JamesVI

The data they present doesn't support their thesis (or the headline).

All the data says is that 50-60 year old non-managerial employees at tech companies are paid less, on average, than 40-50 year old non-managerial employees.

The simplest explanation is that the higher paid employees are retiring early because they can afford to (or even voluntarily moving to lower paid positions with less responsibility/more interesting work/fewer hours).

Everything else in the article is wild conjecture with no supporting evidence.

This isn't new, this has been the law for decades.

In fact I just wasted five minutes trying to figure out when that section of the act was last amended and it looks sub-sec f was added in 1996 so sub-sec e has been around since before then.

Most permanent residents either ignore it or carry a photocopy since replacing the actual green card if your wallet gets stolen is both a pain and expensive.

The capacity for some of the reservoirs listed in the graphic is misleading. Some of them (like Oroville) cannot be completely filled because there are concerns that the dams will break in an earthquake.

You probably want to take CalTrain to Mountain View rather drive up and down 101. It's awful at the best of times and right now it is covered in potholes so there is a non-zero chance that you'll end up hitting one and blowing a tire.

45-50 minutes if you get on an express. 1hr and 10 for the local trains. It'll take 47 minutes to drive if there is no traffic and anywhere from 1hr 20 to 2hr in rush hour.

Currently using

- Version Control (GitHub) - Issue Tracking (YouTrack) - Team Chat (Slack) - Wiki (Stopped using) - CI/CD (Jenkins) - Project Management (Aha.io) - Documentation/what we used to use wiki for (Google Docs, markdown in the repo)

Was previously at startups and companies that were all atlassian.

I have personally hired ICs at $200k base plus 10% bonus target plus RSUs.

Typically 10+ years experience and a some specific experience we felt was relevant to the team.

Sublime has an SFTP/FTP plugin that makes it trivial to edit files over SSH. Since you are running ST on your local machine and only using SSH to save/read the file it actually works better over a flaky connection (like on a plane) than SSH+vi.

Beer brewing. Bought a kit. Forced my friends to drink super-sweet partially-fermented wort. Bought THE book and kept making batches until I can produce better beer than some of the local brewpubs (or so I have been told - I still throw out the odd suspect batch).

Classical guitar. Bought a guitar. Took lessons for a decade or so and then just kept playing.

Have you considered removing the university reference entirely?

The base line assumption is that you list education you completed (graduated), so anything less is likely to 'dissapoint' the recruiter.

If you can repackage what you did in university as discrete 'experience' that might give you the chance to establish a positive narrative ('I was well qualified for university but found the CS program too theoretical so decided to pursue a different path.')

Break it down into the three roles that are described here, co-founder, investor and employee.

You are both co-founders. He is taking considerable risk along with you and neither the product nor the market have been proved yet. Split the founder's equity 50-50 with identical terms.

Your investment, along with the rest of the F&F money should be written up as convertible notes. You will get that money back (plus interest) in the form of cash or stock (at a discounted conversion) when the company succeeds. Obviously, since he is not an investor, your co-founder won't get any of that.

Finally, you are both employees. Since you are also both co-founders you typically don't issue additional equity. However, if you both feel it is the fair thing to do then you could issue stock options to yourself, as the CEO, to make up for the salary cut. 5%, vesting over 4 years, would be typical for a CEO (with salary), but then even a fully-paid CTO would expect to get 2-3%. All things being equal, and assuming you don't both take employee stock options (because it is just more paperwork) I would say that your 50% salary cut is worth a couple of percent in options, at most.

The big variable here isn't your personal stake in the company, it is the success of that company. It is important that all parties feel that the split is equitable and they are full engaged in the process. Treating the guy who has chosen to join you at this early (and very risky) stage as anything less than a cofounder could make the difference between him making a superhuman effort to help the company succeed and treating it as just a job. Deal with the investment and compensation issues seperatly.

Oh, and take the hit to pay a decent attorney to get all this written up (corp docs, co-founder docs, stock plan, convertible notes) and filed properly. A few $k now will save major problems down the road and make your company much more appealing to investors.

Good luck with the startup :-)

If you think what you plan to do is "kind of a grey zone" I wouldn't recommend discussing it in a public forum.

Contact a trademark attorney to have an initial consultation that will be covered by attorney-client privilege. Trademark attorneys are (relatively) cheap and will probably give you a 30 min phone consultation for free anyway.

Yes, they can sue you for damages.

If they demonstrate that your use of their trademark caused brand confusion and they lost business as a result they can sue you for those lost earnings.

If they can demonstrate that a significant portion of your profits are due to inappropriate use of their trademark then they can sue for those profit.

They may also sue for punitive damages if they can prove that infringement was willful as opposed to accidental.

Google around for trademark infringement (http://apps.americanbar.org/litigation/committees/intellectu...)

I'll answer from the other side, as a co-founder.

I won't ask you to sign an NDA to hear my idea. The idea by itself is worthless but your feedback to the idea is invaluable to me.

