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Well, when you pay your engineers 6-12 months of extra salary before you ship anything because they had to use Kubernetes-on-Highways to host this clever NoNoNo
by jerf 7y ago
Well, when you pay your engineers 6-12 months of extra salary before you ship anything because they had to use Kubernetes-on-Highways to host this clever NoNoNoPleaseNoSQL DB hosted that some guy on Github wrote last week, hosted on ZeroNinesAsAService.com and with a new UI built in ThreeReact (the hot new React-based framework that implements an OpenGL interface that works on approximately 3% of devices in the wild right now, and approximately 0% of your target user base's devices), don't forget to account for that in the investor pitch and salary offers.
I mean, seriously, this is a startup killer. Our host wrote an essay a long time ago about beating standard companies stuck in boring old Java or C++ with your fast, agile Python code, but in 2020 it seems to me it's almost more important now to try to convince new startups to be a little more boring. Whatever your special sauce that you're bringing to market is, it isn't (with no disrespect to the relevant communities) that you're bringing in Rust or Nim or whatever for the first time ever, for Maximum Velocity. Just use Python, cloud technologies, and established databases. Win on solving your customer needs.
While by no means is everyone in the world using effective tech stacks well-chosen to meet the needs and without over-privileging "what everyone else is doing and what has always been done", enough people are now that it's probably not a competitive advantage anymore.
Honestly, you can beat most companies in just getting stuff out the door quickly.
(Excuse me, off to file incorporation papers for ZeroNines LLC. Why wonder whether your provider will be up when you can know? Nobody else in the business can make that promise!)
- marcinzm 7y ago>when you pay your engineers 6-12 months of extra salary before you ship Money may not be the limiting factor for a startup and time is a counter-factual as you don't know the alternative. Had they not been able to hire any engineers they may have taken an extra 2 years to ship the same thing. Or maybe not. Hiring at startups is time consuming and difficult with heavy competition for good engineers. Salaries lag behind large tech companies and equity may be worth nothing. Scale isn't there so the problems are less interesting than at a larger company. And good engineers can 5x better than average in an early stage startup because there is no process and technical debt is fine (in a larger organization the 10x ones leave havoc in their wake). That may not be the right decision for a startup to make but there is a logical basis for making it.
- StavrosK 7y agoI like to refer to this availability as "nine fives".
- inkeddeveloper 7y agoWe like to call it "A 9, a 4, and a 7". You pay depending on what order you want those numbers to be in.
- wpietri 7y agoHah! I often encourage teams to start by shooting for five eights. Once they have that nailed, we can start talking about nines.