[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?
I understand that it's not for everyone, but I'm curious to see
which companies work that way. Would love to give it a shot. Edit:
@Waterfowl posted the specifics: this article about how gumroad
works was at the top of the front page yesterday.
https://sahillavingia.com/work discussion
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25673275 reply
Author : sudhirj
Score : 157 points
Date : 2021-01-08 16:56 UTC (6 hours ago)
| kvz wrote:
| I read the post as a Transloadit.com founder and found it to 90%
| overlap. We do have a team meetup once a year and Friday remote
| gaming sessions, and one fulltimer tho (out of 18)
| switz wrote:
| My company is ran similarly; though I never raised VC and
| bootstrapped my way to profitability over 5 years as a solo
| founder. I provide a simple platform for people to play their
| friends on high quality CS:GO servers, while keeping track of
| their stats/wins/losses. https://popflash.site
|
| If you have played a lot of Counterstrike, have real-world
| technical skills, and are interested in a flexible autonomous
| environment much like Gumroad, feel free to tell me about your
| recent projects: daniel@popflash.site
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| How are you making money on here?
| switz wrote:
| I charge users 5 bucks a month to host unlimited matches
| (just 1 person out of 10 pays).
|
| I could charge more, but since I don't have the overhead of a
| large company, I can get by with less and my users get an
| extremely affordable product.
| adkadskhj wrote:
| You host the 128tick servers right? You can afford that on
| $5/m? I would have thought game servers cost more than that
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| They won't be playing 24/7, if you assume a paying user
| plays one match/hour per day on average you need 1/24th
| of a server per month/user.
|
| You can definitely get more than a few servers for
| $120/month
| [deleted]
| MaxLeiter wrote:
| Just wanted to say my friends and I had a fantastic time using
| Popflash 4-5 years ago to organize our ten mans. Thank you!
| switz wrote:
| Well cheers. That's honestly such a pleasure to hear,
| especially on HN of all places. So glad you had a good time.
| mraza007 wrote:
| Hey what tech stack powers your project, I would love to know
| switz wrote:
| Mostly normal stuff; node.js, postgres, redis, some react,
| Sourcemod/c++ for the in-game management. Nothing overtly
| fancy nor magical.
| mraza007 wrote:
| Nice, Thanks for responding, let me know if you are looking
| to hire on short term contract
| urlwolf wrote:
| We do! (and are hiring; although we are tiny!)
| https://datascienceretreat.com/
| Bedon292 wrote:
| You mention you are hiring, but don't seem to have a jobs page
| that I can find. I am not looking for a new job, was just
| curious, but couldn't find anything.
| colesantiago wrote:
| comma.ai, a profitable AI startup that has an open source
| autonomous driver assistance system, called openpilot, a bit like
| Tesla Autopilot.
|
| they previously raised money, and is now recently profitable.
|
| very rare in this space.
| stickmangallows wrote:
| I interviewed at a company under Hall Labs
| (https://halllabs.com/). All hourly paid employees with no
| benefits. Not certain about their management or meeting handling
| though.
| ews wrote:
| Craigslist has (had?) no deadlines and no (formal) meetings.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| Speaking of long shots, I'm looking for exactly this setup with a
| Clojure(script) stack.
|
| The alternative is to build what you want, that has been my
| current plan. My only problem is that I want to make everything
| open source, and have no idea how to monetize my work.
| ignoramous wrote:
| You'd want to survey companies that investors like
| https://indie.vc, https://earnestcapital.com, and
| https://tinyseed.com invest in.
| pickle-wizard wrote:
| Thanks for asking this.
|
| I recently took a job with $MEGACORP after 5 years with start
| ups. I forgot how much $MEGACORP likes meetings. I found myself
| thinking about how gumroad has no meetings. I asked myself the
| same question as the OP.
| dbrueck wrote:
| Similar experience here - lotsa years at startups, then
| something worked out great and part of the deal was I had to
| join $MEGACORP for a couple of years. I left as soon as my time
| was up, and a big part of it was due to the absurd amount of
| meetings.
|
| Now back at another startup (10 people), we have no meetings
| other than a 20 minute Monday call for some sync-up that
| otherwise doesn't occur naturally. It's wonderful.
| blackrock wrote:
| The worrying thing about a 10-person startup is their lack of
| money.
|
| And possibly their unproven business model. Which can lead to
| managers making petty decisions about money and individual
| worth.
|
| Since not every 10-person startup becomes the next Google.
| Instead, most of them becomes the next Froogle, that probably
| shouldn't have existed to begin with.
| dbrueck wrote:
| Yeah, but that's orthogonal to the question at hand, no?
|
| Sure, startups aren't for everyone, just like big
| corporations aren't for everyone. For me, working for a
| /particular/ startup is unstable and risky, while working
| for startups generally has been extremely stable. Other
| people find them too risky, and that's fine.
