71–80 of 96 posts
> But I ended up picking Mercurial for the distributed version control system, which we were definitely wrong on that one–should have picked Git. I'm curious to know: is this sentiment widely shared? Is git really that much better than hg?
Facebook picked mercurial over git because it's easier to customize.
An interesting titbit Aston leaves out about his early days is that he was actually cofounder of AutoAdmit.com[0], a law school admissions forum, semi-notorious for its defamation lawsuits and being an incubator for troll, Michael O. Church[1] (banned on Quora, Wikipedia, and Hacker News for being a thorn in Paul Graham and Dan G, sides) that formed after the great Princeton Review Discussion Board exodus and has per…
Michael O. Church a troll? Please. The guy had an odd view of himself but I always found he provided excellent well thought out analysis and arguments. I'm not saying he is always right, but he wasn't a troll.
> We were all using the product so when there was funny stuff we tended to catch it. I love this. There have been so many times I've run into a bug that makes me wonder if anyone on the engineering team actually used the product.
In my experience dogfooding is the only way to build a great product. Without dogfooding features erode. The "oh I haven't tested that in 6 months" happens frequently. The UX never evolves. I have NEVER worked on a product that got worse when it was dogfooded and I have NEVER worked on a product that consistently got better without dogfooding (sometimes it'll get better but it's always in spurts before going back dow…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience dogfooding is the only way to build a great product. Without dogfooding features erode. The "oh I haven't tested that in 6 months" happens frequently. The UX never evolves. I have NEVER worked on a product that got worse when it was dogfooded and I have NEVER worked on a product that consistently got better without dogfooding (sometimes it'll get better but it's always in spurts before going back dow…
Dogfooding is difficult to achieve if you work in a niche industry which has no immediate relevance to your development team. Smart developers who care about what happens beyond the back of their monitor will, of course, quickly learn a lot about the sector, but they're never going to know or care as much as a real user of the product, and they're never really going to have the same interest as they would if they wer…
It's harder but in my experience it's still necessary. At least I've never seen a good product come from a team that didn't also use the product. That I know of, anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
His dad went to harvard so I am guessing he grew up pretty well off.
Yep. That explains how he was able to focus full time on Dropbox then. He must have always had a trampoline to bounce him back up should he fail. I know it was funded from the beginning most likely, but there had to have been a time before it was funded.
It's basically our duty to take that risk.
An interesting titbit Aston leaves out about his early days is that he was actually cofounder of AutoAdmit.com[0], a law school admissions forum, semi-notorious for its defamation lawsuits and being an incubator for troll, Michael O. Church[1] (banned on Quora, Wikipedia, and Hacker News for being a thorn in Paul Graham and Dan G, sides) that formed after the great Princeton Review Discussion Board exodus and has per…
Michael O. Church a troll? Please. The guy had an odd view of himself but I always found he provided excellent well thought out analysis and arguments. I'm not saying he is always right, but he wasn't a troll.
Every time I read a comment about Church, I find myself asking, "is this how a normal person would write about someone best known for commenting on message boards?"
> We were all using the product so when there was funny stuff we tended to catch it. I love this. There have been so many times I've run into a bug that makes me wonder if anyone on the engineering team actually used the product.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting example. Genuine question, had it been the opposite, if you circle back in time, would you really take that job? (Trick question: Are you less happy than you think you would have been in other case?)
Complicated question. It certainly would've been better financially, though honestly, the difference is "set for life" vs. "set for a long time", so I'm not certain it would make a material difference in my life now. Besides, I think it's fairly likely that even if I were set for life, I'd be doing something fairly similar to what I'm doing now. I think that in terms of lifestyle & personal goals during the 4-5 years…
I appreciate your thoughtful responses so I was wondering what your thoughts are on importance and corresponding compensation of the 1st employee at a company.
If the first employee is important enough that in your mind, it's possible that with depending on the first employee they may or may not be a billion dollar company, do you think the first employee compensation is commensurate with that? Aston also mentions specifically the commitment he has as a first employee, and how he feels "you're basically a founder" in terms of responsibility.
In my opinion, he made off about as well as any first employee could reasonably expect (even unreasonably I'd argue).
I don't have the perspective of either a startup founder or the first employee anywhere so I'm not trying to slight the Dropbox founders in any way.
I guess my question boils down to two parts 1. What do you think a reasonable level of compensation is for a first employee 2. Given the success rates of startups (low), why would someone want to be the first employee somewhere versus either their own startup, or a later stage company that could pay them a much higher salary then the typical startup compensation. My unstated assumption here, which you might disagree with, is that someone who could have the impact of Aston, could become a staff engineer at somewhere like facebook/google/microsoft/etc and pull total compensation of 300/400k with a significantly higher chance.