I (the person working on dashboard) respond to HN et al
getrealordie.com
getrealordie.com
When I was learning to hang glide, my instructor said that when you want to avoid a tree or power lines, it's important to not fixate on it, because the craft tends to follow the direction you lean towards. People have died that way.
Auston wanted to avoid an employee who was only in it for the money - but by fixating on the thing that he doesn't want to be an issue (i.e. money), it has become the dominate issue. If you don't want a fire, don't fan it.
If you want to avoid something, the best strategy is sometimes to focus on something else that you do want. It's a kind of positive thinking, but one that has saved lives.
Diets fail because they're all about food. Better to lose unhealthy weight by exploring other passions... even things that aren't physical such as playing an instrument (or coding). Then over the long term you can start to consume less and less as you have food on the brain less and less.
Anything else makes sense, but I really don't think it applies to dieting all that much on an extended basis (for a short period of time, though, maybe).
Anyway, I claim urban myth on your post ( http://www.snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp ).
It's all very unscientific, and you may be right. But I have this feeling there's room for a distinction between biological/psychological food needs and the ways we cope with each.
I had a teacher who said he'd lose several pounds per game in competitive chess play.
It burns between 15 and 30% of your caloric intake, depending on which source you find the most accurate and the size and level of activity of your brain.
http://www.drbass.com/temptation.html
Indeed it is the same core idea(s) driven at from the view of meditation, of positive thinking, or the "you see what you are looking for - think of 23, see 23 everywhere" experience.
As such, I suppose HN and similar sites are about promoting the "think of opportunities, see opportunities" side, while all web forums talk about "not feeding the trolls".
You post something mocking a guy that applied for your job, and submitted it like it was a humorous story. Now you're defending yourself by saying that not only are you not elitist, but you're not making much money, your job is a bad one, and you're basically an "average programmer."
You are in an incredibly bad position here. Now, rather than admitting that you messed up, you're trying to hold that you've got a defensible position. You absolutely don't. And this was the first time a lot of us heard of your company, which means that your first impression was an awful one. Until you have a product, you'd do well to apologize, clam up, and wait until you blow us all away. And for the love of God, get a better designer: your blog hurts my eyes.
Salary is subjective to where you are living which in my case market is 40-60 (as validated by webwright) and i'm earning above market.
I never said my job was bad? It's enjoyable and I'm happy working here.
I am average web dev in the sense that me, you and other people on HN probably share the same interests...
Lastly I plainly stated it was a mistake... You've never made a mistake?
Of course we all have auston. But you're making it worse by being defensive, as unalone says.
Subjective salaries I understand. However, you're not making a ridiculous amount of money. To mock somebody for inquiring primarily about money, when you're an unknown company with no reputation whatsoever, and when you're not, in fact, making a particularly grand amount of money, is wrong on a few levels.
You're a code monkey with no equity. You might be happy working where you are, but your original post implied that you were somebody with power and that you were being a jerk about it. Now it seems that you don't have any power, and that you were being a jerk without any qualification.
There is no average web dev, as I've come to realize here. There are some people here who are huge into open source, who run completely open software and write for it and modify it. There are others who run Windows or OS X and pay excesses of money for things which they might not exactly need. Your "I am like most people reading this post" remark set me off, partly because I'm not like you whatsoever. My interests? Aestheticism, high-quality writing, and typography. Furthermore, I'm younger than you and have less professional experience. The fact that your original post seemed immature even to me is a bad sign. I wouldn't call it atrocious, because - as you say - everybody makes mistakes. I didn't comment on the original thread bashing you. However, it irritates me that your follow-up wasn't "Sorry, guys, I've done something terribly stupid, we've removed the original post and we'll maintain radio silence until we at least start talking about our idea," but rather an attempt to justify yourselves, followed by another appeal for job applications.
Considering you've got three people, you ought to easily be able to at least launch a beta of your product. Other people have criticized you for hiring too soon; I'm not qualified enough to talk about that without sounding like a hypocrite. It seems to me, though, that if you're going to hire you ought to hold off until you've announced yourselves, so that you get applicants that might actually be interested in whatever Dashboard is.
Working personally: http://dentafy.com http://mymedcareer.net http://whatsinourcloset.com & http://ticketsplz.com
I bring to your attention that every single site is a parked page.
This reminds me of 4 years ago when I had all the ideas in the world, but had to mature a lot to finally be able to realize ideas are bullshit, and there's a long road ahead.
