Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 131 posts

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#91

Post by staunch »

aryastark wrote: post #77
DevX101 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox wasn't a trivial engineering problem. While making facebook for a couple thousand users isn't too hard, scaling it to hundreds of millions was no trivial feat either.

I was under the impression Dropbox is a UI to Amazon S3. I use them and don't mean to deny it's a slick package. But I could duplicate the entire thing in about a day with inotify and rsync. The scaling is mostly on Amazon. That said, I must point out that the scaling issues all of these super modern "change the world" companies, such as Twitter and Facebook, have are purely for the purpose of centralizing power. It'…

> But I could duplicate the entire thing in about a day with inotify and rsync. The scaling is mostly on Amazon.

No, you could duplicate a narrow piece of Dropbox's functionality in a day. You could not even get anywhere near duplicating the product and the service in anything less than months.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#93

Post by StavrosK »

brianpgordon wrote: post #67
rfnslyr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are these mystical dev-fairies pulling in such salaries? Which sectors? Positions? Companies? I've had my fair share of jobs and I've never run into anyone who made that much as a developer. I'm talking strictly developer, not a PM, not a director. What kind of people make this money?

HFTs. This story hit HN a couple of months ago: > A year into his new job he had a job offer from UBS, the Swiss bank, and a promise to bump up his salary to $400,000 a year. Serge didn’t particularly want to leave Goldman Sachs just to go and work at another big Wall Street firm, and so when Goldman offered to match the offer, he stayed. http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-gol... But yeah, reali…

This baffles me a bit. Why would you even want this much money? These sums of money are comfortably beyond anything I could reasonably spend, so after a certain amount it's all moot.

You could live in a nice, cheap country with a good standard of living instead, and spend a tenth of what you make while living very well with your family. People keep wanting more money and what do they do? Get a car. Get a house. Get a second car. Bigger house. Big whoop.

Few people spend their money on experiences, or enjoying their life, because they work too much to have any free time, just so they can go back to their stately home, which becomes "eh, my house" after a month anyway.

My "recipe for success" is "make enough money so you won't have to think about it, make sure you have many good friends, and try to make others happy from time to time". Most people don't even seem to know what makes them happy, really.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#94

Post by sieva »

sblawrie wrote: post #52
sieva wrote: post #41

We're looking for an awesome web developer (oh the irony). Let me know if you're interested :) StudySoup.com

It took me about 30 seconds to figure out what your product does. You might want to move the bit about your partners to the bottom of the homepage and the stuff about the product and its features to the top of the page. I don't really care about your partners if I don't even know what you do in the first place. Good luck.

That's quality feedback! I really appreciate you taking the time to write that out.

We figured since we're so small and unknown at this point, it would make sense to wear the partner badge high on our chest...but your msg makes complete sense.

In case the website didn't make it clear, we provide course creation tools so any educator can create or curate a textbook replacement.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#95

Post by dreamdu5t »

fleitz wrote: post #88

OTOH, most startups don't really need a great tech team. Exactly what highly technical problem is Evernote, Airbnb, Snapchat, or Twitter, or Facebook solving? I mean really deep technical problem like the news feed absolutely will not work with out some sort of huge breakthrough in AI, not that deep learning is 5% better than an SVM. Look at how well something simple like the points*timedecay system than HN uses for…

I disagree. Evernote, Airbnb, Twitter, Facebook, etc. could not be built without a great tech team.

Whether they solve new technical problems in the context of computer science is irrelevant to needing a great tech team to properly execute something like the aforementioned companies.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#96

Post by l0gicpath »

drewcrawford wrote: post #36

Personally I think we (engineers) made this bed ourselves. I mean there are a few possibilities: one is that a CEO says their tech team is not so great. And of course behind that door lies Dilbert. Another is that the CEO says nothing about the engineering team itself at all, and it's all product, product, product. On that path lies Apple, and I have heard many say (myself included) that we would not work somewhere w…

It doesn't have to be all black and white.

Over praising your tech talents, saying nothing about them or saying something that isn't particularly good in nature are just all extremes.

It's really not a two side of a single coin, either this or that.. No, it's more of a spectrum.

