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The side hustle from hell

blog.jacobstechtavern.com

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Re: The side hustle from hell

#71

Post by jakey_bakey »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #43
jakey_bakey wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to be naive as a dev in your mid 20s. It's easy to sell a vision of billionaire startup success to a naive person. Often we sell it to ourselves.

Feels like there should be the equivalent of Matt Levine's "Certificate of Dumb Investment" for this scenario. ~90% of startups fail. Your equity is statistically likely to be worth $0. You will likely grind for years with nothing to show for it except the experience, your network, and whatever cash comp you collected. Proceed accordingly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24285305 (edit: totally fine to still jum…

Yeah, the only real regret is I could have got this experience more quickly with less pain and time not spent with my wife

Edit: just realised that made it sound like she died. She’s fine! We just had baby #2! But we could have spent lockdown making bread and playing RuneScape instead of me grinding

Re: The side hustle from hell

#72

Post by constantcrying »

Having non-technical founders who failed to even outsource their project is an enormous red flag. Nobody there knew how to make the product a reality and if it is you who is doing 100% of the work, then you obviously deserve 100% of the equity. "Having an idea" is not worth equity.

If you thought the idea was great, there was an obvious golden opportunity for you, none of the people there are going to make this into a product, but you can. If the idea was bad, getting paid in equity means getting paid in something worthless.

The only situation where it is reasonable to deal with such a totally defunct organization is if they pay you a lot of money. And if there is a single missed payment you stop any work until you are paid.

Re: The side hustle from hell

#74

Post by constantcrying »

wibbily wrote: post #9

Currently at a startup that did the same thing wrt having their app built overseas. Protip: don't. Endless bullshit, excruciating trying to get anything out of them. We ended up with an app just like this guy's, locked aspect ratio and all. If I find another startup whose product is an app, and they can't find a local developer to write that app, I'm running. Why outsource your core product!?

Because there are legions of people out there who want to be "entrepreneurs", so they come up with "business ideas". They can't make these ideas into reality by themselves, as they lack all technical skill. This lack of skill also means that they can not manage a project, as they lack a basic understanding of how software project works.

Re: The side hustle from hell

#76

Post by ChuckMcM »

praptak wrote: post #68
ChuckMcM wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should probably be an entire chapter written on "Okay, but what if the product was desirable but not 'technically' legal, hmmm?" :-)

It would say "we all know how it went" :)

Had an interesting discussion this past weekend on whether or not Silkroad was a criminal enterprise or a very successful startup. It was an interesting look at the question of 'business first' versus 'lawful first' societies and their relative success through history.

Re: The side hustle from hell

#77

Post by generationP »

So an app that would probably serve a real need fails because the team is unable to bootstrap the two-sided market. The best dev moves to a bullshit "green habits" app that doesn't suffer from such problems because... it doesn't really do much in the first place. Not the greatest outcome for the world.

Re: The side hustle from hell

#78

Post by jimbokun »

bathtub365 wrote: post #46
zelda420 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throughout my long career in the tech industry, from established giants like Oracle to a hyper-growth pre-IPO Airbnb, I've observed a consistent pattern: engineers rarely advance more than one level above their initial hiring position, regardless of their performance or tenure. The only exception were juniors who could rise to a senior. But senior to staff, or whatever you want to call it is almost unheard of unless…

Over about 10 years I moved from mid level developer to director (through senior, team lead, engineering manager, sr engineering manager) at the same company. It was a small company that grew and the founders/high level engineers actually saw the value in retaining and growing people and had interesting enough work to keep people from getting bored, so we had high retention. Many of these promotions were out of cycle…

It seems like the simplest reason for the discrepancy in behaviors is that in the small company, the higher level roles came into being organically as the company grew. Where as at the already established large company, to get a higher level role you almost have to take it from someone else. Or wait for a vacancy.

Re: The side hustle from hell

#79

Post by jimbokun »

jakey_bakey wrote: post #26
ChuckMcM wrote: post #16

I love this story. Why? Because it is the story of so many startups. I was so perplexed in the mid-90's when the dot com "boom" had started by people who wanted to do a "startup" but had no idea what that meant. Like the author, people with a feeling of Destiny that they would be some leader of something that everyone talked about. I had the same beliefs when I left Sun where clearly I would never be "famous" but by…

Do you think a million monkeys with a million typewriters could come up with Oracle Database 11?

Is an existence proof allowed?

Re: The side hustle from hell

#80

Post by jimbokun »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #63
praptak wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A million monkeys with a million typewrites will statistically have one lucky monkey who creates an extremely successful product which also looks very dumb and very unconvincing ("Srsly? You want to make money from random people hosting strangers in their own rooms?" Bang, AirBnB) The problem is selection bias. A startup is 3 monkeys tops, so the chances of that are appropriately low and if the product looks dumb and…

There should probably be an entire chapter written on "Okay, but what if the product was desirable but not 'technically' legal, hmmm?" :-)

I would say good luck finding enough very successful companies NOT matching that description to fill a chapter.
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