Comment by Cymen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cymen | Hacker News Reader

The problem here is that the dream is dying for those of us coming to SF to work in startups. The harsh reality is that more and more of us are going to look towards the better deal at the bigger companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, etc. Companies that provide both excellent salaries and benefits along with potentially as lucrative stock grants.

It's time for the startup community to reevaluate the idea that your early employees (say pre 50) should get 0.05% of the company when they take the monetary risk of working for a startup. With such small ownership, it is starting to become a sucker bet.

So for those coming here, keep your eyes open and know that right now it's only founders, management and investors making out and if you are not looking to hit the lottery, you'll do much better working at a bigger company, maxing out that 401k and investing the rest. Or go for lottery but be a founder -- sure, get the experience of working at a startup but keep a careful eye on your personal burn rate (in regards to your potential earnings). And if you're not learning and you still want to learn more, make the move to the next startup. The options just aren't worth the wait.

There's still a massive difference between founder and early employee. There are also plenty of startups that pay market rates.

It's far more complicated than just startup or big company.

All I want is to be able to write 500 to 1000 lines of code a day and not think about anything else while I do it. I just want to focus. I want to be prolific. Money is irrelevant if the thing a person wants to do doesn't require it. I can see how writing software can make someone a lot of money but if I was interested in money it is not how I would go about it. The people with wealth I know don't seem like they are doing it for the money -- they are passionate about making the deal. It is a game to them and the rules are simple, buy low and sell high.

lol who writes 500-1000 lines of code per day?

To be generous to the grandparent if the problem you are working on is simple then it really is possible to churn out 1000 lines of crappy code a day. Why anyone would want to is another issue.

It's not so much the problem being simple, but more about it being a problem you have already solved. If you give me a blitter API and ask me to write a composited then yes, I can churn out the required quantity of code with ease each day. I know the problems, I know at least one solution, so I won't ever have to head up dead end alleys, stop and research options on the Internet, discover that I've chosen a really inefficient algorithm that requires a near complete rewrite to avoid, and so on. Ask me to patch an existing code base that I'm unfamiliar with to add a new option on a settings screen, and those 5 lines might take me two or more weeks to write, even though the task is simple.

At IBM in the 1980s, typical productivity would be 1,000 debugged, shipped lines of code per year. That was the metric that they used for their median employee. Where as, when we were shipping Half Life 1, one employee, Yahn Bernier, was shipping 4,000 lines of code per day.- Gabe Newell

I remember downloading the source code for HL2 (via the official SDK) and somehow I counted the lines of code and the number of programmers and the number of days it took to program and my calculations came to about 1000 lines per day per programmer. But I thought I must've made a mistake somewhere.

Wait... what? I would consider 500-1000 lines of well tested code a slow day for me.

I usually round 1000 lines of code before breakfast. At my last job, it took a team of programmer to review just half the code I was writing.

What kind of code do you write?

How many users does your code serve?

I think you'll find that andreyf codes on SarcasmOS..

I write in a language hackertyper.com

Java programmers.

Here lemme show you my AbstractFactoryOfFactoryInterfaceImpl class.

More specifically Spring programmers.

<duck and cover behind my TomEE server and continues to simplify the rest of the code.>

I hear ya

Java fixed the xml nightmare it had become, but the development world is about ten year behind in adoption

The thing I'm working on recently has cascading xml as configuration, the apoteosis of previous generation madness

Not Spring Boot programmers...

I believe your figure. But being prolific is not the only measure, there is such a thing as quality and it is more often than not the 500 lines of code that took you 3 months that will make the difference. And 500 lines of code require an about equally large chunk of documentation and most people that 'just code' and don't want to think about anything else skimp on the parts that they don't enjoy.

As for people with wealth, yes, there are those that trade but there are also those that create wealth by adding value. All of those goods traded by others have to come from somewhere.

A cook can make the best soup in the world but if it takes him all day to do it, he will never make a living cooking it. If this line of thought carries over into coding it might be true that higher quality doesn't mean higher value.

In the first season of the Apprentice the two teams had to renovate and flip an apartment. One team kept their apartment a three bedroom and the other team took out a wall and made theirs a two bedroom. The two bedroom apartment was a lot nicer but it was also worth less than the three bedroom and they ended up in the boardroom with someone getting fired. This is another example of something being higher quality but not necessarily higher value.

Sure, there are a lot of people who create wealth by adding value, but the whole point of OP's article on Bloomberg is that the people who are adding value are not getting the share of that wealth. While there are lots of people earning $127,000 a year and getting $350,000 a year or two after their startup's IPO, they are not making the type of wealth people with 10s and 100s of million dollars are. Do you think Larry Page and Sergey Brin are writing code right now? Probably not. Most likely they are looking for companies for sale that are under valued or added to the Alphabet family will increase the value. I was just pointing out that the state of mind of people making deals when they wake up in the morning isn't motivated by the money, they are motivated by making the the best deal and money is just a side effect. Fundamentally, they are allocating resources, they might not necessarily be creating value. They value is already present in the product or company, they just gain an edge at the game when they understand that product or company is, interestingly enough, under valued.

If people are not passionate about what they are doing, they are just wasting their time. And, my experience is people who are worth 10s and 100s of millions of dollars are passionate about making deals because that is all they do all day. People shouldn't write code because it will make them a millionaire. If people really want to be a millionaire they should make deals, even then they still have to be passionate about that game.

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