An invitation to come and hack on Buffer
joel.is
joel.is
I don't think that 50k is competitive for any developer that they would be willing to hire, regardless of where they're located or how much they promise the equity will be worth in a few years.
Edit: Didn't even realize that it said you had to relocate to SF. For SF, one of the most expensive cities in the US and the one with by far the most competition for developer talent, 50k is not competitive under any circumstances (It's barely livable.), and even 100k isn't very competitive for anyone with even a little good experience.
Wasn't this company kicked out of the US because they couldn't sort out visas for the team? If so, why would they require someone to be in SF or any other market if they're not there as an organization? It almost sounds like they're trying to setup a "presence" in SF via a new hire. Given that and the low salary this sounds more like a co-founder role, not an employee.
So on the low end of the scale you're looking at 50k (a salary I can't even imagine for the Bay Area) for full time work plus what, handing out business cards at events?
Pure speculation of course, but since this company was once in TC for not being able to stay in SF asking for SF-based employees only is weird at best.
Also, given that this is a feature company built on Twitter and Facebook I'd say any equity deal is extra risky. It sounds like they haven't run afoul of Twitter's guidelines yet. That doesn't mean Twitter won't change their mind next week.
Totally understand the confusion we've created here with our slightly unusual path so far :-)
We've been travelling for a year whilst we applied for visas and we're heading back to SF with visas to set up a base there and have an office for the first time. Nothing too odd I hope, we simply took the opportunity to go travelling whilst building Buffer for the last year after we found we couldn't stay in the U.S. :-)
We're all going to be back in SF, so we're looking for people a little in advance. Remote work first, but joining us in the SF office once we get that set up in a couple of months.
We'd certainly go to the high end of this salary range (and it's intentionally a broad range).
Hope that clarifies a few things, would love to answer anything else!
For example, if you become very very popular, Twitter might say that automated posting is not ok with them (since it does not help conversation - conversation is not real time which I guess Twitter wants).
Anyways, you just gave me an idea to develop a Buffer app for WP7, I never saw one and might be interesting :)
Yeah, that would have actually been awesome! Stopped using Buffer because of annoying things (like inability to post to selective FB lists). I might have popped over for an open day to fix this for them.
Though one could imagine the logistics would be tricky.. closed source codebase leak etc.
I'll definitely have a think about how this could work. We've all come across startups doing internal hack days, but to do a public one is a really awesome idea. Going beyond just a meetup. Probably a good way to find great engineers too ;)
We started in the UK, and then we spent 6 months in SF where we raised our funding. After that, we didn't manage to obtain visas and that's what sent us travelling (rather than simply going back to the UK). We spent 6 months in HK and we've been in Tel Aviv for 2 months so far.
In 1 month, we'll head back to SF and will base ourselves there (I don't foresee more travelling, it's time to have a base and grow the team more rapidly).