78 karma · joined July 29, 2009
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/lyal; my proof: https://keybase.io/lyal/sigs/VdHswE56pyWz1sqoGanCBtmEhEJwCyScIMQ3n4DAR_U ]
I would say the difference on the reviewer side of our platform is in quality. We are working to surface this more.
Also: I'm lame, I went with "We're the Hotmail of Food Delivery." Still not sure how that deck worked out ;-) /s
Totally true in places like mobile/react, or projects where teams are unlikely to have significant internal expertise despite technology in production (see a midsized game studio running an erlang server for chat) providing value is easy. We believe our approach is working, and will continue to get better.
(On a personal level -- huge fan of your work!)
On functional terms, we have a couple of thousand reviewers that have signed up to review. Our tooling helps them work faster; long term, we'll also provide this tooling to internal terms.
So far, we have about a dozen of the Fortune 500 signed up; larger teams, for a variety of reasons, are more open in some cases (one of the many learnings of this startup).
Edit: signed not signing.
Are you storing/validating tax docs?
PullRequest (YCombinator S17) is building the first platform for code review as a service.
We combine great backend tooling, a custom IDE, with teams of reviews to deliver first class code review. We’re hiring for engineers of all flavors to help us build our platform. We write mostly in python and javascript, but we’re running an agnostic stack.
We’re looking for amazing folks that care deeply about code quality. If that’s you, please reach out to lyal@pullrequest.com
Early stage equity + salary
It's hard for Canadian employers to pay similar wages to other countries for a variety of reasons. Most of them are completely self-inflicted: things like reliance on SRED to recoup salary costs (a program that's gotten increasingly hard to qualify for, but as a retroactive program, devastating when not won), priority selling into Canada as opposed to going global, etc.
The variability of the Canadian dollar is another huge factor. It shifts around; leading to boon and bust against the US for compensation. When I left Canada, it was at par, making $110k very competitive in the US nationally (if not in the valley). It's obviously not there now!
The funding/exit end of things is the other big challenge. A huge chunk of the "Valley Salaries" are RSUs from pubcos, options from startups, etc. It's a chicken and the egg scenario that would be familiar in any secondary market in the US; valuations are low, leading to low exit multiples, meaning that even founders who exit often don't get life changing returns, before we even get to employees. This means that options are discounted entirely in the compensation structure.. making people more reluctant to give them out. It's a bad circle.
We'll definitely have free tiers for our static and instrumentation product though.
Edit to expand:
We also believe that reviewers attached to projects will gain context quite rapidly. We had a reviewer catch an edge case bug for one of our teams that had gone unnoticed by internal review. Economic side of this would have been large... but was only possible through the context they gained in previous reviews.
We offer a free review to companies interested in trying us out. Shoot me an email (lyal@ our domain name).