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Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

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Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#111

Post by kingnothing »

watermelon59 wrote: post #83
kingnothing wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also live just fine off that amount in most American cities. $40k is basically $2,500 / mo after tax. In the Atlanta area for example, there are plenty of nice 2-3 bedroom houses for $200,000 or even less, which puts your mortgage at $1,000 / mo. That leaves $1,500 / mo for a car, utilities, and food, which is plenty doable. Rent out a room if you want to for more income.

Health and dental insurance can be a huge cost though.

Healthcare can definitely be expensive and you'll need a plan for that until Medicare kicks in.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#112

Post by war1025 »

kingnothing wrote: post #111
watermelon59 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Health and dental insurance can be a huge cost though.

Healthcare can definitely be expensive and you'll need a plan for that until Medicare kicks in.

I have a dream that someday America will get its head out of its ass and decouple health insurance from employer benefits.

That would change the employment calculus for a ton of people.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#113

Post by zerr »

courtewing wrote: post #42

Elastic works similarly, though not to the extent that was described in that Gumroad post. It also varies a bit by team, but I've worked on many teams over the last 5.5 years here, so I have a decent perspective on what's normal and how things evolved to this point. Engineering is distributed around the world, so it happens in a highly asynchronous way centered around GitHub issues, the vast majority of which are in…

Do you also pay $10K/mo for a quarter-time dev role world-wide?

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#114

Post by mraza007 »

switz wrote: post #79
mraza007 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey what tech stack powers your project, I would love to know

Mostly normal stuff; node.js, postgres, redis, some react, Sourcemod/c++ for the in-game management. Nothing overtly fancy nor magical.

Nice, Thanks for responding, let me know if you are looking to hire on short term contract

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#115

Post by courtewing »

zerr wrote: post #113
courtewing wrote: post #42

Elastic works similarly, though not to the extent that was described in that Gumroad post. It also varies a bit by team, but I've worked on many teams over the last 5.5 years here, so I have a decent perspective on what's normal and how things evolved to this point. Engineering is distributed around the world, so it happens in a highly asynchronous way centered around GitHub issues, the vast majority of which are in…

Do you also pay $10K/mo for a quarter-time dev role world-wide?

Nope, I missed that part if it was in the Gumroad post.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#116

Post by tegiddrone »

pickle-wizard wrote: post #5

Thanks for asking this. I recently took a job with $MEGACORP after 5 years with start ups. I forgot how much $MEGACORP likes meetings. I found myself thinking about how gumroad has no meetings. I asked myself the same question as the OP.

Sometimes the meetings at $MEGACORP feel like useless ceremony. However I have worked with people who don't frikken read and do their own thing. For these people meetings are where you have to harvest their attention towards the cards/issues/wiki/specs/diagrams. Still not cool.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#117

Post by pelasaco »

eastbayjake wrote: post #24
pelasaco wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you dont have to be in a $MEGACORP to have tons of useless meetings. You just have to move to a company where the people are proud to do SCRUM by the book, with reviews and retrospective (each one 4 hours long)

Hoping this is hyperbole, but if your reviews or retrospectives are actually four hours long, you should politely point out that these do not need to be more than an hour (and many mature scrum teams do both in an hour total)

it's unfortunately not a hyperbole. It takes us literally 4 hours. Mostly the scrum master do it as a monologue. We all just zoom out and do other stuff. Last sprint i finished a lib that i was working on and deployed our code twice in production to avoid dying live on teams.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#118

Post by courtewing »

jatins wrote: post #109
courtewing wrote: post #42

Elastic works similarly, though not to the extent that was described in that Gumroad post. It also varies a bit by team, but I've worked on many teams over the last 5.5 years here, so I have a decent perspective on what's normal and how things evolved to this point. Engineering is distributed around the world, so it happens in a highly asynchronous way centered around GitHub issues, the vast majority of which are in…

What's the performance evaluation process(for promotions or otherwise) at Elastic like? At most big companies I have seen perf to be a major headache

As with anything that is potentially contentious and involves humans, there's a lot of nuance here and breaking it all down into a couple paragraphs doesn't really respect the unique needs of everyone. I've worked with some amazing people that respond best to very informal processes around performance-based feedback, and I've worked with some equally amazing people that desire a relatively rigid and analytical process. I think we all try to do what's best for each person.

That said, it's important that we do have guiding processes and principles here to ensure that everyone is being evaluated both fairly and effectively, so it's not like the wild west or something.

Every "track" has levels with defined expectations in terms of the type of work they do, the impact they have, the interactions they have with teammates, others at Elastic, the community, etc. High performers would be folks that are at least meeting the expectations established for their level, which is where promotion comes in.

Promotion is not necessarily role-oriented in the sense that you don't get promoted out of being an engineer into management or something like that, they are different parallel tracks. For example, I technically took a demotion to switch from a Tech Lead to an Eng. Manager role.

Processes do vary a bit team by team, though they've become more consistent over time and are pretty similar now. This is how things work on my teams:

I have 30 minute 1:1s with each person that reports to me every 2-3 weeks depending on their seniority. This is pretty informal, but the consistent face to face gives us opportunities to talk frequently about how things are going.

Every quarter I do a longer review with each team member. This isn't super formal or anything, but it is more structured with a corresponding doc that I fill out in advance and that we both expand upon during our meeting. Nothing should be a surprise here as I give positive or critical feedback more regularly, but this is where we can really dig into aspects of their performance, rehash current expectations for their level and make plans with them for how to achieve their professional goals, whether it be promotion, type of work, transitioning to a different role, etc.

The 6 and 12 month reviews are a little more comprehensive as I also include anonymous 360 feedback from peers and others throughout Elastic.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#119

Post by adflux »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #108
mediaman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently became a supplier to a megacorp. They'll plop a weekly meeting on eight peoples' calendars like it's nothing. I tried sending out email summaries on various projects, so they could just refer to that instead of having meetings, but they decided they would then just read through the email summary during the meeting. I am discovering that I need to significantly increase prices to compensate for the addition…

The zoom calls are the symptom. Meetings are a way of "doing something" without actually doing something. Most megacorps waste millions spinning their wheels on nonsense, but they're established and make money so it doesn't matter. A strong small team working on a specialized product will always win - that's why they get gobbled up eventually by the megacorps - there's no way they can compete with that internally.

It's economies of scale versus companies being too large to manage

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#120

Post by sangnoir »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #108
mediaman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently became a supplier to a megacorp. They'll plop a weekly meeting on eight peoples' calendars like it's nothing. I tried sending out email summaries on various projects, so they could just refer to that instead of having meetings, but they decided they would then just read through the email summary during the meeting. I am discovering that I need to significantly increase prices to compensate for the addition…

The zoom calls are the symptom. Meetings are a way of "doing something" without actually doing something. Most megacorps waste millions spinning their wheels on nonsense, but they're established and make money so it doesn't matter. A strong small team working on a specialized product will always win - that's why they get gobbled up eventually by the megacorps - there's no way they can compete with that internally.

Meetings are a result of having a large team (or many teams) which require work/information to be synced periodically. I have not seen a software product that can tackle this problem: I only want to see progress on team Y for delivery 1 that my team needs for delivery Gamma.

Also, strong, small teams usually don't scale well - which is why they sell themselves to megacorps who can (e.g. megacorps are much better when it's time to localize to 20 countries on 3 continents and navigate the legal labyrinth necessitated. All that work requires meetings to coordinate, even if legal ends up only asking the engineer a single question)

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