Humility has never demoted a person nor has it affected their odds of succeeding in their endeavor. I think the real issue at hand here is the line of thoughts that "My company just got itself a VC round, I must be the BEST".

Well, maybe they are good, maybe they are even really good. But by all means with 7 billion humans on this planet, I'm pretty sure someone else is better out there.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#97

Post by theboss »

meowface wrote: post #78
skrebbel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wondered about exactly the same. Are generalists appreciated at all in the startup world?

I've never founded or worked for a startup, but I would imagine that especially at the early stages, all your engineers will need to be pretty good generalists. You're (probably) going to need a website, a product frontend, a product backend, an infrastructure, etc... And if that work's being split between 3 - 8 people, most of them are going to have be generalists.

Maybe in 2004 but this is 2013. Rails, iOS, Digitalocean, heroku, aws, with a front-end designer. You no longer need to know anything about infrastructure.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#98

Post by alelefant »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #95
fleitz wrote: post #88

OTOH, most startups don't really need a great tech team. Exactly what highly technical problem is Evernote, Airbnb, Snapchat, or Twitter, or Facebook solving? I mean really deep technical problem like the news feed absolutely will not work with out some sort of huge breakthrough in AI, not that deep learning is 5% better than an SVM. Look at how well something simple like the points*timedecay system than HN uses for…

I disagree. Evernote, Airbnb, Twitter, Facebook, etc. could not be built without a great tech team. Whether they solve new technical problems in the context of computer science is irrelevant to needing a great tech team to properly execute something like the aforementioned companies.

I think he means as a startup company you don't need the great tech team, you need the idea.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#99

Post by fat0wl »

bmelton wrote: post #68
fat0wl wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, I have to admit that I used to be wayyyy too stoked on scripting languages until I did a thought exercise realizing that the most interesting thing I could then ever do in the web-world is make an RPC to a far more interesting service. Do you know about Facebook's architecture? I'll give you a hint which was brought to my attention a couple weeks. PHP is sitting on their front end, but trust me it is NOT doing…

I'm not sure of the implication you're making there, and it confuses me. Defined 'frontend' in that context? Also, are you referring to the HipHop compiled PHP as the 'backend', or are there some fancy Go/Erlang/Lisp/whatever tricks acting as MQ layers, shuttling data around that I'm not aware of?

I was implying that PHP wasn't doing any of the heavy business logic, but then I re-read some articles (most notably this one) & I'll admit I'm a bit confused.

https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2010/02/02/hiphop-...

I WAS referring to PHP as frontend, but based on the article it seems like there may be a lot more HipHop PHP than I suspected, because they mention that it would be too niche to write a ton of C++ code. However, there is this line which I think clarifies somewhat -- "HipHop allows us to write the logic that does the final page assembly in PHP and iterate it quickly while relying on custom back-end services in C++, Erlang, Java, or Python to service the News Feed, search, Chat, and other core parts of the site."

It seems like even though PHP is compiled & heavily utilized, it is still used mostly for page assembly on top of a Service-Oriented Architecture, with services written in C++, Erlang, Java, & Python.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#100

Post by fleitz »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #95
fleitz wrote: post #88

OTOH, most startups don't really need a great tech team. Exactly what highly technical problem is Evernote, Airbnb, Snapchat, or Twitter, or Facebook solving? I mean really deep technical problem like the news feed absolutely will not work with out some sort of huge breakthrough in AI, not that deep learning is 5% better than an SVM. Look at how well something simple like the points*timedecay system than HN uses for…

I disagree. Evernote, Airbnb, Twitter, Facebook, etc. could not be built without a great tech team. Whether they solve new technical problems in the context of computer science is irrelevant to needing a great tech team to properly execute something like the aforementioned companies.

Yes, ability to execute is key, for the most part though you need people who are great with databases, rather than great at creating databases.

eg. Hire the guy that can optimize queries rather than the guy making PAXOS algorithms.

That's what I mean by great, and to be clear about startup I mean Facebook, et al, when they were at the stage of only having raised $5 mm, not Facebook post-IPO.

Post reply on HN