For what time period? It's quite arbitrary.

Start ups are risky but if you like the technology and the product you'll have more responsibility sooner than if you join a more established company. The hours will be longer but you'll probably have more fun than at a bigger company. If you've never worked for a small company, say under 200, you've missed out. Definitely work for money and not equity though.

I've worked for 10,000+, <10, and one place that grew from 20->40 while I was there.

In the place that was growing from 20 > 40, I definitely got a sense that things were changing.

You think 200 is the limit where there isn't much difference between 200 and 10,000 ? Or too variable to say? I think over 200, you definitely get to the point where you wouldn't even know who everyone is that you see in the building. Is that why it feels different?

Also, second the thought to always take the money.

At a smaller company you get to work a bit on every part of the stack. I don't agree with the "more responsibility" part unless the large company has a poor culture and management. Technically it won't be as deep and you won't face many technical/scale issues compared to a larger company. Really depends on your career goals and interests. Also +1 to equity compensation being almost worthless.

I wouldn't say it's worthless as much as it is a gamble. Like any gambling payout, you need to estimate EV by multiplying chance of payout times payout. You're often guessing on both numbers, though. Basically, I might be willing to gamble a small percentage of my salary, but not a large one. My first job was with a startup in the late 90s and I took a big chunk of equity in lieu of more compensation. That company still exists, is still private, and I still have equity in it, but probably it'll be private forever. I could maybe get my shares bought out, make a little money off it (the strike price is essentially nothing, I don't remember, maybe less than 1c/share). Even if I did that, I would probably net less than if I'd just taken the money.

But lots of people won that gamble. A friend of mine at around the same time was able to buy a house with cash due to a fairly lucky break. This increased his effective earnings because he wasn't paying for a house and so although we've had similar careers in terms of pay, he has more money than I do (also, he's not married / no kids, so, a lot more money than I do probably)

I'm not sure what you mean by this. But basically it's the percentage ownership they'll give you based on the current cap table. Future rounds of funding may dilute your percentage.

Typically your percentage is doled over 4 or 5 years with a 1 year cliff. Meaning that you get nothing until you've been there a year.

My tech experience is with two 100k+ companies and a start up that couldn't get past 250 before it imploded and shrank back down to ~100, about a 25 million a year company. So I don't know what it's like making the transition from 25 million to 100 million in revenue and size. I know at the start up I was at you had your job role but if something came up they were more likely to say nice work if you took a swing at it rather than "it's not your job."

With fewer people everyone has more responsibility, it may be covering more on-call hours or it may be getting your own chunk of functionality to be the SME on, but you're less likely to just be given requirements to implement for your first few months on the job.

You also have an opportunity to shape corporate culture instead of just having to put up with it. I enjoyed the opportunity to make the processes and rules instead of just following them.

So you get 2.5% of the company per year you work there or 2.5% of the company and you just work until they go public?

Company ABC inc. has 2000 shares

They offer you 200 shares for 10% of the company either for cash (suzzer's situation/ founder's shares) or as options (the right to purchase X stocks for Y price, which you can continue to hold as an employee as long as you are there, and may have to exercise upon leaving/termination).

You vest 25% of your total shares each year for 4 years, 12 months with a cliff. Meaning after 1 year you get 50 shares. Then each month you get 4.16 (50/12months, it would be for full shares so in writing probably 5 shares every 6 months or something) shares.

Company ABC can now go out and raise more money and create new shares, which are equal to yours. For instance, they could get $X in funding and create 8000 new shares, bringing the total to 10k shares. Your options are still for 200 shares, which has diluted you from 10% to 2% of the total company. Then the company can raise more, say $2X in funding and create 10k more shares, dropping you to 1%.

If the company is acquired or goes public, you get the shares and can cash them out.

Unless you are in leadership and directly responsible for the company, it is probably unlikely you can influence much of the future direction/success. So in that way it is pretty random and probably -EV in the aggregate to accept options instead of cash. But starting companies and holding as much equity as possible is the way to make it big.

Sigh trolling in my game has got so bad I need to do something i didn't want to spend the time on which is make a moderator panel and have to go through the drama of crowdsourcing some of my best regs I guess. No other solution.

Every sufficiently advanced game devolves into 4chan. So sorry for your loss.