|
| Some people love the perceived stability of a large
| company. OTOH, big corps are known to do across the board
| RIFs, independent of how well a particular division is
| doing. Or killing off a whole department on what seems like
| a whim. YMMV.
| pickle-wizard wrote:
| Stability is why I took the job at $MEGACORP.
|
| In the past 3 years I haven't worked a full year due to the
| companies I worked for going out of business.
|
| $MEGACORP isn't all bad. The pay is about the same, but I
| have much better benefits. For the first time in 5 years I
| have a 401K.
|
| I've decided that I'm not going to work for another
| startup, unless I'm a founder. That way I have enough
| potential upside to make it worth the risk.
| war1025 wrote:
| > The worrying thing about a 10-person startup is their
| lack of money.
|
| I work at a company this size. We've almost gone under
| quite a few times. We're still here. It's an interesting
| way to live. It's certainly not for everyone, but you get
| an enormous amount of influence and autonomy. The pay isn't
| "great", but I make enough that my wife can stay home with
| our three kids and the numbers in the bank account just
| keep going up.
|
| Of course, a lot of that is lifestyle decisions, but
| working at a small company is a lifestyle decision as well.
| whymauri wrote:
| Interesting... I went from MEGACORP to startup, only for the
| startup to have, literally, an order of magnitude more
| meetings.
| city41 wrote:
| I think it depends on the company. I've worked at two
| megacorps, one where meetings were absolutely nonstop and the
| other where I had about 2 a week.
| kondu wrote:
| Do you mind telling us which one each was?
| emdowling wrote:
| I'm at a $MEGACORP and actively work to reduce meetings as much
| as possible. I've found there to be far less need for meetings
| as my colleagues are more experienced than those at startups. I
| can trust them to execute, make smart decisions and escalate if
| need be. Startups tend to require a lot more hand holding (and
| therefore more meetings).
| tegiddrone wrote:
| Sometimes the meetings at $MEGACORP feel like useless ceremony.
| However I have worked with people who don't frikken read and do
| their own thing. For these people meetings are where you have
| to harvest their attention towards the
| cards/issues/wiki/specs/diagrams. Still not cool.
| pelasaco wrote:
| you dont have to be in a $MEGACORP to have tons of useless
| meetings. You just have to move to a company where the people
| are proud to do SCRUM by the book, with reviews and
| retrospective (each one 4 hours long)
| eastbayjake wrote:
| Hoping this is hyperbole, but if your reviews or
| retrospectives are actually four hours long, you should
| politely point out that these do not need to be more than an
| hour (and many mature scrum teams do both in an hour total)
| pelasaco wrote:
| it's unfortunately not a hyperbole. It takes us literally 4
| hours. Mostly the scrum master do it as a monologue. We all
| just zoom out and do other stuff. Last sprint i finished a
| lib that i was working on and deployed our code twice in
| production to avoid dying live on teams.
| trustfundbaby wrote:
| Why ... so you can be labelled a malcontent, non-team
| player, denied promotions and eventually managed out of the
| org at first opportunity? :)
| eastbayjake wrote:
| There is a way to give this feedback that is positive,
| collaborative, and highlights what a great team player
| you are -- the sort of thing that gets people promotions.
| But YMMV!
| fsdfgsfsdfsdfsd wrote:
| What happens if you simply decline to attend?
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I see startups having a crazy amount of more meetings than mega
| corps, especially the ad hoc ones.
| mediaman wrote:
| I recently became a supplier to a megacorp. They'll plop a
| weekly meeting on eight peoples' calendars like it's nothing. I
| tried sending out email summaries on various projects, so they
| could just refer to that instead of having meetings, but they
| decided they would then just read through the email summary
| during the meeting.
|
| I am discovering that I need to significantly increase prices
| to compensate for the additional navel-gazing inherent in
| working with a large company.
|
| It's one of the reasons I still remain bullish on the strengths
| of small companies: large ones just begin attracting people who
| apparently enjoy frittering their education and talents away on
| pointless zoom calls.
