noodle

Pretty much all of your complaints are self-inflicted by chasing bleeding edge tech. You don't have to do this.

> I've been burnt before using what was seen once as well-established and polished but when I tried it, it was in total decay (meteorJS).

You tried one older tech and gave up, while you're constantly re-upping on newer stuff without questioning that?

Also it sounds like you're only describing javascript. Javascript is kind of its own thing with its own issues/etc.. Try a different language. You'll always have to use JS for web development, but it doesn't have to be your whole world, either.

I'm currently working in this space and agree - very underserved in a lot of different ways. Commercial is more served because more money is involved, residential is underserved because of a wide range of reasons, and its a pretty real and large problem that will get worse with time without some real movement.

> SaaS for small and medium businesses

This one

SMB SaaS seems to be doing just fine.

Many coworking spaces - weworks included - have private phone booths. They tend to be really packed, though, which leads to people taking calls in the shared areas.

I've been helping someone shop for a car and the Escape PHEV has been on the top of the list of considerations. Agreed its a great alternative, but its basically impossible to find as well. Most ford dealerships are charging ~20% over MSRP for it and there are also wait lists for it. I've never seen one in person.

> Wanting more privacy can be an ends in itself.

People who are willing to jump through hoops to marginally increase their privacy and the companies willing to similarly jump through hoops to cater to these people are a subset of the overall population. Gotta break out of this subset to achieve the wide adoption OP was talking about.

As a CompE and EE major who switched to software after graduation like 20 years ago, EE work was also like way harder IMO. They SHOULD be getting paid more. But they don't seem to be. I switched due to low salary and few available jobs and never looked back.

IMO step 1 is figuring out what kind of business you want to build.

I've had mixed experience here. It REALLY depends on what you're specializing in; specialization alone doesn't cut it. Also, you can get away with being a skills generalist if you instead specialize in a field/topic/etc (IMO).

So its more about positioning, I think. How you're able to sell yourself and the skills you have.

Depends on what you want to do. Entrepreneurial as in start your own consulting company? Or starting a startup where you're (generally speaking) selling a product of some sort?

If they have the money to hire you and they have pent-up growth that refactoring will unlock, that really sounds like close to an ideal path for a startup to take. They're literally paying down their tech debt by paying to hire you. Maybe ideal would be a little earlier so it doesn't block growth, but yeah. In my experience way more startups have died from premature optimization

I think a more thorough answer to this question would require me to put too much detail out in public than I might be allowed to, but suffice it to say that we don't. We also don't really have a problem hiring and we pay above market, so this isn't me lamenting how tough the market is or anything.

This is fairly true for most businesses already, though - at least in tech. It's just a question of how they value your skills that might not be in alignment. Some companies will value what you bring to the table more than others, just because of what their needs are. Or they just can't match pay. We regularly lose people to FAANG because we just can't comp the same, and that's been true for every startup I've hired for ever.

It certainly does act as a filter. My point was more, this was much less of a thing when ranges weren't published. Many applicants had firm requirements across all the way across the spectrum. Published rates end up grouping towards top of published ranges for each role. Could be caused by something else of course, this isn't necessarily commentary on cause/effect, but it's my observation.

I currently post ranges because we're now large enough. But when we were smaller, I wouldn't include ranges because our job posts didn't filter by seniority, and at least part of the comp was the potential for a healthy options grant. So the effective cash comp range was so large as to be meaningless on a single job post. "$0 to $1m DOE" (for example) doesn't help anyone make any decisions and is so distracting that its better to leave it off.

Also as a hiring manager, you'll also find that if you post the range, it just so happens that almost everyone's very firm minimum acceptable comp is the top of your published range.

I don't work for that company. A company that would allow that to happen is probably not a company with a culture I'd like to be a part of.

In your specific example, depending on how the rest of the team reacted, I might've also just stayed to the end.

Yeah for sure. Going from 0 to 7-8 figures is the aspiration for people who attend, and what you've built is a great resource for that growth.

But the person we're responding to has already achieved that aspiration. What's out there to serve the incremental growth of people who are looking to go from 7-8 to 9-10 figures?

The feedback I've heard from people who've attended MicroConf multiple times tends to be that its invaluable content until you're above a certain size, and then the content becomes less impactful.

Microconf is definitely more oriented towards smaller businesses than the previous commenter seems to be.

Cheaper labor is cheaper for a reason. The economy is globalized enough that if you have an actually equivalent skillset, you're very likely able to pull an equivalent salary, no matter where you live.

You'll get outsourced regardless of where you work once a company is willing to take the tradeoffs that come with cheaper labor - a "worse" skillset.

There's certainly a little salary arbitrage to be had for actually equivalent skillsets, but not enough such that its worth firing someone with institutional knowledge. Usually companies will augment hiring via outsourcing or near/off-shoring, not replace people.

If a company is willing to fire you for that little amount, then (1) you were already essentially replaceable anyway in some form or another (sorry); or (2) they're making a huge blunder and perhaps their future is not so bright, so maybe its actually a blessing you have to leave?

Just to add something that hasn't already been talked about (speaking generically since you don't have much detail):

Most people do not care about the black box of HOW you solve their business problems. Identify people with the business problem you're looking to solve, talk to them about the problem, convince them to pay you money to solve it, and deliver on the solution. The means by which you solve the problem is where you extract value, and you do not necessarily have to communicate all the details on how you solve the problem. Or if it's kind of required depending on what it is you're talking about, you can wait on that until some paperwork is signed.

If you have a technical solution, try not to sell it to overly technical people, as they'll typically want to look into the black box.

Yep, for sure. I've witnessed this first-hand, too, many times. Watched many startups die from this desire to build the perfect version of a thing that no one wants to buy.

Many business, products, features, etc never survive long enough to get to "the long run".

WRT your experience at Amazon -

A lesson you don't learn in school, and is even hard to learn in professional life, is that engineering is about getting the best work done inside the constraints you're presented with. Sometimes its time constraints, money/resource constraints, business constraints, political constraints, environmental constraints, etc..

You'll never be given a perfectly well thought out spec/design/etc and infinite time and resources to build the absolute best solution. You'll have to compromise on things when you're doing real work. And sometimes people will disagree with the compromises you had to make, like you are with this team at AMZN.

That depends fully on the format. Original article doesn't specify afaik, but the only sanctioned commander games I've ever played in a tournament format were limited events

Beyond a certain level, everyone has access to all the cards they want. That might cause a poor fit on the bottom levels, but intermediate to advanced levels, its not about ownership

They're definitely required for at least some scenarios, as a raw deploy didn't work for me, they're called out in the help docs, and I had a chat w/ their CEO on the topic a few weeks ago.

The same issue I have with Render, I also have with this. If you have to create a config file for the environment, you aren't giving me a Heroku-like experience.

Give me an opinionated default that works well for most situations that I can then build on top of, configure further, etc..

> How can you establish at least doubt in the other person's mind?

Someone must be open to this in the first place. You can't change a closed mind, and there are many reasons why a mind might be closed. They kind of have to arrive at their doubt on their own, at least in my personal non-expert opinion. The most you can do is express your opinion in a relatively non judgmental way (because if you're too harsh they won't return to you later to discuss) and be available if they want to discuss.

> Minimum Lovable Products (MLPs) add more focus on the idea that whatever you’re putting out in the market has to solve a real-world problem from the beginning

Is this not already the definition of an MVP? As they put it - a skeleton that doesn't solve anything - isn't really a viable product...