swombat

93 ms·

811.
by swombat 13y ago
If you want to be a hundred-thousandaire, take the highest paying programming job in SV or on Wall Street. 100% success rate. Except that doesn't work, because your living costs go up massively, and you also spend a huge chunk of it
812.
by swombat 13y ago
Option 3: Start a business with a business model that allows you to generate revenue in month 1. It sounds like you're using the funding as a cushion to protect you from having to build a profitable business RIGHT NOW . See this artic
813.
by swombat 13y ago
I agree with your specific point but not with the general feeling implied. I'm the first one to agree that all advice is contextual. However, my observation there is based on the people I speak to. Many first-time founders that I spe
814.
Investment increases your risk(swombat.com)
194 points by swombat 13y ago|113 comments
815.
by swombat 13y ago
I don't see how it's "best" or even "better". Mou, mentioned by others, works better. Mou struggles with large Markdown files, but at least it doesn't have strange display issues when scrolling up and down
816.
by swombat 13y ago
Even more ironic are the "digital safe harbour" provisions that cloud providers have been operating under, telling their clients that the law requires the US government to treat servers put under those provisions as not located in
817.
by swombat 13y ago
Not sure exactly how a smart person can choose to do something that's so obviously going to get him caught and ruin his career. Lying about something as highly visible as an AIDS vaccine seems just plain stupid, whatever the ethics of
818.
by swombat 13y ago
I would certainly not take such drastic action based on pattern recognition built out of some HN article. Would you file for divorce based on an HN article about overrated spouses? As others have pointed out, it sounds like he does do a fai
819.
by swombat 13y ago
When pedestrians have accidents they get a bit flustered and apologise. When cars have accidents people die. It's not that unreasonable to have a different law for cars than for pedestrians.
820.
by swombat 13y ago
I'm not a cryptographer, I'm a potential user. If I was up for reading white papers on this, I wouldn't be interested in having buttons shaped like turtles. What I'm asking for is a summary of what this thing actually do
821.
by swombat 13y ago
Website lacks a summary of what this does exactly and how, other than "add turtle buttons that do magic encryption voodoo" - or did I miss it somehow?
822.
Billion dollar climate-denial network exposed(arstechnica.com)
33 points by swombat 13y ago|19 comments
823.
by swombat 13y ago
Valve is the one lumped with Github, and Valve is a $4b company. Also, by now Github has 234 employees[1]. [1] https://github.com/about/team
824.
by swombat 13y ago
Blackberry is sold off in pieces or otherwise goes out of business. We see the last of the Blackberry phones - a failure like all the ones they've released recently.
825.
by swombat 13y ago
If you want to learn about Semco, make sure you read "The Seven Day Weekend", not just "Maverick!", since the former gives an updated view of the business from 2004 or so. Would be interesting to see what Semco looks lik
826.
by swombat 13y ago
Worth noting: as I understand, it boosted the revenues of that specific business unit by 30% - the whole of RSA has much more than $20m of revenues. If so, it's interesting in a "oh, it's like the Enron team in Arthur Anderse
827.
by swombat 13y ago
Just to leave an example - what do you expect will think someone sweating in stress and efforts all day long, working close to coworker better paid with apparently less work/effort involved? That that coworker is better at what he&#x2
828.
by swombat 13y ago
It's far more complex and simple than that in our case. The starting point is that 50% of revenue is allocated to "costs": overheads, base salaries, commissions and the bonus pool. How people decide to split that up between t
829.
by swombat 13y ago
It is absolutely people's prerogative to keep their salaries private from other employees. They can do that easily by working somewhere else. We don't have to employ everybody . In fact, it turns out that being fairly selective o
830.
by swombat 13y ago
If the person has truly demonstrated that they can bring $1m a year and honestly believes that (as an example), then they are presumably a salesperson, and those are on (a generous) commission with very low base in GrantTree, so they will h
831.
by swombat 13y ago
Definitely, though in GrantTree the process of defining how different performance is rewarded is still a work in progress. We set things up so that the team decides together how much people should be paid (that's a lot more complex tha
832.
by swombat 13y ago
> Why assume that somebody asking for their market rate wouldn't be a good fit for your company? That's twisting my words. What I said is that if salary is their primary concern, then they're not a good fit. Asking for y
833.
by swombat 13y ago
One of the most interesting conclusion of Douglas McGregor (inventor of the Theory X vs Theory Y management theories you've probably heard of) is that when it comes to the question "what motivates people?", whatever theory yo
834.
by swombat 13y ago
You wouldn't - and that's fine. We don't have to hire everybody. If what you care about is salary above all other things, that's absolutely fine. I don't judge you for it. I care about making money too. The kind of
835.
by swombat 13y ago
Of course. If you're committed down a path where your company is basically unfair to its employees, then yeah, transparency won't help. A good example of transparency not helping is our sudden transparency about the activities of
836.
by swombat 13y ago
The catch is, transparency forces a certain amount of fairness to come with it. I should probably have mentioned that in the article too. It's difficult to keep unfair arrangements when all is transparent. You can't just implement
837.
Why transparent salaries make sense(blog.granttree.co.uk)
36 points by swombat 13y ago|59 comments
838.
by swombat 13y ago
No, and if all they care about is the salary, they should probably go and take the larger offer.
839.
by swombat 13y ago
There are some posts describing our pay scale in my commenting history, and everyone in the company knows exactly how much everyone else is paid - though I'll grant you we haven't gone as far as writing a blog post about our pay s
840.
by swombat 13y ago
You would only be upset because you currently work in a company with a culture that doesn't value transparency as a core value. If you worked in a company like Buffer or GrantTree, you'd be wondering why others are so secretive ab

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