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| The zoom calls are the symptom.
|
| Meetings are a way of "doing something" without actually
| doing something. Most megacorps waste millions spinning their
| wheels on nonsense, but they're established and make money so
| it doesn't matter.
|
| A strong small team working on a specialized product will
| always win - that's why they get gobbled up eventually by the
| megacorps - there's no way they can compete with that
| internally.
| adflux wrote:
| It's economies of scale versus companies being too large to
| manage
| offtop5 wrote:
| As long as I can Bill my hours, I don't care all that much.
|
| I find smaller or more experimental companies to be much more
| unstable, and in my thirties I just want something stable and
| nice so I can save money and retire with a bit over a million
| in the bank at 40.
|
| Just want to be done with it
| fcardinaux wrote:
| I wish I had thought it that way when I was in my thirties.
| mmkos wrote:
| How did you think in your thirties?
| spurdoman77 wrote:
| This is sane way to think. There are awesome workplaces out
| there. Whether you have a shot getting employed there is
| another question.
| xienze wrote:
| > in my thirties I just want something stable and nice so I
| can save money
|
| Shoot, the article yesterday had me searching for how I can
| apply to Gumroad on top of my day job. They were claiming
| $50-250 per hour with as little as 10 hours a week. You want
| to save money? Have a stable day job and work at Gumroad for
| 10 hours a week. With such a short work week I can't imagine
| you'd be doing much more than simple bug fixes. I can swing 2
| hours of that a day.
|
| > retire with a bit over a million in the bank at 40.
|
| You might have to set your sights a little higher. That's not
| gonna carry you to potentially 85 years old.
| bravura wrote:
| If you retire at forty with a million in the bank, how do you
| make it if you live till 80?
| CabSauce wrote:
| Interest and live on <$50k/yr?
| bawolff wrote:
| A million in bank is like $35,000 a year in interest. Not
| an extravagant lifestyle, but certainly possible to live
| comfortably on that in a low cost of living area if you
| have low expenses.
| atwebb wrote:
| Where are you getting low risk 3.5% interest these days?
| ptmcc wrote:
| It's an average inflation-adjusted expected rate of
| return over time of a balanced portfolio, not a
| guaranteed rate every year. Some years might be 10%, some
| years might be -10%.
|
| Historically, about 4% is the safe drawdown rate. FIRE
| folks tend to be a little more conservative than that,
| though, because of the even longer time horizon involved
| with retiring earlier.
|
| Check out a tool like https://www.firecalc.com/ that is
| designed to run backtested simulations to see if your
| drawdown rate from your starting assets would
| historically be safe for your time horizon. The UI is
| clunky but the math is good.
| atwebb wrote:
| That's fair, I'm pretty familiar with FireCalc and the
| withdraw rates, I wasn't in the right frame of mind (are
| any of us?) but that makes sense.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| In the UK My ISA portfolio is yielding at 3.2 from when I
| last did the sums - this is ignoring any capital gains.
|
| Its a mix of some big Investment Trusts some wealth
| protection like Personal Assets RIT and Capital Gearing
| and a few more speculative bets
| CleverLikeAnOx wrote:
| I think the 3.5% number is not for low risk investing.
| Additionally, you would need to make something more like
| 5.5% to account for inflation. Still a fairly
| conservative number for investments in equities.
| ptmcc wrote:
| The oft-quoted 4% figure is accounting for inflation. The
| nominal average return of a balanced portfolio over time
| is more like 7-8%.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Move to a country where I can live off the 40k -> 60k a
| year an interest or whatnot.
|
| This basically means either Southeast Asia, or some parts
| of Latin America. Asian languages tend to be extremely
| hard, and it might be a lot easier to sort of blend in with
| the populace in Latin America. The last thing I want to do
| in my retirement is draw needless attention to myself.
| war1025 wrote:
| > Move to a country where I can live off the 40k -> 60k a
| year an interest or whatnot.
|
| You realize the median US household income is like $40k/
| year right?
| pvarangot wrote:
| With $40k a year you can live with the rich in some Latin
| American countries, if you can also spend 250k/350k on
| buying your own place in a high rise with private
| security or a gated community. You won't have access to
| Amazon and be able to buy all the top notch gear for your
| new hobbies in a week like as a tech worker in the US,
| but you can have a nice house with cleaning staff, a nice
| car or just take Uber or private cars everywhere, and do
| fancy dining two or three times per week.
|
| The median American household doesn't have all this
| luxuries.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Yeah but I'm not trying to struggle in America, so como
| estas ?
| hinkley wrote:
| Most people who get rich get that way by saving money.
| That means living on less money than you can make.
| Indefinitely.
|
| If you want to get sucked into every ad campaign that
| comes along, you'll end up broke even if you get a huge
| windfall. Which is in fact exactly what happens to many
| lottery winners, sports stars, musicians, child actors...
| groby_b wrote:
| You assume that a million generates $40k to $60k,
| inflation-adjusted, for the next 40 years?
|
| I suppose that's one assumption to make. You know that
| the last time the US GDP grew more than 4% was back in
| 2000, right? And 2010 worldwide? Both with a continued
| downward trend since at least the 60's?
|
| (This obviously doesn't preclude >4% ROI, but that in
| turn means increasing income inequality, and at some
| point, there's a price to be paid for that)
| edoceo wrote:
| It's not about GDP, it's about Equities - eg: SPX which
| averages like 10% growth over last 30 years or something.
