mitchellst

By the way I should mention: I didn't just make this up, I actually _am_ a "self-taught" engineer working for a unicorn. These are the basics of how I got there. I had a bit of programming background—took 2 semesters of CS in college on my way to a history degree, plus a stats class that used R. Really though, a few months of study after college then jumping into a job in the right company is what can make it happen. These days, I interview a lot of other engineers, and this also includes some stuff that makes them more or less successful / more or less attractive to us as an employer.

As the other answers say, you will need something specific to drive at. The field of software engineering is vast. You'll be repeatedly overwhelmed by its size and scope without getting anywhere unless you start, and develop skills on the way. Phrased differently, you don't know what you don't know. By far the best way to explore what you want to do and to gain the skills necessary is to do it on someone else's dime. Get a job.

Easiest way into a tech company in a technical role is through front end. (Let's kill a myth here: not because FE is easier—it's not, necessarily. But the risk is generally lower, since it's hard to really screw things up in javascript and your mistakes will usually be more traceable for others to clean up after you than they would be in, e.g., devops.) Give yourself 3 months to learn everything you can to pass an interview in javascript, html, and css. Then go to a non-silicon valley town with lots of tech (Austin, Boston, Chicago, LA come to mind) and go out for every front end job you can find in a mid size company.

If the company's too big, you'll get locked in the front end role without opportunities to explore other things. If it's too small, you risk (a) that it's the founder's lifestyle business without any real innovation, or (b) that it will grow so fast that you'll have responsibility piled on you and no time to learn. (I recently interviewed a guy like this. Super smart, but he joined a high-growth startup as a cheap early employee, and his expertise stayed unfortunately narrow because he had no time to grow, only to prop up his part of the system.) You're looking for a place with 30-70 engineers, whose senior technical people are over age 45.

This is the best answer here. You've come to the conclusion that you're good at coding alone, but you don't know how to do it well in a team or company— your team and company. Other answers frame this as a technology problem (patterns and practices) but you'll hack it faster as an acculturation task. Get mentors. Plural. Grab one person in each department where you feel shaky— QA's, solutions architects, operations, maybe product, etc. Tell them you're new at this and you want to ask them questions and work closely with them to get better. (This will not offend them and it will not make them look down on you. If it does, you don't want what they're selling anyway.) Two months into asking them for code reviews and just taking them to lunch and asking about things you know they care about in their areas of responsibility, you'll notice results in terms of your own thinking and output. 1 year in, you'll be very, very good at this.

No, they wouldn't shut them down. They'd open up the toolbox of administrative law to bleed them. We don't need to pass new laws. (that's what the line about "enforcement" means.) The US Government can just barrage each noncompliant company with investigations, subpoenas, law suits, enforcement actions, national security letters, consent decrees and the like. They can find every issue or abuse of the platforms that no sane person would prosecute, then prosecute (or settle) them. They can sniff out (or manufacture) contradictions in depositions and pin charges of perjury, obstruction, or lying to law enforcement on individuals at the company. Given enough time, a concerted government effort to make life miserable for any of these companies would sap them of money, power, morale, and attention. (Their attention being valuable, the thing that keeps them competitive in the global marketplace.) This is a mirror image of the no-encryption-without-permission issue: administrative law allows the government to punish using process. You can't really run a company of any size except at the government's pleasure, because they can use administrative law to impose arduous costs and punishment through process.

This is the answer. The reason anyone gets paid what they get paid in the free market is supply and demand, whether it be for their labor, for a product they're selling, or for a security they own. It's not about what they deserve— see the oft-quoted idea that teachers do work that's both difficult and important but are not generally well-compensated. What you make is not a function of what you abstractly deserve or how difficult your job is. It's a function of how many people are able and willing to do it, at what price, and how many people are able and willing to pay to have it done, and at what price. This applies to both IC's and managers.

