Mikhel said in BFI that he is a recruiter.

In this thread he said he is involved with how startups get funding.

He posts like he has recruiting experience and not much else.

Imo

cb,

Best of luck man. I sincerely hope you don't say some stupid **** to your future employers like you do here. (Bloomberg as a SaaS company, or whatever that nonsense was in your above post about google tracks.)

Have you ever worked with someone that was genuinely smart in technology? As in someone who would know how to solve a problem in a matter of minutes that you would never be able to solve? You may honestly have never worked on hard technical problems and never been exposed to people like this. (Granted that you consider yourself the senior technologist at a company, but seem to think that a commanding a 500k+ compensation to be absurd.) Sincerely, you just seem butt hurt. That is fine.

PS: Where in your weirdo summation of google hierarchy do engineering directors fit in? They are L8/L9 with VPs being L10. I'm interested to hear what you think is going on there. I guess we've made clear that you aren't anywhere near this caliber, so I'm curious why you're just guessing at what people at this level do. Did you just glassdoor it all and hope for the right answer? You seem defensive and combative. Good luck tho. The world needs more experience team leads.

I just don't think you have the level of expertise to make this judgment. Also I think you have fabricated your "facts".

I was employee #5 where I am and we are still much smaller, but I'm hoping to get us to 20-40mm valuation over several (maybe 1-2) years, and also have significant equity (double digit) and if we can liquidate I'm starting my own company the next day.

Sounds like you should start thinking of ideas and taking a serious consideration toward doing your thing.

Before I told you I had you on ignore you said I "seemed like some who has been around and done thing before" so which is it?

What do you do then?

That is a very sizable amount of equity for the employee hire level. Guess it is kinda similar to what I described earlier.

Oh. I don't think you have the skills to determine what I do based on a few cryptic internet posts. That is far different than someone who seems to be a competent senior level engineer with a solid understanding of the underlying businesses they're developing technology for. I think both you and cb would be excellent engineers for the vast majority of startups and probably great CTOs for a slightly smaller percentage of them (assuming culture fits were fine).

But thinking you have any ****ing idea at determining what other people do based on internet posts? gmafb. Also I'm glad you decided to remove me from ignore. You may learn something.

In a serious vein, why are you starting your company the next day? Do you need the money? Are you actively working on your next biz? What if you spent 15 hours a week on it, and then magically it became something tangible... Would you quit your current job? (If yes, are you so poor that you need to keep your job?)

Somehow I guessed clicking the button wouldn't reveal a direct answer

Won't make that mistake again

I don't really have a dog in this fight, but Mihkel, it seems odd to me that every discussion you get in with people here becomes so contentious.

If it matters any, I don't have him on my ignore list.

The conversation started out okay, and then went downhill. I'm not sure why Mihkel resorts to personal attacks when it clearly isn't called for (I think I was his first victim here).

If he doesn't want to reveal what he does, that is his business. I don't think many here discuss openly what they do or don't do, and this is fine.

Could you point out where it becomes so? I'm happy to try and make it seem less contentious. Thinking back, I think jj and I were speaking past each other on options and probably could come to some sort of reasonable agreement on structure with several example cases, and probably glean new insights mutually. candybar is totally ****ing wrong about SaaS. There is no way around that. He simply doesn't understand the term and how the business works and is imagining that companies that lease physical hardware are somehow "thin clients" (Bloomberg). But whatever. I think I let that one drop despite the utter stupidity in that view. (I think he asserted Redpoint and Wikipedia were both wrong.)

And here I think LL is just personally attacking me. I think I gave some solid advice to cb on how to improve his resume. Conveying his experience in a coherent manner with specifics on who he managed (I assume it is a he), what he did, and how it correlated to business success is super powerful. But somehow he's being super combative about engineer tracks at google compared to management tracks. I'm not aware of any technologist who built something meaningful over long periods by themselves, so I'm not sure what his point is. Other than extremely brilliant people can make a ton of money working a technology firm solving incredibly hard problems.

Regardless, I'm open for advice. Let me know if you think there are things I can change or ways to communicate better.

Not revealing is fine, dancing around like you've got some great secret only the brilliant could deduce is another (attention whoring) thing entirely

I was being candid to your issue wrt interviewing. I don't think you're a bad person. I think what I said given your interview history was totally reasonable. And you may note, I don't really comment on your career with any advice since you took the initial advice so poorly. (Which is understandable.)

