I was recently contacted by a person who wants me to work on "sweat equity." How do I politely tell this person I have deep ethical and moral issues with this? I could just reply with "no thanks," but I feel obliged to give some reason for it.

I think it is disrespectful to ask a person for free work with a promise of later payout. This person would not build a night club and ask the construction workers, bouncers, and bartenders to work gratis until the club turns a profit, right? These aren't even skilled workers!

I also think it is disrespectful to my fellow database people to ask for free work. We spend years learning how to work with data, mastering arcane concepts, and learning how to be nits.

I'm not angry about it. I'm just mystified by why anyone would do this.

Yea you usually do. This is for summer 2016 and I'll graduate in March 2017. Hopefully I'll lock something up by the end of January.

Just tell them off rudely. The type of person asking you to do this has no respect for you and a hugely inflated ego. Fuggem

In exchange for shares or just foregone wages?

Eh, shares, I guess. I would definitely want a back pay. So risky. I would have to be seriously impressed with someone to even consider that.

In the past, I've voluntarily given up wages in exchange for a share of an unproven project. I'd do it again if I viewed the potential reward to be substantial enough, and I'd be rather surprised if that wasn't the case for a sizable portion of developers out there.

There's nothing wrong with being more risk-averse with how you're compensated, but you shouldn't feel disrespected by someone making you an offer that doesn't align with your values. In your position, I'd probably just respond saying you weren't looking to take on that kind of risk at this time, and thank them for the offer. It's definitely not a spot I'd give someone a piece of my mind or scorch the earth over.

Curious tman, where are you located? Here in silicon valley every jackass has the next big idea and wants people to work for free or nearly free to realize their "genius vision".

While sure almost everyone would consider working for free if the circumstances were exactly right, those opportunities are exceptionally rare

The zombie thing would be cooler with the killing processes, maybe there is a t-shirt out there I can buy.

Yah surprised you're offended dave.
I've been asked to work for shares (not wages) a year ago and declined because the person who was asking, wouldn't go into detail about the team/project much.

Its a cultural thing to feel one way about something and a person can always make agreements similar but different based on performance.
Maybe its not so simple with US laws and I have little idea how complicated, it makes it for someone hiring to pay by stock.

The person could think its more value/rewarding to work for stock in something he believes in or just needs some work on the resume.
There is always interviews to test the person's skill, idk not enough info but weird reaction imo.

There is a multiple of jackasses all over the world, the internet is proof of that lol.

God damn it I am so ****ing sick of ****ing sourcetree being ****ing terrible does anyone use something better?

Try this?

An IPO or major buyout should be rather substantial if you get enough shares, so you aren't asking if the reward is high, but if you think the company is going to be in the .01% that succeed to that level. If I was that good at prediction success, I'd be investing. Certainly better than eating Ramen noodles for the next five years, which odds are will end up being 5,000 years.

I didn't scorch the earth over it...

I've worked in industries where I gained more skills and earned considerably less than what I earned when I started because there was all of a sudden a glut of people willing to work for nearly free. I don't condone that kind of behavior and I certainly don't want to be the one responsible for bringing the average down.

I hear food apps are the hot new thing.

apparently airplane sharing apps are doa

Yeah, the command line

are you responsible for your SC? I had an issue today where I needed to painstakingly check out branches and commits individually to track down an issue and without sourcetree it would have been really painful instead of mostly painful.

I don't think it is proper to be rude to someone who asks you to work for free in exchange for equity.

I think likely these people simply don't have the money, have money and don't truly believe in what they are doing, or are too risk-adverse to ever make it for real.

99% of them are just common crackpots. Pay them no mind.

I haven't been in a major city since I left LA back in 2010, so I haven't been inundated with these offers as the tech bubble has reflated. Fair point.

I can't really disagree with much here besides nitpicking the likelihood of and time to success, given we should be able to filter out the weakest ideas reasonably well. Oh, and I like ramen.

That was in reference to blackize's suggestion.

Do you think this was in response to increased risk-taking or general market forces?

gourmet ramen, or the 50 cent stuff from price chopper?

I generally use github's web interface to track down history, but there are probably some things that are too complex for it to be effective.

I recall this one time me and our project lead were staring at SourceTree or GitX or something for awhile, trying to figure out how the pointer to one of our submodules had become outdated (the pointer somehow got rolled back to a previous commit of the submodule, but there was no history that indicated this happened), and tracked it to something weird like
- the change was made in a long-running feature branch by a non-programmer, probably the result of not having updated submodules and being like "**** it, use my change, I don't know what the **** this **** is" as a merge strategy
- the feature branch was eventually merged back into master through a pull request
- for some reason github (or command line git for that matter) didn't show any commits from that branch in the list of commits that had modified the submodule pointer

But yeah, tracking it down was a nightmare, mostly because we were like "okay, so in this commit it's pointing at the right submodule, in this commit it's not, somewhere in between **** went bad...". And while I would rate my git skills as "okay", I think our lead is pretty genius-level at it and we were still pretty perplexed by this for a long time.

Speaking of which, for tracking down issues in code, I found Perforce's time-lapse view to be one of the most useful tools I've ever seen, and I can't believe that there aren't analogous tools for git. It's a combination of blame view and file history - there's a slider at the bottom of the screen where you can scrub back and forth through different commits of a file, and in any particular version of the file you're looking at, each line of code is annotated such that you click on it and a window at the bottom of the screen will tell you
- what commit that change was introduced in
- what commit that change was deleted in (if applicable)

For the bugs you come across where you're like "how did this ever work", time lapse view is amazing for helping you find that answer. Using git as my main source control now, I've largely given up trying to answer that question cause it's too much of a PITA to meaningfully examine source history.

I use fugitive.vim's git blame mode, which lets me press P to reblame at the parent commit, or O to open a specific commit and see its notes and full changeset. Using P multiple times lets me move back in time and get a pretty good picture of what's going on

Also, git has "git bisect" which is a tool specifically for fixing situations where "I know commit A is good and commit B is bad, where did the badness first occur?" (But it won't be able to work in all situations)

The twenty cent a pack stuff you get in bulk. Add a lot of sriracha, green onion, and some eggs or shredded chicken.

Do you think daveT would know this difference between what you mentioned and joining as a technical cofounder?

I think he'd just lump "hey write me an app, you'll be rich" with the former and be totally unable to discern between the two.

lol @ ethical issues with option packages. smh.

Well, one industry was carpentry, which I got out of before 2008. Since you lived in CA, you probably know exactly how the wages took a nose dive, but others would paint me as a bigot

The best are the noodles that come with a little plastic pouch of brown sauce, red spices, orange flakey leaves, and a solid white mystery pouch. Mix it all together and enjoy!

I know you like to beat the daveT is a moron and criminal ******* drum, but...

This particular app is in an area I'm very familiar with, and no, I don't think he has a complete grasp of how the industry works. Unlike many others with just an idea, he did have a semi-working prototype, which kind of works for and against him.

I think a criminal mind is beautiful and doesn't necessarily correlate with moron.

Oh, wow, look what popped on the front page of Hacker News:

https://whilewest.com/4-hard-truths-...a6d#.k39f8xils