As others have noted in this thread, it's not always true that managers are paid more, but you're right to note that it's normal. There are some dynamics at play to make it happen. Two that spring to mind are (a) managers are often promoted from the ranks of successful IC's. They've probably been around for a few annual raises / promotions as an IC, plus they get a raise for the management promotion. It adds up. (b) A bad manager has more destructive potential than a bad IC. They can make more expensive mistakes, and devote teams of IC's to making those mistakes with them. Their negative attitudes or incompetence can tank morale across lots of people, rather than just their immediate teammates. Their inefficiency can lower the productivity of lots of IC's, rather than just themselves. All the same applies in the positive direction, but the negative is key, because loss-avoidance psychology is a strong force. So if I'm deciding peoples' compensation and I have a good manager, I'm going to pay them enough to keep them. If I don't, and I need to replace them, then I run the risk of making a bad hire, which would make a lot of people miserable and may lead to more attrition, especially among their direct reports, whose work is also valuable to me. If you've been lucky enough to have bad coworkers fired quickly, you know that their (ex) teammates breathe a sigh of relief and thank management for dealing with it. On the flipside, if an IC gets a new manager every few months, (especially a new _bad_ manager) they quickly decide this is a chaotic workplace and take their skills elsewhere.

My favorite of these is notion.so

I don't think it's disrespectful, because I think this is what the OP is saying. When considering how to make money in this business, you need to look at the company you're working for. He emphasizes that if it does not provide value, you won't do well there. If it's overly greedy, the same holds.

It's worth noting how good we have it: when you examine career salaries against years of school required and unemployment/failure rates (i.e., insurance salesmen can make millions, but most don't/can't.) then software engineering is one of the highest paid professions in the US. Could this be true if a controlling majority of employers were so greedy?

Programming craft does not matter because programming craft has no content. Doctors treat and fix bodily ills; their actions— the uses of their craft— are determined by the state of the patient. Similarly, lawyers' craft is determined by the content of the law. (The results can be encouraging or horrifying depending on whether the laws that apply to your time, place, and situation are just ones.) What determines the content to which a programmer's craft is applied? If it does not make money or serve the public good that your nonprofit addresses, why should your firm support it?

I say this as a programmer who likes writing beautiful code. Nevertheless, when we look around, we see no equivalent of charity hospitals for coders, where philanthropists donate wings and endow chairs to advance the state of the craft. (Not to disparage what we do have: CS Departments, GitHub, some open source foundations are awesome, but do not reflect similar public standing.) Our craft is not valued on its own terms because the broader society does not believe it is inherently beneficial to them. In a day when facebook and twitter throw our elections open to tampering, uber does... whatever uber does, and everyone's even more addicted to Netflix than they were to TV, can you blame them?

Lawyers are valued because they make society freer and fairer. Doctors enhance human dignity by caring for those made weak by sickness. Do you have an equivalently positive outcome for what our profession does when left to its own devices? If not, it's rightly difficult to appeal to the pieties of your profession with someone who does not share that profession.

This isn't meant to be a rebuke, rather, a reminder that good skills are unhelpful unless put to good use. If you don't like money as a means of keeping score on that, there's plenty of work in the public and nonprofit sectors.

Come for the 90's nostalgia. Stay for the websocket fight in a phonebooth.

I've been thinking about the ecological sustainability thing thanks to today's news, but it's actually not about supply chains, per se. The news is that China has tightened restrictions on importing foreign waste. (We recycle very little of our own "recycling" in North America; we ship it to Asia where they do it, at least in theory.) Anyway, we have tons of cardboard and plastics on ships already headed for China that will probably be shipped back.

This is a many-sided problem. A few stray thoughts: it's not just a matter of buying recycled materials, it's whether you can recycle stuff after using it. A "demand chain" more than a supply chain, if you will. There's a pendulum aspect to this, where China has tolerated environmental atrocities in the name of growth for decades, and now rather than embarking on a measured reform plan, they're essentially rejecting all foreign waste. Maybe we should have seen it coming. There's also the domestic and international differences in the way we deal with trash. I have lived all over the US and spent time in most states. When I walk down the street in Austin, most of the recycling bins on the street are larger than the trash bins. That's standard in places like Austin and the Bay, but still exceptional in America at large. In much of Europe, you essentially buy permits for recycling, and costlier ones for trash. American consumption has been unbridled by the waste issue throughout the 20th century, but that's likely to change as we run out of places to put it, whether those places be landfills or other countries.