Anyway, aside from your fascination with Clojure (and functional programming) I think you're pretty competent. I don't think you're LL/cb level, but they are among the two most talented people on this forum. (I can't really get a feel for gaming_mouse. And there are like a few people where it is beyond my ability to discern their skill. I bet suzzer is a bad bad mother****er at node as well. But I would be totally guessing to suggest I knew anything more than social signaling in this case.)

Regardless, I just think you are kinda weird and that impacts your interviews. Nothing about you as a person. All the best!

I'm not really sure as I haven't participated in any of the discussions that wound up this way, but when things get nasty in this thread it seems like you're always in the middle of it.

I've known people like this in various domains - note that technology is not a single domain for something like this - but I think you're misunderstanding how they come to be. I've also worked with technologists or engineers or whatever that make 7-figures (and by worked with, in my case, I mean as technical colleagues, created programs together) and they are very good what they do but they aren't geniuses who can magically solve hard problems quickly outside of their narrow domains. In fact they came to us, at the time, entry-level programmers, often to get help on hard problems that they couldn't solve. There are definitely problems that bright kids out of CS programs are good at that can stump even super-smart people lost deep in their complex domains. This is why we need teams and high-performing teams in difficult problem domains are collaborative without an internal sense of hierarchy.

Also one of the students I TA'ed and graded went onto become an engineering director at Google in his 20's. He and I were two of maybe the top 5 or so students in our CS program in our class but one thing I really admired about him was that he was consistently one of the hardest and most disciplined aside from being one of the smartest, while I was very immature in a lot of ways - I threw away some amazing research opportunities with professors in my freshman and sophomore years literally by not showing up - and kind of sleep-walked through school and in retrospect, for most of my career until 2012 or so. I think that kind of thing makes a big, big difference in how your skills develop and how your career turns out. I'm really grateful for where I am, given everything for my career, my family, my life and everything. It could have easily been so much worse.

This is definitely one of my career regrets - I have never worked on technical problems that truly pushed me to the limits. Everything I've done, I think from a truly cognitive standpoint, has been fairly easy. But part of this is just my absurd math background - compared to hard math problems, most things in technology are easy - it's much more about pushing forward and making consistent progress than a single moment of brilliance. Though I heard modern math is like this too.

500K+ is definitely not absurd compensation and I've worked with technologists who make over 3MM and worked for a non-technical boss who made over 10MM. I would however be surprised to see that kind of money used to recruit engineers at startups - again, true startups, not late-stage, high-valuation startups with a massive warchest - given what I've heard and the obvious preference startups have for compensation top employees with equity as opposed to cash. Obviously it's common knowledge that engineers can make 7-figures at big tech companies.

I thought this was my whole point? Basically it's a lot easier to move up the management ladder, so people who get paid a lot are disproportionately manager types, not uber technologists who can magically solve scaling problems like you were talking about.

I'm pretty sure I understand how these organizations function. Also you keep talking about people at startups who are comp-wise and title-wise at this level but don't have the same level of organizational responsibilities they would at Google types as though they are equivalent so I'm not sure what I do is particularly far off. I'm gonna avoid talking about my #s and honestly I don't really know for sure how much I would get if I were to maximize my pay in some combination role involving both finance and technology. I was pretty sure I'd take a sizable paycut going to places like Google but what you said seems to suggest that may not be the case.

"Bloomberg Terminal" is not actually some kind of hardware dude - it's just some software you install, which doesn't even really do much locally - most of the real stuff runs on the server-side because they don't want you to reverse-engineer the analytics and more easily update constantly changing business logic. I guess you could get the bloomberg keyboard but that's just a color-coded thing for people who don't have shortcuts memorized. Also there's bloomberg anywhere that can run the whole thing from the browser. Did you ever use Bloomberg before?

I mean nowadays you can make any desktop software into a "SaaS" with Citrix or some other kind of remote desktop software and that's exactly how a lot of enterprise software companies are using the term. I don't remember what the argument was but I think you were trying to say it's some kind of cut and dry thing when it's pretty much a marketing term that often means the exact opposite of what it seems.

That's awesome - my equity stake is a lot less because I joined relatively late. I don't think our companies are far apart - I'd guess that we're worth like 20-40MM right now but there's no way my boss will take that and will wait out for 100MM type of valuation, at least another 4-5 years.

