91–100 of 449 posts
Joined a promising startup with 1 - Great mission 2 - Impressive engineering culture 3 - Super boring name: Farmers Business Network
FBN is the only reason I haven't moved away from the Bay Area.
We're hiring too, if anybody wants to shoot me an email I'll forward it along. tan@farmersbusinessnetwork.com
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you share why you think that's a problem in his approach/method?
The first time I built a business, I made the same mistake as the OP: "Then, it struck me: what if ingredient parsing was the business? If this was a problem for me, then surely other developers struggled with it as well. Hopefully, some of them made money and would give some of said money to me if I solved their problem. Thus, the idea was born for Zestful, my ingredient-parsing service." Before starting to write a…
I think the market is not in parsing, but extracting nutrition information.
I was a SWE L3 at Google for three years. I left after having similar problems with the promotion process mentioned by others. Since then, have moved from SF to Ecuador and started a humor publication explicitly making fun of companies like FANG ( https://techloaf.io ). It’s very cathartic...
Hey, uh .... why the f do I need to give you my e-mail address to read your stuff?
I left Google after three years as an SDE because I had really really had enough of my bosses, I wasn't promoted when I figured I deserved it, and a project that meant a lot to me wasn't getting the staffing it needed to succeed. I left for a more senior position at a smaller, less prestigious software company, though I've moved again since. Right now I'm working remotely from Toronto for a Silicon Valley start-up. U…
Ex-Googler here. I was a SWE L4 and left after four years in frustration with the promotion process ( https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ ). Since then, I: * Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage. I feel like my time is much less "metered" now because my annual living expenses are so low, I can pursue…
Do you feel disconnected in Western Mass? I am not sure how remote you are but I live in a remote area now but work remotely and feel it. Hell, even in the Bay area I was remote-is since the commute was isolating. All I can say about the culture there is that you have to job hop to develop relationships that may lead to future opportunities. *Btw your cartoon on your blog is good. If that's your original creation you…
You basically get the extremes of everything in Boston at a much lower price.
Possible downsides are long, snowy winters, and far fewer jobs.
Ex-Googler here. I was a SWE L4 and left after four years in frustration with the promotion process ( https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ ). Since then, I: * Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage. I feel like my time is much less "metered" now because my annual living expenses are so low, I can pursue…
Could you talk about what those projects are about and what languages/frameworks you are using?
What's next? Are you looking to start another business or taking some time to just learn and work on projects that you find interesting?
Just wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading your blog posts and forum posts on IH. Good luck!
Another ex-Googler. I worked there as an SRE for six years, then left due to lack of career advancement opportunities[0]. Currently I work at Stripe, which is less capable on some narrow technical metrics but a far more pleasant environment. Stripe is hiring. We list open positions at https://stripe.com/jobs#openings . Email me at jmillikin@stripe.com if you'd like to hear more about the engineering work here. --- Go…
I hope to never work for other people again, but if I did, Stripe would be on top of the list of companies I'd apply to (despite their use of Ruby ;-) ). The CEO seems to have his head screwed on straight, and all employees I interact with seem very competent and pleasant.
This is a great answer, and I particularly appreciate the "bad differences".
I was a SWE L3 at Google for three years. I left after having similar problems with the promotion process mentioned by others. Since then, have moved from SF to Ecuador and started a humor publication explicitly making fun of companies like FANG ( https://techloaf.io ). It’s very cathartic...
Hey, uh .... why the f do I need to give you my e-mail address to read your stuff?
https://mailchi.mp/872ceee548ec/its-loaf-time
https://us17.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=14538d8f8591165977...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first time I built a business, I made the same mistake as the OP: "Then, it struck me: what if ingredient parsing was the business? If this was a problem for me, then surely other developers struggled with it as well. Hopefully, some of them made money and would give some of said money to me if I solved their problem. Thus, the idea was born for Zestful, my ingredient-parsing service." Before starting to write a…
Zestful sounds like a feature of Edamam ( https://developer.edamam.com/ ). I think the market is not in parsing, but extracting nutrition information.
The project kind of came out of me needing ingredient parsing for a different product and existing solutions being a poor match.
Edamam requires you to display their logo in your app if you use their API[0], which I found inappropriately intrusive.
There's a similar service called Spoonacular, but they don't allow you to store results for more than an hour[1], which is crazy. I wanted to build a search index that let users search by ingredient, so it made no sense for me to reprocess my entire corpus of data every hourly.
But they succeeded and I didn't, so maybe the weird API terms are what they need to survive.
[0]: https://developer.edamam.com/about/terms
[1]: https://market.mashape.com/spoonacular/recipe-food-nutrition
Ex Netflix. Joined a promising startup with 1 - Great mission 2 - Impressive engineering culture 3 - Super boring name: Farmers Business Network FBN is the only reason I haven't moved away from the Bay Area. We're hiring too, if anybody wants to shoot me an email I'll forward it along. tan@farmersbusinessnetwork.com