| Getting 4% off $1M isn't that hard at all. And with $1M
| you may be able to get some portion to work higher
| yields.
| kingnothing wrote:
| You can also live just fine off that amount in most
| American cities. $40k is basically $2,500 / mo after tax.
|
| In the Atlanta area for example, there are plenty of nice
| 2-3 bedroom houses for $200,000 or even less, which puts
| your mortgage at $1,000 / mo. That leaves $1,500 / mo for
| a car, utilities, and food, which is plenty doable. Rent
| out a room if you want to for more income.
| watermelon59 wrote:
| Health and dental insurance can be a huge cost though.
| kingnothing wrote:
| Healthcare can definitely be expensive and you'll need a
| plan for that until Medicare kicks in.
| war1025 wrote:
| I have a dream that someday America will get its head out
| of its ass and decouple health insurance from employer
| benefits.
|
| That would change the employment calculus for a ton of
| people.
| gnicholas wrote:
| How does this work if you have kids that will be going to
| college when you're ~50? That is, how do you know at 40
| how much you'll want to spend on your children's college
| education?
| mooreds wrote:
| > That is, how do you know at 40 how much you'll want to
| spend on your children's college education?
|
| It's hard to figure how much to save for kids college,
| because the spectrum is so wide. For example, do you plan
| for the worst case scenario (ivy league, no scholarship
| or out of state state school, no scholarship) -- $250k
| and climbing.
|
| Or the best case scenario (they take tons of ap courses
| and courses at local cc until transferring their jr year
| to in state school with full tuition scholarship) --
| ~$20k?
|
| Maybe try to aim for the midpoint? It's a hard problem.
|
| What I've read that mad sense to me, though, is that kids
| can borrow for college and you can't borrow for
| retirement (reverse mortgage notwithstanding).
| Bedon292 wrote:
| If you have kids, and want to help pay for their college
| education, a 529 plan or other custodial type account
| (UTMA/UGMA) would be a good choice. I would not want to
| take that out of the funds you are trying to live on.
| kingnothing wrote:
| Either you keep working to pay for their education, or
| you tell them to take out loans like most families, or
| you live in a state that pays for education. Georgia, for
| example, has the HOPE scholarship which pays for kids
| with good grades to attend public colleges at low or no
| cost as long as they keep their grades up.
| offtop5 wrote:
| At least my plan assumes I won't have a family. Kids make
| this nearly impossible. While I can up and move to Costa
| Rica tomorrow( assuming their wasn't a pandemic ) , you
| can't exactly just tell your wife and kids to pack it up(
| and expect to remained married).
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| A reasonable investment portfolio ( _in the US_ ) will
| reliably generate enough inflation-adjusted growth on
| average that this will afford a modest lifestyle in most
| parts of the US. $35-50k/year (today's dollars) without
| much risk, which is a fairly average wage. It is only
| unrealistic if you live in an expensive city with a lavish
| lifestyle.
|
| Anecdotally and ironically, many tech people that do this
| end up making a loads of money _after_ they "retire". They
| don't sit on a beach and do nothing. The ability to be
| highly selective about what they work on, and to defer any
| compensation, often leads them to invest all their time on
| software projects they are passionate about, which not
| infrequently ends up throwing off a large amount of
| incidental income even though that wasn't the objective per
| se. I like the term "recreationally employed" to describe
| this lifestyle. I know many engineers who ended here and
| some of them make more money "retired" than they did work
| the 9-to-5 grind at a big company.
| CleverLikeAnOx wrote:
| There is an idea called FIRE (Financial Independence /
| Retire Early). The first half is having enough money to not
| need to earn again, so you are not dependent on work or
| others. Once this is achieved, then you can retire early if
| you would like.
|
| The conventional wisdom in this community is that if you
| invest a sum of money in equities, you can withdraw a
| certain percentage annually without ever running out of
| money. That is, you mostly live off of the growth of your
| investments. Generally, 4% (inflation adjusted) is
| considered a safe withdraw rate. So if you have a million
| dollars, and you can live off of 40K a year or less
| indefinitely, then you can retire.
|
| Obviously this is a simplification and there are more
| considerations. Let me know if you have any questions. This
| is a topic I am passionate about and happy to give my 2
| cents on.
| war1025 wrote:
| I'm pretty well versed in the whole FIRE thing, and find
| myself more or less on that path.
|
| One conclusion I've come to is that after people "retire
| early", they almost never actually stop making money. It
| just tends to end up being more entrepreneurial stuff
| that they make money off.
|
| You don't "have to" work, but you "might as well", and
| all the sudden you may even find yourself in a more
| lucrative gig than you started with because you changed
| your focus and found a niche you can fill nicely.
