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Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

paulstamatiou.com

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Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

#31

Post by dannyr »

famousactress wrote: post #22

What are typical working hours? Can engineers work from home? Jason: 8-10 hours in office, more from home / weekends. Yes if needed but we prefer to collaborate in the office. Since we run continuous deployment speed matters, and that means you need high intra-office bandwidth. If the bit about intra office bandwidth isn't ridiculous misdirection, then apologies... But it sure sounds like it. I think it's interesting…

Votizen is an early-stage startup still trying to develop its own company culture.

If you have a bunch of remote employees, it's not going to be easy.

Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

#32

Post by jorgeortiz85 »

famousactress wrote: post #22

What are typical working hours? Can engineers work from home? Jason: 8-10 hours in office, more from home / weekends. Yes if needed but we prefer to collaborate in the office. Since we run continuous deployment speed matters, and that means you need high intra-office bandwidth. If the bit about intra office bandwidth isn't ridiculous misdirection, then apologies... But it sure sounds like it. I think it's interesting…

Collaboration is hard. It's harder when you're not in the same room. You can bend over backwards to try to make remote collaboration productive, but the state-of-the-art is nowhere near as good as being in the same room, at least for some kinds of collaboration.

Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

#33

Post by jdunck »

famousactress wrote: post #30
jdunck wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devs use IRC, even in the office. And we do standups with some members on Skype. But meatspace still matters. We generally prefer people in the office, all other things being equal. All other things are generally not equal, but it's a complex set of factors. I worked as a contractor with several clients for about a year, almost all remotely from my home office. It works, but it is definitely still good to be in perso…

More conjecture. I feel like the honest answer to this question would be closer to: "We've been lucky enough to find smart people who are happy to come into the office so this isn't a bridge we've needed to cross, which we're happy about because we don't really have much idea how it would impact our company or what challenges it might introduce" It's unfortunate that the idea of remote employees is perpetrated as a c…

Honestly, we've been close to hiring 2 remote people in our short time. Both were because we knew how good the people were. Hiring with confidence is difficult, and canning a person shortly after you realize you made a hiring mistake is a bad outcome for both parties.

Hiring remotely makes this harder.

(Personal opinion, not my employer, yadayada but:

I've long thought that the best way to hire eng would be to have a pool of contractors, all "maybe interested in FT" in both directions of the transaction. Hire the best of the pool who are willing once you have confidence gained. Remote would be one factor to overcome in gaining confidence.

Even so, there are structural problems with this; it's hard to take that course in hiring as the first-mover. People don't like to quit jobs - even in this awesome job market for devs - without a bird in the hand.)

Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

#34

Post by njs12345 »

PStamatiou wrote: post #2

Author here -- Please let me know what you think of this format. If it works, I'd love to do more of these immersive-get-to-know-a-startup articles with other startups. Is it too long? Does the Q&A structure work here? My inspiration for this was The Setup ( http://usesthis.com/ ), but in my own style -- focused on the startup and in my natural super-long-form.

Definitely, this is excellent. Like the way it's got a bit of tech stuff and also business as well.

Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

#35

Post by [deleted] »

PStamatiou wrote: post #2

Author here -- Please let me know what you think of this format. If it works, I'd love to do more of these immersive-get-to-know-a-startup articles with other startups. Is it too long? Does the Q&A structure work here? My inspiration for this was The Setup ( http://usesthis.com/ ), but in my own style -- focused on the startup and in my natural super-long-form.

[deleted]

Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

#36

Post by jedberg »

aamar wrote: post #19
scarmig wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing that their database isn't voter registrations but individual votes--one person can have multiple votes and registrations recorded over the years. I still don't see how that could add up to a factor of 10, though. I'm in a similar space and typically people will have fewer than that, although the voter records we have don't go back more than a decade or so.

A ~10 year record could mean ~30 chances to vote, but hardly anyone votes in a majority of those elections. I, too, am curious how they have an average of 10 votes per voter.

I've been legal to vote for 17 years, and I've voted in every election since I became legal. That's about twice a year for 17 years (odd years sometimes only have one), so I probably have around 30ish voting records.

Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

#37

Post by zvrba »

PStamatiou wrote: post #2

Author here -- Please let me know what you think of this format. If it works, I'd love to do more of these immersive-get-to-know-a-startup articles with other startups. Is it too long? Does the Q&A structure work here? My inspiration for this was The Setup ( http://usesthis.com/ ), but in my own style -- focused on the startup and in my natural super-long-form.

Your webpage layout sucks: in a Browser half a window wide (Opera 11.61, 64-bit Win7, 1680x1050 resolution), the text overflows past the right margin. When I scroll it horizontally, the blue block of text ("Paul Stamatiou") and the purple ad overlap the text. This (1st line of text) is where I stopped reading.

Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

#38

Post by PStamatiou »

zvrba wrote: post #37
PStamatiou wrote: post #2

Author here -- Please let me know what you think of this format. If it works, I'd love to do more of these immersive-get-to-know-a-startup articles with other startups. Is it too long? Does the Q&A structure work here? My inspiration for this was The Setup ( http://usesthis.com/ ), but in my own style -- focused on the startup and in my natural super-long-form.

Your webpage layout sucks: in a Browser half a window wide (Opera 11.61, 64-bit Win7, 1680x1050 resolution), the text overflows past the right margin. When I scroll it horizontally, the blue block of text ("Paul Stamatiou") and the purple ad overlap the text. This (1st line of text) is where I stopped reading.

Željko, I think you could have worded that a bit more politely. Try readability, RSS or perhaps increasing the size of your browser window.

Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

#39

Post by kogir »

PStamatiou wrote: post #38
zvrba wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your webpage layout sucks: in a Browser half a window wide (Opera 11.61, 64-bit Win7, 1680x1050 resolution), the text overflows past the right margin. When I scroll it horizontally, the blue block of text ("Paul Stamatiou") and the purple ad overlap the text. This (1st line of text) is where I stopped reading.

Željko, I think you could have worded that a bit more politely. Try readability, RSS or perhaps increasing the size of your browser window.

Remove "position: fixed;" from "div.left-col" in responsive-stammy.css

Unless there was a reason to break the (horizontal) scrolling.

Re: Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture

#40

Post by PStamatiou »

kogir wrote: post #39
PStamatiou wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Željko, I think you could have worded that a bit more politely. Try readability, RSS or perhaps increasing the size of your browser window.

Remove "position: fixed;" from "div.left-col" in responsive-stammy.css Unless there was a reason to break the (horizontal) scrolling.

I think he meant horizontal scrolling (which is because his browser window is only 800px wide).

position fixed on the left sidebar was actually requested by many folks so they dont have to scroll all the way back up after reading a long article of mind to get to the nav

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