Did you really say a good product will sell itself? Generally this is not true, especially for enterprise solutions. But, I'm happy to be proven false if you can provide examples
It's unfortunate he used those exact words, but you're also leaving out the greater context:
"A good product will sell itself without spending the billions on marketing. It’s so amazing that a startup that has not even spent ₦100,000 on marketing came for an investors meeting and was asking for ₦100 million to be spent on marketing for a 4-month duration."
His point is referring to these startups coming in asking for huge amounts of money without having spent even a small amount already. It doesn't make sense for an investor to put in $10 million if you haven't even put in $10 thousand.
> It doesn't make sense for an investor to put in $10 million if you haven't even put in $10 thousand.
That's not always the case, and it depends on the situation. If a startup founder is working for no salary and focusing fulltime on the startup, then money might be better in their pocket, than in the company. $10k could by the founder 6months working at the company. Sweat equity and opportunity cost are also important to consider. Just because a founder hasn't put up cash, doesn't mean they aren't also committed and taking a risk.
At our company code reviews are my way or the highway. Raising objections only gets you negative feedback. It's mostly for coding style, spaces, variable names.
You probably would be if you lived in SF. Since the available housing ratio to jobs is 1 to 3, they have effectively guaranteed that not all jobs can ever be filled. Great for the job supply!
Or NYC. Or another major urban area with plenty of tech jobs. Anecdotal but everyone I know here in tech (varying roles, skills, and levels of experience) gets plenty of recruiter spam. By contrast, I do know similar people who have had a tough time with the only difference being they're in a smaller market in the interior and are not willing to relocate.
I think location really matters a lot. Telecommuting has not made it irrelevant. There's strong network / market effects for an industry with frequent job hopping and frequent changing of company hiring needs -- employees want to be somewhere with a lot of employers and employers want to be somewhere with a lot of employees, so the top few cities end up taking the lion's share of the tech work.
If anything, easier communications maybe has made it easier for companies to just open up an office somewhere just because that place has a lot of prospective employees. Maybe in an earlier era slower communications with colleagues in other offices might have made this less attractive, but it's so easy now. E.g., tech companies starting in SV but then also opening up an Austin, Pittsburgh, London, Seattle, NYC office because there's plenty of prospective hires there. What you don't see them do much is also open a St Louis, Tampa, or Little Rock office. It's just not worth it.
DEFINITELY consider trying moving to a major tech hub, or just a bigger city at least, if you have persistently had a hard time finding a job locally.
Never tried but I think it could be an interesting experiment to temporarily change your LinkedIn location to SF and see how much it affects the recruit-o-spam numbers.
I do believe in paying for solid articles, but 29$ is about 2 orders of mag to Much. The paywall implementation is horrible too, I couldn't even Sign in with Facebook
I too was having paywall issues as well. Contacted customer support, and they said i didn't have the web access enabled for whatever reason. Enabled and problem solved. Might be worth contacting them.
It's theft. People don't explicitly agree to it. It's forced on you. And most taxes don't go towards the advancement of society. Advancement comes from the people and businesses.
No one follows you around to ensure you follow them.
Rest assured most people dont follow the laws they do know 100% of the time and better yet... No one knows 100% of the laws they are required to follow.
Yup. And, as vc dollars start drying up and companies get pressure to become profitable again, employers will figure out where to go: out of San Francisco.
So, my impression is that the companies that pay enough that you can actually afford to think about buying in SF are the large and profitable companies... from what I've seen, vc-dependent startups pay dramatically less.
Of course, most of those profitable company jobs are in the south bay, not in SF proper, but hell, if I could buy one of those mini-condos in sf for a quarter mill, I'd jump on it.
I'm trying to say that I'm not sure that the vc-dependent will have as much effect on the market overall as you say, unless the slowdown progresses to the point where it starts pulling down the big guys.
(which isn't impossible. someone put forth the theory that a lot of the highest-margin advertising dollars come from said vc-dependent firms, and if those went away, everyone would pay a lot less for advertising, which would dramatically effect the big, profitable employers around here. I would rate that theory as plausible, but not certain.)
They form the same labor market though. Fewer startups puts less pressure on the price for hiring engineers.
You don't have to many any assumptions about advertising dollars (the vast majority of which come from outside SV) to see how a startup slowdown will also have an impact on all engineering salaries.
> They form the same labor market though. Fewer startups puts less pressure on the price for hiring engineers.
Yeah. I guess two questions.
1. how much of the market for Engineers is vc-dependent startups? My impression is that they have an outsized PR footprint for the number of jobs there.
2. If I'm right that they get paid less, (which is my experience and belief, but I have no hard data to back up my assertion) are the engineers working at startups mostly just entry-level folks? (this is kind of my impression, or at least they seem to be way less experienced than folks you see at established companies, though again, I don't have hard data.)
I mean, inarguably, it will have some effect, but how much depends a lot on those two factors.
> 1. how much of the market for Engineers is vc-dependent startups?
Based on my inbox, half the hiring is from startups.
> are the engineers working at startups mostly just entry-level folks?
No. Startup compensation is certainly less cash, but it's also more variable. At better startups, you'll find plenty of senior engineers including ex-BigCo people.
Also keep in mind that for top engineers there's also the competitive option of founding a startup. If funding cools down substantially, then that prospect becomes much less attractive and companies have to worry less about retaining talent.
>Also keep in mind that for top engineers there's also the competitive option of founding a startup. If funding cools down substantially, then that prospect becomes much less attractive and companies have to worry less about retaining talent.
In my experience, If you are not an 'executive track' type; I mean, if you don't have both the contacts and the business skills, you are generally going to make a lot more money as an Engineer at a big company. I mean, like most technical people, I used to think I was a lot smarter than my boss. I mean, I maybe still think that, depending on what you mean by 'smart' - but I tried, and I can tell you that business is a complex thing that requires a completely different skillset, and after trying it? smart or not, it's something I'm terrible at, or at least if you compare the "what a big company would pay for the labor in" even to my raw revenue, I apparently destroy a lot of value.
And yes, yes, you partner with a business person! But... you know how there are 10x programmers? the difference in productivity of business people is way, way bigger than 10x. And just like hiring Engineers, it takes one to know one... I'd argue that it's even harder to hire a businessperson profitably, because negotiation and perception management are core skills for the businessperson.
I never said it was necessarily wise to start a startup. Having worked on my fair share, I quite agree that it's very difficult and you need very strong business skills.
However, people (including very good engineers) are not rational and in boom times are attracted to the idea of founding a startup even if it's economically undesirable.
