I don't understand a lot of it either. The coupe de grace is that the syntax doesn't work correctly, so why bother figuring it out when I can just code it correctly and ignore it?

I'm not going to spill the beans on everything, but I'll give an example:

One of the libs is abandonware and documented as "not really working." Actually, most of the libs are like this, but I'll just say this one does some meta-code HTML generation.

Instead of generating something like:

it generates a load of JavaScript with a hidden type and a text type input, like this:

The problem (if you haven't guessed) is that the JavaScript doesn't actually validate it as email when the user submits, so the end-user can make a mistake and enter, idk, a name.

Well, the JavaScript *does* validate when the response comes in and displays the entered text as

And the page throws an error.

It's just nuts. Doing it correct would take zero libs and one LOC. Instead, install a lib, use 30 functions, pass values around, and generate a bunch of awkward race conditions.

This bad, right? At least it's "typed."

I think it's gross as well.

Input type="email" did not exist prior to html5. Probably whatever that library is predates that.

In my case I worked for companies where you had to bill at least 40 hours to clients every week. Either that or you put it on some internal project, which was frowned upon because the company felt like they were losing money. Problem of course is you don't always have 40 hours worth of work a week, lunches are marked an hour but often drag over 1.5 hours, video games aren't going to play themselves, etc. More than 40 hours/week however is always billed.

I'm assuming this is pretty similar at most places that bill out all their hours. One reason I don't like working for places like that. The company's primary concern is for you to bill out all your hours, which doesn't align with the client's primary concern that you build the thing they want as cheap as possible.

It's possible the lib pre-dates the email tag. If this is an on-going bug, it should have been fixed a while back, and since HTML5 has been around for a few years now...

Regardless, forms should be tested for this stuff. The JS suggests that adding an email to the field should have thrown an instant error. If that fails, copy / paste JS or jQuery from SO, validate the email after submission. Just something.

This breaks pages in the system (pages don't load), so definitely not a minor issue and not something that should have taken years to fix as an HTML5 time-line would imply, so I doubt this bug pre-dated HTML5. If it did, that's better or worse?

The point was really about over-using meta-programming and using bad and untested libs. Writing the HTML straight would have made the problem obvious.

I liked codewars a lot. theres a ton of different problems and I thought the interface was nice.

I also used HackerRank and InterviewCake a lot.

Actually, my favorite site was ProjectEuler but it is not really tailored to interviews.

If you can make it seem kinda like you were 22 in 2014 and then did volunteer work and coding projects until you realized coding was what you really wanted to do, that might work. The poker could also be put down in such a way that it only looks like a couple of years. It seems like you'll be fine either way.

(This said, obviously you don't want to get yourself into a situation where you're sheepishly saying "well actually I played poker for 10 years, not 2".)

Jquery?

That is pretty hideous. But I don't think anyone was really thrilled to an outsourcer in USA#1.

like I said no one makes actual new applications with jquery selecting elements and showing/hiding them any more, they use other stuff. Not to say they aren't still around but they're all legacy.

Has iMessage been messing up for anyone else the last few days? I get messages on my phone but not computer, or worse sometimes on my computer but not my phone.

What are people using for non SPA? Or is it just all SPA now?

document.write() baby! Vanilla JS ftw.

I think I've figured out what my startup side job is doing. I think they're working on an internal system intelligence and health tracking system, which will be come a new product with a new company and none of our shares will matter anymore. The insane back-end guy I butt heads with will be part of the new company I'm sure.

The big boss just doesn't seem to give a crap about the actual app anymore. But I'm still getting paid quite well to do very little, so meh.

I wonder what the rules are wrt to employee shares when taking a chunk of IP developed at one company and starting a new company with it.

No worse than usual and I recently turned on my iMac after it being off for months.

Obviously, the answer is "it depends on a lot of legal details". But almost certainly your shares will be worthless.

