London’s Lonely Unicorn: Two Frugal Expats and Their Billion-Dollar Startup

And if it was, personally, I wouldn't have a problem as a customer.

Total aside: As an Eastern European emigrant, I don't really mind being characterized as hard-working and rarely-complaining. I like to think it's true.

Marx theorised that instead of seeing the people behind transactions, rather we focus solely on the trade itself, the commodities involved. This is a simplification of the theory of commodity fetishism, so to say that commodities are fetishised by focusing on one particular aspect of the product rather than the whole web connecting the products, buyers, sellers, labourers etc.

And actually, developers are merely capital. Their labour time is purchased, just as the computer is purchased, or the loom or silk or bale of cotton. It's simply a transaction which is factored into all the other costs, there's nothing special about labour.

From Wage Labour and Capital:

>Consequently, it appears that the capitalist buys their labour with money, and that for money they sell him their labour. But this is merely an illusion. What they actually sell to the capitalist for money is their labour-power. This labour-power the capitalist buys for a day, a week, a month, etc. And after he has bought it, he uses it up by letting the worker labour during the stipulated time. With the same amount of money with which the capitalist has bought their labour-power (for example, with two shillings) he could have bought a certain amount of sugar or of any other commodity. The two shillings with which he bought 20 pounds of sugar is the price of the 20 pounds of sugar. The two shillings with which he bought 12 hours' use of labour-power, is the price of 12 hours' labour. Labour-power, then, is a commodity, no more, no less so than is the sugar. The first is measured by the clock, the other by the scales.

I'm willing to pay top dollars if I could but right now I need to make my bootstrapped stuff stretch with every dollar. Once you take the helm of a business, it's painfully clear how expensive hiring people is.

I'm trying to build something like Patreon for open source developers where you get paid to work on open source projects the community requests.

I am actively trying to help people get paid, there's not much money that goes into my pocket, I'm doing this because I believe that 1) Open source is going to eat commercial software 2) Developers should be able to easily find side income or full time income without having to drive their wages to the floor on freelancer websites.

I've hired people from Ukraine, Romania before and they were every bit as good if not better in some aspects. The cost of living there is different and the USD goes a long way in many parts of the world.

I also think it's great to give people meaningful work all over the world, especially in places where they are rare due to structural economic issues.

Q Television Channel - Informercials 24/7

For #1, this pretty much requires human curation/submission to accurately gather the vendors for each process you might outsource.

For #2, Rich, quality tags that provide a near complete representation of feature sets requires human intervention or a substantial crawl with NLP+ranking algos on par with Google.

The closest that really exists is:

http://alternativeto.net/software/server-density/

http://alternativeto.net/software/sentry/

> Of course, ideally such tool should also include a price comparison mechanism, and maybe "performance levels" per each relevant performance dimension, kinda like the one you get in digikey, the electronic component store, where you can select chips by speed, power,etc.

> The question is, how to get there, and how close it's possible to get?

An AlternativeTo clone with a focus on tagging features/performance dimensions, having people rate those individual dimensions, and submit prices would likely work. The only problem is the incentive for people to:

A) Switch

B) Be that detailed.

C) Avoid it becoming a popularity contest like ProductHunt & AlternativeTo are at present.

I remember a post made not long ago by the HN admins themselves where they said they'll try to reduce the political posts.

So far, it's not working out.

The FizzBuzz test exists to quickly filter out candidates who really cannot code at all, despite what they say in their CV, what jobs they have done in the past, or what courses they have passed.

If you can show that yes, you understand what for loops and if statements are, and can write 10 lines of code roughly correctly, the test is passed and the interview can continue with more interesting questions.

If no, then it saves everyone time to just cancel the interview.

Having said that, we tend to pair program for our interviews. Our current interview system is to do a quick telephone interview and then follow up with a 4 pomodoro pair programming session. Usually we ping pong and offer to drive first so that the candidate has a chance to settle in. Generally we TDD a fun kata.

I've been surprised at how effective this is. For the people we've hired recently, the programming session really shows what the person is like to work with (to be fair, we actually pair program on most work so it is easy to judge the effectiveness of the hiring system). Apart from that initial telephone screening, we've dispensed completely with formal interview questions because more than anything it was biasing us away from hiring people with qualities that we cared about (being able to program, being able to pair, being able to TDD).

I've had the experience of cutting interviews short before, when it was obvious that the candidate was well out of their depth. We've stopped doing that. We go through all 4 pomodoros with each candidate. Even if we are sure it's a poor fit, it's important to give something back to the candidate who has taken time out of their day to come and visit. It sometimes turns into a 2 hour coaching session, but that's fine. Hopefully it helps the candidate sometime in the future.

It's kind of expensive, but trying to have an interview system that leaves a positive feeling should eventually lead to a good reputation in the industry. That, in turn, should make recruiting easier/cheaper. If you leave the impression, "those people are awesome -- I really want to work there", then it's worth the added expense, I think.