joshpadnick

PEO stands for "Professional Employer Organization" and is an American term for a company that serves as the legal employer for the people you want to hire. For example, see https://justworks.com/. When an employee joins our company, they legally become an employee of JustWorks, but we're the practical employers. It's purely a legal relationship.

This is welcome the USA government because they know these companies help us achieve compliance better than we could on our own. JustWorks has been great, but only employs people in the USA. When we want to employ someone outside the USA, we therefore need to find a "global PEO." These companies are sometimes called "Employers of Record."

Popular Global PEOs are:

- Globalization Partners

- Elements Global

- Capital GES

- Pilot.co

- Lots more.

But it's a highly fragmented market and has been a pain to engage.

#1. Trinet for full-time remote/distributed workers. I've spent countless hours researching Global PEOs and reviewing their often poorly written contracts. If a reputable service existed that allowed us to hire in any country without having to form our own corporate entity in that country, we'd be ready to sign yesterday. Unfortunately, all existing services are either:

* Too new (There are promising upstarts, but they usually don't operate their own entities and it seems risky to route all our IP ownership assignments through a tiny company)

* Too expensive (massive markups on what should be a standardized service)

* Too incompetent (One PEO sent us a contract for a Canadian employee that assigned their IP in accordance with US law. It's facepalm-bad sometimes).

Gruntwork | 100% Remote | Full-time | Full-stack engineers | https://gruntwork.io

At Gruntwork, we aim to improve humanity's most important invention: Software. Our product enables software teams to launch and maintain production-grade cloud infrastructure in days, not months.

We create the building blocks that devs and DevOps engineers can use to make launching in the cloud 10x better / faster / easier. We think of our work as creating a new paradigm for how DevOps can be done, one that leverages the insight that so many companies re-invent so much of the foundations that software engineers need to build and launch their apps. We work primarily with AWS, GCP, K8s, Terraform, Go, Typescript, and React, and introduce new tech as needed. We’re a small team (~15 people), but our clients include the United Nations, Adobe, TicketMaster, Verizon, and lots of startups.

We are profitable, self-funded (no investors, no debt), pay salaries, equity, and bonuses according to transparent formulas, and are very focused on building a company we're proud of. We are 100% remote, with half our team in the USA and half in Europe/Africa. We have company-wide in-person meetups every few months. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds.

Our measure of a successful Grunt is (1) think like an owner, (2) make impact, (3) communicate effectively, (4) be a good person. If this sounds like you, we're hiring full stack-software engineers:

- Software Engineer

- Senior Software Engineer

- Principal Software Engineer

Learn more at https://gruntwork.io/careers/

We repeatedly celebrate employees prioritizing their families over their work, and we make every effort to avoid taking on projects or commitments like 24/7 support that might threaten that. In short, we plan the company around our lives, not the other way around.

Of course, the counterpoint here is that people still need to add value and get things done. So we also very much celebrate shipping and moving the ball forward each week.

Our startup[1] is 100% distributed and has in-person meet-ups roughly every 4 months. About half our team (including me) have kids and, to your point, when one of us travels it definitely puts an added burden on our partners back at home.

So we recognize this fact and try to mitigate it in a few ways:

- We structure the offsite week so that Mon - Thu is meetings and Fri is a fun day. This means attendees can leave on Thu night or Fri morning if they'd rather re-join their families sooner.

- We actively encourage our team to prioritize their families above their work and make it clear that attendance is preferred but optional. One of our colleagues just had a baby 2 weeks ago and no one would expect him to attend.

- We do what we can to make our meetups remote-friendly. If someone can join remotely, we use a Meeting Owl[2] to give them a better remote experience. It's not perfect, nor is it Cisco Telepresence, but it seems a lot better than everyone present jumping on a Zoom.

- We try to work around colleagues when possible. We recently held the meet up in my home town when my wife was in her third trimester and really needed me home!

For the rest of the year, we enjoy the benefits of being remote, among which flexibility is ranked high.

[1] https://gruntwork.io

[2] https://www.owllabs.com/meeting-owl

Yeah, I've noticed this, too. It definitely optimizes for the initial "Oh wow" walk-in experience. But day-to-day could well be different. As one example, I'm drowning out their hip background music with my earphones and something that enables me to actually concentrate.

