bottompair

Porn star names will usually do the "trick".

I wonder just how long this discussion is going to go on. To me looking at who has jobs in tech broken down by gender is flawed from the beginning.

The more interesting sociological question is whether there is a nurture thing happening here, or just a natural tendency for women to not be as interested in computers and technology at a young age.

Boxing and MMX have way more men than women - why isn't there a "we can do better" campaign for these disciplines?

By the way my co-founder CEO is a woman and she's an amazing technologist and leader.

This could have been a two-day contest: Flappy Ryan and Flappy Chris. Profit.

To turn this the other direction, here's some perspective from a startup exec. This job requires constant compromise between doing what's right for the business, the investors, and the employees of the company. In my management experience I've found that I've always worked FOR my people, not the other way around. My days are full of battling it out with the CEO over a pay raise I know a good engineer deserves, or figuring out a way to provide additional stock option bonuses when more cash just isn't feasible. The majority of my time, however, is spent as keeper of the peace. People are tricky and all very different. Some have thick skins, others don't. I spend countless hours being a therapist and making sure everyone is able to work as close to peak performance as possible without killing each other. This involves a ton of moving parts.

In my last gig I managed five directors who all had their own teams under them. The juggling to make sure these folks were well taken care of and their teams were happy overall is tough. Things do fall through the cracks. A developer might have a big problem with a product manager. I might not hear about it until the developer has put in notice because my engineering director thought he/she could take care of it without me. That engineer more often than not probably thinks "hey, the CTO is ignorant and has no idea what's going on." I accept that as part of the job and understand I'll never have 100% view into everything that’s happening. I accepted a long time ago that in some cases a member of my team might believe me to be incompetent. Comes with the territory.

On top of those duties, the overall company strategy and operational plan needs oversight and contributions from the executive management team. The amount of time spent talking about ideas and direction is enormous. By the time a pivot or major change has been decided on it’s generally been under discussion for several weeks, sometimes even months. The inputs and process for arriving at these decisions are a complex mix of research, customer conversations, cogs analysis, competitive analysis, M&A discussions, go to market strategy, pricing, technical feasibility, margin, etc. When the decision is finally ready to be communicated to the troops it can often cause confusion and the belief that “these guys don’t know what they are doing.” While that may be true in some cases, I’ve never been involved in one of these types of decisions that didn't have a lot of well thought-out reasons behind it.

This is only the first step. The way the best leaders separate themselves in this situation is their ability to communicate decisions and make everyone BELIEVE it is the right thing to do. In startups there’s never a 100% clearly correct answer. Faith comes in more often than I’d like to admit, and getting everyone to drink the Kool-aid is pretty damned important in terms of morale. The rightness or wrongness in the decision won’t often be known until a year or more passes. If the decision causes the company to be successful the execs are looked at geniuses. If it fails they are incompetent idiots. Many of the factors that determine the outcome are out of the control of the executives. I guess that’s life. My advice is always this: be self-aware about what you want. If you have a passion for a product or space and enjoy your work, try not to let the factors out of your control dictate your job satisfaction. If you are unhappy with decisions being made or company direction, put yourself in a position to have influence. It’s easier than you might think.

Daaaaaaamn you must have some awesome secret files!

Which ecosystems? And if you work in those as well then why are you bothering with an ecosystem that has "several orders of magnitude more crap"?

.01% is a small number - so you have 3,000-4,000 problems with the CLR and .NET framework.

Sorry to translate literally, but this kind of gross exaggeration and lack of data is what creates the "Microsoft sucks!!" attitude that is based on a 10-year old reality (at best).

Hmmm... I guess since you don't use a public profile pic or take selfies this is a bad product idea. Or maybe, just maybe most people don't really care.

Maybe your point was that you won't use this particular product? Are you the person who also posts negative reviews on Yelp for restaurants you've never been to because you don't like that style of food?

+1 In sad/tragic times we often overlook the really important lessons to be learned.

"I want to be able to compile things from the command-line first and use the IDE to edit the code."

You want a text editor, not an IDE.

Ironic language given that most "engineers" today can't write code without dependency on built in garbage collectors.

Do you really think developers these days are just as good at optimizing for limited system resources as they were in 1986?

"We still run into..." Who? Maybe you - but most developers aren't running into map/reduce problems every day. And when they do, they certainly aren't coding a solution from scratch.

True. Hibernate isn't really the issue - more the existence of Hibernate sometimes creating lazy engineering. I guess I'm old school - my preference (even with simple CRUD) is to build the queries myself if nothing else to avoid object models in code being translated into often flawed data schema by the ORM (if you happen to let your ORM create database objects for you).

Even with simple CRUD I've had to unwind faulty implementations where a smallish (50GB) database was being eager fetched into memory because of poor ORM config and overuse of FK relationships - when a user did something as simple as logging into the app.

And I'm not talking junior developers - some of these guys were 10+ years at Amazon.

This is why heavy ORM's like Hibernate are only good for the most simplistic (and tiny data) use cases. Every situation I've been in where queries can't be optimized appropriately for specific use cases like this involve engineers who "don't do Sql" and have made heavy use of something like Hibernate. Then scratch their heads when dashboards take minutes to load.