| offtop5 wrote:
| I'd love to have free time to pursue other hobbies like
| working on video games, and making music. If I had the
| million dollar cushion, and then maybe I only made like
| $500 or $600 a month with my hobbies that would be
| awesome.
|
| Life is too short to do anything else in my opinion.
| unless I guess I end up with a family but that's not
| really in my plans
| stocknoob wrote:
| Yep. The type of person who gets a high-paying enough job
| (and has the discipline) to save $1M usually doesn't have
| trouble getting extra work if they want. But now there's
| no pressure, they can take "fun" gigs that couldn't have
| supported them previously (musician, librarian, teacher,
| etc.).
| hinkley wrote:
| Wooing a client isn't so different than pursuing a
| romantic partner in this way. When you don't 'need'
| something from someone, you are easier to be around. Your
| personal qualities aren't being overshadowed by your
| agendas.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I work for an ultra mega corp and honestly the amount of
| meetings would be comical if it wasn't so monotonous. The
| recent meetings have centered around increasing capacity, I've
| tried to explain that less meetings would give folks more time
| to produce value, nobody gives a shit so I stopped caring too.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| I have come to the conclusion that those kinds of meetings
| have nothing to do with exchanging information, finding
| solutions, or anything remotely related to _creating value
| for the customer (tm)_.
|
| Though I have yet to figure out what they're _really_ about.
|
| An easy way to pass the time? People relying on them to
| validate their salary? The only way a weasly middle manager
| can get himself heard? Cargo culting? Probably a mixture of
| all and more.
| cedricd wrote:
| I know this isn't a fun answer but in my experience it's
| just bad process and culture
|
| Basically nothing can be done / no decisions made without a
| meeting. Why? Because X number of people feel they need buy
| in. If you don't get them onboard and give them a chance to
| voice opinions you'll be pushing uphill to get work done.
|
| And meetings are actually a fairly effective way to do that
| -- you have a group's attention for a set amount of time.
| If you just sent a doc then you'd have to follow up, etc.
|
| That sort of becomes the default, so there are meetings
| even when that sort of buy in isn't necessary, bc meetings
| are just how things get done.
| jameslk wrote:
| I run a small B2B service/product hybrid company, DevisedLabs,
| focused on ecommerce in a somewhat similar fashion. Our team of
| 12 is entirely freelancers, from engineering, to project
| management, to sales. We only hold meetings when necessary (we
| have no standups) and meetings are generally <= 2 people since
| it's usually for a specific purpose. We coordinate mostly over
| Trello and Slack, and meetings are reserved for demos or
| complicated questions. We use OneNote and Notion for company-wide
| knowledge, planning, and information tracking.
|
| Since everyone is freelancers, most work for other clients or
| have regular full-time jobs. Everyone has flexibility on hours,
| but we try to pick those who have overlap with the team,
| especially for those who need to interface with our clients. Some
| in our team prefer to travel around, others stay fixed in a
| location.
|
| Rates-wise, we don't prescribe a formula for what others should
| charge, nor do we usually try to negotiate anyone down. I believe
| everyone should make the decision of what their time is worth
| themselves. That is one of the biggest benefits of self-
| employment after all. Ultimately it comes down to what that time
| translates into value, so that's the lens we view it through.
|
| I would say it's worked well for us, although I do see the value
| in employment for our most dedicated team members. Those who are
| truly full-time should be given full-time employment I believe,
| since it better protects them (benefits, unemployment, etc).
| Others who want to have a freelance life should be allowed to do
| that too. We will likely be offering both options eventually.
| fsdfgsfsdfsdfsd wrote:
| Valve perhaps?
|
| 37signals probably.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| I'd be really curious to hear Basecamp's opinion on Gumroad,
| and how they'd compare and contrast their own experience with
| it (Basecamp is the new name of 37signals).
| chdaniel wrote:
| Jason Fried (CEO of BC) retweeted the Gumroad post and said a
| few things in a tweet
| ayewo wrote:
| Basecamp's CEO Jason Fried actually shared his thoughts in a
| tweet:
|
| _" Good read on how Gumroad experiments with work,
| structure, hiring, and compensation. Re: part time... Little
| known fact: I hired @dhh quarter-time (10 hours a week) to
| build Basecamp way back in 2003. That's all he had, and we
| made it work."_
|
| https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1347300851631542272
| asattarmd wrote:
| At what revenue would it start calling a full company rather than
| just a side-project?
|
| It's a little different for Gumroad because they started as a
| company with an office and became this, but for many side
| projects, they start out without meetings, without offices and
| remain that way earning a couple of thousand USD per month.