I won't ask you to sign an NDA to play with my prototype/MVP. It is a product and I want customers/testers/critics to try it out and give me feedback.

I WILL ask you to sign an NDA before I discuss technical details that I will be including in a patent application. Actually, I HAVE to make you sign an NDA because, outside of the US, public disclosure before filing can invalidate a patent. Having you sign an NDA makes it clear (to the courts) that I didn't intend to publicly disclose the information, even if it leaks before I can file the patent application.

I WILL ask you to sign an NDA before I give you access to detailed designs, plans, documents or source code for the product.

Before you do any work for me (even if it is "as a friend") I will have you sign an NDA and an assignment of rights document so that there is no question that the company owns rights to any work done. My co-founder and I have signed these same agreements so that the idea and the product belong to the company, not to us as individuals.

I do these things on the advice of my attorney, primarily to give future investors confidence that there are not going to be any issues around intellectual property rights.

Whenever I sign an NDA that our company lawyer didn't draw up I have a lawyer look it over. That said, they are all pretty similar so once you have seen one you should be able to identify any unusual terms.

No.

This is impolite and unprofessional.

You don't want to work for a company that treats job applicants in this manner. They probably treat their employees even worse.

The author specifically recommends hiring someone for weeks. Maybe he meant a couple of weekends, but it doesn't read that way. I agree that something small - evenings and weekends - might work. Of course, you and your team need to be prepared to come into work at those times too, in order to make this a bidirectional experience.

Yeah, something small is probably okay. I know that I've invested more than that preparing to interview for a new job (brushing up rusty skills, revising algorithms I don't use but interviewers love to ask about). The author talked about hiring people for weeks. I think that is too long.

Variations on the theme of "have them do a paid project for you" surface here every so often. The problem is that a large number of job seekers currently have a job (everyone keeps telling them it is easier to get a job while you have a job). Even qualified, competent programmers will find it hard to accept the risk of being dropped at the conclusion of the short project (and if you no-one ever gets dropped, what is the point of the project besides giving you a warm and fuzzy?)

Fact is, you have to do everything up to that 'mini project' then just go with your gut and hire/no hire. If they underperform in the role you need to either change the role, try and train them up or let them go.

This trial period is just a way of pushing the risk of a bad hiring decision back onto the candidate and allowing the manager to avoid the discomfort of actually firing someone (although telling the candidate that the project didn't work out is functionally the same thing).

He isn't a military officer anymore. He resigned from the army to become head of the CIA. If he were still in the army he would be facing charges.

This isn't actually true for all companies.

At my (large) company HR only gets involved once a decision to hire has been made. They make sure the background check is performed, vet the offer to make sure it is within guidelines (or the guidelines have been waived by someone In Charge) and then handle the huge volume of paperwork that must be signed in order to formally accept the offer.

Following on-site interviews the hiring manager will collect and sanitize feedback from all the interviewers to give to the candidate. Sometimes the message is something generic, like "not a good fit" or "lacking required experience" because some feedback just can't be sanitized.

If the deficiency is in skills (technical or soft), rather than personality or demeanor, then we generally provide solid feedback. For a candidate that is borderline we will sometimes invite them back (or out for a drink) to ask them how they would address the perceived deficit if we were to hire them. Not only does it give them a chance to recover, it lets us see how they handle critical feedback.

I don't believe there is liability exposure here, unless someone were to refer to gender, race, religion, disability or ethnic background as a reason for not hiring. Since those are never the reason for not hiring, this isn't an issue.

Yes, this is complete BS. The backbone of all systems currently in use to block URLs leading to child abuse images is the Internet Watch Foundation block list, which is manually compiled by a small team of police-trained analysts.

Companies providing the actual blocking services don't want to even see the URLs on the list (going so far as to ensure that it is encrypted at all times until the URLs can be safely hashed). They certainly don't want to download the contents and have them sitting (even temporarily) on a server somewhere.

At my company HR signs off on the offer, but is not directly involved in the negotiation. The hiring manager is given a range to operate in based on the grade he is hiring for.

We make the hire/no-hire and grade decision after interviews then the manager handles salary negotiation one-on-one. If a good candidate pushes the envelope we have to get Senior VP approval to go over the limit (rarely happens) or we try to make up the difference with stock grants.

Given the current challenges of hiring qualified candidates, particularly at the higher ranks of individual contributors we generally laugh at our colleagues who make low-ball offers to good candidates (and then promptly outbid them).

If you DO successfully push the envelope your subsequent raises will be small. We try to push everyone towards the center of their pay grade so newly promoted individuals (or poor negotiators) generally get a couple of good years of pay raises regardless of company-wide economics. People at the top end of the pay range typically get no increase at all.

HR doesn't own the salary budget. It is actually assigned by business unit (VP/SVP). If there is significant surplus then it just gets rolled up to hiring more people.

HR bonuses are partially determined by company performance metrics and partially by individual performance determined by their manager (based on what, the devil only knows).

Correct, Tom Gillis is not an engineer.

He is a salesman who happens to lead a business unit at a technology company.