I changed Caps Lock to Control, which is extremely helpful. Especially since on the Macbook keyboard, it's tough to reach down and hit the Control button without accidentally hitting Function instead.
Super annoying. Very first thing I did when I got my MacBook was install KeyRemap4MacBook (http://pqrs.org/macosx/keyremap4macbook) to switch Control and Fn.
I've been an early employee / only programmer in a startup in the past, in which the founder said the exact same thing -- once we get to "revenue neutral," you'll get "a big share of equity."
It won't happen. They only said that to keep a carrot in front of you for a little while longer. If the company ever gets to revenue neutral, their idea of a "big share" will suddenly change. After all, why give a programmer a significant chunk of equity once the company is making money? That equity is suddenly worth something!
If you don't already have equity, you're not likely to get any. And it sure sounds like you deserve a significant amount of equity given how early you are and the risks you're taking; if you wait to negotiate how much equity you get until after the risk has gone down, you'll get a lot less equity. And that's if you get any at all.
Yep. No big slice of the pie for you. Actually, what they'll do is give you a crumb that fell off the pie and make you wait 4 years before you can eat it.
Good point on vesting. Chances are that your vesting would start when they start giving you equity (if they eventually do). Even if they were to give you the same amount it's not fair to you to have to wait a couple extra years to finish vesting.
The risks you're taking right now will also look a lot less once the company gets to revenue neutral. "we made it, so it wasn't that risky after all…" it'll be easy for them to negotiate down at that point.
Thanks for the experience based insight. I've had that nagging worry all along.
Part of me has wanted to be a bit more trustworthy as they've shown themselves to be very friendly people -- I regularly go to bars with the CEO outside of work, the COO and I share interests and talk about them/engage in them (being vague here), etc. But I think your point is pretty clear and well thought out. And pretty much not arguable. Thanks for that.
I couldn't agree more, and add one to the folks who've been in the "when we become revenue neutral". The funny thing is that in my case, the entire company bought into the founder's line on that (well, only about 12 people), because none of us had done a startup before and we didn't know better. In any case, that's not how it works in the startup world. There's a reason why over the years, companies adopted vesting schedules.
edit: I should add that in my case, the stock options were left out more out of ineptness than maliciousness. Either way it's a bad sign. The company imploded after a year and a half, but not before one of the employees mentioned the options in a disgruntled tone. In short, we wondered if the founder really cared about our contribution.
I've been promised stock options that never materialized too. If it ain't on paper it don't exist, and if your boss is truly honest he won't pretend that it does.
I agree this guy should be looking for other work, but disagree that working relationships are always inherently manipulative.
The big problem here is the bloated management structure, pre-launch vacations and failures to meet targets, all of which are strong signs the decision makers in the company are bad at their job. This implies that decisions about this person's future compensation and role in the company will be made by a committee that does not understand his value. I think that is the problem more than anything else.
This is not a healthy working relationship - he is being manipulated. The equity participants are on vacation while the sole employee does all the work because they've made vague, non-specific promises that someday maybe he too can join them.
I paid mine off within about two years after graduating, but later learned that doing so wrecked my credit. (The credit score people want to see a long record of payments, not someone who quickly pays off debts in full.) I felt that it was better to pay them off NOW, rather than pay 10x as much over the course of decades.
I'm sure if you have a credit card or something, you wouldn't have to worry about that.
It's probably more accurate to say that the loan you took and paid back was insufficient to establish a high credit rating due to insufficient history, rather than "wrecking" existing good credit.
Right, I also paid off my loans within two years, and it doesn't seem to have affected my (very good) credit rating negatively. I've also had a credit card in my name (with my dad as guarantor, at first) since I was about 16 -- and he has sterling credit. That helps a lot.
Unbelievable. I have never bothered to check my credit score, as I can't bear the thought of forking over even more money to that crooked industry. If what you say is true though, mine must be terrible as well. And here I thought acting responsibly and paying off my debts in a timely manner would be looked on favorably.
the entire point of a credit score is to measure how likely the lender is to get a lot of money from you.
It makes sense that deadbeats have low credit score, however, it also makes sense to lower the rating of someone who pays it off fast, thereby causing you to not gain as much money as if they had waited 10 years to pay you off.
The "credit score" is important but when a good lender is evaluating the risk of a potential borrower, they won't rely on a mere score they'll consult the actual credit history.
