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Usually somewhere between 1.75 and 1.9, depending on the content. There's something weird that happens moving from 1.9 to 2.0 where I feel the audio quality degrades dramatically.

This assumes that you can hire the two extra engineers. In all likelihood, their business is constrained by the speed that new people can be recruited, vetted, and onboarded. This means that even with infinite budget every engineer is a precious resource and should be allocated to higher-value projects.

I've been happy with Uplift. Everything from the packaging to the assembly instructions was on point. Expensive though.

High quality standing desk.

Ask for the comp range they're offering. If the money is fantastic then consider jumping through the silly hoops.

If it's just average then tell them that your open source project is proof of your technical abilities, you're happy to do culture / leadership conversations and answer code-review style questions about the technical design of your projects, but that otherwise you're not interested in passing an arbitrary leetcode bar.

I actually think this one is way better than the first. It's a little too wordy and breezy for me, but it does speak to your identity as an organization and provides insight into the environment a candidate would be entering.

1. Agree with others cutting out phrases like "chills", "badass","haha just kidding"

2. Typo: "sleek and crips UI design" --> crisp

3. As a general rule, less is more. So as an exercise, ask yourself what you would write if you had to eliminate 50% of the text in this post. What about 75%?

Here's my quick first read:

"self organizing teams" + "every stage of the project" + "split work" + "leadership" --> "We have no idea how to run a software company. We don't have PMs, managers, or tech leads. We're hoping we can throw a bunch of smart people in a (virtual) room together and it will somehow just work."

My overall impression here is that you have no company and you are trying to hire your first employees, because obviously if you had a company with more than 5 employees this would be a disaster. That's not a great first impression. If it's somehow not a disaster, you need to really explain why this way of working is unique and superior, and then sell me on the value of that experience.

Carnival (owns Princess, and some other brands) has done some pretty innovative work here. Nothing super surprising for the HN crowd, but way beyond what most hospitality providers might have considered a few years back. IIRC they have a tech lab with a fake ship interior built into a warehouse in Miami. That way they can test out all of the upgrades before doing them for real on the water.

As always, Matt Levine is shockingly informative:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-07/matt-l...

Key quote:

1. You get a bunch of Bitcoins.

2. You slice them into junior and senior claims.

3. You sell the junior claims to people who want levered Bitcoin: people who want margin loans against their Bitcoins, etc., who want to gamble on Bitcoin without putting up too much cash.

4. You sell the senior claims as stablecoins: “Even if Bitcoin drops by 50%,” you say, “these coins will still be worth $1, because they are backed by $2 worth of Bitcoin.”

This is a management failure. If not corrected, this person will eventually destroy the team and no progress will be made anyway.

You should continue to bring your concerns to your manager. Hopefully your manager will listen, or you will learn something you didn't consider previously.

Without external pressure this other developer is unlikely to change. Unless you already share a deep trusting relationship with this person, you are unlikely to be able to affect change on your own.

I believe you have misunderstood the purpose of patriotism.

Belief in a country is self-identification with a shared narrative. Just like with a startup, some things are impossible to achieve unless everyone (perhaps irrationally) believes they are possible.

Is Country X special? Maybe not. But if everyone there believes it's special, the country may yet become some version of its ideal self. Patriotism is vision casting. It is the story we tell ourselves that we may become the people we want to be.

Check out SpotInst (spot.io). It runs your workload on cheaper Spot machines but converts to On-Demand automagically when necessary.

It's not the making of money that's addictive, it's the spending of money.

It's easy to forget, but remembering this fact results in a wider range of life options.

Concentrate on customer value and stickiness first. This is not the same as "more features"! Rather, what are the key things that customers love about your service which will cause them to stick around? How can you improve those specific things?

Right now you have freedom of motion. You can make experiments and you are mostly insulated from negative effects due to the small customer base. It's harder to make changes later.

Any investments in customer acquisition are likely to be a waste. If you churn customers every 6 months, any new cohort is a time-limited boost to revenue which will quickly disappear. If you improve retention to 12-24+ months, now you have better revenue over time AND you're able to capitalize on marketing. Same thing with increasing spend per customer: find out how to hold onto them first.

Seems weird to shame users for liking your service...

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

― Mark Twain

It's theoretically possible to structure a debt offering where the investor is paid out over time by the donations of other future donors. This is morally suspect though: since a non-profit doesn't generate positive financial returns, they're really robbing themselves in exchange for larger impact now.

A better model might be the "for-profit charity" which seeks to generate a return but not an excessive one. This might attract investors who are seeking a reasonable (but smaller) market return along with social impact.

Cars with manual transmission.

:) I see what you did there.

Fair point. So maybe we should say that our sun would occasionally be a part of the galactic arm as the pattern morphs and re-forms. A fun concept.

To be slightly pedantic: our sun is a star in the galaxy, so as the entire galaxy rotates we would not pass in and out of a galactic arm. We would rotate with it.

Especially at senior levels, there's ramp up time AND a larger scope of impact if the person makes bad technical decisions or negatively impacts the team. A bad hire is super expensive on both those dimensions. It's even worse when the candidate is hired into a leadership role and will be responsible for further hiring.

It's easy to see if someone is incompetent during their first 90 days: that's a basic recruiting failure. It's the other type who are sort of good, but ultimately disastrous, that cause real problems. And often, these mis-hires take ~12 months to identify and correct. The result is that caution dominates when hiring.

Technical people are expensive (and hard to fire if they don't work out), which really raises the bar for minimum qualifications and skills. There's no room to "take a chance" on anyone anymore.

As a HM, most candidates I see are woefully underqualified. The great ones are beyond my (quite reasonable) budget. And I've seen this on the other side too: recruiters contacting me always want to hire me for mid-sr IC role when I've been managing teams for years.