So, how to build a venture out of this mess? There are a few ideas. Recycling technologies are big. I read recently about a startup (funded by MassChallenge, I think?) that was trying to turn waste plastic into diesel fuel. The biggest process problem with recycling is contamination— how do you get it below, e.g., 0.5%? (China's new threshold amount.) Better AI, more dextrous robots? Maybe. Microbes or insects that just eat the food off plastic or cardboard pulp?

Thinking outside little processes and at larger scale, we should probably start recycling our own waste on our own shores. It would seem more efficient than shipping all our opened Amazon boxes to China, it would create some jobs, and based on both culture and governance, the environmental side-effects would probably be much lighter than shipping the same waste to Vietnam or Thailand. But the scale necessary to do this is massive. China's waste importers are worried that their businesses will become insolvent, because they have built economies of scale for recycling that require more waste than their billion-man domestic economy currently produces. Do we have either the capital or political will to build that?

If you're not a garbage person, fine. Materials, then: get it before it becomes trash. The world is shopping online more, which means more individually boxed items and more cardboard. How do you use less of it per package, or make it break down more easily? The rules of the game are that it can't increase the cost of shipping and it needs to be hygienic enough that you don't give any infants botulism or something. Do you think Amazon's already optimized that problem, or is there a step change to be had?

Not to fanboy, but the "Who is Hiring" thread posted here on hacker news on the first of each month. In my experience, the rate and speed of responses from that thread is dramatically higher than anywhere else.

Obviously it's not the UX that makes it shine, but when you're looking for work, you care about the results. I recommend that thread to anyone who mentions looking for a tech job.

The "issuing bank," which issues your cash back or rewards credit card, has its cut protected by the payment networks. Part of the "interchange," the wholesale cost of processing a payment, is reserved for paying out the issuing bank. The interchange rates are set for the payment processors by the card networks (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex). Whether you spend $100 at the locally owned boutique or Costco, they get paid the same amount. The middleman— the payment processor— gets squeezed by merchants like Walmart and Costco, competing to shrink the margin for the promise of massive volume. But Chase, Captial One, etc. don't have their consumer credit card divisions affected by who processes the card. (Unless you're Citi's processing side with Costco, and only accept Visa. Then your competitors get zero volume from Costco on their mastercards, discovers, and amex cards)

True, but the big guys like First Data are out of reach to the size of shops that generally use square. (They can use them, but the fees don't get appreciably more competitive until you clear a certain scale.) I'd say Tsys and Worldpay are appropriate alternatives if you're the size of business who's considering square.

Most, yes, but with plenty left over. They charge this for all transactions, whereas the wholesale/processing rate depends on the type of card. Pin debit transactions clear interchange well under 1%. Visa and mastercard have a few different tiers. There's not much margin in an American Express transaction at that rate, but your average VISA/Mastercard wholesale costs will net out to ~1.5%, depending on the kind of merchant you are and what kinds of cards your customers tend to use. (It's more expensive to process a reward card like the Chase Sapphire Reserve than your local credit union's visa card.) Square covers lots of different merchants, with special prominence in low denomination restaurants / cafes. At scale, that's pretty lucrative.

It's true that processing is low margin, but (1) you make a ton of money on a low margin as long as you have a lot of volume. Just ask Wal Mart, Amazon, Big Oil, etc. (2) Not quite the same, because verifone is not a processor. Compare to companies like WorldPay and TSys.

I'm not sure what proportion of square's revenue comes from processing vs services, but if I had to guess, I'd say most of the services are loss leaders for the processing. This is especially true with their rates so far above market. 2.75% is a fat chunk of change if they're processing 10 or 12 figures. (Working primarily with smaller clients, you get to charge that much, but it makes them less competitive with larger merchants who process more volume.)

