blizkreeg

My advice: take advice from people who have invested that kind of money before, and no one else.

you don't think $7B of revenue in 2019 merits 10k people? Do you think you can run that size of a business with 500?

We know that having people vouch for you goes a much longer way than self-reported accomplishments on a resume. I keep wondering why isn't there a platform where your specific accomplishments in a job are validated by your former co-workers? Effectively, a peer-validated resume. Not LI style testimonials but more specific like say "yes, Jack worked on this feature and did a great job!"

I’m the Founder of an early stage (just me) startup building a hiring solution for early stage, small and mid-sized companies. Hiring is broken - we all know that. One of the biggest reasons is how companies hire and the experience of looking for jobs. On the company side, I'm building a product/tool that helps them hire better/faster (think an anti-ATS ATS). On the candidate side, I'm building a community that lets you find opportunities without ever having to apply to a job again.

I’m looking for a talented full-time, remote engineer to join me as we build this from the ground up. Check out the apply link to learn more about me.

Who I'd love to work with:

- someone who has strong experience working with Rails and/or React (so we can move fast)

- fast learner and operator. We are going to move fast, build and deploy experiments, and iterate our way to product/market fit.

- you have decent design sense/front-end skills as an engineer (i.e., you can take a wireframe and translate it into something nice - we'll use Tailwind UI)

- you don't have a chip on your shoulder, are humble but confident in your abilities, and have high standards for your work

- can balance perfectionism when it comes to quality without boiling the ocean (we're not going to aim for full test coverage, in fact should we just use Airtable as a back-end for our MVP initially? these are the questions we may grapple with).

- not looking for something too cushy. It's just the two of us for some time with a lot to prove ahead of us.

- based outside the US

Please reach out if you’re interested: https://airtable.com/shrySlqbwlujfNVbL

I’m very interested in building an anonymous social n/w or community where you share what you’re currently working on/solving —- while being careful not to disclose confidential stuff. There’s so much interesting discussion that can happen around it.

Because it remains the fastest way to launch and iterate on a product, even in 2020. You could certainly augment it with a React or Vue on the front-end, but Rails is pretty unbeatable even now.

Who has read the best description of a 10x developer? I'm curious if there's genuinely read-worthy thinking on it.

Toptal and Gigster come to mind first. But I keep seeing ads on FB for more and more of these "remote developer" platforms.

Your best bet is going to be freelancing/software dev contracting. There are many platforms other than Upwork and Fiverr. If you're on LinkedIn, post it to your network that you're looking for some consulting work. Talk about what you can build - focus on outcomes (how you can help clients deliver stuff). Join Slack communities focused around your skills. Find any community you can join and keep an eye out for work.

Even in a "third world country" (fwiw I don't like that term), you can easily get $25-40/h doing freelancing for US/Europe based clients. At $30/h, you only need to freelance 50h a month to make $1.5K. It is very doable.

My personal 2c is ignore all the other advice you're getting in this thread (some of it is outrageously impractical and divorced from reality) and focus on finding freelance work.

NOTE: I'm talking from experience (though I'm in the US). Heck, I'll send some work your way if you're good at your stack. Send me an email (in my bio).

See my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23264947

How do you think it will play out?

I'm curious how this plays out in practice. Should every company just start offering bay area salaries to everyone, since bay area salaries are at the top end?

How do you decide what a software engineer salary (since we're talking about pure skill and not location) should be? Is it $30K, $80K, $150K, $400K?

Do you see the problem and why I don't think this will happen?

That's good for you. And there will always be companies that are the exception. Some companies will do it simply to keep you because they're already familiar with you, know how you work, and have trust built. But it won't be the norm.

I might still say if someone is doing a 6-mo/1-yr temporary change of scenery, it makes sense to not dock their salary. But an actual move and keep my $300K FAANG salary while working in Thailand? I don't see it happening. If the difference is < 20%, may be sure. But a > 50% difference? I doubt we'll see that world. But who knows...stranger things have happened.

Every profession gets paid this way. Tech is no different, or some special snowflake.

I think it's silly (and borderline divorced from understanding how business works) to expect bay area salaries when you're living in Nebraska or Uruguay. After all, when you move to the bay area, you don't say "give me my Kansas salary". No one gets paid that way. Pay is always tied to comparative salaries in that market.

Why should I hire someone and pay them a bay area salary if there are equally talented folks in that geography that are perfectly happy making what's market for _their_ location?

This is only a perspective that highly paid engineers living in the bay area share. The rest of the world doesn't work this way.

I'm working on a tool that links technical documentation to code. The problem: product specs/technical docs are often out of date with the implementation.

If anyone is interested in sharing their pain with this, I'm all ears and would love to brainstorm! Email in my bio.

I've somehow never believed that theory. There are tens of thousands who buy gas guzzlers, at whatever price of gas was/is. If only people were that rational, they'd stop buying them to save our planet.

You can tax cigarettes all you want, people are still gonna smoke.

I don't believe the Tesla crowd bought theirs to save on gas anyway, so not sure if this is true.

Managing the roadmap (and delivering value) is the hardest and the key part of product management.

It's hard to give generic advice not knowing more about the context but here's one way that I've found useful and successfully executed. Bucket your roadmap into 3 rough buckets - delight features (no one has specifically asked for but that deliver high value), customer requests (obvious), and your/company's product vision (not something you just concocted but based on real data and validation).

The % of your roadmap and sprint allocated to each bucket depends on your specific business, current situation, and startup/product stage.

Don't let customers hijack your roadmap. Talk to them, listen to their needs, understand the requirements coming from the business team, evaluate the severity and sensitivity, and ultimately prioritize yourself. There are times (sprints/months) where > 60% of my roadmap has been customer-driven and times when only a third of it are customer requests.

