warcher

Not really, although there is a proven model for apps that don't bill through the respective stores. Netflix and Spotify don't share their revenue with the platform providers.

But I think you probably need an app in the store(s) long term, even if it's a wrapped web app.

The only real rot I see in the PhD track is the dangerous imbalance of degrees to jobs in certain areas (not STEM usually, although STEM is pretty uncompromising for tenure track). IMHO in the humanities the PhD is some kind of sick ponzi scheme, where advanced degrees serve to subsidize tenured faculty's careers with little to no hope of going on to anything of their own. (I know STEM isn't much better, but it's a little better, especially with industry being willing to assume some risk.) But I've got friends $100K in debt for an art history PhD, and that's craaaaaaaaaazy given what awaits on the other side.

The critical issue there is where you are on the totem pole. 100 engineers as an engineer? Probably not gonna make a big dent unless you’re really good and on the right project (tricky, uncertain).

But, a fresh exec or management track engineer? You could make a difference and climb the ladder.

It depends on where you are. Different folks need different opportunities.

People think they want the equity but they absolutely do not. They may want something for nothing, certainly plenty of folks are interested in that, but you don’t really understand the devils bargain until you’ve made it.

I know what I’m doing. Been at it for years. It works for everybody. There are so many people who deserve a shot but will never get one, if you’re willing to dig and develop there is no shortage.

I disagree- I’m really good. They just have a very large hammer they swing. Anybody can get good results with the resources they bring to bear. Getting good results with jack shit takes talent, haha.

The answer is not and will never be writing bigger checks with money you don’t have. It’s getting real up close and personal with your team and figuring out a way for everybody to win. If folks want to ride my ride, that’s super, but most cats don’t really have a taste for my risk and work profile. Where I excel is professional development and lifestyle. I can move the needle for people there.

The only reason that makes sense is to break into an industry without experience, or to move up the career ladder faster. Startups are hungry and will take folks who couldn’t even get interviews at big tech. And if you make your bones, boom, you’re in.

Respectfully, if you don’t like the split, the clear answer is to be a founder.

The option is available to all, but very few take it. For really good reasons.

Yo, you gotta tell me when you’re working. You must. You’re on a team that is depending on you and somebody has to know where the fuck your are and when you’re going to fix whatever is broken today.

“Where’s will?” “I don’t know, our manifesto says nobody gets to know when he’s working.” “Well he broke the site.” “That’s his right as a sovereign citizen.” The end.

Hey uh, I don’t do a lot of mobile gaming, but what’s a loot box and why should I care if it’s gambling or not?

You might be jumping from the frying pan into the fire there. Be careful. All the consultants I know want to make a product.

Cause this stuff is illegal and high profile. And Uber has been skating if not nakedly flaunting the law for a long time now. If the DA starts sniffing, people are going to start talking.

Furthermore, the odds of the leaks continuing approach certainty at this point. Even in a civil trial, who would perjure themselves over a job? (Pleading the fifth is a potential option even in a civil case, but is real problematic and probably will make a criminal investigation even more likely.)

White collar tech bros will not hold up under investigation. A ivy-league mba has way too much to lose to risk going to jail over some stock options. Doing this kind of dirt can only survive via staying under the radar-- somebody is gonna flip and this whole house of cards is gonna go down in a stampede of Uber employees rushing to drop the dime on each other.

Man, pro tip- always go with a PA over an actual doctor for most general purpose visits. Doctors are waaaaaaaaay harried and checked out of the process. PA all the way. Honestly, even for hard problems I'm half inclined to go with a PA first, just because getting through to a doctor is so difficult, and there's always an easier solution they're going to try to make you prove won't work (to save themselves a little trouble).

It's funny- I was an unlicensed grey market house painter for a while in college. I booked most of my jobs while standing on top of a ladder, where somebody would stroll up asking me if I'd do their house next.

You can also deny workman's comp claims if somebody blows a drug test. They are powerfully financially incentivized to fish for a hot sample in the case of an accident.

Couple things briefly.

The only time to do something important is right now. If you found the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, marry them. Today. Life won’t wait.

