brogrammernot

Yes. I’ve worked at a couple of companies now where this has happened. It’s really hard for founders to let go of their “baby” and as such, there’s a lot of rationalization that goes into the decision when they sell the company or go public.

One of the common ones is that they will have a large enough say to keep the culture of the small company intact and often say things like “we’re just going to continue being ourselves but with more funding or resources or XYZ so it’s really great!”

In the end, they don’t accept the fact that the larger company’s values/culture is their company now and they can try to enact change as much as they want but they are no longer the key decision maker for the company overall.

For a public company at scale, it’s incredibly hard to 1.) grow exponentially or greatly and 2.) keep the hiring bar high enough to maintain your culture. There’s a trade-off made there that you’re public & you cannot slow growth at the risk of upsetting shareholders but it’s a catch-22 cause you can’t also let your salaries go out of control to hire the right talent for your culture cause you have to explain that cost increase to your stakeholders.

I'd still advise and openly admit as a random stranger on the internet you can disregard this, that the Uber code path is much better until you guys scale much much more.

I work for one of the major players in a similar space, and the best advice I can give you is to stay away from delivery because of the capital expenditures (lots of fundraising or massive credit lines) it would take to set up that network.

The "easy MVP" of delivery will be tempting - drive the vehicle to the customer, drop it off, the employee takes uber back but I would suggest staying away from that temptation.

I'd be interested in the deprecation curves you're modeling on the vehicles as I'm just trying to ballpark what that break-even point is for the dealer. The other issue for the dealer is that while they have excess inventory, they typically have excess inventory on vehicles that aren't moving quick enough so I don't think the target is luxury models but more functional users (e.g. your situation in NYC makes sense. You need a car to get away to a destination and the car itself doesn't matter much as long as it's clean and runs)

Looking forward to seeing how you guys grow.

I can’t imagine the vast majority of their customer base uses Linux, and was likely left out as a fast follow as it isn’t worth being a supported system until they can see it gains traction.

Together, the cheapest plan I could add that would actually give me the shows I watch is around ~$50 additional, so it’s about even.

Not taking Prime into account cause I use other prime features more-so

Amazon doesn’t really count as it’s an added benefit of Prime.

However, all of those you listed are cheaper than adding cable to my bill.

I pay for Netflix, Hulu and YoutubeTV. It’s cheaper than adding cable to my bill & that’s just absurd to me.

Yeah, that’s the point I was trying to make.

Lots of times Doctors are providing a service and the expectation is “I feel bad, give me some pills to help” when in reality many cases are rest & recover but as a client can you imagine paying your social media person $500 for them to say “doing nothing is the right move”? Not really, no.

OxyContin isn’t a bad drug, it’s a highly addictive drug and the company knew it was highly addictive & not only didn’t do enough due diligence to make sure prescribers didn’t over prescribe it but also intentionally encourage that behavior which has led to an epidemic.

However, food for thought on that same subject is the over prescribing of amoxicillin and other similar class of drugs for viruses. The doctor is operating a business and his/her clients want a solution to their problem, so they write a script as they want to keep their customer happy and it “can’t be too bad”.

There’s a case to be made that a certain amount of immediate gratification expected on the part of the consumer is a large contributing factor to overprescribing in general.

However, in this case, Purdue was very much in the wrong and should not have been encouraging over prescription of a highly addictive drug.

There’s literally no risk for them. It’s yet another vertical business that isn’t addicted to the fees and they know you’re going to continue to use them for payment processing so the CAC for a corporate customer at ~$1500 or so is dirt cheap for the LTV that they(you) provide.

lol, or a way to express themselves

Or....

A way to piss of IT departments

100% agree. When I was at my best, I was lifting weights every morning before going to work & it’s super addicting.

Fast forward to today after a 7 month grueling project, and I’m exhausted every day so I’m being a scumbag and not going to the gym in the AM. I started running a few miles each night about 3 weeks ago, and I’ve been more clear headed than before.

