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I have been at startups where they just stop paying the office lease and salaries stop. These days i am just prepared for it. If you are in the backend side of

I have been at startups where they just stop paying the office lease and salaries stop. These days i am just prepared for it. If you are in the backend side of things you can figure out most things with a few sql queries.

wing-_-nuts 4y ago
> If you are in the backend side of things you can figure out most things with a few sql queries. Expand on this? You querying the prod db to sus out the health of the company?
- krallja 4y ago
  Even without querying prod db, postgres://billing.and.analytics.internal is available to most engineers in small startups.
  - akavi 4y ago
    Yeah, the lack of a revenue dashboard at a startup would be a red flag in and of itself.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  For the platforms I've built I've had access to the customers table for example, you know if it's growing or shrinking. You don't even have to explicitly nose around, looking at the logs you'll see customer IDs and if they are sequential a keen eye will notice if they stop getting any higher.
  - bluedino 4y ago
    We generated a report each week to let all the devs know how many customers we had starting that week, what products they were launching, how many users they each had... It was great for planning the on-call rotation as well as giving us a heads up on which nights we could go out drinking and how late we could come in the next morning.
evan_ 4y ago
if you have to query the database to tell how the company's doing- or you don't trust what they're telling you- that's probably a pretty big red flag by itself
commandlinefan 4y ago
> stop paying the office lease and salaries stop Last job I had before this one, I came into work the week before Thanksgiving to a mandatory morning meeting that consisted of "the company is out of business effective immediately, you will all be emailed your severance details by personal email, please clean out your desks".

wing-_-nuts 4y ago

> If you are in the backend side of things you can figure out most things with a few sql queries. Expand on this? You querying the prod db to sus out the health of the company?

krallja 4y ago
Even without querying prod db, postgres://billing.and.analytics.internal is available to most engineers in small startups.
- akavi 4y ago
  Yeah, the lack of a revenue dashboard at a startup would be a red flag in and of itself.
willcipriano 4y ago
For the platforms I've built I've had access to the customers table for example, you know if it's growing or shrinking. You don't even have to explicitly nose around, looking at the logs you'll see customer IDs and if they are sequential a keen eye will notice if they stop getting any higher.
- bluedino 4y ago
  We generated a report each week to let all the devs know how many customers we had starting that week, what products they were launching, how many users they each had... It was great for planning the on-call rotation as well as giving us a heads up on which nights we could go out drinking and how late we could come in the next morning.

evan_ 4y ago

if you have to query the database to tell how the company's doing- or you don't trust what they're telling you- that's probably a pretty big red flag by itself

commandlinefan 4y ago

> stop paying the office lease and salaries stop Last job I had before this one, I came into work the week before Thanksgiving to a mandatory morning meeting that consisted of "the company is out of business effective immediately, you will all be emailed your severance details by personal email, please clean out your desks".