| Varqu wrote:
| Chipping in as the co-founder of a job board startup -
| https://swissdevjobs.ch
|
| We are:
|
| - 2 co-founders
|
| - 2 up to 4 people part-time as contractors
|
| - full remote, almost zero offline retreats
|
| - growing the user base around 10% MoM
|
| - all communication happens on our Discord server
|
| - bootstrapped, no founding
|
| It's not clear if this model will scale easily, but I can see us
| growing to at least 10-15 people this way.
| sparkling wrote:
| How do you make money? Only from companies posting jobs?
| Varqu wrote:
| Yes, that's the most straight-forward model - companies
| paying posting the jobs.
|
| You could theoretically also serve some relevant ads
| (products or services for Software Engineers) but the
| conversion would be probably very poor.
| courtewing wrote:
| Elastic works similarly, though not to the extent that was
| described in that Gumroad post. It also varies a bit by team, but
| I've worked on many teams over the last 5.5 years here, so I have
| a decent perspective on what's normal and how things evolved to
| this point.
|
| Engineering is distributed around the world, so it happens in a
| highly asynchronous way centered around GitHub issues, the vast
| majority of which are in public repos. Slack and Zoom are used,
| but if they're used to make decisions, the recording is saved for
| others to consume and the decision is documented on GitHub.
|
| Meetings are discouraged, but not non-existent. To give some
| context, I'm a manager of two teams and this week I had 4.5 hours
| of meetings (including 1:1s), which is pretty normal. When I was
| an independent contributor on a single team, I often had weeks
| where I had a single 30 minute meeting.
|
| In practice today, I suspect an engineer at Elastic will spend an
| average of ~2 hours a week in a meeting, with a few spending a
| great deal more than that and others spending less.
|
| This culture is demonstrated top-down and has been a common
| thread from the early days, through the IPO, and continues today.
|
| Edit: We also have a general philosophy of features being done
| when they're done rather than when we reach some arbitrary date.
| This doesn't mean we don't have timelines (we have ~2 month long
| release cycles), but if we can pair down scope to make a release,
| we will, and if we can't do it then we'll just move the feature
| to the next release instead.
|
| We've codified a lot of the philosophy that feeds into this
| workflow here: https://www.elastic.co/about/our-source-code
| jatins wrote:
| What's the performance evaluation process(for promotions or
| otherwise) at Elastic like? At most big companies I have seen
| perf to be a major headache
| courtewing wrote:
| As with anything that is potentially contentious and involves
| humans, there's a lot of nuance here and breaking it all down
| into a couple paragraphs doesn't really respect the unique
| needs of everyone. I've worked with some amazing people that
| respond best to very informal processes around performance-
| based feedback, and I've worked with some equally amazing
| people that desire a relatively rigid and analytical process.
| I think we all try to do what's best for each person.
|
| That said, it's important that we do have guiding processes
| and principles here to ensure that everyone is being
| evaluated both fairly and effectively, so it's not like the
| wild west or something.
|
| Every "track" has levels with defined expectations in terms
| of the type of work they do, the impact they have, the
| interactions they have with teammates, others at Elastic, the
| community, etc. High performers would be folks that are at
| least meeting the expectations established for their level,
| which is where promotion comes in.
|
| Promotion is not necessarily role-oriented in the sense that
| you don't get promoted out of being an engineer into
| management or something like that, they are different
| parallel tracks. For example, I technically took a demotion
| to switch from a Tech Lead to an Eng. Manager role.
|
| Processes do vary a bit team by team, though they've become
| more consistent over time and are pretty similar now. This is
| how things work on my teams:
|
| I have 30 minute 1:1s with each person that reports to me
| every 2-3 weeks depending on their seniority. This is pretty
| informal, but the consistent face to face gives us
| opportunities to talk frequently about how things are going.
|
| Every quarter I do a longer review with each team member.
| This isn't super formal or anything, but it is more
| structured with a corresponding doc that I fill out in
| advance and that we both expand upon during our meeting.
| Nothing should be a surprise here as I give positive or
| critical feedback more regularly, but this is where we can
| really dig into aspects of their performance, rehash current
| expectations for their level and make plans with them for how
| to achieve their professional goals, whether it be promotion,
| type of work, transitioning to a different role, etc.
|
| The 6 and 12 month reviews are a little more comprehensive as
| I also include anonymous 360 feedback from peers and others
| throughout Elastic.
| zerr wrote:
| Do you also pay $10K/mo for a quarter-time dev role world-wide?
| courtewing wrote:
| Nope, I missed that part if it was in the Gumroad post.
| GGfpc wrote:
| Do you hire for non senior positions?
| courtewing wrote:
| We do, yeah. We include "target" seniority designations in
| the job post titles, so if it doesn't say "senior",
| "principal", etc, then it isn't a senior position. We also
| don't (for the most part) have requirements around years of
| experience, though in practice there's an obvious
| correlation.
