throwaway4726

http://sivers.org/itunes

" I decided to refund everybody's $40, with my deepest apologies. With 5000 musicians signed up, that meant I was refunding $200,000.

Since we couldn't promise anything, I couldn't charge money in good conscience.

I removed all mention of iTunes from my site.

I removed the $40 cost to make it free.

I changed the language to say we can't promise anything.

I emailed everyone to let them know what had happened.

I decided to make it a free service from that point on.

The next day, we got our signed contract back from Apple, along with upload instructions."

They only call themselves Directors (who are supposed to answer to VP's), so what title should I ask for? They suggested "product manager", but that is BS because product managers are responsible for the features of a product, while I'll be involved in its development. I've also been told they don't plan to hire another technical person after me for two years. They made hiring decisions before by having votes between the founders. So even if they give me a vote I won't be able to hire/fire anyone I want. I suppose I can convince them later on...

Thanks for the advice, I have a clearer idea of what I want to do now. :)

I am at a non-US profitable startup where the founders know exactly what people actually want and would pay for, but I wouldn't say the technical side of the start up is good enough to even call mediocre. The "technical" co-founder is more like a sales guy who takes a brief look at the technical side of things one day a week. They've been hiring fresh graduates without any experience. The code is getting difficult to maintain and performance is sluggish, resulting in excessively high server costs. The founders were fresh graduates when they started this company and I don't think they got funded by any venture capital. They have a knack for figuring out what people want and selling to them but I feel they lack technical experience.

I've been interning here for a few months, and they've already asked me to stay when I graduate, so that I can lead the IT team (around 4) on two products, handling software architecture, development process, performance optimisation, etc, etc and basically replacing him and hinted at offering a more than average graduate salary. They were apparently very impressed at my software engineering abilities. (I had done some freelancing work before) I've asked them why don't they consider hiring someone experienced in their 30's instead and they said that's what they're going to do if I reject their offer.

I know how to do what they want me to do more because of what I've studied at university than from my experience, and I feel nervous being given such a large responsibility. I want to work with people who write good code, with projects that already have a good architecture in place. Is that possible or are most companies in similar shape? I also feel that it won't be easy to advance this fast at another company and I could be missing a great opportunity. My friends who recently graduated and are working at large companies tell me they're lucky to write >10 lines a day and that they are always stuck in meetings. There are other startups here but I don't think I'll get offered a salary that's any good.

What should I do?