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No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

sahillavingia.com

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Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#211

Post by bdamm »

Retric wrote: post #137
bumby wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely, you have a process that you follow in your own work though? There are formal codified processes and there are informal tribal ones. Often when I hear people have disdain for processes, it’s usually they don’t like someone else’s process. Unfortunately, standardized processes tend to become more necessary as systems get more complicated in order to ensure an operation becomes fault tolerant by not being relian…

> Surely, you have a process that you follow in your own work though? Personally, no. I have spent enough time at enough organizations to simply adapt to whatever they do. But if I want to write some code I just do that. I might toss in testing or whatever for bigger projects, but it’s all ad hock. Processes are about repeatability, but for personal projects you can customize based on more specific goals. If I want s…

The moment your personal project becomes an open source project with you as the maintainer, there will be process. Manually making releases without any process gets real tiring, real fast.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#212

Post by draw_down »

meowster wrote: post #16
draw_down wrote: post #3

This is maybe the only “how we work” I’ve ever read that is actually appealing. It really does sound wonderful. My only question is around health insurance for the US based folks (I’m guessing the answer is “take the money we pay you and go buy some” which is unfortunately not a good solution) but otherwise yes, sounds ideal.

It might be a better solution that tying health insurance with a job. Doing so seems to make it harder (more expensive) for people without jobs to get health insurance. But otherwise, what they're doing seems interesting. FYI, I had to vouch for your comment. Looking at your comment history to see why, maybe try staying away from one or two word replies. Edit: I see HN as a place for people to improve. If it seems li…

See, I was talking about health insurance, not HN posts.

Nobody is arguing that tying your healthcare to your job is good, certainly I am not, but in many (most) cases it's what our system requires because otherwise you pay through the nose for crappy coverage. (Or pay a bit less for really crappy coverage.)

I'm aware of my HN situation. If you want to vouch for posts that's your business, but feel free to take your posting advice and cram it. No offense bud.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#213

Post by hogFeast »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #132
treis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their revenue is a bit misleading since most of it goes to CC processing fees. This tweet says net profit was 214k in 2019: https://twitter.com/shl/status/1215673023472140289 Probably triple that this year with the Covid bounce. So obviously doing well for himself, but not quite as good as you think.

From the Tweet, from Sahil (CEO) himself: Gumroad, Inc in 2019: Revenue: $5M (up 46% YOY) Gross profit: $1.7M (up 68% YOY) Net profit: $214K I not familiar enough with the Gumroad model to understand why how the creators made $73M in 2019, but Gumroad revenue was only $5M.

It is the difference between gross and net revenue. It is why bookmakers don't report all the bets they take in as revenue. Banks that trade securities don't recognise the money from securities they sell as revenue. Roughly, you only recognise revenue on the part of the transaction that economically accrues to you. If you are just a middleman, you only recognise your commission (this is, however, very complex...for example, some companies that trade in commodities recognise product sold on the top-line because they take ownership of the cargo...so it varies...the accounting in this case is what I would want to know as someone using the financial statements).

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#214

Post by eloff »

matsemann wrote: post #184
poorman wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't realize that as a contractor, you can write off the room you're using for your office. As a remote employee you cannot. For people living in high rent areas, that's significant.

Where I live that office has to be a "proper office" in a sense, where you could have clients stopping by. Not just working from a room next to your exercise bike and laundry. Here the tax law is mostly written with hair stylists and others in mind, using a room for customers with its own entrance.

Where is that?

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#215

Post by cambalache »

gricardo99 wrote: post #162

But we can compete–and win–on flexibility. And then the following part describes: In 2020, Sid left Gumroad to start his own creator economy company, Circle, together with former Gumroad coworker Rudy Santino I fail to see this as any competitive advantage since Gumroad's "employment" approach literally incubated a competitor.

This seemed straight out of a Silicon Valley episode.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#217

Post by boo-ga-ga »

I think the critics who complain about money, pensions and healthcare didn't do proper calculations. Gumroad pays from $50 to $250 per hour. Let's say you get $100 (below average) and work 60 hours per month (one-week vacation every month). This is $6000 per month, which is basically more than enough for a comfortable living in 95% places on the planet. They pay equal money regardless of location, so the proposition is great for anyone except a tiny number of people who want to live in extremely expensive places.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#218

Post by mikewarot »

bumby wrote: post #71
dkdk8283 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they idea that there is a single "thing" called process and some places have it and some don't is just dangerously misleading. Is that what I said? No. I got into computers because I dislike people: leave me alone and let me work.

Surely, you have a process that you follow in your own work though? There are formal codified processes and there are informal tribal ones. Often when I hear people have disdain for processes, it’s usually they don’t like someone else’s process. Unfortunately, standardized processes tend to become more necessary as systems get more complicated in order to ensure an operation becomes fault tolerant by not being relian…

>Processes mitigate risk.

Processes mitigate risk of repeating a mistake, but they don't prevent new ones, unless you have very wise people building them, and keeping them current.

Processes can be thought of as an institutional form of OCD. There are costs, and they shouldn't outweigh the benefits.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#219

Post by eloff »

cromka wrote: post #201
that_guy_iain wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that employees are using their personal email address to do Gumroad business makes me feel a bit uncertain about how securely my information / my customers' information is being stored. I know there is a legal thing in some countries where ext contractors must have a different email. Normally this is done by creating a new domain for the contractors or a sub-domain but Gumroad could be that new they haven'…

I truly doubt that's the case: absolutely none of the contractors employed by the global-brand investment bank I work for use e-mail addresses that are any different than those of the FTEs.

I've encountered this in my work as a contractor. Depends on the company.

Re: No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees

#220

Post by meowster »

meowster wrote: post #16
draw_down wrote: post #3

This is maybe the only “how we work” I’ve ever read that is actually appealing. It really does sound wonderful. My only question is around health insurance for the US based folks (I’m guessing the answer is “take the money we pay you and go buy some” which is unfortunately not a good solution) but otherwise yes, sounds ideal.

It might be a better solution that tying health insurance with a job. Doing so seems to make it harder (more expensive) for people without jobs to get health insurance. But otherwise, what they're doing seems interesting. FYI, I had to vouch for your comment. Looking at your comment history to see why, maybe try staying away from one or two word replies. Edit: I see HN as a place for people to improve. If it seems li…

Edit 2: Well then, I see now why that user is shadowbanned. My mistake.
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