CEO writes tech hiring blog post, everyone winces…

"The more we’ve let our engineers be involved in the fundamental business model, strategy and direction of our business, the more successful we’ve been."

I wish more non-technical leaders understood this. It's not that engineers have all of the answers, it's just that we specialize in thinking critically and solving problems. That's useful everywhere, not just with technical matters.

This post is certainly bizarre in many ways; I would agree with the 'wince', to be sure. The litany of mechanical errors throughout the post substantially detract from it.

The thing that boggles me the most, though, is when the author goes out to say: "What about something you believe in [...? ...] surely few things could motivate you quite like teaching code to disadvantaged kids or working for a non-commercial organisation to transform something for the greater good using technology." This makes sense: his point is that people want to work on things that matter, and that's why people will choose interesting, fulfilling, and validating projects over employers that pay a huge amount (i.e., quants), or over employers that have colossal benefits (i.e., Google).

This actually makes lots of sense, and resonates with me. The thing that boggles, though, is that he proceeds to drop that line of reasoning on the floor completely; he talks briefly about "contributing to our company", but says absolutely nothing about why the work that he has to offer is at all fulfilling...

You appear to be looking to hire engineers, and have chosen a cute self-deprecating title. I didn't figure this out until the last paragraph, but maybe I'm just slow. I thought you were going to make some meta analysis on CEOs writing blog posts for engineers.

I winced, because it seemed like the kind of pep-talk speech you might have to hear over and over again when you get called into a very high-level meeting without any discussion about execution, in the middle of a workday where you have code to build and ship instead. There's little here that appeals to my actual intelligence or abilities that screams "challenge". We can say we're in it for the social impact and "meaning", but if there's no succinctly-stated technical challenge to face and succeed over, there's no food on that fishing hook.

I've got a possibly naive question about DropletPay.

I was under the impression that Apple essentially took 30% of all money that flows through an app. Is there an exception for payment / ecommerce apps? Is there a special agreement in place? Is this app a "timebomb" that just hasn't been noticed by apple yet?

It's possible that the "30% of all money" is a bit of misinformation; I can't find where Apple's app policies are enumerated.

I'd be interested in knowing and I have no doubt someone here has a good idea.

I think Michael O'Church would have a field day with this one. Particularly the "frustratingly smart" line.