|
| That said, at this very moment we happen to have a boatload
| of more senior positions available. There are a couple less
| senior ones though.
| mikek wrote:
| Doist (http://doist.com) works similarly.
|
| See https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/what-remote-work-looks-
| like... (paywalled) for a good description of it.
| joemanaco wrote:
| I run my company in a similar way. It's myself, three employees
| and a bunch of contractors. ( https://asylumsquare.com/team )
|
| We have an office, but everyone can work from where-ever he wants
| to (actually the freelancers are from all around the world).
| Since Covid hit we're operating 100% remote before most of the
| time we worked with 2 people in the office the rest of us
| remotely.
|
| Everyone works as much or less as he wants, can take days off
| whenever he feels like.
|
| We do have voice calls from time to time when it's appropriate,
| but in 99.9% only two people are involved and it usually happens
| when we have the feeling it would clarify faster as by
| asynchronous chat (for example when screen share is involved to
| demonstrate something). Actually I wouldn't even call it meetings
| because we mostly don't even setup a schedule, it just naturally
| happens (for example chatting about a specific topic, then
| deciding a call would be easier / faster).
|
| It works well for us, but I think it would be a lot harder if we
| were more people as we don't have anyone who organizes or manages
| the project and the people.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| My startup, Haekka (https://haekka.com) functions similarly. We
| don't deal with office politics and bullshit. We only have two
| FTEs (founders) and 3 contractors. We're 100% remote and have no
| plans on not being remote. My previous company that I sold was
| remote for 7 years. I don't believe in building software in an
| office.
|
| We're very transparent about our financial and business goals. My
| only scheduled meeting is a weekly dev sync that I do think is
| very helpful, but we don't do daily standups or daily calls. All
| comms are done through Slack, GitHub PR comments and Linear
| comments.
|
| I will likely be hiring a contract python (or full stack) dev in
| Q1 as well as a growth marketing position. Feel free to email me
| ryan@haekka.com
| recursive wrote:
| How do you avoid dealing with politics? A lot of people I've
| heard say "they don't do politics" are affected by it just as
| much as anyone else. They're just bad at it.
| [deleted]
| ryanSrich wrote:
| Everyone is hired for a specific job. The details of that job
| are explicit to both parties. Where there is ambiguity we
| call that out and set that expectation (ex: that this duty
| may change).
|
| This alone avoids a lot of the "not my job problem" or people
| trying to encroach on someone else's job. In turn, this
| reduces chances of conflict and politics.
|
| Additionally, we keep communication extremely focused on
| work. There are no slack channels for watercooling, there are
| no "get to meet each other" zoom calls.
|
| We (including founders) log on, we do our work, we
| communicate (via text) about issues, wins, concerns,
| questions, and we log off. There's no expectation of working
| hours (save for that weekly dev sync I mentioned).
|
| We also don't preset deadlines. I'm not going to sit here and
| say we don't have target dates, because we do. But it's an
| explicit function of engineering to determine the scope of a
| feature and to assign it an effort. Based on that effort I
| can then forecast when it might get done. But there's no
| deadline. This is just good engineering practice and also
| helps us improve our code quality over time. We do not share
| forecast completion dates with users and customers. The most
| we will say is that we're working on something. No etas.
|
| We've also built in a culture of shipping constantly.
| Shipping a feature or a release isn't some big event. I might
| log on in the morning and see that a feature was finished
| over night (including final QA, etc.) and I'll just release
| it. This takes a lot of pressure off development. Because
| we're so comfortable releasing, even if there was an issue,
| we could just roll back. I've had to do this twice now and it
| was a non issue. The release notes hadn't even been emailed
| to users yet, so no harm.
| skynet-9000 wrote:
| This sounds pretty awesome. I think that some of the office
| politics creep in not because of the projects that people
| are working on, but just because people actually interact
| on non-work things. This can be a really good thing in many
| cases (you spend a lot of time with these people, so it's
| good to have a cultural fit and hang out), but it can also
| be bad, because so much of your personal life can be
| wrapped up in people from work.
|
| This has less personal contact, and therefore the only
| politics will mostly be focused on work. As long as things
| are scoped tightly and you are self-motivated, this should
| work pretty well. But, you have to have your own social
| life, since you won't get it from work.
| dbrueck wrote:
| I don't know how others do it, but at companies I've started
| or where I otherwise have a say in things, (1) we don't have
| any titles and (b) during interviewing we weigh personality
| almost more than tech ability. If someone is generous, has a
| good sense of humor, open to feedback, is laid back but still
| driven, and seems to love building cool stuff for the joy it
| brings, odds are pretty good that they will have little
| interest in the contention & disruption of office politics.
|
| It doesn't completely eliminate politics but it comes pretty
| close. When it hasn't worked out, in most cases some coaching
| of people one-on-one has helped them improve, and in the
| other cases - where they seemed uninterested or unwilling to
| change, we just fired them.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > We don't deal with office politics and bullshit.
|
| Maybe you meant to say - you don't have office politics. If you
| are not "dealing" with it then you are creating a bigger
| problem.
|
| I believe politics are a side product of humans working
| together. It'll just be there. Just like eating causes you to
| fart.
|
| Related interesting read but looks good only on paper -
| https://hbr.org/2016/06/how-facebook-tries-to-prevent-office...
| dgellow wrote:
| What does FTE means here?
