I was about to comment the same thing. Managers might interpret this in the totally wrong way and will probably end up using this against employees, like "you're not coding enough" and dump more work on you. Knowledge work, especially software engineering is way more than just time spent coding.
I as a programmer, however, might find this insightful, but then again be too hard on myself and wonder if I am not working hard enough. There's a lot to say about a tool like this, though. Interesting work. I'm too scared to try this out lol.
I personally think this will be one of the biggest "what the hell were we thinking" ideas to come out of the still-developing hangover of the 2013-2023 startup space. From my perspective, the once-startups that are now big companies are the ones who focused ONLY on solving a real and immediate problem with happy, motivated employees. Every industry has inefficiencies to improve upon. Most employees want normal hours, a 401K, some benefits, and clear performance reviews. There's still a ton of work to do at cool-but-not-the-absolute-cutting-edge startups.
Even if AI should be home-run, it probably won't be for most people. In a more technical community, it's natural to think that most people care about "values" when it comes to tech. However, the reality is that people just want what's easiest / cheapest / most fun. It's great when what's easiest/cheapest/most fun aligns with what's best for the individual or society, but those cases are outliers. After spending a few years building a crypto startup, I left with more conviction around this theory.
> In a more technical community, it's natural to think that most people care about "values" when it comes to tech.
Do people actually think that? I know people sometimes joke about an HN bubble but I never really took that seriously. People are using stuff like AWS and Azure which probably wouldn't be the case if "values" was more important than what is most convinient. (relatively) few people today set up their own email servers and instead use Gmail or whatever.
You actually just kind of gave an example of what I meant! Developers are the consumers in this case, and they'll almost always opt to use AWS and Azure versus hosting their own infra. It's easier, faster, usually cheaper, and it makes you yourself are more marketable.
There's a reason software-as-a-service has beat out software-as-a-product. While people might think they want full ownership/control over what they're buying, they want it to be as safe or secure as possible, they want it to be self-hosting and not communicating information back to the distributor... that's just not what plays out for the most part.
OpenAI vs Mistral, Coinbase vs Metamask. I'm not that old, but I'm beginning to notice a trend where the fast, easy, cheap business model wins the most market share, and then slowly works towards providing more values-aligned features as it grows. The company aligned to consumer values from the get-go usually has a tough time keeping up (although they can usually still carve out a good niche from people who are particularly values-focused - Mistral and Metamask aren't doing poorly by any stretch of the imagination).
I did a similar thing to you. However, I do feel like cutting your teeth as a "founding engineer" at an early startup has 2 major benefits:
1. You get to see what it's like under the covers, as you said. It's not nearly as glamorous as it looks from the outside. And yes, as an early engineer, you share in a lot of the downside without nearly an equal share of the upside.
2. You get to leave. Unfortunately, the startup I joined entered a tailspin. But, my name wasn't attached to the company, and I didn't have a fiduciary obligation to our investors. I had a lot of "stake" myself after putting in years of 12-hour days, nights and weekends, but at a certain point I saw that my career was actively being harmed by staying. That "founding engineer" role on my resume got me the job I'm at now, at a level that skews higher than my YOE.
Do those two points mean you should get a fraction of the equity (or rather, a fraction of the options) as the founder? Honestly... maybe. I've now seen a few founders fail. It can really be a career-killer.
> Do those two points mean you should get a fraction of the equity (or rather, a fraction of the options) as the founder? Honestly... maybe. I've now seen a few founders fail. It can really be a career-killer.
And I have seen a few founders fail and enter bigger companies at a pretty high position. Not sure I would relate that to how much money they should get in case their startup is one of the lucky ones.
Getting to leave is so underrated. Nothing keeps your head above the doom and gloom like knowing you aren’t shackled to the thing, and the world’s your oyster if you need to move on. We live in a weird world if people don’t think a gig with $160K salary, 2% of the company, where you can work hard but not 24/7, and _leave any time you want_ is a bad gig. That 0.25-0.5% after one year that you get is PERMANENTLY gone for them even if you just fuck off after a year. Years later it could be worth millions.
But anyway, as founding engineer you get to set the systems, culture, language etc. maybe some people don’t want the responsibility but for others it’s an opportunity to build things out in our own image and learn a lot.
Maybe it won't go back down to 8, but I do consider it very likely it'll drop back down to at least 12-15. Humans simply don't work in a way that allows something to nearly triple (in value, land, whatever) overnight and stay there.
I bought at 8, I bought below 8, I bought above 8... but there's no way in hell I'm buying above ~20 for the next 2-3 years.
This viewpoint doesn't hold true far outside of forums like this one and certain subreddits. People just don't care about any of the things you noted, and if they see everyone wearing Airpods Maxes, they'll want Airpods Maxes. They'll see AKG as inferior, even though that's objectively untrue.
This is an interesting take. As someone who is relatively interested in this stuff but by no means an expert (i.e. I've read a few pop-psych books), do you have any further reading I could do to see where you're coming from with this claim?
Because, by my very limited understanding, I always thought something like electromagnetism was always thought to be "concrete," for lack of a better word - whereas I always thought that sociology and psychology were much more subjective fields (and this is why it's impossible to, for example, predict whether a stock will go up or down). Is there any reading to suggest the latter?
Understanding the history of science gives a sense how progress works when dealing with things extremely complex .
Here are 3 good starting points.
1. The little book of psychology (penguin randomhouse) charts the important milestones and people in psyc. (Michael Lewis's Undoing Project not many like but it shows why understanding complex non obvious things take time)
2. Faraday and Maxwell by Nancy Forbes charts how long and why it took long to stumble upon EM field theories.
3. Infinite Powers by Steven Stogratz charts the history of calculus. Which shows why it took thousands of years to get to Newton's Laws.
Textbooks present the math without showing people the journey. Psychology and Sociology are going through those same moments Physics and Maths witnessed when new discoveries suddenly start exploding.
Super cool, I've never thought about it this way before. Having read about this stuff somewhat intensively, it just goes to show how many blind spots I have.
This is one of the main reasons I love using Go for backend work, and the lack of this functionality is just one of the reasons I dislike JavaScript.
Anything to make JS feel less haphazard and more elegant (i.e. using TypeScript) is awesome in my books. Looking forward to hopefully using this pattern in my personal work going forward, and maybe trying to introduce it to my team ta work.
