gkmoyn

He could have also been professional and only stated that the employees statements are generally false, and left it at that.

The idea that people really work 80-hour weeks is TOTAL BULLSHIT. It's only self-aggrandizement.

80 hours a week means 11 hours a day every single day. That means you wake up at 8am, roll into office at 9am (ya, show me a startup where everyone's there at 9am!), work straight until 8pm, and get home 9pm. Including Saturdays and Sundays.

I completely reject the notion that even in the most dedicated startup, you will find a large number of people who do this for any sustained period of time.

People have limits. After a few days of 11-hour shifts, anyone will say "fuck, I need a break." Even the fabled CEO, who will be on email and essentially on call 24/7, will take breaks that bring the number down from 80 hours sustained.

I find that self-taught people have a bias towards self-taught. They see it as a reflection of passion, because that's someone who took their own initiative to learn.

I see it differently, for two reasons:

1. The best programmers I've ever worked with (directly, and also the best programmers in the company) were NOT self-taught. They did CS undergrad, possibly MS, and (rarely) PhD. So I simply observe a strong correlation.

2. To me, if you chose another degree for your undergrad, then that's a signal that you were NOT most passionate about computers at that age. Film school, art school, poli sci... you either liked those fields more than computers, or were stronger in those areas. Fantastic. But I could not imagine myself having chosen any degree except CS, having programmed since a wee lad.

Now, I've met and worked with plenty of self-taught awesomes, including with non-CS degrees, or without any undergrad at all.

For me, degree isn't a must-have on a resume. But I like the signal.

There are two outcomes after the acquisition of a small company. You can tell based on their announcement message:

* "It's been an amazing journey!" --> shut down.

* "We have no plans to shut the service down" --> shut down.

This was a long time ago (1994), but even today, if you're writing a 3D renderer from the ground up, your polys are gonna pass through a big ol' pipeline to get onto the screen. No way around it.

While agile terms (spike, sprint, ...) become common parlance, I will show myself the exit.

Cool. I've never worked there, but I appreciate that your comment came from personal experience.

Also, Oracle sounds super bureaucratic if you actually need approvals from the Google CEO! ;-)

Have you worked at Oracle, or just bashing them for fun because they're a large successful company?

Somehow I knew the top comment was gonna be "C++ is insane!!"

How would you implement pipe functions in Javascript? And I mean literally using the pipe operator, and not just chained. You can't, so you don't.

In Java? You can't, do you don't.

In C++ you can. You probably won't. You probably shouldn't so others can maintain your code in the future. But still, you can do very advanced things.

Thanks, pfultz2, for flexing C++'s muscles.

Why don't you go out and do the research, find out if Plated is, actually, doing so well, and then come back with some actual findings, rather than a flippant dismissal of this article?

It'd be great if instead of founders generously giving to employees post-facto, startup contracts were more employee-friendly from the beginning. How much % should engineers 1-10 demand? One percent is typical for eng #1. On day one, with no code written, where the founders depend entirely on the engineers, where it's just an idea and investor money, they're only a hundredth of the value of the company.

Sorry, my original point must have been very unclear.

In a typical startup, the ratio of equity between founder and employee #1 might be 50:1 or even much more. I am always surprised that people sign up to be employees given how fast equity grants drop for every subsequent hire. And, I wonder if any company has tried more gradual equity drop-offs. For example, where the ratio between founder and early employee grants is < 2:1, for example.

I'm talking about the equity on day 1, not on exit day. But even on exit, the ratio is the same between founders and employees.

This I just don't understand. The founders have the idea, leave their jobs first, and raise the money. Fantastic. Then they bring in two engineers a couple of weeks later, who quit their jobs for a nascent idea with no proof it'll work. The founders have maybe 65-80% of the company between then (then the investors and option pool), and the two engineers have 1% each. Everyone works shoulder to shoulder and the early first employees contribute critically, but the payouts on exit are off by orders of magnitude.

Why do people sign up for such lopsided payoffs?

Has any company tried a more gradual equity falloff? Say, with two founders and two employees, instead of an equity distribution of: F1=34 F2=32 E1=1 E2=1 you might have: F1=20 F2=19 E1=15 E2=14