Secondly, the culture of startup Uber alles is real dubious and I question the wisdom of dedicating yourself 100% without question to a group of venture capitalists who are, bluntly, counting on most of you to fail. Trust is reciprocal. Don’t get too far out over your skis- this is business and managing resources and risk is your job. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that you are costantly triaging your time and energy, and without a strong sense of priorities and boundaries, you will be totally consumed by the endless cycle of other people’s wants. There are a lot of people who will tell you to go all in and sacrifice everything for the company. I think most of those people have an agenda that is serving their interests over yours.

Lastly, man, I work real hard and have for a long time. You have a ceiling where your hours are going to get real soft efficiency wise on a consistent basis. You can go 60 hours a week with a family. Very few people can put more than that number of hours in at their job without experiencing a real sharp productivity dip in their per hour output. I would submit that most of the folks going 80, 100, 120 a week for sustained periods of time are getting nothing they couldn’t have with a disciplined, 100% focused schedule and a family. They’re selling out the only life they’ve got for a handful of sloppy meetings or ugly code. Go home and have dinner with your kids. Hug your husband. Get a couple hours in on the weekend. Delegate more stuff, better. Focus on finding and executing what’s going to move the needle, and cut out the rest.

I'm kind of a slacker responding to HN stuff, but here's what I'll say:

Yeah, you're right, if shit isn't shipping, it's my fault.

But.

There are a variety of psychological profiles in computing, and they have various pluses and minuses. I need folks with kind of a... move fast and break things attitude. That's what I select for.

Furthermore, the 80/20 rule is a super real thing and the last 1% until a project ships hurts real, real, real bad. There are people who can push through that and there are people who can't. Yeah, it's my fault we're not sipping tea as we ship, but I've been doing this a long time and I'm pretty good at it, and I can't make that pain stop. I just can't. I've been on teams that shipped and suffered, and I've been on teams that didn't ship.

If somebody's cracked this code for me, man, throw me a bone. But while I'm always trying to do better, I also kind of have given up. I'll make it up to you on the other side, I promise, but it's gonna hurt a little pushing it out.

This will sound flippant, but you can’t win them all.

There are hordes of false negatives in any hiring process, anyplace. My process is more accurate IMHO but it’s indisputably more work and it does not scale at all. Ultimately everybody is going to beef with any criteria they don’t align well with and I have to remain flexible enough to not throw the baby out with the bath water. I don’t mind getting drug a little on HN— I have a good team, and their open source contributions might not be as impressive as you assume.

Most assuredly. But what are we talking about on a whiteboard? Not the things that I personally am interested in, or the things in my opinion most important to the success of a project.

Honestly the code review isn’t for the obvious rock stars. Anybody can pick them out. It’s for the sleepers who might not get a fair shake but who can deliver.

A lot of programming is real grimy and there’s a lot of skeletons in every closet. Par for the course. I’ve seen it all. The code isn’t the code, it’s a conversation we have about how you think. So many people dragging me in this thread think it’s about the code. It is not. I’m interested in the person. The code is just an artifact and a conversation piece.

I don’t know their arrangment with their old employer and I don’t ask. Very often folks will have an ongoing maintenance consulting relationship and retain some IP just in case. More often folks will just have some stuff lying around, and they’re already breaching their contract by having it.

Believe it or not, there’s next to nothing I’ve ever seen that was the remotest bit interesting on an industrial espionage level. Just regular old business logic that was either cleanly done, or not.

I honestly could not recall any of the crap from the interviews I’ve done beyond a sense of how people thought.

Anyways, you wanna do some interviews your way, be my guest. I will happily send the guys who don’t want to do show and tell to you. I’m not trying to be all things to all people. No open source, no closed source, no side projects? We can play API bingo or code a b-tree, but prob not a culture fit.

“How much time is the interviewer willing to invest” is a super legit question to be asking. It tells you a lot about how many shits they give about you in particular and is a good proxy for the quality of the team in general.

On boarding. Training. Professional development. Pair programming.

It’s much more cost effective to invest in your existing people. That’s one thing I never skimp on.

