Denzel

Counter anecdote: my mother started Nutrisystem and prioritizing fitness because the pandemic gave her the time away from work to focus, experiment, and dial in a new routine.

She’s lost almost 20 pounds and counting, healthily, and currently weighs less than she has in 30 years; her doctor halved her blood pressure medicine a couple weeks ago, and predicts she’ll be able to stop it entirely soon — once again something she’s been on for 30 years; her blood work came back with flying colors; and she went on her first actual grueling hike in her life a couple weeks ago.

She has a new lease on life due to the pandemic: a window of opportunity where she didn’t have to work to live. Now she’s ready to return to work, with her new habits, and never look back.

> They're the ones who the accounting is ultimately for.

I absolutely agree with you. I just don't agree with the conclusion this article reached: that stock-based compensation must be accounted for as an expense that affects income because, in the case where shares are issued via dilution, it doesn't affect income.

Is there a better way to present this to owners than GAAP vs. non-GAAP? I think so. Have I given it much thought? Not really. I just don't agree with including dilution as an expense that makes companies appear as if they're losing money hand-over-fist.

I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but this article didn't do it for me.

That's the crux. :) I don't have an answer for you, but that seems to be why the different sides are talking past each other in this discussion.

If a company can just dilute, there's no real tangible expense outside of the company transferring value from the shareholders via dilution. If a company has to buyback shares from the market, then I absolutely agree that stock-based compensation needs to be recorded on the income statement as a real expense.

Exactly this. I find the article unconvincing as far as its conclusion is concerned. At the end of the day, shareholders pay for the stock-based compensation with dilution. There’s no expense to the “company”.

As a thought experiment: say someone works for $0 in salary and 100 shares of Worthless Corp. After a year of work, our employee attempts to sell their shares, only to find no buyers. Unsurprisingly, their shares of Worthless Corp are worth $0. Did Worthless Corp incur an expense somewhere?

As far as I can tell, Worthless Corp received a years worth of work at no expense.

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/ is a good start.

I was shoulder deep in primary source material (#4) on real-time fuzzy search and wasn’t able to make heads or tails of where everything fit. Until I found a #3 overview that referenced most of the primary sources and put them in context. That paper was worth its weight in gold!

Do you have any tips for how to quickly find these #3 materials in other spaces?

No, it's not just about ordering grocery pickup/delivery the day you run out of food. The big problem is that there is no queue!

For weeks now, I've seen, "We're sorry! All times are currently booked. Please continue checking back - new time slots open up throughout the day."

Despite planning ahead, subscribing to the delivery service, and attempting to schedule a delivery or pickup, I get this unhelpful message and have been forced to shop in the store two times.

Why can't they just queue my order with an expected delivery date like Amazon? I'm fine waiting a week to three weeks as long as I don't have to keep polling their delivery slots every hour, on the hour, just to figure out that they don't have any available.

By the way, I'm not complaining. I understand the system is overwhelmed and operating outside the expected capacity. I'm just frustrated with people looking upon those shopping in-store as if it has anything to do with lack of foresight.

I think you're misunderstanding.

It starts with an async slack conversation. 90% of conversations go well and end with a shared understanding without much back-and-forth. Done.

For the odd 10% of conversations where you've gone back-and-forth a couple times, you ask the person whether they're available for a videochat. They either say yes, at which point you join a 3-5min videochat, or no they'd prefer to put a time on the calendar.

The above is not an immediate popup video.

Compromise makes sense when both sides are willing to compromise. Speaking broadly, the U.S. government and its institutions (NSA) have proven reluctant to compromise even when the American public is.

I’d be willing to compromise here if along with the compromise we replaced “hope” with laws around destroying this technology/platform at a certain defined point in time, along with sufficient criminal penalties for continued usage of the technology/platform after said point in time.

If the Patriot Act proved anything, it’s that we as citizens must demand laws with teeth around the deployment and usage of these dangerous technologies.

Yes, I imagine the ad-hoc creative process does get thrown off when transitioning from in-office to remote. As a remote worker for the past 3 years, that’s been involved in creative engineering discussions, it’s on the individuals and the company as a whole to be intentional about the creative process.

My company was ~50% remote across the US and adjoining countries before, and now we’re 100% remote and the transition has been relatively seamless.

Some things that help:

1) Over-communicate. Don’t be afraid to sound stupid or think that your ideas have to be fully baked. Share early and often. Whether that’s a message, a doc, an idea, anything. Blast it out and organic conversations will usually flow from there.

2) Foster a culture of popping open a video chat when there seems to be a misunderstanding after two back-and-forths. This comes from Gitlab’s principles, I forget the actual wording, but the spirit of the principle has helped me numerous times from having long, dragged out conversations through text when a simple 3min video chat will resolve the issue. Integrating your video conference solution with your chat client works wonders here. We have Slack+Zoom so a video chat is a simple text command away.

