josephmosby

(not the author, but here's how I think about it)

Assuming that you're not a commodity product, it all kinda nets out in the end. If you have a competitive market, you have proof that people want your product at a good price, else no one would be in the market. If you execute better than all of your competitors, then you can theoretically take every last penny of that market.

I don't think the competitive pressure changes the decision whether there's revenue to be made in a certain space, though it may change the personal decision if the operating tactics required in a competitive market are personally fun for you the human being.

Wholeheartedly agree.

Personas are useful for developing a general character that you can refer to. But you still have to be able to say "Alice Robertson, who is a demand-gen marketer at $CUSTOMER, is a prime example of this persona and someone we should talk to during product research." If you can't speak to an actual human and validate your ideas, then you are at risk of creating a fake persona who sounds just plausible enough to convince you to make wrong decisions.

I have used Modernist Cuisine at Home for years. The techniques are a little more approachable for the home chef, and the results are A+.

And if science-infused cooking is your jam, Kenji Lopez-Alt is another great read. https://www.kenjilopezalt.com

Spiritually, there is a dichotomy, but it is (as most things) perhaps more nuanced than you've laid out here. This dichotomy is also commonly referred to as "top-down vs bottom-up" or "strategic vs tactical" or "big picture vs in the weeds."

On places where I agree with you: there are some people who naturally think about the big narrative, what could be done, the vision, and the way the hero will progress through their journey. There are also people who think through the day-to-day, less about the hero's journey and more about how the hero will get from Town A to Town B in two days. Great pairings come from having both; this is one of the reasons that co-founder teams are often so much more successful than individuals. They complement each other.

On the places where I disagree with you: some of your statements refer to reactions when the scenario requires thinking that is different than natural strengths. A successful "narrative" person understands and respects that someone needs to be thinking through the day-to-day, and a successful "facts" person understands that someone needs to be setting the big goals. They recognize weaknesses in themselves as strengths in another.

For example, a fully-aware "narrative" person won't think it's wrong to pierce a valuable story with contrary facts. They will respect that their story should be updated. And a fully-aware "facts" person won't put their foot in their mouth by saying things at the wrong time. They'll respectfully listen to others and chime in when it's appropriate to build up the group. None of us are perfect, so we will all make mistakes here, especially under stress.

There are a couple of buried pieces in here.

The first two examples are founders who moved from Europe to San Francisco. Given the entrepreneurial ecosystem in most mid-to-large U.S. cities and more favorable ways of working, I would imagine that you could get a win by moving to any U.S. geography with >1M people versus being a software entrepreneur in a EU regulatory environment. San Francisco is one of the examples... but Chicago probably is, too.

And if you're a founder, there are all sorts of things you need for your business beyond software engineers. You need access to capital, and most VCs are based in the Bay Area and would prefer you be there too. You need access to talented advisors, and later on, experienced hires. Those are also often in SF. It's not impossible to do elsewhere, just more challenging.

Neither of those examples make the case that it's better to hire your engineering team in SF, or that your rank-and-file employees should be there. Yet the article jumps to imply that's the case.

This has happened before. From 2000-2004, this was the world. Companies were going out of business or cutting headcount to the bone, and the folks with 7+ years of experience were getting picked up (often at a discount). If you started your first job coding in 1999 and then got laid off half a year later, sucks for you.

2004 both Salesforce, Google, and Blackboard (they were big then!) IPO, and Facebook comes screaming onto the scene. Greenspan monetary policy had already made capital nearly free, and the 2008 financial crisis kicked us into 0% interest rate territory. It costs us nothing to invest in talent, so why not? If we invest in 100 startups, each with 100 employees at $150K salaries, and just two of those unicorn exit, we've made our money back, and it costs financiers nothing to wait.

2004 kicked off the simultaneous rise of "software as a service" and "social media," both of which were highly lucrative. But not only that - SaaS allowed traditional (think General Mills or Procter and Gamble) to have high-quality, cutting-edge software products without needing to employ a lot of engineers to run them. They could just pay a line item to Salesforce and let them concentrate the devs.

Just like in 2004, I think we will have a major industry shift that unlocks jobs for lots of these junior folks. I don't think it will be AI - just feels too obvious. I suspect it'll be something to do with climate change.

For early stage growth companies (say <100 employees), I think in-person will come back unless you're planning to take a massive pay cut.

Middle stage (anywhere from 100 to 1000 employees), I think there's a lot of space for remote. You're competing for talent with everyone at that point, and you're not cash-rich... the amount you spend on office space could also be spent on another engineer or couple of salespeople.

