This list might just barely meet your expectations, if you squint a bit.
290 karma · joined July 9, 2019
People gradually stop posting so they had to fill the void with nonsense.
Let me ask a designer friend and shares the results by email.
Re "Do you know other jobs that can be done remotely and where non-native English speakers aren’t at such a big disadvantage?", design also comes to mind, but software engineering seems to be the absolute best.
When you join this early, the main compensation is equity.
To give you a benchmark, most investors pressure founders to never grant more than ~1% of the company to a single employee. In this current environment though, you could probably push for ~1.5%, especially if you take the title of "founding engineer".
When it comes to salary though, you can do three things:
1. Clarify the minimum you'd "happily" take to work with them. This mainly depends on your alternatives and how much you care about this company
2. Understand how much budget they have by asking how many people they want to hire to achieve what milestone when. Note: often people don't have a plan, so you have to resort to no. 1
3. Negotiate a written agreement to raise your salary by X% when the next fundraising goes through
Finally, look for ways to enlarge the pie, such as negotiating getting a 1on1 with the founders every 2 weeks to learn about whichever topic interests you.
Did I forget anything? Happy to share more.
Link to the whole article: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/developers-mentoring-othe...
I would find it awesome to get work done while in nature.
There are many tools trying to bridge the gap so you can use others to iterate faster. Out of the dozen tools I tested, Sunsama was the best UX so I moved my whole company to it. Try it and let me know what you think
- founders having low ethical stands → background check them
- founders having poor management skills → evaluate their managerial skills
- founders using their information asymmetry to screw you over → check the contracts
Let's dive into all three.
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# Background check the founders
Few do it yet it's highest impact as all problems come down to people problems. Find their last company or co-founder and email them to get on a 15' call. This saved me from almost partnering with a guy who had abruptly cut ties with every single company and founder he ever worked with.
Here's a good starting checklist:
1. Understand the context - Can you verify the person's employment, job title, pay, and responsibilities? - Why did they leave that job? - How do you know the person?
2. Evaluate the candidate - Tell me what it’s like to work with the person. - What are the person's biggest strengths and weaknesses? - If you learn they got fired, what’s the 1st reason that would come to mind? - Would you build a company with said person? Why not?
3. Opening - What else do I need to know about the person that I didn’t already ask? - Who else should I speak to about the person that can provide different insight?
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# Evaluate their management skills
Many founders make employee's life hell not out of malice but out of incompetence in managing themselves and others.
Best but highest effort is to run a ref check with someone they managed before.
Lower effort is to question your boss during your interviews: what's their management style? With what kind of people does it tend to not go well? Evasive and imprecise answers are a red flag.
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# Check the contracts
You can easily spot red flags by sanity checking a) salary and equity amounts and b) contract terms.
On amounts, founders will often say they're giving you an offer above market because you're special. The red flag is them not having answers when you say "how do I know it's above market?".
Good founders will be very transparent, and share exact examples from their own experience, and point you to equity and salary benchmark research articles or softwares like Pave.com.
On the terms, founders will always tell you they're giving you a "standard contract" when it's not the case, a sin they're learned from VCs! The best is get your hand on the YC standard docs and run a diff, but googling your way should do.
There's a lot of good articles online, so I'm only highlighting the two most important - Does your equity differ from the standard 4y vesting with 1y cliff without a good reason? - How long is the exercise window? 3 months is common but bad, 5 years is great. Personally I always negotiate this one to 10 years.
Overall, the YC has good resources, starting iwht https://www.ycombinator.com/library/F5-startup-compensation
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Hope this helps, let me know if I'm missing anything.
My main user feedback is that I was a bit confused by the controls. For example it wasn't obvious I had to use arrows. Otherwise it's great.
Also, it's amazing you spun this off from a replit bounty project made by a 16 years old dev! Did you order the bounty? I'd be curious to learn more about your experience, such as whether it was hard to find someone, and whether you needed a lot of back and forth on speccing the project.
I remember a podcast of Tim Ferris where he was boasting that people often complimented him on his Vans black shoes because "they could pass as dress shoes". No one past the age of 15 would be so tasteless as to share such a compliment, and that's what's beautiful about SF.
SF also happens to be the place where I heard a deceptively powerful method to get rid of stuff
1. Put all your stuff in boxes 2. Pick items out when you need them 3. After a year, throw everything you don't use
- Push security breach details down so fewer people read them. Nothing until line 11. Or line 13 if you count the TLDR.
- Litter your text with understatements. After publicly exposing keys, you replace them "out of an abundance of caution" to replace them.
And yet this is one of the best security breach posts I've seen in a while. When will companies start to respect developers?
I have a hunch most people would be a lot less regarding of security vulnerabilities for tools that boast such as nice "packaging".
This has potential of bringing "free browser extension that sells your data" to a whole new level.
Another option would be to improve the UX, with VS Code inspired vertical lines that make it easier to track indentation. Not as fancy though!
Completing it takes about a day. If you only have time for one exercise, pick Kaufman’s 49 questions.
My brother has a similar/worse sickness that halves his life expectancy. He's also a programmer. Some quick thoughts from going through the downs with him:
- There's no silver bullet. More sleep, better nutrition, more sports, and less stress make a difference.
- My brother literally left a PhD in treatment optimization using ML at Cambridge because pharmaceutical companies are churning such better treatment so fast that optimization past ones felt irrelevant. The bad news is that most new treatments only stabilize your situation, so you have to stay as healthy as you can until the cure comes. We felt it was better to plan around this, and open the door to be positively surprised, than hope for the moon and get crushed with never ending disappointment.
- There are many ways of earning a living that don't involve programming. Career switches can be daunting when you've lost self confidence, but most jobs require only a fraction of the brain it takes to program.
- If the prospects are very gloomy, consider changing country. We had my brother move country so he could get a medication that's not covered at home and costs >$250k/year. The medication changed his life, and will soon be covered at home too. Having to leave your friends for health reasons suck, but European countries offer such better health coverage that it can be worth it. And it's easier living a happy life when you don't have to worry about unpredictably becoming homeless.
The idea was to remove the social upbringing's impact on test scores, as candidates from higher socioeconomic status are heavily advantaged from using a larger vocabulary from birth.
A PhD friend who studied this told me it had no measurable impact. Put aside raising math tutors salaries of course.
- The three body problem
- The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy
“Will this object outlive me?”
As a software engineer I have to admit… I’m envious.
Number of the 100 of his favorite books written before year X:
1500 6
1900 29
1950 24
1990 41
2022 0
→ it's all pretty recent, which is surprising for a Taleb reader
→ but 0 was written in the last 30y!
Also, 0 of the books he read in the last 30y made it to his 100 favorites list.
When I did the same exercise, 50% of my favorite books were readings from early adulthood. It scared me: am I not learning anymore? I hope I'm not the only one.