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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

#401

Post by b0rsuk »

>What’s not so good at Gumroad?

>“There's not a lot of room for growth. We're staying profitable, and not planning to double the team every year. While there will likely be a few leadership roles, there aren't plenty of them and they aren't built into the career path of working at Gumroad.”

Interesting how he equates growth with raising in hierarchy. I suppose if you're a programmer seeking to improve skills, sharpen your tools and increase knowledge, you're automatically a loser for many people.

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

#402

Post by baby »

simpixelated wrote: post #122
quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you stay competitive with similar products without instituting deadlines?

I work for a small company (less than 10 employees) that follows a very similar working process. No deadlines, one (very short) weekly meeting. We don't try to stay competitive with similar products. That's impossible with VC funding flooding the market. What we do instead is focus on making our current customers happy. Everyone is involved in support. We follow up with customers when we do launch features they reque…

Signal?

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

#403

Post by baby »

jvns wrote: post #175

One thing I find a bit strange about this (as a Gumroad user) is that Gumroad employees don't seem to be granted @gumroad.com email addresses -- when I've needed to email their engineering staff or marketing staff I often get replies from someone's personal email address. The fact that employees are using their personal email address to do Gumroad business makes me feel a bit uncertain about how securely my informati…

How is this related?

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

#404

Post by philsnow »

callmeed wrote: post #400
philsnow wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have to imagine it, I live in California. Top federal income tax: 37% Top California income tax: 13.3% Federal Medicare tax: 1.45% Additional federal medicare tax*: 0.9% The "additional" Medicare tax is only on whatever income is over $200k/$250k for single/joint filers. Call it "0.55% effective". Adds up to 52.3%. There's also a sizeable additional capital gains tax for three lucky ones who live in Californi…

Don’t forget almost 10% sales tax on most things you buy, the most expensive gas in the country, and property taxes that–while low compared to other states–are still applied to much more expensive properties. At least our public schools are ranked 38th.

> At least our public schools are ranked 38th.

My go-to is "at least we'll have a fast train between Bakersfield and Fresno in 2040" but damn, you hit me in the feels with that one.

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

#405

Post by baby »

thesausageking wrote: post #19

Let me understand this. Gumroad raises $8m from VCs, isn't able to grow fast enough, so the VCs agree to give up any claim on the company. Sahil fires all of the employees, hires a cheap contracting firm and some of the employees back as part-time contractors. The company now does $11m in revenue, most of which is profit and Sahil keeps. That's amazing. For Sahil. Not so great if you were one of his investors or form…

Why leave the creators out? If this was the plan all along then sure maybe Sahil is evil. But the other way of seeing this is that he found ways to keep the product alive and it worked incredibly well (at least according to that post). If that’s the case that’s great for the users of the product no?

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

#406

Post by randomchars »

codemac wrote: post #252
boo-ga-ga wrote: post #217

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…

And as a contractor there are significant tax advantages, along with personal growth advantages. I think the big draw back is actually long term total earnings - the big companies in SV still pay order of magnitudes more than that.

But isn't the big caveat that those companies only pay that in SV, and not in ie Europe? I could earn more in 10h/week at Gumroad then even my most well paid developer friends do here.

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

#407

Post by lmm »

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…

> There are formal codified processes and there are informal tribal ones

True but misleading. A lot of the time the difference is simply doing a bunch of process activities versus not doing them. E.g. imagine team A develops software in a more-or-less sensible way, and team B spends 80% of their time doing the same things that team A does and 20% of their time estimating how long those things are going to take. It seems fair to say that team B has not just different processes from team A or less formal processes than team A, but actually has more process than team A.

> Processes mitigate risk. Just because that risk isn’t important to you doesn’t mean that risk isn’t important to someone.

Processes can be a mechanism for mitigating risk. They can also be entirely devoid of value.

I'm not saying all process is worthless, but someone who wants you to follow a process should be able to tell you who that process benefits and how. If the only reason you're following the process is because it's the process, it's probably a waste of time.

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

#408

Post by aaronblohowiak »

lynguist wrote: post #207
ativzzz wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If two equally capable entities are competing, the one who puts in more time will almost always win. The Chinese may be lacking the (social and physical) infrastructure that the Europeans have a head start on for productivity, but they are catching up or have already caught up. This probably applies less to big conglomerates who exist and will continue existing regardless of what happens (honestly most of their emplo…

No. I can guarantee you that in general in software engineering, you will produce the same result, whether you work 30 or 40 or 60 hr a week. The productive hours will be the same as you just have so much focused hours inside of you.

The result is markedly worse at 60 hours.

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

#409

Post by philmcp »

langitbiru wrote: post #363
philmcp wrote: post #44

In years to come we will look down on the 5 day working week in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution. It absolutely blows my mind that 99% of office roles are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model? I'd be more than happy to work a job for 80% salary for 4 days per week... So much so, I'm about to launch a website lis…

Similar to you, I'm building a part-time jobs website. https://parttime.careers I feel that the part-time jobs trend now is like the remote jobs trend in 2007. It's still in the early days.

Awesome! Completely agree its in the early days. Out of interest, how did you find these part time jobs, just by searching Google?

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

#410

Post by dannyw »

konjin wrote: post #331
cercatrova wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, your comment suggests that you were spending beyond your means, or keeping up with the Joneses. Millions go very far if invested properly and drawn down properly so that the principal is never touched. If you're spending the millions instead, then yeah, that's definitely not gonna go far.

There's a huge trough in what you can do with what you can buy when you earn between $80k a year and ~$8m. It's the same shit just better. Your shitty commuter house 3 hours out of town is now a mansion 20 min outside of town. Your shitty 1990 ford fiesta is a very nice 2020 BMW. Your shitty healthcare plan is a great healthcare plan, but the main difference is how nice the plants at the doctors office are. If you wa…

“Everything is better but I don’t get a nuclear warhead”.
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