Large stage, I feel like Stripe's hybrid approach will be the model. There will be in-office roles in key geographies where pay is better, and there's an expectation of being in the office at least a few days each week. There will also be a "remote" option, and entire teams will be remote. Salaries will probably be a bit lower and promotions beyond a certain level will be tougher.

What's influencing my perspective: I'm at a mostly remote company with ~500 employees, and while ICs are generally remote all the time, there's some expectation on managers and above to occasionally travel into the office. And I've got some friends working at Salesforce in Denver who see it's tough to get beyond manager level in any non-hub office, and the few Directors are regularly traveling to SF. No VPs based in the non-hub offices.

+1 to statsd. We've moved from SignalFX to Chronosphere, all using statsd and without having to change any of our application metrics-gathering code.

At best, the primary reasons companies do unlimited PTO is that it's just not worth it to invest in official rules and some sort of tracking system. Just say "take what you need" and move on.

But at worst, companies don't pay attention to the psychological impact.

If you're a manager or leader in this sort of environment, I suggest telling your teams something like "I consider 4-6 weeks of PTO to be a healthy amount. You should take somewhere around that. If you need to take more, I'd appreciate it if we talked about that. And if you still feel pressure to take less, let's talk about that too so I can help you feel more comfortable."

taking no PTO isn't mentally healthy. I've never felt like we got "more done" over the course of a year because no one took PTO. Eventually it was just burnt out employees grinding through the days.

We have an alternative path that works for us: get a terrible, ugly, but functional version of the feature up as quickly as possible. Preferably, the uglier the better. Skip the tests for now. Put it behind a feature flag or some other way to "get it into production" without any real users able to see it.

This lets you try the feature out end-to-end. Click buttons that call APIs and see if the right actions occur. Fix all the stuff that breaks when you first try this out.

Then show it to a friendly. Product manager maybe, engineering manager, another developer... whatever. Someone who understands you're just looking for someone to try out this feature with you.

It works now? Great. Put unit and integration tests around it. Make sure that this happy thing you have running won't accidentally break. Now make it pretty. Give it the design product actually asked for. They'll have feedback, which you can now incorporate safely because you have tests.

As a suggestion for finding mentors, maybe just track down some senior software engineers at OpenAI and the like and drop them a cold email explaining that you're curious and would love some time to chat about how <some new tool they're working on> works?

If you email ten, at least five will probably ignore you, three will say they're too busy, but two might be up for a chat. You lose nothing by asking, and if someone's "offended" or something because they received a cold email... well, that's their problem.

That's the start of a mentoring relationship. The first two probably won't be good AI mentors but you'll have learned something cool, and maybe they're curious about distributed systems. But maybe the second or third or fourth time you repeat this process, you find someone you really click with.

The word "soccer" started in England as a slang of "association," which became "assocc" and then "soccer." Americans learned the word from the English.

It may also surprise you to learn that water closets are called restrooms in other countries that speak English.

Reading up on the stuff that's actually coming out of the can, it doesn't look like there are particles that are small enough to actually aerosolize into the air. They tout wool and mohair as candidate things that can be sprayed.

> his fantastic universe is pervaded by an overwhelming force of goodness that seeks to bring events to their right conclusion through divine providence.

That is, in fact, explicitly stated in The Silmarillion.

"Then Ilúvatar (the God/Yahweh creator spirit) spoke, and he said: 'Mighty are the Ainur (the angels), and mightiest among them is Melkor (Satan / the fallen angel); but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Ilúvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined."

IANAL.

It is not an absolute requirement. It is often preferred from EU-based customers to store their data in EU-based data centers because then that data is subject to EU law, which can make things easier for your customers with their own legal compliance.

edit because I was incorrect It is a requirement for EU users for their data to be subject to GDPR. It is not a requirement to store that data in the EU to be compliant with the law.

I've got a friend who made the transition.

Ultimately, he went to law school because he didn't feel there was career growth as just a patent agent... you've got to be a full-on attorney if you want growth in that marketplace.

I'm recalling a little bit of his rationale, but it seems that if you're curious about the law, it's a decent way to get exposure without the total commitment of law school, and you get paid while you're learning. But don't think of it as a "career transition" unless you're going totally into the law, it's more like an experiment to see if that's a direction you'd want to take. You'd still have to go to law school and pass the bar if you want to make a career out of it.

(advice is U.S.-based)

Some of the other answers here appear to be "just don't do it," which I don't think is helpful. I also struggle with the Joneses.

