sombremesa

I’ve worked at a small startup and find this to be untrue. If you’re working with people 10-100x worse than you, you can be sandbagging as hard as you can and still be miles ahead and look like a paragon of productivity.

Now, will that particular startup succeed? Probably not in the way their investors would like.

The cliff is irrelevant, if you leave before you fully vest your pay rate does not actually match what you claim.

The reason I brought up taxes (which might seem odd to people since compensation usually ignores them) is because they will significantly change the equation for various reasons. (AMT, RSUs taxed as short term gains and not long term, state tax affecting comp regardless of cost of living, etc.)

Ultimately, any compensation number that rolls all of this up into one number is mostly useless for actually knowing how much money you’ll have in N years, but it is useful for comparing offers, which is fine - but then these numbers shouldn’t appear without qualification in the type of discussion where personal finance is involved.

Not to mention that since this is a forum where many people are involved in startups, a 50k salary often (ok, maybe not often but I’m on 1/1) turns into several millions in a few years. Does that mean founders should claim they were making $2 mil per year? I don’t think so - but that’s the only comparison available if you use levels.fyi.

> Twitter has very high quality content

Can you give me an example? I have zero followers/following on Twitter and just use Tweetdeck so I'd like to know what I should be looking for.

> places like Google

Which place aside from Google?

There are huge issues with how these salaries are reported. When you include stock compensation especially: what about vesting schedules and taxes? You can leave a job (by choice or otherwise) where you worked for a year and were making "1 million a year" with less than $300k in total compensation.

It feels like a little trick being played on the employees, kind of like unlimited PTO. I'm sure some people actually enjoy the full benefits of what they're promised, but I'd be surprised if that's a majority.

How does this type of definition apply to something like Flappy Bird? Would you call that poor execution?

What is execution? It seems that in some way, it's analogous to success itself. If you make apparently terrible decisions but your business succeeds despite you, would anyone really call that bad execution? If good execution equals success, then is it helpful to know that good execution equals success?

It would seem that your home fell within the 90% of homes that are supposedly crap.

The scale of the planet is pretty amazing too, this is .00000001 views for every insect on earth.

Another issue is that recruiting isn't the same across the industry. TFA is written by a dev, but at a FAANG, the first person to see your application is practically guaranteed to NOT be a dev. How you impress them is going to be different.

This is a little project I originally made for NaNoWriMo 2021. I was experimenting to challenge one of my most absurd limiting beliefs: "Nobody pays for software on the internet."

This is using LaTeX in a docker container on Heroku.

The PDF files have clickable checkboxes with custom icons, which was surprisingly hard to do in a PDF...so it's a hack.

Revenue has been modest, I didn't really market it much. But, there has been revenue, which was unexpected.

I was too lazy to make a database so purchases and other events are tracked by submitting a Google form in the backend.

Of course your voice is going to sound much better on a condenser mic than on a $1 mic from RadioShack, but that doesn’t mean your voice changed. We’re talking about improving handwriting, if you write someone a note illegibly your excuse should not be that you forgot your good pen at home.

Just copy writing you think is good, and keep a daily journal where you write exclusively in that style. It'll be slow going at first, but it works. Takes about a year before it's totally natural.

I disagree on the suggested method, but I agree that handwriting can be improved. Someone who writes in prescription cursive isn't going to get better with a new pen and different paper. It takes deliberate practice and attention to detail.

This is why "a poor craftsman blames his tools" is an adage.

I don't understand. Your product already says "easiest way to design and print labels, period." How much more of a leap is it to "tell the user why it'll help and save them time"? In fact it seems less "problematic" than what is already there?

Well, the reason I was able to apply both "middle of the road" and "80th percentile" labels to the same code is because the former was regarding code quality and the latter was regarding code prevalence (in the same sense that scoring 50/100 on an exam doesn't necessarily put you in the 50th percentile).

As far as developer quality goes...I'm afraid I'm not qualified to comment.

It is middle of the road.

Which means it’s probably at least 80th percentile nowadays.

Looks interesting...but I think I'll hold off for now. Too used to Alfred 3 to even upgrade to Alfred 4.

Interesting pricing model, though. I wonder whether they'll succeed with it. In my experience, people love the idea of Alfred, but I've never had success getting anyone on my team to adopt it. (Maybe because of the "pay individually" nature of the good stuff (powerpack)? I'm not sure.)

What, no Alfred?

Does this really align the business with its users? With this model aren’t you incentivized to make users waste as much time as possible so their time spent in the app increases, which is directly convertible to $ for you?

I’m not convinced. Maybe I’ve misunderstood something.

Charging for time spent developing is very different from what AWS does.

I recently pulled out my 2018 13" Macbook pro after quitting my job and not having touched this laptop in a while. The keyboard had a couple of issues with repeating keys...and I was out of the warranty period.

Thankfully, Apple has a keyboard service program, and they fixed it for free — in late 2021. No questions asked. With a one year warranty on their fix.

This was just before thanksgiving and it took them just about 3 days to fix from when I dropped it off to when I picked it up, even though it was shipped to a repair center.

That being said, I might not buy a new one for a while because I like having bootcamp to play games and the M1 makes that impossible.

Just an FYI, this is written by a PM, likely in reference to PM interviews.

Somehow the OP didn’t remind me of this pertinent article [0] but your comment did.

[0] https://avc.com/2009/10/slow-capital/

My dog is actually doing Mac only, since that’s where the money is.

Yup. Here’s a good video for what goes on behind the scenes at Amazon’s gaming org for example.

https://youtu.be/aggk93Nazuk

I can verify this is true since I used to work there.

Weird that this person doesn’t even consider Firefox, the only browser that lets you have Adblock and other addons on mobile (but not on iOS, sadly).

> I think a lot of good would come from that and not much bad.

Here something that'd happen - the homeless in encampments would get hoovered up by slumlords who put them in squalor and consume their $1k checks. Poor people would have more children because each child = $1k/mo, even if they have to wait 18 years. Abduction would be easy - the ransom pays itself over time. Fraud would be rampant. The ultra poor underclass who are undocumented would still get nothing, further exacerbating the divide.

Right, a bunch of options for a shell company with no real assets that could be shut down by the PRC on a whim.

I’d love to ask this guy what he considers risky.

Neither the author of this article nor the investor being interviewed seem to actually understand options.

You want to make a “safe bet” and decide to buy a bunch of options…whoo boy.

> The brilliant ones are so driven that they will often succeed without assistance.

That might be true, but the level of success might change dramatically based on assistance. Founders know this, and may choose that path despite being capable of success regardless.