000 ILWU employees who run the port of LA / Long Beach. And there was already a backlog of 29 container ships waiting to unload in the port."

https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1351942493907034112

DCRainmaker has a specific guide for a range of Garmin watches and machines - https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2020/07/how-to-upload-your-garmi...

Gimlet Media did a really fun story talking about Paul in the context of superpredictors. https://gimletmedia.com/episode/58-earth-pony/

Boy. As someone who actually runs a contracting + project agency, that looks to be of an approximately similar size as 10x (at least before this was published), this was lifting-cars-painful to read - not just because they have PR and I don't, but because they (Solomon and Blumberg) _are the inefficiencies they are pretending to eliminate_.

Let's take a few parts of the article:

>"The three partners have separate roles. Blumberg handles his and Solomon’s eleven remaining music and entertainment clients, and takes care of back-office matters: “Accounting, invoicing, collection, payouts. Everything that’s the bane of most people’s existence.” Guvench vets new talent. Potential clients have to fill out a questionnaire that one programmer compared to “the most complicated dating Web site ever.” Then Guvench and Solomon conduct interviews, to screen for communication skills. (I heard one potential client say, during a meeting in Solomon’s office, “We don’t want people who just write code and drool.”) Guvench also does code reviews—testing Web sites that aspiring clients have built, and reviewing the programs they’ve written."

So... --Blumberg isn't working on the business at all; --Solomon's work isn't even described (except "conducting interviews for communication skills").

So there's one person, Guvench, an ex-engineer, who's actually doing the technical vetting - i.e. 100% of the value so far is coming from one guy.

OK, then maybe the others are selling? Nope.

>"10x technologists are working with a variety of customers: Live Nation, a virtual-reality startup, and an N.B.A. player who has an idea for a social-messaging app. Solomon admitted, however, that this list is somewhat random—it consists mostly of people who found 10x through Google, or whom he or his clients know personally. He has hired a salesman, to pitch 10x to companies."

OK, so you're closing PR-driven leads and your friends in the entertainment business? That's your sales pipeline?

I know a number of agencies with two or three partners running the organization. I don't know a single one of those where there isn't somebody pounding the pavement, hustling, finding clients - and who know the difference between a long-term partner and a sports star with an "idea for a social-messaging app." (We _all_ hear about those.)

The other value they're talking about is in the negotiation process. Hey, I'm totally willing to believe that a many-year entertainment agent is a better negotiator than I am, at least in the first-principles department. But this is not some magic skill in what is generally a well-defined and competitive market, and of course you're better at it when you deeply understand the technology and market, the BATNA for the client, etc. Those of us who actually understand the very small markets that one job description might meet are, in fact, pretty darned good at it too. For that matter, I've never told an engineer that you should work with us because we can get you a better deal than you can get for yourself, and if you're dealing with a client who understands the market (which said NBA player may not), that's pure hokum. (P.S. plenty of people on HN provide that coaching for free all day long.)

It's ok that the author doesn't really understand this market, and so the competitors she mentions aren't really competitors at all - they're all focused on full-time hiring. I guess it's also OK that the New Yorker's fact-checking department didn't discover that there's no such programming language as "THP" - that should be "PHP." (Maybe it's just a typo.)

But to let the reader believe that this approach represents the best this market has to offer - well, I guess that's just really, really great PR. Back to work.

(Added later: I realized I commented on these folks 1.5 years ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5527610. I was feeling nicer then? Maybe? It looks like the participant in that HN thread was the partner who's clearly adding value.)

These are excellent responses as usual, and I'm coming to this a few days late, but I wanted to add another answer for someone who maybe isn't willing to bite off quite as much sales skills as tptacek and patio11 are suggesting, or are dealing with a buyer who doesn't have the authority to go against the agency rule - i.e. the dev manager wants to bring you in, but he has no idea who he has to talk with to get you on board as an independent contractor, and you're not on an approved list, and two people tell him that he can't do it, and three months are going to go by and meanwhile everyone is frustrated, including you, who wants to work.

This is a common, real-world scenario, and we see it all the time. Agencies, in fact, are used to it: it's called payrolling.

If you find the work yourself - i.e. someone wants to hire _you_ but needs you to go through an agency - then ask for the names of three agencies they work with, and if any of them payroll. (They may not know the answer to that.)

Then call all three, tell them the hiring manager and anything else you know about the financials (you might know bill rate, or what you want to make, or both), and tell them you're calling all three agencies, and you'll go with the one that can make the best deal. That's a win for the agency (a little money and another person on the books with that client) and a win for you (in comparison to the $65/$130 deal). Factoring in things like employment taxes and such, you can assume that you'll keep ~90% of the bill rate. (So $65 would become $117 total comp: if they're required to employ you and pay taxes, offer insurance, etc., more like $95 to you. Look, almost a 50% raise.)