Time to get back to lifting heavy things up and putting them back down again in the AM.

Super interesting idea and hope it goes well.

I’m not sure if it’s just a slew of interviews lately with older individuals or a trend but couple of things to avoid when interviewing that maybe are innocent comments but can def get you labeled as disrespectful.

Things I’ve been called or have had said by candidates in interviews the past three weeks: - Kid - “You’re basically a child then” - Youngin - ”You’re too young to know this but there used to be...” — Punch Cards — Mainframes — COBOL - Not taking my questions seriously compared to the older individual I’m interviewing with - A comment about the fact I’m wearing a t-shirt

So, yes, I do think ageism is a problem in technology but also, there’s a growing issue it would appear with older candidates specifically not understanding how disrespectful it is the other way to assume lack of 15+ years experience somehow indicates I don’t know anything about the origins of computer science, that I’ve never touched low level code before and that it’s okay to use phrases like “you’re too young” and “youngin”.

Please submit a PR. Open source 101

Yes, this has been the hardest challenge of it all.

When I took the role (I’m on the product side, my counterpart is the Engineering lead but we run it together) I made it clear that I’m only taking this role if they let me run the teams the way I want to run them, within reason.

My view on what you’ve described is that my directives are to improve sales, stability and the trajectory of the company.

It is not my job to worry about what other teams or tracks or departments think of how I run my teams. For the first few months, it was very rough because I did get a lot of that passive aggressive bullshit from people.

I told them the exact conversations I had with the respective leadership individual and encouraged them to go have a conversation if they were willing to put themselves in the same situation as me.

None of them did and over time I grew thicker skin, plus stopped caring about what they thought as it was working fine.

There’s about five more teams in the product/analytics/engineering realm that operate the same way I do now and it has been a culture change.

I’d imagine in the next 9-12 months we’ll revisit the policy company wide.

But I’ll say this, I’m not sure it was the right call from the overall morale of the company but it turned our team from the butt of jokes into the leading example so it was the right call for our team.

First off, holy shit. I come back from travel and arguably the least interesting comment I’ve made on a thread in years is the highest upvote one I’ve had lol

Now on to your question - We haven’t had any issues here with the HR policies and OH&S so far.

Each of the team members is in the same state as the office so no additional burden there for taxes.

This times a hundred thousand percent. I’m battling this hard right now at my workplace, some of my developers live a good 45 min drive from work and that’s just insane to ask them to be in their car for 7.5 hours/week.

So what did I do? I went “against” the company policy and had each of my team members work at least 1 day a week from home, now they’re up to 2-3 days depending on the week (humorous part is during the summer they’re in the office more cause it’s more quiet than home cause their kids are out for the summer lol)

So we’re still a “work from office” company but I run our team how I want and surprise - zero attrition in 3 years on my team, we meet most of our commitments, developer happiness/engagement is up on my team, our time to first response for production issues is great and all because of a mutual understanding that regardless of the “rules” I’ll take care of my guys/gals.

One could argue that it is a lip service that was say that as a society yet do not work to improve public transit or take the extreme but reliable step to put breathalyzers in all vehicles.

Doesn’t really matter.

Moving off Salesforce is a many month project for a small company and possibly years for a larger company depending on the add-ons and everything.

Doubt they lose any real customers over this but they’re definitely going to be cutting some checks/credits to a ton of people for the next few months but it’ll fade.

$2 per day plus an additional 7.25% tax from Colorado, plus 2.9% sales tax.

This has nothing to do with protecting rental companies and everything to do with states being pissed they aren’t getting their cut.

Rental car companies have refused to adapt or change their model for many years. They’re built upon antiquated systems with the thought that they could never be touched, and to be blunt I don’t feel much sympathy for them.

They’ve been approached numerous times with more innovative uses of their fleet and they’ve turned up their noses so many times at it because they felt they didn’t have to change.

I don’t think it is at all, as long as you realize some co-workers are only work friends and when you or they leave that you won’t really do much of anything together anymore.