These articles pop up once in a while, and it always makes me grateful for my high school debate experience. New England private schools don't compete in NFL, they have their own league that's federated with some other private school leagues from around the world. Spreading is banned, essentially on the good, old-fashioned, "we know it when we see it" standard.

I readily admit that for most people, it's not so simple as, "you want good high school debate? Simple! Just go to Hotchkiss or Exeter." (schools that cost $50k/year) In theory, there's no reason why other leagues and schools could not ban spreading and put down a rhetoric-forward, comprehensive debate format. The catch, it seems, is that none of them have successfully done so. It's probably a culture thing-- the New England prep schools have a fairly large community of teachers and students who know how their debate format works, who know how to practice and judge for a less formulaic format. It's not obvious how you would create such a culture out of nowhere, and you'll get little help from New Englanders, especially the prep set, who are famously provincial about education.

I think this is fine for excusing the social quirks of individual contributors. If you're talking co-founders, though, I'd consider this "caveat" a red flag. If a person can't bring himself to make a positive impression to other human beings because he's too enamored of the "idea and doesn't care for the looks," he probably doesn't have the requisite maturity to co-found a business that will employ people.

Of course, some people really are all talk and no action. But I suspect you're assuming too strong a correlation with social skills. The fact is that there are plenty of brilliantly social people who can and do execute, and plenty of smart introverts who can't. I'm not saying, "go into business with your friends!" I'm saying go into business with people you trust and respect.

The corollary is to become someone who is trusted and respected by people who don't share the same skills and biases you have. Good places to start: seriously consider whether "the looks" have merit, and practice carrying friendly conversations.

It's a good question. I received some advice about this young-- and it wasn't about startups, it was about careers generally. If you don't know what you want to do, but you know the general area, proximity is your solution. Get as close as you can, and watch carefully. The example cited was Cornelius Vanderbilt. He sailed goods around and dabbled in ship building for decades before he got into the railroad and steamship business that built his empire. He became deeply familiar with the skills and problem space: market economics, securitization, transportation, cost competition, steam engines. Eventually, he became the first person to use a limited liability corporation to accumulate private wealth by offering services that transported goods and people, at brutally competitive prices.

Go work in something that interests you, and watch for opportunities. Uber and Flexport are proving that Vanderbilt was right, and transportation is still sexy. For myself, I like finance. There's plenty of room in healthcare, especially senior care, education, security... I think for the best ideas, you have to know something. The lightning bolt out of the clear blue sky to twenty-year-olds with no life or work experience is probably played out.

For my part, I think the partners are much more important than the idea. Good companies can pivot to find a good market. Bad partners will sink you, or never get off the ground to begin with.

Select for team, not for idea. The best idea is the one that can attract and motivate a great team, or one put forward by people you want to work with.

FWIW, I recall Paul Graham writing something that explains how he screens YC applicants. The upshot is that he doesn't devote consideration the idea unless he's first intrigued by the team. Whether you're a spectacularly successful investor in many startups or the potential co-founder of just one, that's probably a good place to start.

OK sure, but it assumes that young student would be able to discriminate a money-making investment from a money-losing one-- something the best VC's in the business, who vet tech deals all day every day, struggle to do.

Imagine you repeal all accredited investment regs overnight. Which of these seems likely:

- everyone in america invests $1000 in a future facebook, ten years later we're a nation of millionaires.

- 10% of the middle class (a huge number of people) wholly or partially cashes out retirement funds to put too much money into speculative early stage startups chasing fantastic returns. They lose it. Kids lose college funds, adults lose retirement funds, and we / society / government has to pick up the tab when such people get too old to work.

The point is, it's easy to attack these regulations as a barrier to opportunity and an unfair impediment to your right to do whatever you want with your own money. That's fair as far as it goes, but you also have to grapple with the real consequences of changing the policy. I have a hard time with your analysis that accredited investment rules have no "public good."