We're a small agency (~50 engineers), and we usually have 3-5 people we're payrolling because either the client called us and asked us to payroll, or we got a call like the one above and decided it was worth it.

Hark was a Capitol Hill startup (and some great people), but has been effectively defunct for ~9 months. http://www.geekwire.com/2013/hark-hit-wall-corporate-records...

Blake, you're right that the vast majority of PNW _vendors_ (i.e. technology service providers) are MS shops. That's because almost all (at least 95%) of the vendor ecosystem here is supporting Microsoft or clients Microsoft directly connects vendors with. (We're primarily a non-Microsoft vendor - we'll do MS-based development if required, but we don't choose it for new projects, and 95%+ of our work is on Linux - but we are one of a very few exceptions at any scale.)

As noted by others, _startups_ - being created from scratch by people choosing their tools - absolutely use a wide variety of platforms. I expect that the numbers would bear out a higher percentage of Microsoft-based startups than in other locations (and there are a number of successful startups in the Seattle area with Microsoft-based platforms), but it's certainly not a significant majority.

Unnecessary ad hominems aside, you're confusing what we know now (BlogThis! didn't become big and important) with what was a realistic concern then (distributing easy-to-use one-click blogging that biased towards one platform would grow that platform substantially, and that this would actually matter).

Worth noting, of course, that some part of Tumblr's growth has come precisely from their equivalent of a BlogThis! button - it just took a few more years.

That's right - they seeded nonsense queries with very specific results. Working assumption is that Bing was integrating clickstream data (either from ISPs or from the MSN Toolbar) into their results.

http://www.wired.com/business/2011/02/bing-copies-google/

Hi Michael -

Welcome to HN, and thanks for creating an account and then posting a minute later. We're happy to have you.

I'm not sure you're going to get very far saying (to your knowledge) EVERYONE else doesn't give a hoot about the engineers they work with and only cares about squeezing every last cent, and only you care about "creators." Some of us have built businesses that have been around for a while caring about all parties involved.

This is a challenging business. Best of luck to you.

Altay, I wish you the best of luck here - I hope this model works for you and your team. One thought for others, one for you.

>>First and foremost, our clients are the developers.

No, they're not. Your clients are the people who pay you money. The companies pay you money, then you pay the developers money. The developers are your vendors.

What you're actually saying is that you care about your developers and you want to treat them really well. That's awesome! Great agencies do this _all the time_.

I run an agency - we have a good reputation, and each of our recruiters has dozens of candidates who will answer the phone when they call, because they've built a relationship over the years that nobody's time will be wasted. All good recruiters have engineers who trust them. If you live in a town and haven't found a recruiter who cares about your best interests, keep looking. If you're in Seattle, find me.

Then when the recruiter finds the right role - or, as the article says about 10X, "the company tries to find gigs that match coder skill to client need" - you can make a match. (Note that the article forgot that 10X's "clients" were the developers. That's because they're not.)

>>And finally, as the article mentioned, our cut is only 15%. My understanding is that consulting agencies often take 50%+.

I wish! I wouldn't be typing to you, I'd have my minions do it.

OK, kidding. There are consulting companies that do bill >2x of their employee's wages, but they're not the kinds of companies you're competing with here. Those are companies that have folks on salary, that bench them and pay them in between projects, that provide training/mentorship, have management in place to help support their people, etc. (You can decide how valuable those things are.) Also keep in mind that their folks are employees, so they're paying a burden of 18-22% on top of their wages, which my assumption is you aren't doing.

You're competing with placement agencies (whether you want to or not). Those are the Volt/Greythorns of the world, who are likely taking more like ~15-25%. For example, many hiring companies will negotiate a markup rate of ~50% on top of someone's hourly rate, not including load/benefits - which when you add on load/benefits and calculate cut (i.e. margin) off the top, that's more like 20%. ($150 bill rate -> $100 pay rate + $20 load/benefits -> 20% cut)

If you can make 15% work with the cost of client loss and wasted time, etc., that's great. I hope the press gives you a lift you can sustain to get there.

No 40Kwh models have shipped.

Does anyone know where we can find actual user reviews of this? I like the ballsiness of requiring payment just to see the beta, but I don't know what I'm getting for my $60.

SEEKING FREELANCERS - Seattle or Remote (NA hours required - we're on Pacific Time)

We're looking for a few freelancers for different clients.

1) Ruby/Rails developer, primarily front-end development: clear knowledge of view layer, highly detail-oriented. SASS/Compass knowledge useful for some roles. Could be short-term (think a month or two) or ongoing.

2) Python/Django development, full stack. Seattle better for this one. Have a 2-3 month project that's well-specified but needs someone to own and develop. Need experience building out full-stack applications, not just brochureware.

For all of these, need great evidence and references for your self-starting and self-managing capabilities, to keep clients happy.