A credit history is basically a record of loans and payments. If you're late on a payment, long enough for your lender to report it to a credit agency, then they will show up on that history.
In this case: paying back a $20,000 loan in 2 years is impressive but doesn't really say much about your ability to pay back $300,000 over 30. So yes, it might have been marginally better to pay back the $20,000 over 10 years. If you're going to loan someone $300,000 to buy a house, you want to see data that the person is capable, organized, and diligent enough to pay it back. People paying back mortgages in 2 years is probably not a serious problem for most banks.
Do you want a high credit rating, or do you want money in your pocket?
If you don't need to borrow money, then you don't need a credit rating. In this day and age, a house is no longer a given (since they have proven to be extremely poor investments at times), so you don't necessarily "need" a mortgage anymore. If that's your situation, then your credit rating means a lot of nothing. You don't need a good rate on your mortgage. You need cash in your pocket.
I ordered the original ZenPad, before learning that it was essentially a scam. After I placed the order (along with others, I'm sure), they delayed the shipment date by several weeks, putting it after the 45-day return limit for Paypal (they required payment via Paypal).
After discovering this, I complained to Paypal who promptly canceled my order and returned my money. Enso has repeatedly had problems with having their Paypal account restricted because Paypal considers them a scam.
Since then, Enso has sent out numerous emails whining about people accusing them of being a scam, citing such "evidence" as the fact that their Paypal accounts regularly get restricted, their website doesn't really work, nobody has ever seen any of their products in person, their alleged manufacturers claim never to have heard of them, etc. These complaint emails are invariably stuffed to the gills with misspellings and poor grammar, and each time they send one I received 22 copies of it.
So, while this hardware _looks_ kind of cool, I am not going to preorder it. And I won't buy anything from them until they actually manage to ship something.
Because staying on point isn't a civil rights issue, jackass. This is why most blogs aren't considered real journalism and require, as Jobs said this week, "oversight" to be considered fully legit.
If Walt Mossberg suddenly digressed into his favorite movie or what he likes for dinner while he's reviewing a product, I would call that unprofessional.
So what it means is people like Gruber are pseudo-professional journalists who are mixing amateurish diary entries about their personal life and topics they don't know about along with the commentary that actually brought them alot of hits in the first place.
And don't even get started about "free". Because it's not subscription but he gets paid thousands through advertising, but I'm not "paying for it"? Just like more legit journalists do. And if something's free I can't complain I suppose...
"Gruber continually comments about topics unrelated to why people are reading his blog. It's like, great dude, you like Stanley Kubrick. Great dude, you're a liberal. Great dude, you like baseball. No one gives a fuck! Write about apple and tech. DF is too popular to digress and distract into a personal blog like it still has only a few thousand hits a day."
An epic fail col_kurtz because you were overly snide and because you failed to see the elucidation to your gripe within your own missive.
"Because staying on point isn't a civil rights issue, jackass" ... not only vapid, but again, anomalous. If staying on point is of no consequence why get soooo perturbed about it?
Does Gruber randomly digress during a product review? I personally have never noticed any such skylarking, besides, even if he has occasionally or even if he did habitually, so what? that would be his MO and thus would partially explain why you either enjoy his discourse or not, evidently you don't.
"most blogs aren't considered real journalism".
"people like Gruber are pseudo-professional journalists"
"legit journalists do" (as in get paid?? I think??)
It is necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff, obviously, just because a writer is paid to write does not imply that that writer is good (look up the word "good" in a dictionary as it covers a lot of ground, seriously look it up) and just because a writer is not paid does not automatically deem them to be bad (see dictionary for "bad")
OS X, 2 monitors. 8 Terminal windows, 2 fullscreen MacVim windows (with vim running the NERDTree and Buffer Explorer plugins).
I do all my Java/Flex/Ruby/Python development like that, and I think it works great. I've written code generators to give me Java or Flex classes as needed, without having to write much boilerplate.
Just do what feels most comfortable, and make small changes as needed to make it better.
I take Damage Control Master Formula from Primal Nutrition; in the last six months I've lost about 30 pounds, find myself considerably less hungry than I used to be, and have a lot more energy than I did before. (That all may also be related to the fact that I switched to a high-protein/low-carbs diet at the same time.)
Primal Nutrition also offers Omega 3 supplements, which I also take. I have not had the rancidity problem.
The same is true of most people who use email, but email still wouldn't have become as widespread as it is today if it weren't interoperable with other email servers.