3) Establish some loose SLAs for communication like “will respond to comments within X period of time.” (Be as detailed as you like.) But let people know when they can expect a response from you generally based upon the medium.

4) With the above, embrace a RFC (request-for-comments) culture where people can give feedback and have organic conversations on anything WIP. And then follow-up with a scheduled 30min meeting to resolve any outstanding ambiguities.

There are probably a few other things I’m forgetting, but the above has served myself and our company so well that I honestly feel more productive working remotely than in an office. The meetings are shorter and more focused, there’s more documentation, and there’s less shoot-the-breeze interruptions.

All the above isn’t to say there isn’t merit to working in an office. There absolutely is! Just that I think it’s normal to have some growing pains when transitioning to remote work, and I hope that people won’t write it off entirely before giving some amount of intentional thought to learning, adapting, and building an equally productive remote workflow.

> Anytime a business model allows a company to profitably provide a product that a customer wants, its good for both the consumer and producer

I never said anything to the contrary?

I'm not disputing that customer interests are aligned with a business's profitability insomuch as they'll be around to continue to provide you the product or service you want. We agree here.

I'm simply wondering if there's a "your margin is my opportunity" play here where a company could devour SaaS companies by changing the distribution model. That's all. This thought has been banging around in my head for the past couple years due to a few data points, but I haven't had time to formally test the hypothesis.

That's all it is: a hypothesis that there's an opportunity here to change the distribution model to one that focuses on the customer and destroy a large number of SaaS models.

All of your concerns are alleviated with a simple return policy. (A customer-focused benefit.)

Have to disagree with your conclusion, counterpoint being Jeff Bezos who maintains a number (a majority?) of business lines that compete on price.

Mind giving details on the product and experience? I’m interested.

All fair points, a mix of which some focus on customer benefit and others on benefit to the business. Perhaps the motivation behind my question was wondering whether there’s an opportunity to eat SaaS margins with products that compete by changing the distribution, and whether there’s any market data to support that hypothesis.

1, 4, and 6 align with the customer. 4 could be alleviated even with a local application a la Sublime Text. I concede 6 is marginally easier to manage, but then again represents a con from the customer perspective in that the software they’re using could disappear at any time since they don’t own it.

JetBrains model seems to represent the best compromise to the customer here: subscription fee for constant updates and support, cancel anytime and keep your current version with no updates or support.

2, 3, 5 benefit the business, not the customer. In fact 3 is probably the most beneficial to the business in that cost of support and maintenance isn’t aligned, they’re decoupled! Hence the 70-80% margins this company is touting.

5 is brutal as csallen said, but then again there are counterpoints to this in that people will certainly pay and not pirate for the right experience: iTunes, Kindle, etc. even when the pirated versions are readily available.

I appreciate your response.

Semi-rhetorical question: why do customers accept something like this delivered in SaaS form? It seems so antithetical to customer obsession when this is the exact type of problem that lends itself well to a locally running application.

Why not deliver this as a desktop application that users download and pay for one-time? There’s absolutely no need for an ongoing subscription to a backend service here. Outside of rent-seeking.

Just in case the author stops by HN: I want to echo the sentiment that this post was awesome, informative, and motivating. Thank you for posting, and please continue with your blog!

r/personalfinance’s guide is worth its weight in gold: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics.

PocketSmith holds my personal budget. It takes some getting used to and dedicated time to learn, but it’s been well worth it to me. YNAB was too simplistic for my needs, however it may be just the right fit for someone else.

People that want to control P&L necessarily want accountability. I’m not sure why it’s difficult to imagine someone who’d want that? Every founder of a company, by definition, is seeking and taking accountability.

Your second point is spot on. A natural tension arises as ICs move up the ladder, and if one values being an IC, then one must maintain their boundaries.

You didn’t contradict anything I wrote.

> embedded IC is given free reign to spend time helping other teams organically

Then, by definition, they wouldn’t be an “embedded” engineer, no? In fact, what you’ve described is not at odds with what I’ve described.

I’m afraid you constructed a strawman to argue against that doesn’t occur in my comment at all.

I’d like to hear more on your thoughts about Google’s IC track and implementation, especially if you’ve worked there. Care to provide a compare and contrast?

Responsibility vs. accountability. If one wants more accountability, then you must move to management. Responsibility can and should scale with IC levels.

What’s the difference? Think about when a project fails. “Bad things” happen for the person accountable, whereas the person responsible can move on to the next project. The buck stops at the accountable individual not the responsible one.