For me, it helps to hold in my mind what the Joneses have to do in order to be the Joneses. It may look like the Kardashians got super rich off doing nothing, but instead they consented to having cameras in their life all the time. There's no taking a long nap on a Saturday and not doing anything. They are constantly doing something to stay entertaining, and that seems exhausting to me.

On a closer-to-me level, I have some friends who are engineers at hedge funds in New York. I really love New York and I get jealous thinking about making fintech money there. But then if I chat a little more I realize that most of them are working 10-12 hour days on the regular, their apartment is either way out of downtown or it's super tiny with no room for personal projects.

However, I also have some friends who are super into their fitness and their travel. And I do try to keep up with them, because that lifestyle is appealing to me. I'll track them on social media and try to push myself to take more vacations and work out harder. They're my inspiration.

To keep myself grounded, I don't just think about keeping up with the Joneses, I think "am I willing to do what it takes to be a Jones?" Yes - some folks got lucky and fell into a pile of money. Most didn't. Sometimes I'm willing to do what it takes to be a Jones, sometimes I'm not.

I worked alongside Gravwell on a volunteer effort at a conference, and will attest that they're phenomenal folks!

I've seen $600/hour rates for individual engineering work on mission-critical systems or high-revenue systems.

There are two massive factors impacting rates: sophistication of the buyer, and sophistication of the contractor.

I used to make $200/hour doing Drupal development for really small outfits: tiny real estate agents, restaurants, etc. My budget rarely went over $4000 and the sites were templated enough that 20 hours was honestly doable. They didn't want much and therefore wouldn't pay much because the return on investment for a website honestly isn't much for some of those places. Restaurants derive more foot traffic off Google Reviews than their own websites.

If you're dealing with a mission-critical system that costs you $100,000 per hour that it's down, then paying $1,000 per hour for someone to do it right is a no-brainer. However, that also means that the consultant has to inspire the confidence that they can get it under control. BCG/Bain/McKinsey/Deloitte/etc are masters at inspiring that confidence which is why their rates are so high.

Recharge Payments | Senior Engineers (Python, Ruby, frontend, data, etc.), Principal Engineer, various EM | full Remote US

Recharge is hiring several roles in our engineering team! We're looking for engineers supporting our underlying API, SMS tooling, frontend stack, data team... just about everything.

Recharge handles payments and customer management for the world's largest subscription brands. We're well-funded and fully remote - we were before the pandemic, and will be forever after.

Our job postings are here: https://boards.greenhouse.io/recharge

If you'd like to chat more about any of them, you can drop me an email at jmosby @ rechargeapps.com

If you'd like to read about our engineering culture to get an idea for the team, you can do so in our blog here: http://eng.rechargepayments.com/a-million-tiny-details-b396d...

ReCharge Payments | Senior Software Engineer, Platform Services | Remote US | Full-Time

ReCharge is a software-as-a-service platform that manages subscription payments and customer management for some of the largest e-commerce brands in the world. We're well-capitalized and fully remote - we were remote before the pandemic, and we'll be remote forever afterwards.

We handle payments and customer management for some of the largest subscription brands in ecommerce. If you've subscribed to Native, Hubble, Lola, Soylent, or Billie products, you've bumped into us!

If you're curious about our engineering culture, read more here: https://eng.rechargepayments.com/a-million-tiny-details-b396...

We're looking for a senior software engineer to join our Platform Services team, which handles our asynchronous workflows, orchestration, caching, etc. - all of the inner cogs that make the app hum along.

If that sounds like fun to you, you can reach out to me direct (jmosby@rechargeapps.com) or click the link below to see the full job description:

https://boards.greenhouse.io/recharge/jobs/5304198002

No. USPS still has to stop by all of the houses anyway to pick up mail as well. So junk mail subsidizes the cost of going to all of those remote homes.

I have absolutely zero connection here, but saw elsewhere that Specialized (the bicycle company) is hiring for a lot of software engineering positions in Boulder, CO that would hit your marks.

If you accept these postulates as true: * on a long enough time horizon, companies must either adapt to their environment by changing their product, or they must cease to exist. * a changing product means changing the abilities required to deliver that product at some level * changing the abilities required to deliver that product means the humans must change as well

then you have to conclude: On a long enough time horizon, the humans must change their own abilities to match the changing requirements of the product, or the company will go bankrupt.

Now, given that conclusion: you are correct, goal-setting is not required. And we have evidence that it is not required in companies that mostly outsource technical labor on an as-needed basis rather than set goals to continually realign employees with company objectives.