I was responding to the parent post that seemed to insinuate that it’s young employees at fault for believing their work friends are friends and that’s more of the culture of technology companies.

I’ve made a handful of good friends over the years from people I met at work, but I also have seen the nasty side of that when it comes to promotions, people leaving, drama/gossiping and so forth.

So it’s best to just go in eyes open and realize that some people may be your friend on the surface but they’ll fuck you over first chance they get (same can be said for real life as well)

That’s not even close to fair to put the “family and friends” mentality onto young employees.

Tech companies are notorious for baking this into the culture to churn more hours out of employees. The usage of company values, tons of on-site perks to keep people there longer and of course if you’re going to spend the vast majority of your waking hours at/around the “campus” you’re going to consider co-workers friends.

Anything on the product side for this by chance? Did sales/solution engineering before but working in a product role in what you described sounds so much fun.

Switching over from KM to your product and love y’all. Looking forward to ideally seeing some interesting product openings.

Kudos to you, this is really badass to see and speaking honestly, once I’ve built up enough of a nest egg the idea of working in the public sector is exciting (outside of trying to find affordable housing in DC lol)

The company I work for still uses Kissmetrics but are navigating away from it. I have to agree that the author misses the point.

We’ve used them for almost... 5 years now and I have no idea what the author is referencing as their “fire” product.

The UI never made much sense, and above a certain number of streaming events the live view was useless.

The reporting is not great or reliable, the “SQL” report is a nightmare to use. It doesn’t follow many of the normal SQL syntax and was sorta just dropped onto users without much information besides a two paragraph help article that isn’t that helpful.

Simply put, they built a great initial product and then spent so much time twiddling their thumbs to not improve the product or help customers who stream a lot of events get them into better pipelines (e.g what segment does very well) and then built out pretty shoddy reporting tools on top of it.

We had to build our own reporting tools through a myriad of ETLs using spark + other technologies just to clean the events coming through. Some user error and bad eventing policies on our side? Of course but Kissmetrics didn’t do much to help customers with tooling.

I’d rather build something or do a case study (since I’m on the product side now, RIP sweet mechanical keyboard) then walk through white boarding problems.

I don’t mind a take home assignment that has a reasonable due date, but they should only be given deep enough into the recruiting process IMO.

Big fan of Segment, been wanting to transition some of our stuff over and tap into the kinesis pipeline connectors

Works for TripleByte, doesn’t work for the rest of the companies who do white boarding interviews.

You don’t learn how to implement various sort algorithms by hand in boot camps (oh weird, I never had to implement or work with anyone who had to implement one yet we all had to pass that during whiteboarding).

I’ve hired boot camp grads with success and failure. I’ve also hired CS grads with success and failure.

The number one quality that determined their success in my opinion was grit and passion for programming. Programming is always evolving and really hard to master without dedication, time and so much trial/error that you’re so pissed off by the 18th time of trying to solve something that they 19th time when you do solve it the high is so intoxicating you’re ready to do it again on the next task.

None of that is taught in a classroom regardless of its a boot camp or CS degree.

I wish I knew was company this was so I could blacklist them from any future contact.

@OP, upper management fucked up majorly and if I were you I’d be looking to leave as well. Everything you’ve said makes them seem like complete assholes who said “fuck the culture” and opted for profits over people.

What should you do? Tell the guy in person that he should leave, take the patented material with him and don’t look back.

The company has had to have made more than 110k off his parents, and this is such an infuriating question to be asking.

As others have pointed out, you’re going to get diluted tremendously if they raise another round.

When a startup is trying to survive they’ll give up a tremendous amount of equity because the alternative is 80% of nothing or 40% of something.

Does that $13k hurt you to pay out? If it’s not that painful, you can weigh that.

For what’s its worth, I didn’t exercise my options when leaving the last two companies and I felt so sick to my stomach when the last one sold for a couple hundred million but then I looked & saw they sold for less than their last valuation so my shares would’ve been even more watered down in value.