I also encourage you to think carefully about your physical location. Think about proximity to tech jobs, family, quality of life, etc. After 10 years, chances are you may have acquired a spouse, in-laws, mortgage, kids, and friends. It becomes much much harder to move to a new location for career opportunities. So choose while you still have freedom of motion!
Readit News_ah commented on When banks call to verify your details how do you know the call is legitimate? · Posted by u/blurr
The only time I saw this handled correctly, and I forget the company now, worked like this:
They would call you and then want to verify themselves to you. You would be asked to open the companies app. The app noticed you were in a support call and had a link at the top taking you to the support section of the app. The caller would then read you a code you would type in and it would let you know if the call was legit.
This can be easily attacked with two scammers executing a MITM attack. One calls the bank to impersonate you and steal your money, the other calls you to get your app code.
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_ah commented on How to Scale a SaaS Startup from $1M to $100M ARR Without Investor Funding? · Posted by u/pajuhaan
> Whatever it is, find the GENUINE thing that makes your story super unique and use that to attract good employees for less cash.
That's called emotional manipulation. Pay people what they are worth.
Not manipulation but a recognition of reality. Mission is worth something to people. Different amounts for different people, but not zero .
Why do game developers get paid less, on average, than someone doing boring business software? Because people want to make games. You have to pay someone more to do boring work. "I build games" is part of the compensation package just as much as a paycheck or healthcare benefits.
As a startup you can't always choose your cash flow. But you can choose your mission. All else being equal, you should choose an exciting mission that attracts better talent.
_ah commented on How to Scale a SaaS Startup from $1M to $100M ARR Without Investor Funding? · Posted by u/pajuhaan
You need to watch your CAC Payback Period very very very closely. This is the thing that kills otherwise successful SaaS companies... they are profitable long-term but bankrupt short-term, and end up needing to scrape up funding with terrible terms to bridge that gap.
All customers will cost you something on the front end, even if it's just time. That time is money. How long does it take to earn enough profit to pay that back? Higher margin and lower operation cost --> faster payback period --> ability to onboard customers faster.
Stated differently: if 10M new customers walked through your door tomorrow, could you onboard and retain them immediately? Probably not. Determine your new customer flow rate and gear your sales + advertising activities to hit that rate. Then you can add more business capacity and continue to scale.
One more thought: as you scale, how can you lower your employee cost? People talk about remote hiring, and that's an option, but there's also another shortcut: mission. People will take less money for the same work if they're excited about the mission. Mission IS compensation. What makes a good mission? Maybe you're focused on minority-owned small businesses. Maybe you're offering a chance for developers from non-traditional backgrounds to grow. Maybe you employ ex-cons. Maybe you're trying to launch a rocket to Mars. Whatever it is, find the GENUINE thing that makes your story super unique and use that to attract good employees for less cash.
I have always thought the best solution is strong encryption, plus weak encryption.
Every user has their data encrypted with a unique, zero-knowledge, weak key. Then it's encrypted again by the service provider with a strong key.
When the government shows up with a warrant, they get the strong key. But the weak key is known only to the user, not the service provider. So now the government has to go spend CPU time to brute force the weak key.
Economics enforces good behavior. Governments with lots of resources can afford to break into any single user's data. But they can't afford to break into EVERYONE'S data and go fishing. It's the same as hiring detective to do a stakeout... you can follow anyone but you can't follow everyone.
_ah commented on A day in the life of a Walmart manager wsj.com/business/retail/a... · Posted by u/impish9208
Making 500-700k at a FAANG right now.
Money certainly makes me worry less, not complaining.
I still feel like a cog in a machine.
If anything, it further isolated all the problems in my life that money could never really solve.
Meaningful friendships, dating, self-control and discipline, self-esteem.
Before, I could go by telling myself the story that "if only I had X amount of income, I'd be happy".
Now, I don't have that excuse any more.
I stare at the mirror, still see the same person, and realize that no amount of money will help.
A nice problem to have I guess, but problems that have plagued me my entire life.
"You don't seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help."
-Jean Kerr
Anecdote time: My great grandmother lived to be 102 and never had a cavity. Kept all her teeth to the end.
One time, an orderly who thought she was just being senile tried to reach into her mouth to take out her teeth (thinking she had dentures). My great grandmother bit that person; hope they learned not all old people are senile!
I’m 40% of the way there. No cavities and rave reviews from my dentist. I brush—-best case —-once a day.
I’d not be surprised if it’s a genetic lottery of tooth enamel, tooth size (small) and mouth biome.
I'm very similar. I have excellent oral health... brush 2x/day, don't floss. Two interesting datapoints:
1. I changed jobs a few times, and for various reasons I neglected to see a dentist for 10 years. When I finally went back, had perfect oral health and no cavities. My hygienist still remembers me because this event was so far outside her experience + expectations.
2. My wife had "normal" tooth decay problems throughout her life, until we started dating, at which point she's had no further cavities. ;)
To answer the normal questions: I don't do anything particularly special with my diet except a general avoidance of sweetened drinks - no soda pop, no sweeteners in my coffee.
If anyone wants to swab my mouth and pay me a small licensing royalty for commercialization please get in touch. Heh.
_ah commented on Two Thirds of American Kids Can’t Read Fluently scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/LinuxBender
The author wrote a piece of software she thinks does a better job of teaching reading skills. The article is just an argument that people should use her software, and complaint that because it's not phonics nobody will buy it. This article is more sales than content.
I actually worked on Office performance many years ago. We did a lot of very clever stuff to improve the product, even to the point of optimizing the byte ordering on disk (spinning rust) so that the initial boot would be faster.
That said, it always felt a bit like a losing battle. The goal was "make Office not get slower". It's very hard to convince app teams that their new shiny abstraction or graphics object is actually the reason everything is worse, and it's even more challenging when there's no direct impact- just a broad increase in system memory pressure.
Typically, perf isn't a few bad decisions. It's a very large number of independently reasonable decisions that add up to a bad result. If the team loses that discipline for even one moment then it's very very difficult to fix. I wonder if my former team still exists or if they've all been reassigned elsewhere.