I am technical and we will sit down and go line by line, haha. And I know where alllllllll the fun code is hiding, not just the boilerplate. I get real deep in there. I’m sure my methods probably weed out some folks who don’t or can’t drop trou, but I never expected to catch every single fish in the ocean.

I guess I see that as disrespectful of their time, but I could probably work something like that out. I run a small shop. I am allowed to use my good judgment.

Sure, sure. And if you followed the letter of the law I’m sure you deleted it all from your laptop promptly and is unavailable to you no matter what.

But if you didn’t, for whatever reason, and you happen to have an illegal copy of some production CRUD app hanging around so I can look at how you organize your thoughts, nobody I’ve interviewed has ever gotten even a whiff of heat for letting me look over their shoulder and see how they wrote their schema. I don’t want a digital copy and I could give a shit about your illegally retained IP (and there’s a whole lot of it floating around). I want to know what you name your variables.

The best way forward is absolutely some open source code, folks clean up better in public and you don’t have to make apologies for things that weren’t your fault.

But this smells like folks just wanting me to take their word, and it ain’t gonna happen. I’m flexible, but when in doubt I choose ‘no’. If the next guy can prove it and you can’t, hey, plenty of fish in the sea.

Computing is really noisy and chaotic. There are a lot of dudes out there that just can’t cut it, for whatever reason, and there’s no good way to figure out who’s who.

Whiteboard stuff selects for a particular algorithmic dexterity that I just don’t need a lot of the time. And rejects some of the grungier virtues that make a big difference in moving units in production.

Hiring folks for a couple weeks is fantastically expensive in management overhead. I gotta be highly confident you will work out to take that step.

Just hiring a bunch of dudes and firing the duds is similarly expensive and I frankly don’t want to be that guy. I hate firing people just because I was lazy interviewing. This is my job and I take it seriously.

And there are a whole lot of guys that just don’t ship. They show up. They commit code. They are prompt and attentive at meetings. But if you need to ship, they just can’t shit it out. So many organizations are rotten with these guys- you wonder how so many devs can produce so little product, this is the reason. (Also shitty management- mgmt is ten times noisier and a hundred times more expensive if you fuck up.)

I’m not mad at you, but as the dude on the other side of the desk, I have to decide whether you can cut it and I’m fine saying no. I could make you do some whiteboard problems, but I think whiteboard problems are pretty far removed from your day to day development and I am uncomfortable relying on them as a proxy for your ability to ship code.

I don’t really disagree with your philosophy of working while you’re working and NOT working in your downtime. I think the same way.

But I have a whole pile of stuff I can show you that I’ve worked on. I don’t ask anybody to take my word for it. In computing, you just can’t. The signal to noise ratio is too bad, there are too many guys out there making unmaintainable junk, if they actually ship anything at all. There are shops out there that can afford to hire a bunch of maybes and just weed out the duds when they wash out, but I don’t have that luxury. Nor am I going to go on some weeks long hiring safari where I hire you for a week or two and see if you can cut it. No time man. Sorry, don’t have it. I’m going to give you the job or I’m not going to give you the job.

I feel like.... maybe some of these guys are feeling the hangover from other people's money, and trying to have it both ways.

It's far from easy to bootstrap, but you basically solve all the problems these guys are talking about if you can survive it. The problem, of course, is that your unit economics have to work, you have to have the personal patience and resources to get to profitability, and you have to survive a potential funded competitor using their financial leverage to sell at or near a loss and torch your position in the market.

So a lot of folks take the money, but you take the money, you gotta pay it back. An IPO is ultimately just kicking the can down the road, and taking on a new set of guys that are going to cash out your venture debt for public debt. Who also expect to be paid back. I don't see a way out of this devil's bargain short of, you know, delivering on the milestones you talked about in your pitch deck, or in your roadshow.

But spare me the crocodile tears, huh? You took the money, you gotta pay back the money. Plus interest. And a lot of these IPOs, they had to make big promises when they went public-- big multiples, big projections, to support big valuations. Now you are sitting on a big pile of teachers' pension money and you have to deliver.

Food safety is a great way to backdoor agricultural import restrictions. Europe has been doing it for decades on GMO's.