The exact way they become worthless may vary, but you won't get anything. For example, I'm sure your lead investor has liquidation preference for his shares. He could likely have the 'new company' buy the IP from the 'old company' for a reasonable amount that would all just go to him anyway leaving nothing left at the 'old company'.

What if they did that with the exact same app? If nothing, then what's to stop them from promising a bunch of shares, getting devs to build an app, then just forming a new company? Bad reputation?

Also of course a few minutes after I post that the boss asks me when I'm ready to talk about the back-end changes needed for v2 of the app. So I guess he does care.

I suspect there are some legal limits in terms of fraud / shareholders rights for the really absurd situations. Although that's getting out of my realm of knowledge/experience.

I think the main thing stopping them is that it doesn't make a lot of sense. They'd effectively just be firing people to get the vested shares back. It's an expensive process, with a risk of getting sued if you're successful, all for relatively little gain. A standard vesting schedule is 4 years with a 1 year cliff. These employees aren't going to have a lot of equity until they've done a lot of work, and are presumably still valuable to their company.

Hell, it's probably easier to just dilute the shares of the people you want to fire.

Edit: When I first started getting involved in startups one thing I found really interesting was reading through the legal documents for the preferred shares being issued. There are lots of ways to screw a shareholder in an early startup, and lots of ways to prevent that from happening. But most of those ways don't protect lowly common share holders.

Obviously IANAL but a lot of this comes down to the value of the shares in question because if it's not worth suing somebody over, it doesn't matter if the law is completely on your side which it may be in this case - a related-party transaction that liquidates the company that happens to benefit the controlling shareholder and cuts out the others would be a textbook example of fiduciary negligence. With the caveat that whatever equity agreement employees typically sign may include a waiver of certain shareholder rights (and include arbitration clauses) which may or may not be enforceable. Likewise, if the value in question is really large, it may be willing to fight in court even if the law is not on your side because the other side may need a speedy resolution to proceed with the sale/IPO/etc. Aside from truly frivolous claims that are easily dismissed, it's tough to be certain of a quick victory and settlement is likely the best course of action. You just wait till they hit a large liquidity event, at which point you decide whether it's worth the lawsuit.

I have 160k founder's shares for $.001 apiece. Should translate to about 2% of the company assuming a normal series A and not more dilution.

Is there a vesting or buy back rights if you quit/leave?

Even here, there's really very little protection if you end up dealing with someone shady. I'd be absolutely shocked if you had provisions around the percentage ownership instead of just some absolute number of shares.

160,000 * $.001 = $160.

If this 2%, the company was only worth $8000???

Apparently that's how founder's shares work or something. They price them really cheap so we don't get a tax hit. There's some loophole for founders or something. And something called the Mark Zuckerberg rule.

Yeah they told me it could get diluted more if there are more rounds. They didn't promise 2% guaranteed or anything.

Supposedly after a year I get 1/4 no matter what. So if I leave and the company takes off I still own 40k shares. But who knows what it would be like to claw that back. I don't think these guys have much of a clue what they're doing, and the back end of the app is a complete disaster, so I'm not holding out a ton of hope the company takes off.

As long as they're keep paying me 80% of a competitive full time salary I'm pretty happy. (100% if I quit my day job.)

A startup has no value when it starts.

I believe the way founders shares usually work is that the shares are given to you all up front and then the company has a right to repurchase them when you leave and that right disappears on a typical vesting schedule.

So once you've been there a year you get to keep those 40,000 shares if you leave but the company could buy back the other 120,000.

But founders shares are usually (always?) just common shares that have advantageous tax consequences. So you can still easily get diluted / screwed.

Usually the first round of outside investment will create more protections for you. The company structure gets more rigorously defined. It's harder for the founders to pull **** on their own. There's more paper work documenting previously verbal agreements. Things like that.

It's also possible that as terms for investing an outside investor doing a series A would require new equity grants with new vesting schedules. It can often be a requirement for founders, but not sure how often it happens with early employees. The idea being that the investors want to make sure everyone is incentivized to stick around for some period of time after the investment money is received.