alecbenzer

13 ms·

91.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
The time still isn't liquid, though. Yes, if you worked for someone for a year, you've given them $X (where $X is the paycut you took), but the founder can't just turn around and sell that $X to someone else. To the extent th
92.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
Does any startup give market rate salaries?
93.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
This is a really good point that I hadn't considered. Employees are "investing" money in a startup too in the form of opportunity cost, but a founder can't turn around and "sell" the investment when it's j
94.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
> if the employee worked for substantially below market wages all of that time For an engineer that could get a job at FAANG or similar, I think this is pretty much universally true for all startups.
95.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
having an opinion == omniscience?
96.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
I just don't think it's a very useful mindset. Or at least, it's not a useful way of phrasing that mindset. You should absolutely understand the very large chance that your equity is worthless. You should absolutely 100% not
97.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
Mid 20s, but that's not a useful way to tell someone you think they're wrong.
98.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
$1M over 4 years is L4 at Google. https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/SE/L4/ edit: Oh, well I guess that's not counting the startup's salary. If they were getting paid $200k/yr, that&#x27
99.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
> Employees that are paid common stock didn't put any money. > It is like playing a lottery, but only with opportunity cost. So, they did put in money. It's "opportunity cost" money as opposed to literal cash, but
100.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
I feel like there's a lot of founder/non-founder equity disparity that doesn't quite make sense. If it ever got to a point where startups genuinely had a hard time recruiting good talent, I would think/hope that one leve
101.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
You can't possibly actually values your shares at zero. Test: can I have all of your shares? No? Well then you must value them at _something_. What if I gave you $1? 10? $100? Just because something is (even incredibly) risky doesn&#x2
102.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
Normally the way the preference works is that you "give up" your shares in exchange for being paid back, as if you had initially given the company a loan instead of bought equity. E.g., you invest $1M, company sells for $15M, and
103.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
I think Google is a bit smarter about that? I.e., I'm pretty sure it detects things like "you click on one link, come back after 10 sec, click on another link and then never come back" and correctly attributes the weight to t
104.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
Why? Hedging is fine. I think it's important to accurately communicate how certain you are of a thing. Constant hedging is annoying, but so is stating everything as if it's a fact, despite how sure you really are. Communicating co
105.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
For sure, that's what I meant by the ROI bullet. I just often feel like people want estimates that go beyond the level of precision/accuracy you'd need to make a relative ROI call. And just in general don't do a good job
106.
Ask HN: How seriously to take offer letters?
1 points by alecbenzer 7y ago|0 comments
107.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
Lol this was so out-of-place given that most of the other advice was pretty reasonable. It would definitely seem a little odd if someone used no keyboard shortcuts at all (like, edit->copy, edit->paste), but even then I can't ima
108.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
I'm intuitively on team #noestimates but trying to have an open mind/not dig in my heels. I feel like no one does a convincing job at communicating why estimates matter (and how much value you get out of how precise of an estimate
109.
by alecbenzer 7y ago
> the chunk-graph does not change during gameplay We mean the chunk component graph, right? That does technically change, because you can use https://wiki.factorio.com/Landfill to fill up water and modify which positio
110.
by alecbenzer 8y ago
They mean the risk is higher quantitatively because the money you're giving up from Google, etc. is higher than average for a software engineer. OTOH, nothing about the reward changes depending on what other places you could be working
111.
by alecbenzer 8y ago
Is rounding of a float manipulation?
112.
by alecbenzer 8y ago
This is true, but it's a bit of an implementation detail. All I'm doing is a schema change; a migration is what the database does under the hood to facilitate it.
113.
by alecbenzer 8y ago
> - Who do I report to? -- this trips some startups up, but can highlight potential issues. What are good/bad answers to this question?
114.
by alecbenzer 8y ago
I meant the test itself being poorly factored. But, even in that case, I'm not sure realizing that square(inp) == square(inp) is silly would direct you to go to manual input/output lists and not something like square(inp) == inp ^
115.
“Tests should be poorly factored”
6 points by alecbenzer 8y ago|2 comments
116.
by alecbenzer 8y ago
That sounds like you'd need to manually enumerate all possible queries you'd want to listen to and have all writers do the work of deciding which channels to update. The idea of simply being able to listen to a query without any a
117.
by alecbenzer 8y ago
That's definitely not proof; there's other explanations. E.g., maybe women take longer to lower their standards, so while eventually they become less picky, as a whole women might have higher standards. Maybe the extent to which w
118.
by alecbenzer 8y ago
Awesome, that's horrifying. One concrete issue with this technique: it doesn't "loop". Meaning, for example, if initially method #3 doesn't work but method #4 does, it'll settle on method #4. If later, method #
119.
by alecbenzer 8y ago
That's consistent with Google promotions though -- being promoted doesn't mean going up in the org chart.
120.
by alecbenzer 8y ago
Huh, interesting, I don't believe that's consistent with Google's use of the term from what I remember, but that does seem to be the meaning I'm finding now. So yeah, fair enough, I do just mean "ranking" I gue

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