I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this, but I actually just signed up to be a (thankfully month-to-month) WeWork customer for a HotDesk today in Phoenix, and it's actually been a pretty great experience: Great space, nice people, reasonable IT, I was up and running and working within 30 minutes of doing my tour. And yes I've had a cup of the famous We Kombucha.

This particular location just opened 3 weeks ago and is apparently already at 70% capacity with a mix of enterprises and startups. Even my Hotdesk membership can't start officially until Oct 1 because they're apparently sold out (though walking around there's plenty of space).

Based on these surface observations, the core business at least seems "plausibly profitable". But all the crazy side businesses like co-living just seems like overexpansion to me.

I'll politely decline as an investor, but I'm happy to sign up as a lowest-tier, month-to-month customer.

My sister works as a physician at Phoenix Children’s Hospital and they are literally studying whether giving “dirt pills” to children helps prevent asthma. Wish I could find the link for more info.

This article seems to be arguing that Docker’s primary downfall was being hostile to its open source community. Without having an opinion on whether that’s true, I suspect the core issue was not that but their business model and execution.

Before Kubernetes was the dominant container tech, they were pushing Swarm but I remember being confused about where Docker “standalone” stopped and where Swarm began. Perhaps it would have been better as a separate tool with a more clear open core model?

Then there was Docker Hub, whose UI was never great and which always seemed light on features.

I don’t recall seeing any kind of container introspection tool from them for a while either, despite others coming out.

Meanwhile, they represented a threat to the cloud providers if you could truly run anything in a container on any cloud. But the cloud providers all neutralized that threat by the classic “commoditizing the complement” strategy where the Docker cluster and registry tech were all either open source or commoditized.

Once Kubernetes emerged as the winner and de-valued Swarm while the cloud providers all offered their own Kubernetes and Docker registry offerings, I’m not sure how much more profit there was for Docker to claim.

Honestly, startups are hard. Sometimes really hard. It’s hard to know if a different team would have gotten different results in this space.

Does it have a much worse APR? I got 12.99%, which while an expensive loan is still the best APR I think I've ever had on a credit card.

My company[1] has written 100's of 1000's of lines of Terraform code as part of a commercially maintained library of prod-grade Terraform modules. We've also used Terraform to setup 100+ teams on AWS with prod-grade infra, and I can confirm that Terraform works very well for robustly launching on AWS.

There's also a fast-growing ecosystem around Terraform: lots of open source modules, automated testing frameworks, and a growing number of tooling solutions. In the early years of Terraform, bugs and stability were major issues. With 0.12, the maturity factor is becoming very compelling.

On a separate note, I'm surprised the author endorses plain old EC2 over Docker. I get the point of "choose boring tech," but it seems like launching your app on EC2 requires a whole bunch of rework around automation that's already done for you in ECS, EKS, or dare I say even Elastic Beanstalk + Docker.

[1] https://gruntwork.io

At this point in our relationship, Atrium's basically been a really well-run law firm who is economically incentivized to make legal more efficient. They also have significant funding, an experienced CEO, and silicon valley thinking, so yeah I think the foundation for something significant like "law as code" is there, even if it's years away.

That being said, I agree the first releases are underwhelming but "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/reidhoffman/status/847142924240379904?la...

Our startup signed on with Atrium and they've been superb to work with. The attorneys are great, the pricing is reasonable, and they're very fast at turning around documents. I never appreciated just how much speedy turnaround can make the legal process more pleasant.

I don't think they've quite hit their stride yet with the add-on services. I agree with the comments so far: It's not that difficult to organize your trove of legal documents in Google Docs, and I'd rather control my own hiring doc templates with a general-purpose tool like DocuSign than add another tool in the mix.

But the bigger picture here is the fact that they're releasing any such services at all. The chance of a traditional law firm releasing these services is zero, and there are software-based services I really want.

Personally, I'm waiting for the tool where I can declare my company policies around NDAs, and then use Atrium NDA (or whatever) to automatically scan the NDA I received, tell me how it violates my policies, and auto-generates a response to the counterparty.

Gruntwork | Senior Full-Stack Engineer | 100% Remote | Full-Time | https://gruntwork.io

Our mission is to make it 10x easier to understand, build, and deploy software.

We are currently focused on knocking all the grunt work of DevOps, where our goal is to make it 10x easier to get up and running with production-grade infrastructure as code on major cloud providers like AWS and GCP.