In some way, you have to choose an approach for calibrating changing employees and changing company objectives. Goal-setting is a low friction approach for calibration when the company prefers employees with internal domain knowledge over time. There are plenty of other approaches for aligning needs and available labor as well, but they are generally not preferred by both companies and individuals which is why you see the prevalence of this approach.

I have worked at companies where there was an expectation that you sign on at 9:00AM and leave at 9:00PM. And I have worked at some where my boss regularly took us out for burgers and beers for lunch on Friday if the weather was nice and then sent us all home for the day. And sometimes, those were the same company, with different managers.

I have had really amazing growth with managers who worked my butt off with some unreasonable hours. And I've had some managers who really encouraged me to take more time off. At different phases in your life you might want one or the other. Aligning company, manager, and where you are and what you want in life is a super important thing that should be done with a lot of intentionality. (And regularly re-assessed)

I think the first step - independent of company goals - is to know yourself and your own goals. Maybe your goal is "make more money." Maybe your goal is "take a class in art history, because I'm curious about it." Maybe it's "read more books" or "connect more with nature through hikes." Know yourself first. Avoid the temptation to succumb to pressure to force-align yourself with company goals, and just get a good understanding of yourself first. I believe this is important for all of us to do just as humans - even though I'm a manager, I have my own personal goals. One of those for me right now is running a 5K at under 20 minutes, because I like running and like the challenge of getting faster. To achieve that goal, I need to leave the "office" at a suitable time to catch daylight for a run.

Knowing yourself and what you want is very important. If your job just poofed out of existence today, but you still made the same salary - what would you want to do with your time?

Once you have that firmly entrenched in your head, then you can begin the negotiation with your manager and your company on how to align your personal wants with the company's wants.

I think it's bad when you-and-company don't have that alignment, because it means one (or both) of you hasn't truly thought about what you want and aren't communicating your desires well.

The endgame in all of this is an agreed-upon social contract between you, your manager, and your employer. You agree to provide a certain amount of work in exchange for compensation, which might include money, learning opportunities, pleasant coworkers, an easy commute, etc. Proper goal-setting, at its best, should be just ironing out line items in that contract.

Engineering manager here. I have recently set goals for people.

The best-case scenario is to align personal career growth goals (e.g., senior engineer wants to be a staff engineer, or engineer wants a big raise) with company objectives. Company objectives are typically realized on a longer-term time horizon, which could be several years long. Goals, in their best-case scenario, should be a contract between company and employee that says "if you change and grow in this way to help me, I'll help you back."

Ideally, a good manager should use their experience and vantage point in the business to help their team members set good goals that both align with the company's long-term growth plans and their employee's personal growth plans.

Where these things go sideways: * an manager-type has set goals for a team that are tied to their assigned goals from their manager, and they are hoping by setting goals with their employees to shift responsibility onto them. (example: if manager's boss wants the team to be proficient in Rust by end of year, that should be something that I as manager just assign out as tasks and give you time to do) * manager and employee don't effectively communicate on employee's growth plans, so the goals are lopsided. (example: employee is trying to spend more time with one-year-old daughter this year. Their personal goal is "leave office at 4:30PM every day." Manager ignoring this goal is bad.) * manager is not very good at handling differences between growth plans and fails to communicate those issues to employee. (example: employee wants to get better at a legacy language that is on its way out at the company, and employee also wants to get promoted. These two goals may be in conflict.)

Goals should be a way for employee and manager to align employee's personal desires with company's objectives. For many reasons - most due to questionable managers - this is often lost.

Project managers != engineering managers.

Project management is a pretty saturated field, you are correct. Engineering team management is considerably less saturated and EMs are just as in-demand as ICs.

However, much of the value of a good EM is derived as someone who builds and grows a team over a long period of time, so you don't see nearly as much short-term job hopping as you do with ICs.

Our working hours for East Coast folks average out at 10-6. Some folks take earlier (even on the West Coast, we have some folks working 6am - 2pm because of kids and such) and that's ok. That's also why we have lunch events so there are multiple opportunities.

Every Thursday at 5 EST we have company "pub trivia" over Kahoot. Folks take turns as the host and coming up with trivia questions, and as we've grown we have a healthy set of inter-team rivalries going.

For ad hoc events we've played Among Us, had a tarot card reader come read fortunes, had multiple chefs do cooking classes, and had a few musicians do amateur concerts over Zoom.

Agree with others that work hours is best. We have standardized on around 5 ET for most things, which is not too late for the East Coasties and not too early for the West Coasties.