The next step is usually to jump into a column oriented data store, document store, or some other technology they understand even less than Sql.

All good points. Sharing models without emailing spreadsheets around (now you have your version and I have mine) has probably been the best thing I've gotten out of it so far.

I've already had a few people email me links to their model with questions about implementation. Since posting on HN there have been more than 2,000 models created. If someone finds a serious bug in a formula or better yet, a new feature is added then they all get the benefit. There's not very clear path(s) to upgrading an Excel workbook.

And my straw man argument: I could make a case for building a lot of stuff in Excel that currently exist as successful hosted applications. Lowering the barrier to entry is one way to differentiate.

Ouch. Fixed.

As posted higher up, the spreadsheet I created and based the application on:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxgh-9Z9zd40ZExtRnYyZVhWU2s...

Feature development on the app will be faster (and reach a broader audience) than the spreadsheet, however. And I wanted to learn AngularJS ;)

This was the worksheet I created (and have been using for a few months). I believe funded.io is at feature parity with this simplified model - https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxgh-9Z9zd40ZExtRnYyZVhWU2s...

A few things I was thinking:

- Spreadsheets are prone to fat-fingering and messing up formulas. For example, if you built a spreadsheet with three product SKU's and wanted to add a fourth, it's not so easy. Especially if you have visualizations tied to specific ranges of cells, etc. With this app I can validate data once and not worry about some random missing formula screwing it up down the road.

- When creating models for comparison the typical pattern is Save As -> New. Before you know it, you've got 8 or 10 different spreadsheets with different variations on the numbers. Now add a new expense category to the model in spreadsheet #10. If you want to compare backwards to the rest you'll need to do that work over and over (this is the pattern I was stuck in).

- Longer-term I wanted to be able to overlay models - sort of an A/B test given different configuration

- During the past few months I've met with countless entrepreneurs trying to launch startups pre-money. Most of them are trying to build models from scratch (or a template they found) and it's been a clear pain point for them

- I can share models in a service like this easily. I've already used it several times when someone's asked me to help validate their business model. I create the model in the app and send them a link. They can tweak it and show me their ideas. It's crude right now, but collaboration between founders on something like this might be worthwhile.

- Even longer-term I'd like to add in more templates to support startups beyond the initial financial model. Basically I looked at my last several years' worth of operational spreadsheets from helping run SaaS companies and thought "there ought to be an app for this".

True, for lower priced products the SKU slider is limited. I struggled with this on my Excel worksheets as well. In mid-market SaaS ($200-$1500 MRR range) growth tends to slow down the higher the price goes. In addition, growth increases over time as the company grows, but the higher priced SKU's grow slower.

The sliders are only one possible solution to visualizing the rate of growth per price tier. Most other things I've tried involve math fiddling that I haven't managed to translate well to a user experience.

Open to suggestions or examples if you have ideas!

Yep, planning to keep rolling with it if there's interest. I mentioned this in previous responses, but the data is actually being saved. The unique Url generated when you first start will get you back to the settings for the model you're working on.

It's a stop-gap feature so that I didn't need to implement a login/authorization system in the MVP.

If you have an example worksheet I'd love to see it. I've spent my last 7 years in B2B SaaS so have plenty of the tiered SKU models for reference.

The data is actually being persisted (MongoDB). Notice a unique Url is created when you click through the initial landing page. If you save that Url somewhere and come back to it your data will be there.

Thanks for taking some time on it - feedback is most welcome as I'll continue to hack on it over the next few months - time permitting.

Totally with you. Would love to build out several different cost/revenue models including one completely based on web site visits and paid customer conversion rate. Sprinkle in some correlation with marketing spend and you've got something passable for a B2C company.

Hadn't thought about open-sourcing the project yet. Initially just something to remove the pain I was feeling in my current role. It allows me to share models with founders and collaborate as well. Data is persisted (MongoDB) and the unique Url for each model created will work if you navigate directly back to it.

Plan to do this eventually. However, this fundamentally doesn't solve the core problem (for me at least). Versioning nightmares happen when you've got one model that you customized to have three products and your new model has four. To compare to your previous model(s) you've got to keep updating all spreadsheets.

An app like this would hopefully remove some of that rework and eventually allow A/B testing of different fundraising scenarios, or different revenue models with similar fundraising, etc.

Great suggestions. This initial pass was meant to solve one specific use case I happened to have, but I'd love to add more modeling capabilities.

The addition of one-time costs or revenue based on customer acquisition is important and something that will be there eventually (training is a good example in Saas).

Struggling with maintaining 25 versions of financial projection spreadsheets for a tiered SKU based SaaS startup. I decided to spin this up as quickly as possible (and learn a little AngularJS along the way).

The result - after ~30 hours it's usable enough to show. Obviously needs more flexibility around the variety of revenue models and expense categories. But really it's just for rough estimates at this point.

Python developers always whine about doing their best.

Node developers go home and fuck the prom queen.

Couldn't agree more. Most of us started at the bottom and worked very hard to get where we are. Kids cost money, try refraining from having them until you can afford it. I'm sure his mom is loving the situation.

My thought as well - it sucks how one comment can kill the credibility of the entire blog post.