danieltillett

Do you have a professional background in biotech or at least the life sciences?

Or pay people less to do the pleasant jobs.

How did you end up on this team?

As an employer I always read the cover letters. You had better have a slight clue of what job you are applying for or your application ends up in the garbage.

A meta question on the WSJ headline - do American really use the plural for linen to refer to sheets, etc?

The E in AAVE is English not Language.

This is a seperate (important) issue.

The reason why is it is easier to train a biologist to become a programmer than it is to train a programmer to become a biologist. Sure the quality of biologist-turned-programmer code will often not be great, but it will usually answer the question asked.

How about which jail cell you are placed in if arrested?

This is why you should not ever dedicate yourself to a single project no matter how much you believe in it. You should at a minimum have one back up project that will generate publishable results no matter what happens.

Sometimes the company has no choice as the alternative is everyone loses their job.

I don’t think employees should think of the company as their family, but don’t get into the mindset that all employers treat their employees as disposable cogs.

Yes, but it is not quite so clean. Employers are humans and in my experience they care far more about the people they know (employees) than abstract people (shareholders).

Many employers agonise over laying off employees, I would go so far as to say the vast majority do. Many employers try to keep on employees in situations where they really should be laid off, putting their own jobs at risk.

Don’t get into the the mindset that employers are all psychopaths - not only is it not true, but it will damage your career thinking this way.

When someone’s future salary is tied to acquiring $new/$shiny skill then you are going to get this sort of rational behaviour from the engineers. Smart people respond to incentives.

I think you should get out and see what farmers are doing to the wild mice.

Something I have always found insane is all the regulations and paperwork hurdles around killing mice in labs. Want to kill 10 mice humanely in a lab then you need to fill out a 60 page report, send it off to an ethics committee for their opinion, and then wait 3 months. Want to kill a few hundred million mice in the wild with a poison that will result is a slow and painful death - go for it.

It is not. One side is winning the long war and it is not the USA.

I used to be a non-technical manager “managing” a team of developers. I later (through circumstances) became a developer. Looking back at the games my team played with me I can see why many managers are cynical about the estimates they are given and attempt to negotiate.

As a manager what every report wants is to be genuinely listened to by their manager. If you make the effort to really listen to what your report has to say you don’t need to worry about praise or other feedback.

The downside is real listening is incredibly time consuming - I struggle to get under 60 min per person per day (not all at once of course) without compromising its effectiveness.

Yes they are likely to be mirror twins [0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin#Semi-identical_twins

I assume you know about mirror twins [0]. Do you and your sibling happen to have opposite dominant hands?

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin#Semi-identical_twins

It certainly is counterproductive. We should be incentivising replication, not novelty. If you started giving out grants aimed at replicating results we would speed up scientific progress ten fold.

That is not what meritocracy is - it is rule by the cognitive gifted.

The argument for meritocracy is that meritocratic societies (and by extension businesses) kick the butts of all others. It might not be fair, but it works better than all the other alternatives.

I wasn’t suggesting reneging on the deal, just laying out the options and letting him choose.

You could consider winding up the company and starting again with a fresh company.

Fire them and then give everyone a raise with their salary.

Why is it that a lot of people who ask leading questions on HN are such morons?

Nothing like having to do a job to take the fun out of it. Why not keep it as a hobby and just have dinner parties?

Working really, really hard when I was younger. I still work, but only on what I want to work on.

Have you asked him? Maybe he will be happier with a smaller share and avoiding the tax implications.

Can I ask why you want to open a restaurant? Have you ever worked in one?