You'll work with a wide range of tech including Go, Python, Bash, AWS, GCP, Terraform, Docker, Node, React, and whatever else is necessary to solve the problem. Prior experience is less important than an ability to quickly ramp up. Much of your work will be open source.

We are 100% self-funded and have been profitable from day 1. We compute salaries and bonuses formulaically, which results in an above-market salary with generous benefits. We also employ a progressive equity system to more equitably distribute the proceeds of any future liquidity event.

Email us at careers@gruntwork.io.

For more info, see:

- https://gruntwork.io/careers

- https://blog.gruntwork.io

I recently contacted Stripe about how their Stripe Billing invoices rendered in a confusing way in some situations. Within one week, they fixed the issue. I was pretty impressed by that responsiveness.

First, congrats on your funding! Exciting to see innovation in this space. Here are my questions -- feel free to answer just one:

1. Is the goal to remove the need for lawyers by letting software do the work, or to equip lawyers (and law firms) to perform their own work more efficiently (and potentially move away from the per-hour pricing model)?

2. I've reviewed probably 25 NDAs this year and they're all differently worded variations of the exact same concepts. I really just want software to tell me "hey, this is your standard NDA but this company took a more aggressive stance on this once piece." Is this part of what you're aiming for?

3. Reading contracts completely sucks. Any plans to make a UI that presents them in a more human-friendly way?

4. The back-and-forth on contracts completely sucks. Any plans to improve this?

IANAL, but it feels like so much of my time as a co-founder goes to managing legal matters, so I guess I'm excited for a better way.

This was a concern for me as well. Brand new relationship with a company: now here's all my most precious banking credentials. There needs to be a lot more assurances around this.

In our case, I used bank creds, and immediately changed them to something else.

One other point of feedback. The AWS rewards is a big draw, but you learn new conditions only after you sign up. I don't think it was intentional but it felt a little bit like false advertising. Be sure to state all the conditions upfront that are required to win the rewards.

We[1] are a fully distributed team and also ran into this problem when we hired our first team member outside the US. There are lots of players[2][3] in the "Global PEO" market that have corporate entities in multiple countries and will handle payroll and benefits for you, but caveat emptor, these solutions are shockingly expensive. The average cost was 18% of the remote worker's salary (!), which I personally considered insane.

We ultimately went with a company[4] that had a different model where they connect you with a local PEO in each market and present a common UI on top of all the disparate local PEOs so that you get a company that specializes in just that country, but a common UX no matter how many countries you work with.

I liked the model, and more importantly, it was a fixed fee and much less expensive, and they published pricing. Disclosure: We made the decision to go with them, but haven't started working with them yet.

[1] https://gruntwork.io

[2] https://www.globalization-partners.com

[3] http://globalpeoservices.com

[4] https://papayaglobal.com

Just some quick feedback on your site. I'm intrigued by the product but I was really looking for a "features" link on the nav so I could quickly assess what it does.

I know you're trying to drive people to "sign up for free", but I guess I wasn't compelled enough by the text descriptions to do that in the absence of a concrete feature list.

Also, having pricing before features makes me click on pricing first, which seemed premature in my mind before I was even decided I was interested in the product.

Hope this helps!

Somewhat off-topic question, but how do others handle the need to create an invoice that corresponds to a Stripe charge? We've been using Stripe Subscriptions (I guess, now Stripe Billing) to auto-charge customers, and we separately define recurring invoices in QuickBooks Online. It's a clumsy process, but I'm assuming all Stripes Billing users have to solve it. Is there a better way to handle?

The thing that frustrates me most about the slow, drawn out demise of first Borders and now Barnes & Noble is that there has never been a bold vision for the future. The mega-bookstore was a great model in the 1990s, but post-Internet, they really needed to leverage their space to do something magical.

One idea I would have loved: Browse your books in store, but buy them for Nook or Kindle -- at the same prices you pay on Amazon. Maybe that's even a loss leader and you upsell $5 lattes.

Or perhaps they double-down on really awesome kids sections, where you want to try out a book on you kid before buying. Or maybe they aim to make the store more like a "community center" and build in meeting rooms, or make certain stores specialized in a particular topic (e.g. the "tech" store downtown).

But running the same, tired playbook year after year ultimately is, just as the author suggests, a way for current executives to milk the cow until it falls over. I hope when my son is old enough to enjoy sitting down to read on his own, I'll still have a nice book store to enjoy with him.