Happy to tell you much more if you send a note: you can find me at scott at roosterpark dot com - and you can check out our site and see that we're legit. Individuals only, of course.

Super happy to be a sponsor!

First, on the mail to the existing employee: get it, ha ha, recruiter so stupid. It's generally kind, though, to make room for the capacity for human error: it seems like a safe bet that the recruiter made a mistake and didn't think that would actually work. People make mistakes, even recruiters(!), especially when they send a fair amount of mail each day (which every one does, some smart and targeted, some dumb and spammy).

We're a boutique shop, we're super-careful, and we still make mistakes: one of my recruiters sent a mail about Client A to an employee of Client B. She screwed up - she saw an old resume that didn't have Client B's name, and didn't double-check on LinkedIn. The employee was pissed, Client B was pissed, I was pissed, my recruiter was embarrassed, but we all got over it, because we're adults.

Second, on finding an agency you like, I wrote a blog post on this a month back: http://roosterpark.com/blog/hiring-a-recruiter-how-to-choose.... dmk23 is right that you should be asking real questions: I've included some examples in the post. (I've never even submitted this to HN before. Wonder why.)

I've been using followup.cc for this purpose (among others) for the past few months and am a complete fanboy - it's a great tool for inbox-obsessed task managers like me.

This looks really clever: good luck!

Separating the detailed comment from the pedantic comment: the word is flair. You put a flare in the road. You do things with flair. (And in Office Space, you wear pieces of flair. And if you're in the ring with the master of the figure four, you're with Ric Flair.)

If you're in a male-dominated profession, where both the "employees" (VC's) and the "clients" (startups) are 90+% male, and the way people are to apply for your roles (primarily) is through an introduction, you should not possibly believe you will get >10% women - you will almost certainly get far less. In addition, if the women that others can see in the profession are concentrated near the "top" (i.e. they're already VC's or they're CEO's at successful or well-known companies), and you look at their stories and they didn't move up from the "bottom," then you don't even see anybody who looks _like_ you.

And saying that what you want from other candidates is "hustle" doesn't help matters much, though I won't pretend to be an expert on gender-dominated language - there are plenty of smart people out there (here?) who can comment.

(I thought there was a very cogent blog post from Anil Dash on this topic some years ago, but I can't find it.)

(Added: I saw Ivan's HN headline for this post and somehow missed the original. "Let's Try This Again Ladies"? Really? That certainly screams "comfortable work environment.")

I hire engineers all the time, and one of the most common failure cases in hiring is someone who's smart but doesn't get things done - i.e. they whiteboard/interview/code sample well, but when push comes to shove, don't actually end up delivering.

There are lots of reasons people don't deliver, but one is that they aren't actually writing code during the day. I'd love to have someone prescreened with a "he actually spent 40 hours this week working in Textmate & Terminal." That's like hearing you're somebody's first choice - a huge point in your favor.

So while I can't imagine this not feeling slightly creepy, I love the idea. Go RescueTime go!

+1 for the key message here. Lawyers aren't negotiators, and you have to remember _all the time_ that they work for you in this negotiation, not the other way around. They will give you lots of advice, and you should think of it as such, and ask questions about the real risk you might be taking, and make decisions accordingly.

I've watched friends have sales fall through because they didn't trust their own judgment when faced with their lawyer's thoughts. Apply the same confidence you have (or fake) for building your product to the redlines from your lawyers.

I created the original sheet (and have hired and attempted to hire from it). As I said then, I don't love the bifurcation of data - I don't think that this author is updating the data back, or even when it was updated - but I'm not sure if I can do anything about that.

I do a _lot_ of recruiting - either direct for clients (i.e. wearing a recruiter hat and filling their positions) or indirect for my consulting firm (i.e. people who will help us meet our client's needs). In doing so, I place a lot of ads on CL and personally read hundreds of resumes and notes each month. I read every CL mail myself. Before this, I spent 10+ years hiring at various BigCos and MedCos. So it's one person's opinion, but I do know what I'm talking about.

If you're applying for a position on CL (or, really, anywhere), it is _absolutely_ worth spending five minutes doing _something_ that shows that you've actually read something - the job description, the company's bio, their videos of their technology, something. I'm reading a lot of people arguing their way out of doing so below, and I'll tell you that I'm happy for your ability to argue but you will miss out on great things (and you can hardly ever know great things from a job description) by not spending five minutes. I don't care about a fancy or detailed cover letter, but if you just submit a generic sentence and a resume, you've done nothing to make an initial positive impression - which is why you're applying in the first place. This does not take a lot of work, it's just called being thoughtful.

You don't really know who's reading your submission - could be an HR person, could be the hiring mgr, could be the CEO - but every one of those people has a vested interest in finding somebody who gives a crap, and has limited time.

(And yes, the article is a waste of pixels.)