The Vast and Endless Sea
codinghorror.com
codinghorror.com
My experience is that it is the very rare company, even among startups, that thinks of compensation in this way or otherwise meets the prereq. It explains the somewhat extreme sentiment I've seen here on HN of "screw you. pay me." on the topic of motivation and engagement.
When what I do[1] can easily save twice my salary, as a side effect, it's surreal to be negotiating an extra 10%. These days, I just quote an acceptable salary range when asked, despite the negotiating disadvantage. More often than not, it succeeds in filtering out wastes of my time.
To some degree, perhaps not fully consciously, it's also been a test. Assuming the initial need filter is passed, how hard my reasonable asking price is pushed back on is a measure of how much my contribution will be valued.
[1] Assuming I'm actually needed, and not just wanted, perhaps as overkill.
Once you've raised a Series A round, though, then you should be going for quality over quantity and paying people what they want (within reason). Since at that point it still is about runway but you probably have significantly more cash to play with (a couple of million dollars). I don't think being too cheap at that point makes a lot of sense. It is interesting that pg and a lot of YC startups are taught to be cheap, but there's a fine line between cheapness and efficient use of capital.
On SO people's desire to "demonstrate mastery" can often turn into "make people think I'm awesome at any cost". I have ~500 points, so am not a total SO rookie, but quickly stopped answering any questions because you can be guaranteed someone with a worse answer will get voted up if they get it in first and make it sound authoritative.
Admittedly, this seems to have gotten better in the last few months from the threads I've seen, but early on I made a laundry list of totally erroneous "best answers" and it was just depressing.
Writing awesome content on your own site and getting links from Reddit, Hacker News, and the like is far more rewarding in the end than plumping up someone else's content site, if you have the faculties, time and resources to do so.
Also, useful solutions to simple common problems don't tend to be very good linkbait. Do you really think anyone on Reddit or HN will link to a blog post on the practical differences between id and NSObject* in Objective-C? It will get lots of votes and help a lot of people on Stack Overflow, but the Internet as a whole doesn't care.
Basically, I don't have the time or inclination to play the stupid blog promotion game, so I may just as well spend my time tutoring the bathroom sink. By contributing to Stack Overflow, people will actually be able to find the information I write.
I see this article follows typical codinghorror-notation.
EDIT: I think SO and reddit are "ads done right". Anyone remember '97?
I don't particularly agree on SO, but on Reddit - totally. I frequently click on the ads there because advertisers seem to make the effort to make them fit into the gamut of typical Reddit links (because most advertisers are Reddit users, I guess). The "open source" ads on SO are good, but there needs to be more of a "users are the advertisers" revolution going on across the Web.
I don't see why something closer to Reddit (but with a slightly more evolved interface) couldn't function as a non-profit in StackOverflow's place.
Its almost as if...
The only winning move is not to playThe worst thing for me right now is that when there's a question, there's an ad located right where the header should be.