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| Usually Full Time Employee
| qeternity wrote:
| Full time equivalent.
|
| Basically it means one person.
| dgellow wrote:
| Thanks!
| dgellow wrote:
| I had the same question in mind when reading the other HN thread.
| I recently started doing contracting work and would like to try
| working with such a team.
|
| Just thinking out loud here, but that may be a good target for a
| niche job board? That's maybe already a thing.
| qntty wrote:
| You'll have to be specific. Work in what way?
| davish wrote:
| I believe he's referring to this article[0] which was discussed
| on HN yesterday.
|
| [0]: https://sahillavingia.com/work
| waterfowl wrote:
| this article about how gumroad works was at the top of the
| front page yesterday.
|
| https://sahillavingia.com/work
|
| discussion
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25673275
| tbran wrote:
| Just made a tiny job board for this: unaffixed.com
|
| Send new jobs to: jobs@unaffixed.com
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Not the same but a weird one is Gore. They've a flat structure
| and no managers.
| skynet-9000 wrote:
| Userify (https://userify.com) is similar; meetings are rare
| (except probably with customers). Most communication occurs in
| one-on-ones, with a strong bias toward the minimum number of team
| members for any project.
|
| Most team members are contractors, even those working on new top-
| secret products, which might be because the core team is small
| and based in Texas and most devs are geographically elsewhere. It
| does seem to take up some time to build trust on new commits,
| which is a bit discouraging at first, but reviews are usually
| within 24 hours. Pay is based on deliverables, not hourly or
| salaried, so you don't get paid for time spent learning or
| experimenting, but free training and classes.
|
| The core team seems a bit old school and conservative in tech
| choices (not much in the way of k8s, for example), and there's
| not much in the way of "team" tools like you might expect for a
| geographically distributed team, which seems to slow things down
| a bit and reduce communication velocity, but they're very
| responsive (this might be because it's a smaller, security-
| focused company). Also a rather complex 10-page NDA.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Most communication occurs in one-on-ones, with a strong bias
| toward the minimum number of team members for any project._
|
| Putting my best future prediction hat on, this means only a few
| people know what's actually going on. If the company grows
| there'll be competing antagonist efforts from different parts
| of the business. You'll start scheduling strategy meetings to
| avoid this because it's a waste of money, and that will drive
| away your early hires who joined because there was a culture of
| no meetings.
| skynet-9000 wrote:
| That's a good point and might eventually lead to inefficiency
| or looser team cohesion. Management reaction to strong growth
| probably feels more like Apple than Microsoft, but maybe with
| less angst ;)
| lostcolony wrote:
| Not sure how influential you are, but one thing I've
| noticed is that when meetings start to feel unproductive,
| its due to one of two reasons.
|
| The first is when you have NxM meetings. What does that
| mean? Well, you have, say, N people representing one
| interest, and M representing another. You put them all in a
| room together. This usually only happens when a decision
| has to be made, and it sucks (note: it's fine if you're
| just brainstorming, where no decision is being made). This
| is a great place for leadership to exist; if instead you
| take the lead from N, and the lead from M, you reduce it
| back to a 1-on-1 meeting, and then each of those
| individuals can go back to their teams with what was
| decided, and have 1xN and 1xM communication.
|
| The other instance is where that 1xN or 1xM meeting feels
| unproductive. Note the nature of these meetings - they are
| mostly informational. They're either getting information to
| inform a future decision (and possibly decide on what the
| team's position is depending on how egalitarian the org is;
| I still consider these an informational meeting, since then
| the leader is more a representative, and trying to find out
| what the group believes, in order to represent it
| elsewhere), or they're communicating that a decision has
| been made. These can likely be done via some asynchronous
| mechanisms rather than meetings, to avoid it feeling like
| an unnecessary meeting (and to have documentation of the
| information!). If it is done as a meeting, be aggressive
| with providing an agenda, and ensuring only members of a
| single team/department/etc, and ideally hierarchy level,
| are included. If you have more than that, you almost
| assuredly are having a meeting that is 1x(N+M+...), because
| you're including multiple groups. And those groups have
| different priorities, interests, etc, and at least part of
| your meeting is almost assuredly going to be boring and
| unnecessary for them.
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