I disagree, and think this could actually be a good overall optimization technique. If the product you are selling is overpriced (not a bad value per se, but maybe ~35% above where it could be) then the sales person should absolutely optimize for the immediate sale. You get to sell RIGHT NOW at a high markup, and any time you would invest later trying to close a deal at a lower price can instead be spent selling someone else at a high markup. There's obviously no opportunity to close later at a higher price, since by then the customer has had a chance to shop around and discover true market pricing.

This works particularly well for large one-time sales where pricing information is scarce and the relationship is less important. Example: sales for replacement windows, doors, roofs, etc.

Short answer: I loved visits to the library and the local science museum.

Long answer: Provide lots of opportunities for unstructured play and exploration. I've intentionally filled my adult house with "tools" of all varieties for my young daughter so that no matter what she's into, she has an outlet. Practically speaking, this means that she will always have access to: paper, pencils, crayons, rulers, tape (so much tape!), cardboard boxes, old digital cameras, batteries / flashlights, garden implements, woodworking tools, a soldering iron, several musical instruments, sports balls, a well-stocked kitchen, LEGO, etc etc etc. These were the things I appreciated from my own childhood.

Re: #2 - The biggest world-impacting thing 20 years from now can be guessed at but is unknowable. The best chance to ride this new unknown trend is to develop curiosity and adaptability.

One item to watch out for: though you shouldn't push your daughter to excel everywhere, you should definitely push her in at least one area that's hard and intimidating for her. If you don't, she'll get bored in school. Worse, when she encounters something difficult she'll think there's something wrong with her and give up rather than work through it like everyone else. The sooner she learns this lesson the better. "Working on things that don't come easily" didn't really sink in for me until later in life so I have a bunch of regrets around missed opportunities.

Ok cool. With this write-up, you de-risked one area and added risk in a second area.

GOOD: High GPA, got funded, ambitious, quit school for valid and rational reasons. I'm excited to hire you.

BAD: Startup didn't work, I worked on some other ones, trying one more time before I get a normal job. Now I'm concerned that (a) you think you're hot shiz and won't accept an entry-level dev role and/or won't be willing to put the effort into that role, or (b) you think you're mid-level but can't pass the hiring bar due to team (not technical) deficiencies, or (c) you'll be awesome but bounce out to a new adventure in ~9 months.

I don't know you, and it's quite possible that you're brilliant with a steep growth curve and huge upside potential. And it's possible (maybe even likely!) that you'll be unhappy in any job and just need to keep pursuing your own thing. Awesome. But if you want a "normal job" I recommend shifting your approach slightly:

Remember that a hiring manager wants a person who can (1) do the job, (2) not cause problems, (3) stick around. You've got #1 nailed, #2 is an open question, and #3 is a big risk in my mind. So I'd suggest starting by making a personal choice regarding your next career stage and then actively believing and selling that vision. So if you decide that you want to work for a while, figure out what you want to get out of that time and push that narrative. Example:

"I got funded by... <rest of your credentials here>. I tried a few other ventures but failed to get traction. I've decided that for my next career stage, I need to spend some time working with other more experienced engineers to learn {large scale engineering, team dynamics, product prioritization, leadership, etc etc whatever}." --> With this narrative you're a very attractive candidate. A good manager will know that you're not signing on forever, but will throw challenging projects your way in the hopes that rapid growth will convince you to stick around for 2-3 years.

Note that your history of scrappy risk-taking will probably play better at smaller earlier stage companies.

It's tough to read too much into this single paragraph. I think the key is why you dropped out of school. You need to have a narrative.

1. "I had some promising personal projects, so I quit during my 3rd year of school to launch one of them. I did {X,Y,Z} but ultimately couldn't turn the corner to profitability so I shut down / failed spectacularly. Now it's time to get my feet under me and learn proper engineering for a few years before I try again." --> This is a good story, but needs to be backed up by data regarding your startup failure.

OR

2. "I was tired of school and quit. I had a bunch of personal projects going and hoped to start one of them into a company but none of them really went anywhere." --> This is a bad story. If this is your situation, you may need to suck it up and go back to school to finish your degree. Otherwise you'll need to be incredibly honest with the interviewer about why dropping out was a bad decision.

OR

3. "I had to drop out of school for <personal reasons>. I've done a bunch of personal projects, so I have the passion and basic technical competence to succeed. I'd like to eventually finish my degree someday." (<--Note: doesn't matter if this is really true) "My focus now is to really engage somewhere for a few years to prove my worth and learn from other smart people." --> Another good story. Shows humility.

Your biggest risk here will be overplaying your past projects. From a Hiring Manager perspective they're interesting technical toys like a university project, but since they didn't go anywhere they don't mean that much. Not fair, but true. Also: stay FAR AWAY from the word "burnout", because this telegraphs "I have issues and won't be able to do my job."

Communicating that you made a mistake and now want to learn in a better environment for a few years helps de-risk you to the hiring manager and shows good self-awareness.

Not everyone has a single career. Sometimes, it's great to work on something for 10-15 years and then try something else. You have room in your life for 3-5 careers.

You've just finished your first iteration. It went ok! Not as great as you might have hoped, but could be worse.

Look 10-15 years into the future... you'll be at the end of your second career. What does that look like? What are the steps to get there? How to you start today, from zero? Remember that it's ok to start from zero: you're now starting your second career. No matter what you do, 10 years from now you will be 10 years older. Since aging is inevitable you might as well make the best of it.

Your life is like a fruit tree: if you want tasty fruit, the absolute best time to plant that tree was 10 years ago. But the second-best time to plant that tree is today.

Asian grocery stores are great. They often have foods from all over the world.