Gruntwork | DevOps Engineer | Anywhere | REMOTE http://www.gruntwork.io/

At Gruntwork, we offer DevOps as a Service. That means we help companies figure out how to do all the steps that come after writing code. How do you test that code? How do you deploy it? How do you monitor it? How do you keep it secure?

It turns out that many, many companies are are struggling with these questions, and we need to grow our company to keep up with demand. We are distributed (work from anywhere), bootstrapped (no investor pressure), family-friendly (no crazy hours), trying to build a diverse team (people of all backgrounds, genders, races, cultures, and ethnicities are welcome), and profitable (we work with some of the biggest brands in the world).

We're looking for a senior or veteran full-stack engineer interested in engineering a fundamentally better DevOps experience to join as the 4th member of the team/employee #2. If that's you, email us at careers@gruntwork.io.

For more info, see the blog post we wrote when we were looking for employee #1: https://blog.gruntwork.io/gruntwork-is-hiring-devops-enginee...

Funny, I listened to this recently and had exactly the same reaction. The cheesy audio jingles aside, the idea of contemplating your customer's experience in terms of stars ("What's a 1-star experience? What's a 6-star experience?") was a really neat way to think about product vision.

I also loved the idea that you can't just ask users "what would make this better?", but rather "what could we do that would make you tell all your friends about this?"

Overall, great examples of how when humanism comes first and tech comes second, the results can be magical.

I'm also deeply concerned about "backdoors for the good guys". Beyond just worrying about who else could get access, the "good guys" really just means government, and my comfort level with the current Trump administration using their "good guy" backdoor for a noble purpose currently sits at zero.

All that being said, how do we the tech community solve Theresa May's problem? Her philosophy is "if we knew more, we could have prevented this." Is that the right philosophy? Is there some other mechanism to authorize "legitimate" access to encrypted data?

I'm a big fan of Keybase overall, but I share the annoyance of intrusive notifications. I don't really need to see a popup window of all users that pertain to my keybasefs folder every time I access it. Also, I've noticed keybasefs can be quite slow sometimes.

But these are minor annoyances in the context of a great product.

Could someone explain how the underlying keys are managed for Keybase mobile? I'm guessing as part of sign up you generate a unique key just for your mobile device, and if your mobile device is lost, you'll need to generate a new key? How does this dovetail with your desktop key? Does resetting any active key trigger a re-proof of each your identity services (i.e. Twitter, GitHub, etc.)

Looks very cool overall!

This looks promising! Somewhat unrelated question, but has anyone had success using AWS DynamoDB as a time-series database? I'm generally curious on the case for a "managed" TSDB versus setting up your own open source one.

We (http://gruntwork.io) are still establishing best practices around managing multiple AWS accounts, but so far having a single "admin" account where all IAM Users are managed seems like a best practice. You can then implement a nifty dropdown that allows IAM Users to easily switch accounts. [1] I'm not sure about how IAM Groups fits into this.

For IAM Roles, we use Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) to create all those anyway, so I still prefer to create those in the AWS account that contains the resources to which they apply.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/enable-a-new-feature-i...

I work on multiple AWS installations and we use the approach you describe of only defining IAM Policies and avoiding resource-based policies where possible. The one exception is KMS Keys, which require a KMS Key Policy.

That being said, I've found IAM's power impressive but ultimately complex. If you're really serious about isolating users from certain resources, separate AWS accounts for each environment may well be the best way to do this. This way, you can grant "admin" access to users in your "stage" AWS account, they get all the permissions they need to do their work, and have no permissions to the more sensitive "prod" account.

I believe our current paradigm for how data is stored is fundamentally broken. The author is right that when you choose to use a service you have no real control over how they use your data. Frankly, companies aren't even accountable to uphold their own privacy policies since no one actively monitors them (except perhaps in the context of HIPAA, PCI, etc.)

What I'd love to see is a marketplace of "personal data banks" that would work like this:

- The bank maintains an isolated database of every major database vendor. The databases are isolated to a single consumer.

- The bank exposes API endpoints of every major database to companies like Facebook or new SaaS startups. Those companies now agree -- when requested -- to write your data not to their private database but to the bank's database that is private to you.

- You, the consumer, pay the bank a modest monthly fee to control who can access that data, and even optionally cut off access to the original "generator" of data.

I guess this still suffers from the need to trust that Facebook is abiding by your request that all data be written to the bank, and network latency becomes a real issue. So maybe it's not the right business model, but it's an important problem to solve.