Phrased differently,the view on the ground in middle America is this: lots of middle-class people buy lottery tickets. Why do you suppose they do that?

Actually... kind of.

Imagine you're a French pharma company. You know the US is the richest country in the world and spends a quarter of its massive GDP on healthcare. When you put together R&D budgets, it makes sense that you plan to recoup most of your investment in the US, and that US FDA approval is one of your most important goals.

Of course they want a profit anywhere they sell it. But the calculation would change if the US health care system weren't so "messed up." You may not make the investment at all, because you couldn't recoup it over a reasonable timeline without the margins you get in the US.

The US rewards advanced medical tech development more than any other country. There are many things wrong with our system, and this might be related to some of them. But on its own, it belongs in the W column.

"Charging the maximum allowed by private insurance" is the same thing as competing on price. You're just competing to please insurance plans, not consumers. Admittedly, the insurance plans have every incentive to play ball: they want to brag on large provider networks in order to sell themselves to employers/consumers, and every corporation and person in the US is legally obligated to buy health insurance, so they don't lose customers by failing to deliver value for money.

So many replies to this comment, and none have yet acknowledged the high probability that Baron's request is sarcastic.

When frat guys with names like "Baron" claim they have superior social awareness, this is what they mean.

Is the DO NOT PUBLISH across the top of this article some kind of a gimmick from axios, or did someone mess up pretty hard?

Homejoy. Adora and Aaron Cheung.

well, yeah.

There are doctors who, for example, treat your kidneys. They never need to prescribe opioids.

There are doctors who perform surgeries, and prescribe a week of pain killers for recovery.

There are doctors who manage chronic pain. (Often anesthesiologists by specialty, hence that list is all pain management specialists and anesthesiologists.)

How is this surprising? Frankly, if the numbers are accurate (5% prescribe 60%), I'm tempted to think it's not concentrated enough-- sounds like docs of type 1 and 2 should knock it off.

But, what is this number "opioid prescriptions?" Is a script for 1 week of meds a 1:1 unit with a script for a month or 3 months? If you're using medicaid/medicare/insurance payer data, then probably, meaning these numbers do not reliably proxy amount of drugs or number of people receiving them.

By all means, we need to pay attention to the problems with opioids. But context-free clickbait numbers are a really bad place to start.

I think you mistyped a URL, the link is broken. Perhaps Contentgems.com?

What about the treatment side? Once you have a diagnosis, could we use AI to review the patient's medical record, compare outcomes of past patients with the same diagnosis and similar histories, and suggest adjustments of personalized treatments to optimize outcomes?

Overall, of course, you're right. Liability is the problem with my suggestion. Doctors prescribe to treat, they also prescribe to meet the legally mandated standard of care and minimize second-guessing later. Looking at each patient as a unique snowflake-- or at least, part of a thinner-sliced group-- helps with the first, but directly undercuts the second goal. Such an approach would probably need to originate outside the U.S.

Maybe the fact that you know your diagnosis is not the important part. If the app can verify the diagnostic data is accurate (e.g., temperature, AI image recognition of visible indicators like rashes and pupil dilation, audio analysis of heartbeat and breathing) then it can save the provider time taking these metrics in the office. Case notes are full of "subjective temp" vs "objective temp," meaning, "what the patient reported" and "what I measured on the visit." Successfully removing this distinction would be difficult, but would save provider time and paperwork. All this info could be sent directly to the doctor for diagnosis. (Possibly with AI giving a suggestion?)

The analysis assumes prices for these used battery packs are not governed by supply and demand. What happens to this analysis 5-10 years from now when the secondhand market for decade-used, 80% capacity batteries faces a supply glut, with relatively few potential buyers? As the comments here make clear, it's not altogether clear that such batteries are worth $15k now, as the paper claims. Let's say they are worth that much-- sounds like a great opportunity to build a business reconfiguring batteries for utility storage. But if you do that job well, then once your utility customers have satisfied their peak storage needs, your returning business drops to nothing, and the floor drops out on this battery market.