21–30 of 32 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you work for the couple of days? If you don't mind me asking.
Sorry, are you asking how to get part time gigs? Or what kind of work I’m doing? Or how to juggle part time with a new venture?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, are you asking how to get part time gigs? Or what kind of work I’m doing? Or how to juggle part time with a new venture?
Oops, I missed a word. How do you find consulting work with that little of a time commitment?
Presuming you're working with your client directly and success is in measured in outcomes not hours, you get to craft exactly the engagement that works for both parties.
Since then full-time software dev contractor, can't complain income wise. Apparently: Even running a page into the ground yields enough technological experience to make you interesting enough for other companies ;-)
Sometimes I felt the itch to try out a new venture with a friend. Some ideas including non-profit things. But quickly give up, because VCs are loaded with with requests, and those VCs that can shuffle free their calendar are not the ones you want to do business with.
YC never was an option because they demanded to move to California and (at least officially) little money.
Contracting delivers a very comfy cash-flow, but not really the fulfillment one might seek with a startup
As someone who has both founded a startup (and failed), as well as took 18 months to go overlanding -- and who now has a normal engineering job -- I found that interviewers were more impressed with the travel than the startup. The co-founder label still has some sort of negative connotation with certain interviewers. It seemed worse the larger the company was. I had no problem finding my pick of companies to work for…
I went from a 3 person startup doing low 6 figures in annual revenue to a startup in the same space that had just closed its series A. I interviewed with FAANG’s and startups in nyc and the Bay Area. I felt like my experience was valued by most companies I interviewed with, to my surprise, and many others had similar stories to mine. It felt like the right the step, like going to a version of my company that’d turned…
> I was hurting pretty bad, constantly thinking of what I could’ve done differently and still had many, many sleepless nights. It took those 18 months to really get it out of my system and move on. Thanks for this insight. I recently made the leap to quit my tech job to build a startup. I keep telling myself that if it doesn't work out (which is the statistically likely outcome) I can at least go back to another tech…
2. Don’t pay attention or compare yourself to other startups/potential competition. No good comes of it.
3. Recognize how large a factor luck is. This means preparing for things to go wrong, but also accepting that factors beyond your control can hugely impact the trajectory of your business.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not hard at all. We were 3 years in and we had around 20 employees by the time I left. I was the CTO and since we didn’t have a big development team, I still coded every day so I was sharper than ever and with more experience not only in technology but also with raising money, accounting, HR, sales, etc so I had multiple offers to choose from. That experience was super useful for my next/current endeavor with my wife…
I wish "non-tech/well-rounded" were better valued or even understood in the mainstream. People mention them as cultural virtue-signals, but it's not part of any interview or screening I've been a part of, and I've done dozens in the last year. I don't feel that "soft skills" are sought or even desired in an engineer -- I'm only ever asked about some certain framework or technique or algorithm (lol), not even tangenti…
If you know what you are talking about you can still respond to "How would you prioritize technical debt" and offer way more than a direct technical answer. You have to take opportunity to "enhance" every question you are asked with information that portray you in a good light and directs the conversation towards where you think you can generate most value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, are you asking how to get part time gigs? Or what kind of work I’m doing? Or how to juggle part time with a new venture?
Oops, I missed a word. How do you find consulting work with that little of a time commitment?
Find a client that wants you bad enough to forgo their preference for full time, and make sure the work you’re doing allows for it.
It helps to be more senior and have a longer proven track record.
In one case I had a 6 month contract building internal tools for a large company. It was a very unpleasant job, but they really liked me. After the 6 months were up, they offered me a FTE position. I politely said I had other goals I wanted to pursue. I had no intention of continuing with them, but they were persistent and we were able to negotiate to two days a week.
In two other cases startups approached me and I was honest and said I liked them but I didn’t have 40 hours a week to devote to their project, and they were cool with part time.
Earlier in my career I also worked freelance gigs with variable hours, little projects or on-call. That wasn’t so great, haggling with clients, more overhead (billing, unpaid travel, etc.) —- a lot less money and more headaches.
However, my tech being ready in '08 was in the middle of the global financial crisis. Plus, nobody ever heard of "automated actor replacement" back then, angel and VC investors simply did not believe it was possible. If they did, they wanted to pursue pornography, which I refused.
I went bankrupt. I ended up selling the global patents, which was an incredible achievement acquiring them in the first place. One of my technology providers was a facial recognition company that incorporated 3D reconstruction in their FR suite. So I went to work for them for about 7 years. I quit last spring, I guess a part of the great resignation. Far too many long hours, with no equity participation.
Currently, I enrolled in some graduate Machine Learning classes, and I am formally learning what I've been doing without the training for the last 7 years. I expect to be back in the market around the beginning of the new year, with a freshly minted formal understanding of the ML/DL aspects of the computer vision work I've been doing professionally for nearly a decade now.