Start meditating. It will help your restless mind.

Location: SF/Oakland

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Skills: Product Management, Engineering Leadership

Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8avluthbjh55cg0/resume%20-%202020....

Email: in resume

I'm a product and engineering leader looking for part-time, interim, or consulting roles. Over the years, I've built and led teams that has shipped delightful products to customers. I primarily work in B2B/SaaS and preferably early to mid stage startups and companies.

SEEKING WORK

Part-time, contract, interim, or consulting Product/Engineering lead roles

I'm an experienced product and engineering leader. I've built productive, talented prod/eng teams and shipped delightful products at multiple startups. At my last startup, I took a SaaS product from a back of napkin sketch to software with dozens of business customers and in the process we raised venture funding. Prior to that, I led a 10-person eng team at a well-known startup in SF.

What I do:

- I will lead your product and eng functions - I will drive all aspects of product development, including product research, talking to your customers, product strategy, sprint planning/execution, and ultimately, successful product delivery.

- Provide product and/or engineering leadership and make sure your team is motivated and building the right thing without over-engineering it.

- Ensure that good product and engineering practices are built into your organizational culture.

- Help keep your product and business moving in this time

Resume: upon request

Location: SF/Oakland/Remote

Willing to relocate: No

Email: in my profile

Sort of related, genuine q for the founders who've raised money and lost it (had to shutdown): how did you feel about losing investor money? Did it make you gun shy about raising again from investors? Did you retain good relationships with them? Does credibility take a hit?

May be his tweets were a reflection of his inner journey and struggle with where the company was headed? Let's be kind. This is not easy.

at that size, would it be better to just hire an in-house accounting/book-keeping person?

In India, confessions in lock-up or to the police are not admissible in court in a criminal proceeding. I've always found that as the way to prevent innocent people from being convicted based on their confession.

Oncue | oncue.co | Senior Software Engineer | Oakland, CA (full-time) and Anywhere in the world (contract)

Our mission is to bring trust, transparency, and ease to one of life's most stressful experiences - moving. We're helping drive a better consumer experience and our SaaS product helps these companies run their business. The problems we solve for this industry are the same faced by many service businesses, so the opportunity is big.

Just this past year, more than 11K moves were booked and managed through our platform. We have paying customers and are rapidly adding new!

Our stack is Rails, React (Redux), React Native, and Postgres.

What you'll get at Oncue:

- The opportunity to join a small but highly nimble engineering team.

- A competitive salary and meaningful equity in a company that is rapidly signing up paying customers.

- Work with experienced Sales and Product leaders at an early stage startup that has a proven business model.

- A diverse and inclusive team. 60% of our leadership team is female. We also strongly believe in promoting internally to leadership roles.

Some core values and benefits:

- As an engineer, you will be working on projects that not only impact small businesses but also end consumers like yourself. You will be building not just to help businesses grow but also materially impact consumer experience.

- We provide a high degree of autonomy and ownership over projects. This is not just lip service. We are there to help each other, but trust in your drive and initiative to take projects to successful completion.

- All of us work from home on Fridays!

We are looking for a full-time senior engineer in Oakland, and 1-2 remote part/full-time contract engineers in other parts of the world.

If this sounds interesting, reach out to me at vineet[at]oncue dot co

-Vineet, Co-founder

It's interesting to me how no one knows or is talking about the kid who lost to the champ. He is perhaps equally good but lost in this game.

hey Kathy, thanks for you response. I'll reach out to you shortly!

Patrick, I love Stripe's offering, but I have to pull teeth within my startup to justify why we use Stripe to non-technical people. In fact, when I put on my Product person's hat, I can see everything they tell me clearly.

Stripe just does not look or function like a credit card processor. It is nearly impossible for non-engineer folk to grasp - to the point of it not being a viable platform. The almost hermit-like reporting interfaces (the best that can be done is a bunch of paginated tables??), the lack of visibility into how charges break down at an aggregate level (how much do we pay Stripe in fees has to be pulled from a shudder export of all transactions), handling of disputes, no ability to generate monthly statements (for Connect accounts), no direct line access to an account manager etc etc - the list goes on unfortunately.

I love the simplicity, but I can tell you that Stripe is lagging far behind in functionality and ease of platform use for SMB and enterprise SaaS companies (specifically, in our case, a platform/service provider that runs payments for a bunch of small businesses). We're small, but not tiny, and growing - so the noise around the problems we face just keeps amplifying by the day. The moment we crossed a dozen customers and 100-200K in monthly processing, it’s as if Stripe just stopped working for us.

Stripe's clearly an extraordinary engineering-driven company, but solving for real business use-cases is key. From the outside, it feels like Stripe is solving all the back-end problems and optimizing it, but doing nothing about the front-end, metaphorically speaking.

I'm now having to get on calls with old-school card processing providers since Stripe just doesn't "scale" for us from a business use-case perspective. It's too catered to the devs.

Hope this falls on the right ear. I'm happy to chat more and provide my 2c of feedback if someone wants to listen.

How is cost of a drink related to the value the maker provides?

I will admit you have a point with the NY>Kentucky example. In that situation, the company may pay them the same, but if the company hires two equally talented devs, one in NY and one in Mexico, there will absolutely be a difference in their pay. If the dev in mexico moves to the US, their salary also goes up accordingly.

What you're proposing is out of touch with reality. Compensation is based on value added, but also based on geography. Bartenders in South Dakota don't make the same as bartenders in San Francisco for a reason, though they add the same value to an establishment.

Most companies would stop hiring remote if they had to pay SF salaries - that's just the fact.