Mistakes You Should Never Make • Hacker News Board

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#221

Post by exacube » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 9:31 PM UTC

ameister14 wrote: post #202

Tactic wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This brings up an excellent side point that I taught my children... that stealing is not taking something that belongs to someone else, it is taking something that does not belong to you. It is a subtle, but important, distiction that is often used as a rationalization. Edit: This really belongs on the child comment.

That's not really true, though. If I'm walking in a forest and I pick up an apple, prior to my picking it up, it did not belong to me. Upon picking it up, it now belongs to me. You can claim things that did not belong to you prior to said claiming. I get what you're saying but it only applies in situations where everything is already owned by someone.

That's too technical of an argument and takes away from the idea that Tactic is trying to convey. Most people don't find that apple-picking from a forest is stealing.

My take on Tactic's explanation of stealing is that the guilt you should feel from stealing should also be from having taken something that isn't yours from someone, instead of just the guilt of depriving someone from the thing you stole. Although both perspectives are good to have, taking something that isn't yours is a better framework to think in so you can avoid the grey areas of stealing.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#222

Post by JabavuAdams » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 9:32 PM UTC

michaelvkpdx wrote: post #172

Poor founders and your VC-funded pain. How about some empathy for each of those employees you are firing, who have to go home and face families and lives that they've shared with you and you have essentially shat upon? They are not "resources". They are people, humans, and their lives and loves are just as important as yours. They shared a piece of their humanity with you to help you in your dream. A dream which, mak…

> They shared a piece of their humanity with you to help you in your dream.

... and got paid for it. Your company is not your family.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#223

Post by wglb » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 9:32 PM UTC

tarr11 wrote: post #102

tptacek wrote: post #33

Of all the financial mistakes you can possibly make running a company, withholding payroll taxes and then failing to remit them is probably the worst. Be thankful you caught this before the liability exceeded your available funds, because company operators are apparently routinely held personally liable when there's a shortfall, and I'm not sure that debt is even dischargeable in bankruptcy. What's worse, minor versi…

Ok I'm using the bank of America payroll feature and now I'm scared. :) However, are you sure that this doesn't work? The B of A system I am using (in California) calculates payroll taxes, and then even lets you submit them electronically. It also nags me constantly for forms I am supposed to submit to both CA and the US IRS.

I have used ADP for quite a while and it is not expensive and they don't forget anything.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#224

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 9:37 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #188

larrys wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In reality, though, the main point that you missed is that in a world made of shades of gray, the only person you can ever truly rely on is yourself. If you don't have scruples and you don't have honor, you don't have anything." Well let me put it this way. I don't think you understand my point about nuances and that I (once again) don't feel any of this is black and white. As an example the honor that I might displ…

The thing my grandfather taught me was that you live with all of your decisions for the rest of your life. When you make decisions which put other people at risk, you take on the risk that you are going to make someones life harder, possibly much harder. What is perhaps even more important is that no amount of "I'm so sorry I did that ..." will ever undo it. Sometimes its little things, like taking the last serving b…

> I didn't understand any of that when I was younger.

Nothing to be ashamed of though, plenty of people never learn that particular lesson.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#225

Post by sethbannon » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 9:40 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #218

sethbannon wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that you made this HN account only to comment on this post. I've learned that getting into a back-and-forth with anonymous posters on HN is never a good idea, but I'll respond just this once. 1. You're absolutely right. I majorly screwed up here. I say so as much in the post. 2. I think people can reasonably disagree here. An example: a potential customer asks a sales guy during a demo "...and will we be able t…

2. The reason engineers tend to hate tactics like this is that it shifts responsibility for fuck-ups from you, the CEO, who should be managing and prioritizing features so you get the best bang for the buck, to them, the engineers, who are now on the hook for a feature that may or may not be able to be built in the time frame you promised. Things go wrong in engineering, and there are unexpected snags and slowdowns,…

Very well said. We actually saw a lot of the exact problems you outline. Largely because of this, as we matured as a company we moved towards the approach you suggest.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#226

Post by lauradhamilton » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 9:40 PM UTC

dreamweapon wrote: post #21

Mistake 1: Taxes This thing about not noticing that you weren't paying payroll taxes wasn't a "mistake." It was pure head-in-assery. How can you "miss" the fact that you weren't being subtracted for payroll taxes? One quarterly / annual review after another, for 3 years? It's like running a personal budget, and "missing" the fact that you aren't paying rent.