In practice, every project has a manager that’s accountable and a lead that’s responsible. As ICs move up the ladder, they’re able to lead larger and larger projects and offer expertise and guidance across multiple projects. Think: providing feedback, from hard-fought past experience, on a design doc that’ll save a team 3 months worth of effort; architecture review, etc. Essentially ensuring and instilling engineering excellence across the organization.

One thing to note, moving up into a senior engineering role may mean you’ll be coding or designing less. And that’s to be expected. Senior engineers understand that coding/designing is one portion of a larger picture that includes communication, eliciting buyin, documentation, architecture, software quality attributes, and many more responsibilities.

In theory, this provides equal management and IC tracks that are fulfilling to all. In practice, very few companies work this way, but there are some out there. And when you find them, you won’t want to leave because it’s such a pleasant experience.

I’m a very active vegetarian that runs/bikes and strength trains 9 times a week (some days include a cardio and strength training session separated by 12 hours). So, needless to say, I need a lot of calories and protein.

I’d recommend you checkout some vegetarian recipes books at the local Barnes and Nobles or on Amazon. The “Complete Vegetarian” is the first cookbook I bought. It offers a great foundation for building some tasty recipes with variety. Roughly 75% of the recipes turned out so well that I shared them with friends and family that enjoyed them equally as much.

For protein, you can get a lot of variety with: tempeh, tofu, millet, peas, quinoa, lentils, black beans, buckwheat, peanut butter etc. The average individual only needs from 50-70g of protein/day according to the USDA. Tempeh has 15g/serving (3 oz) — you can easily eat 2 servings of that and get to about half your daily needs. A serving of quinoa+peas will get you 16-20g protein.

There’s a lot of easy ways to get your daily macros as a vegetarian. Of course, for me, I supplement with 1-2 protein shakes just as I did when I used to eat meat because my requirements are far above-average.

Yes, this is engineering in a nutshell: determining a course of action within a set of constraints that meets your objectives. Where constraints can be time, cost, physical limitations (processor speed, memory size, disk space), etc; and objectives can be functional (user can edit files), nonfunctional (user can edit large files in < X seconds, energy usage), personal learning, or any number of other requirements.

The GP offered a valid decision point to consider based upon what an engineer is solving for. I don’t think he said that an array was the solution he’d ship in a production text editor to millions of end-users.

Engineering is hardly naive. :)

Google pushed the narrative that they were more than just a “better search engine”. Specifically when they proclaimed to be the stewards of organizing the world’s information with a clear dictation from the top of “don’t be evil”.

I’m on mobile, so I don’t have the time to collect a full timeline for you. But I’d suggest you look closer at their organizational history and messaging. There’s a reason people are feeling jaded, and it’s not because they misinterpreted Google’s mission and vision.

> Where are the examples of tech billionaires making it and working to make that possible for all the rest who failed?

> Concerns like this are beginning to dominate my psyche to the point where I'm not sure I want to be in tech anymore.

That’s a part of the problem. People, like you, that consider these questions and would like to make positive a difference, give up.

Because the proposition is an ambiguous long-term play where you could spend a lifetime trying to solve it with little to no results at the end. If these issues are important to you, then wouldn’t it be worth it though?

You’ll have no better opportunity to fix this than by being in the position you’re in now. Which is, an “insider”, that can easily command $100-300K salary+stock that can readily be invested in many of your own ideas and businesses in a bid to ratchet your liquid capital up to >$10M. This capital can then be used to propel you on to >$100M or >$1B or wherever you think is the best point to make a difference in the problems you’re seeing.

You’re only two hops away from making a difference. As opposed to people that are scraping by on $20-60K a year with little to no savings and thus no resources or time to dedicate to more self-actualized pursuits. They’re four to five hops away.

Each hop probably carries 5-7 years worth of effort plus potential risk of ruin.

Point being: don’t give up. Go make a difference in the problems you’re seeing.

The author is very friendly and responsive. I'm sure he'll respond to your concerns if you reach out to him.

Exactly this. I’ve grown tired of Fitbit’s lack of cohesive bug-free products — simple things like adjusting the volume of Bluetooth headphones were known bugs for years without progress — and I had to make a choice between jumping off the bandwagon or sticking with Fitbit.

Battery life kept me. Being able to go 4-7 days without thinking about the watch is paramount. I also don’t want to charge every night because I want to track my sleep! So Fitbit won out.

I wish they could succeed independently. They have so much love and stickiness in my friend group and we all love the simplicity of simply an advanced fitness tracker without all the weight of a full-fledged phone on your wrist. Sadly, it seems like they don’t know how to run a company effectively. Which is a shame because I really really don’t want to move to Apple or Google products or anything else in this category until they solve battery life.