(I remember when I had one of the first websites where commenting on pages was the norm. I knew I'd made the big time when I became the target of automated spammers)

Grue - what kind of trolling?

I'll probably wind up doing a talk about some of the challenges I've fast because its essentially what rusty says, eventually 4chan finds you.

Its a SPA app that is essentially a lobby with a list of games that are in progress/started/unstarted (needs players) that you click on to join. There's a list of players sorted by win rate in the upper right and a general chat in the lower right. In the game, there's a chat box that observers can chat in. It takes 2 seconds to register. Games last 3-15 minutes and depends on players playing honestly for their team.

So first thing is people making offensive names. Right now to delete them it takes me logging into mongo shell. And they can make a new one in 2 seconds. So whats the point of that? I made a small list of word fragments I don't want people using that are blocked. Then they use numbers or capitalizes them..

Then there's the just flat out spammers who copy/paste the N word into chat. One eventually crashed the server he did it so hard. I had to a) have a filter to disable observer chat and b) add a debounce to both gen and game chat. That seemed to work.

Then there's the people who intentionally throw games/AFK. First I added a private game and whitelist feature, but that doesn't scale well. Then I added a karma system where if 4 or more players (5-10 can play per game) hit a report button that person takes a hit and temp ban (up to perm ban) from playing. 1st off, that requires players to pay attention/read release notes. 2nd off, the griefers then just make a new account..

Now I've been hearing reports of bots. Yes, bots, for my creative common licensed game that has no real rewards besides "if you play enough your name is different colored". I mean really? Also unsubstantiated reports of cheating/dual screening.

So this week I'm adding logging of IPs to both signup and signin. I need a interval function that checks not only that new accounts don't have the same IP as a current account but that no two logged in accounts share the same IP.

But as far as I can tell there's no easy solution other than ****ing mods and a mod page right? There's a decent number of regulars who want this to be a good game so I'm sure they'll deliver but come on internet this is why we can't have good things.

I'm going to guess that eventually my $10/month DO will get hit by LOIC or something similar and then that'll be the end of it unless I spring for cloudflare or whatever the solution to that is. IDK.. whole thing is pretty offputting.

For the offensive chat, I wonder if it would be effective to do that thing where you mark a person such that their chat isn't shown to anybody, but they don't know it. So they effectively keep spamming but nobody sees it.

Maybe the same approach helps with the offensive names? You map their offensive name to a random one and automatically substitute it to everyone else.

Point 1 they'll just find a way to "get around" my word blacklist regex. Of course I could have a function that prevents spam i.e. counts their submits per minute or w/e but that would be a bit of a pain. But thats probably the best solution.

Point 2 is interesting but people refer to other players by name so I don't think that would work/confuse everyone. And again, blacklist regex problem.

Seems like mods is the only thing that works. Obviously not exactly a stunning conclusion here in 2017..

For 1, I mean a user-level property that means all of their chat is hidden.

The goal being that it takes them more time and effort to figure out what happened and adjust - improving the ratio of your effort to their effort.

Generate names for the players randomly, make one of the benefits of winning be editing your name.

Can you require FB account login or Google?

Logging in to the DB directly to make changes is never a good idea - create some sort of admin interface to rename accounts etc. It will be 100x quicker.

RE chat, I'd start with a "mute" function so people can mute spammers. Keep a mute count with each muted user and you can perhaps gag people who have 10+ mutes.

Create blocked word filter obv, you can make it more intelligent by creating character maps where [L1] == [i] etc.

Although they don't seem it these are nice problems to have - your game is getting attention! Abuse prevention is also an ongoing maintenance problem - you'll never be able to solve it without taking away features.

at my job, somewhat often my code "runs on my local" but not on the qa or even production server. this is a problem that I am responsible for figuring out.

so ya, welcome to coding I guess.

How difficult/in depth is your average undergrad crypto course? Reason I'm asking is I'm rapidly losing enthusiasm for CS and that seems like one last area where I may find some salvation.

Grue,

Welcome to indie gamedev. Its a fun and exciting place where you don't make any money and your users are idiots (since they are a subset of all users, which are obviously idiots).

yuck

Real crypto is just a lot of math and coding math, read Applied Cryptology if you want a preview.

Can't help but feel every time I make a table with a composite primary key I'm making a design mistake. Keep coming across a table where I think composite makes most sense, then suffer for it later.