Yeah, I was confused by that as well. I don't see how you could have any books of any sort and not notice the discrepancy.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#227

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 9:44 PM UTC

Qantourisc wrote: post #126

jacquesm wrote: post #63

This is why you pay an accountant the big bucks and pray they don't mess up in turn, very frequently if they do the responsibility is still yours. Running a company comes with a lot of responsibilities that tend to keep you awake until the small hours of morning. Details like these can get you, especially because they are retro-active and hardly anybody is in a position to absorb an instant loss of say 7 years remitt…

This practise is in my opinion SO wrong. There is a saying: "... as humanly possible" in other words people make mistakes !

In the eyes of the tax man there are no mistakes. There are only audits and fraud. Better have your stuff in order when that audit rolls around anything more than a few pennies out of line and you'll be looking at months of extra work even if you're a small company. Looking back at a decade or so of your paperwork will turn up a ton more that you'll have serious issues documenting if you didn't take care of it at the time.

That gets expensive in a hurry (tax lawyer, fines, interest, surcharges).

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#228

Post by tptacek » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 9:45 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #220

tptacek wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be good advice in NL, but it's sort of diametrically the opposite of best common practice in the US. Payroll being handled by payroll firms is the norm in the US, and the stories about terrible payroll withholding screwups hurting companies are, as far as I can tell, invariably the result of people trying to handle this themselves, paying "directly into the coffers of the tax man".

Does the American system have any provision for payroll companies that fail to fulfill their obligations? (segregated accounts per client, accounts only usable for remittance of the salaries or taxes with the payroll company then taking out its slice when everything else has been done?) I remember the Accupay affair and that took a lot of employers by surprise, and even though 'best common practice in the US' may be…

You remember the affair of a tiny payroll processing company in Baltimore? Is there some news source about them that isn't in the local Baltimore media that I missed? I had to give Google News a custom search range just to find those local hits.

If that's the kind of firm you're talking about, I agree. Don't use tiny fly-by-night payroll firms. Just use SurePayroll or someone like them.

I'm serious: that's a good point you have. When I said "the norm is to use a payroll firm", I should have said "big payroll firm". There are a lot of little firms out there, and I wouldn't feel safe using them either.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#229

Post by nostrademons » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 9:46 PM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #74

matthewmacleod wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me. Your optimism is endearing, but the vast majority of companies I've done business with do this. Often companies I've…

Since you are competing against people who will tell you that the feature they want already exists, people who are too honest in this area will quickly get filtered out of the marketplace. It sucks, but there are lots of markets where the customer says "please lie to me" and gives their business to the person with the most reassuring lie.

I don't think that's true. In my experience, the very best companies all refuse to do this. If you leak an upcoming Google feature or promise something to a customer that doesn't exist, you get fired. Same at Facebook and Apple, or Blizzard.

I do think it's much more common in highly competitive markets with no barriers to entry. Google/Facebook/Apple have pretty strong moats and large diverse markets, and can afford to release products "when they're done" and not talk about them until then. People in very competitive, low-margin markets often need the sale now. But then, people in the latter type of markets quickly get filtered out of the marketplace regardless of what they do.

Re: Mistakes You Should Never Make

#230

Post by k__ » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 9:46 PM UTC

afro88 wrote: post #207

sethbannon wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that you made this HN account only to comment on this post. I've learned that getting into a back-and-forth with anonymous posters on HN is never a good idea, but I'll respond just this once. 1. You're absolutely right. I majorly screwed up here. I say so as much in the post. 2. I think people can reasonably disagree here. An example: a potential customer asks a sales guy during a demo "...and will we be able t…

> 2. I think people can reasonably disagree here. An example: a potential customer asks a sales guy during a demo "...and will we be able to export a list of our users?" Answer: "yes, absolutely". The customer signs. The sales person then runs to dev team and says "we need to build this export functionality before they launch". Did the potential customer think that feature already existed? Probably. Is anyone being h…

It's so common that most people think this is how every one works.

I worked with many sales people who got CEOs later, because they made big sales, but most of them, because they sold stuff they didn't had, because they didn't really know the customers.

In extreme cases, this leads to overworked devs and rich sales people, when the devs are good and the features aren't that hard to implement. If the features are too hard, it leads to angry customers and the company losing much money.