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sambrand

163 karma · joined February 28, 2013

Head of Product @ Slader.

Previously worked at Stack Overflow & Union.vc.

Say hi: @samthebrand

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sambrand··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2020)
Slader | Design & UX Lead | NYC, New York | Onsite | Full-time

At Slader, we're changing how students do homework and study. Millions of high school and college students use our website, apps, and camera-first Q&A platform to succeed in the classroom and beyond.

We are looking for an experienced designer to join the team, working as a leader and individual contributor out of our beautiful office in SoHo.

See full job description here: https://slader.breezy.hr/p/f5c6f7f69f19

Feel free to reach out directly.

sambrand··on A ranking of the highest tech salaries in the US, adjusted for cost of living
This reflects more or less what we found, in 2016, in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey:

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016#salaries-and-...

TLDR: Move to Montreal.

sambrand··on BigQuery public datasets now include Stack Overflow Q&A
Hey, I figured it out!

https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/savedquery/809799891616:6b...

There's a learning curve. Getting in without giving up your credit card isn't exactly intuitive. And Leslie isn't the most popular name in the US -- it's gender neutral name, so there are lots of rows.

sambrand··on Visualizing a Job Search Or: How to Find a Job as a Software Engineer
Gotcha! I figured that might be the case. I'd be very happy to hear more about those table stakes. 100 stakes is a lot tho =)
sambrand··on Visualizing a Job Search Or: How to Find a Job as a Software Engineer
I find it interesting that the author doesn't mention anything about the product as priority during his job search. No mention of tech stack, product-market-fit, growth potential, or being convinced that a product is filling a genuine need. These are the things that I would prioritize when considering a job search. The author mentions as a priority responsiveness of the recruiter. Also:

- How nice are the employees? - What’s the vibe in the office? Noisy? Quiet? - Do employees look happy? - How’s the food? - and so on and so on…

Is this typical?

sambrand··on A New Code License: The MIT, This Time with Attribution Required
Nope.
sambrand··on A New Code License: The MIT, This Time with Attribution Required
I work at Stack Overflow. We don't have an SEO team. We don't care about this at all.
sambrand··on A New Code License: The MIT, This Time with Attribution Required
Attribution doesn't necessarily need to be a name or contact information. It just has to help end users identify the provenance of a work of intellectual property. A URL does that. Many end users are already including URLs in their code to indicate where they found a snippet - compliance with the new terms is already somewhat socialized. That's a big reason we chose these terms. We spoke at length with the Open Source Initiative about using a URL as attribution, and they agreed it works in our case.
sambrand··on A New Code License: The MIT, This Time with Attribution Required
Curious, what's the right way?
sambrand··on A New Code License: The MIT, This Time with Attribution Required
I work at Stack Overflow. I've been working on this licensing initiative for a year now. Moving to the MIT only protects the company insofar as it protects the community. I consider myself very lucky to work for a company where community & business interests align, almost always.
sambrand··on Pandora Acquires TicketFly for $450M
Trying to get indie artists paid, are we? Or just astroturfing your last.fm ranks? Both seem noble enough.
sambrand··on What we break when we fix ad blocking
At least today even fraudulent impressions are valuable because ad buyers are willing to pay for them. They're smartening up though, as Tony Haile (author of the linked article & Chartbeat CEO) is aware. Viewability & attention metrics are the future of ad performance tracking. (and that link gave me a good laugh)
sambrand··on What we break when we fix ad blocking
I respect your ideals. And I'd love to hear about how you plan to move the Internet towards Utopia. But I'm not sure consuming without paying (attention to ads) is really the most respectful or effective way to get there.
sambrand··on What we break when we fix ad blocking
The adblocking : DVR analogy is broken. TV ads are interstitial. Online ads are, for the most part, native. You can consume the content and the ad simultaneously. So online ads really are already, in some sense, product placements. Are you're arguing in favor of blocking out all product placements?
sambrand··on What we break when we fix ad blocking
Advertising is paying for goods with attention. It's a novel type of currency. It's a wealth generator. And it's contributed to a more diverse Internet.

If you don't want to pay with attention that's fine. If you believe the Internet should be an ad-free Utopia, that's fine too. But rather than take content without paying attention, practice some civil disobedience: embargo publishers who piss you off.

sambrand··on Code to transform Hillary's emails from raw PDF documents to a SQLite database
With zero assurance that all work emails are truly in the dump, I wonder if it will be at all possible to analyze gaps in it (ie. questions by Hilary without a response, regularly recurring interactions missed) to make educated guesses about what confidential emails she purged.
sambrand··on To Raise Productivity, Let More Employees Work from Home (2014)
WFH doesn't just pay off in productivity, it pays in compensation, too. Our latest survey shows that full-time remote devs get paid 40% more than never remote devs:

http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#work...

There are probably a few reasons behind this phenomenon, not least of which is richer countries outsourcing to cheaper countries. But even in wealthier countries, remote devs get paid more.

No surprise then that more developers are working remote than ever before. This year 29% of devs told us they work at least part-time remote vs. 21% last year.

sambrand··on Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
Creating a company page is free: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/products/company-pages
sambrand··on Advertisers scramble as ‘non-human traffic’ eats up online budgets
Also with CPA, if I'm a seller, I'm not going to sell to you unless I know your landing page converts. That's asking me to do a lot of due diligence or assume a lot of risk.
sambrand··on A Fantasy Sports Wizard's Winning Formula
No. The stats seem to be in the public domain. See: http://www.silha.umn.edu/news/summer2009.php?entry=195089
sambrand··on Plot Thickens as 900 Writers Battle Amazon
There's a lot of talk that Publishers are a dying breed, but I don't really think there is a status where publishers don't exist. Middlemen with more perfect information will always prosper.

This is a valiant cause. There is no bad guy, it's just economics. Though I have particular respect for anyone that can and does write a book.

sambrand··on Steve Ballmer to Sign $2 Billion Deal to Buy L.A. Clippers Basketball Team
He suggests he won't relocate the team to Seattle (doing so would be "value destructive"). But I wonder if this purchase itself destroys the value of his own net worth. That's a lot of money to pay for what was just a few years ago the hallmark of a terrible pro sports franchise.
sambrand··on After Big Bet, Hedge Fund Pulls the Levers of Power
Article seems relatively balanced to me. And I don't think we should fault Ackman for shorting a company he's lobbying against. But having publicized too-close ties w Representative Sánchez, any change in his Herbalife position should me met with serious suspicion. This isn't an article about the ethics of shorting & lobbying, or nutritional supplement pyramid schemes vs. Wall Street -- it's about insider trading.