Kids are a bit of a limiting factor from a purely time and commitment perspective - ideally I'd wait till at least the little one turns 3 or so, which is over a year away. This is also going to have an impact on the job search since I really only work around 40 hours a week and you can't really get away with that at most jobs that pay competitively, whether it's explicitly enforced or not. I also haven't been around my current level of cash compensation for long so more savings would be nice though that's an argument for staying because I can probably up my cash comp by 20% much more easily than I can get another job that pays at that level. But I think it should be easy enough to make money that I don't think it's a huge issue besides my general paranoia.

One possible avenue right now is actually from work - we have this potentially huge project that my boss is super interested in that doesn't have much to do with our existing products and is pretty close to my sweet spot. The project is most likely dead without me and no one else at the company has relevant expertise so I think there's like a 10% chance I can talk them into creating a majority-owned subsidiary that I will run without much interference and will get to run a company as a founder, albeit with a minority stake. Obviously the upside is much less and the project is bigger than what we do, but the natural ceiling is like 200MM - 500MM range, which means it's not truly a startup in the VC sense. But the complete lack of downside - the worst thing that can happen is I have experience running a startup while getting paid well and with a job to go back to afterwards - makes this a compelling opportunity. My suspicion is that the project gets killed one way or another or I get shot down in my attempt to isolate it from the rest of the company, which is why I'm beginning to explore opportunities.

It's not about what you do, but who you are. It won't do a whole lot of good to change how you post, if you remain the same. This forum isn't that important.

Mihkel, you think Larry Legend is among the most talented programmers on this forum, better than gaming_mouse, even?

Your advice to me was this:
Which I should note was your very first post in this thread. It is also kind of ironic you are placing it on me that I "reacted poorly" to this "advice." Projection is a wonderful thing.

hey guys, so is it normal to absolutely disagree w/ a new design but just truck through it? my company is split into small teams (5-6) ppl and my original team finished our stuff ahead of schedule, so i got pulled into this new team to help out.

in this new team, all the engineers are super smart but just passive as hell. no one speaks up when the PM/designers come up with weird ****. i think the design is unusable because every big site does it 1 way, and we try to do it in another. it seems, however, i'm the only engineer with this opinion, so should i just keep my mouth shut? it's basically too late to make changes, but i honestly feel if we release the new design, a large portion of the users are gonna be pissed.

That's kind of a weird spot. If you really think releasing the design you have is going to be that much of a problem then speak up and try to get things pushed back to allow for the changes.

If it's absolutely too late to do anything about it then I'd bite my tongue. No good can come of it and you'll probably end up running people the wrong way

I'm finishing up Javascript Allonge, thanks for the rec GM.

Anyone have any book recommendations to help me with feature/product design and breakdown, project management, and team management? I'm already getting these types of responsibilities and it seems likely that I'll be promoted to a team lead type role in the near future.

Yes definitely an ad hominem directed at you, no doubt about it.

The Phoenix Project:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Phoenix-Pr.../dp/0988262592

Probably the best book you could ever read on project management.

I don't even work at a corporation, nor do I have any intentions of ever working a position like that but it pulled me in because it's a great glimpse at the other side.

Cool, glad you liked it.

Mikhel,

Constructive criticism and civil spirited arguments are welcome here, but I agree with the others. More than once, your comments about people's opinions have turned into personal attacks on them, the daveT example being the clearest one, but even your recent responses to candybar come off as aggressive for no reason. The content of your posts could be communicated just as well (actually, better) with a more respectful tone.

candybar's most recent response to you is a great example of the kind of posts that impress me. He completely ignores the personal insults, and responds respectfully and thoughtfully to the content of your post, while being open-minded about it. That's the gold standard for the culture in this forum, imo.

I have to say that Mihkel's posting has resulted in contributions by candybar that have been incredibly eloquent and have taught myself and I'm sure others a lot.

Last time they got into the argument about SaaS, I sent my CEO a link to his post and told him he needed to read it because it captures the reality of modern "enterprise SaaS" better than anything I have ever read. We are also launching a new product for which it is super relevant.

A lot of what is said by M is just plain wrong. For example, speaking about this theoretical super architect who builds giant tech specs (and then adding in agile hurr durr) is just ridiculous. We recently switched from Waterfall to Agile and have an enginner who has world-class experience in what we do, if we told him he had to write giant tech specs I would lose respect for him if he didnt walk out.

If he wants to have productive conversations about topics like these then he could, but it seems like he is incapable.