I do not intend to kick this guy while he's down, but only to highlight what we all already know - he has a lot of growing up to do.
It's more a matter of "what about you do you want to make public?" If you link to a bunch of dead sites as your only info, it gives off a bad vibe.
What's stopping me is that I'm simultaneously rebuilding my company (freelance) site, and I keep going...Drupal! No, now it's Cake! No, Chay says I should do it from scratch! No, Drupal really works! And on and on...
I need to take a weekend and just finish the damn thing.
The poster keeps assuming that there's an inverse correlation between how much you pay someone and how many hours/how hard that person works. It is entirely possible that you can find someone who gets paid $75K that does the work of two or three people who get paid $40K and perhaps even do it in fewer hours. Or perhaps someone who gets paid $100K is such a great architect that their architecture saves every employee an hour per day for years.
By your logic, the heads of hedge funds that get paid millions (if not billions) of dollars per year only show up for work for three seconds each day. Okay, perhaps that's not the best example.
I am 22 years old ...
I have no options and no equity in the company.
So, you're getting an awful deal, but at least you have time to learn from your mistake.
I could have made more per hour delivering pizza than I did in my first technical job as a fresh grad, but it was fun, it paid my rent, I learned stuff and it put the experience on my CV to get a better job when I got bored of it - and management there well knew that that was my plan, and had no problem at all with that.
There's no employee equity at Shadowcat (the company I co-founded) either. Myself and the other founder hold one share each, which pay no dividends, and which we never intend to sell - they exist to give us the authority to build the company we want to work for for the forseeable future, the way we think it should be built.
There's more than one way to do things; not all of them are wrong.
Putting "I worked at a startup you've never heard of" on your resume isn't a good thing, unless you can say you were a founder. He should either be getting paid a lot more than market, or he should have equity, to compensate for this.
If these two biz dev guys can make the company successful no matter what the quality of the product, then he's not very valuable. If that's not true, though, then his work has a very direct impact on the value of the company, which generally means that he would have equity. The former case seems unlikely, so it seems like he's getting a raw deal.
Without equity grants, you have to give employees monetary incentives. Those are usually capped and generally don't have much upside. They're also almost impossible to calculate on a single-person basis. Equity has essentially an unlimited upside and its worth is easily measured.
Why don't you give your employees equity?
The company is held only by the founders so we can control its progress and ensure it becomes the company we envisaged.
Our employees believe in that dream. Since there's no monetary value to having equity, they don't care that they don't have any. They do, however, make more than I do.
As for "well give it out anyway, they could always sell it" I refer to the point of "becomes the company we envisaged" and what happened to craigslist.
I never said our model was common. I never said it was wise for the majority of companies, or even viable. But it -does- work for us.
You "buy" equity with risk and lower/no compensation. What is this guy risking? They are funded, so really the only risk is that the owners lose interest or run out of money (a risk you have working ANY small business-- or any business at all in this economy).
Here's some guidelines on what you can expect if you're getting paid roughly market rates:
It's like a record label "employing" a solo artist singer for an average wage, and then pocketing all the profits from their music and passing none of it on. It's just a pretty raw deal.
"They're funded" is also mis-leading, as they're still in the process of getting an angel round. The guidelines and the post you've written (which are excellent, by the way) are more for "post series A, pre series B" stage rather "angel round, forming the core team by signing on the first technical person" stage.
Apparently you believe age should have an impact on how much you get paid. Can you elaborate?
Well the reality is that it often does. Anyway, it's indicative of experience.
Occasionally. Less so for developers than for other careers.
He's probably nearer year 1.
Exceptions abound, of course. There are plenty of well-paid morons with decades of experience and lots of young rockstars.
But ask any programmer on the planet whether they got paid more or less 5 years ago (adjusted for inflation) and the majority will say "less".
We choose to give it to people. And while I like a good bashing as much as anybody, I'd rather we stop focusing on these people and start focusing on lengthy, well-written blog posts. We haven't had many of those recently.
Though I honestly don't think they're doing this for gluttonous publicity. I think that their first one was, and that these successive ones have just been attempts to undo their drop in credibility before. I don't think it's helping, but I doubt there's some clever exposure scheme going on at this point.
--Abraham Lincoln
Edit:
One meets his destiny often in the road he takes to avoid it.
--Oogway, Kung Fu Panda
I'm not sure if that's fantastic or horrible.
jaw drops
So after considering all of the above information, please feel free to apply! We really do need good people.
psst: thats not my number