We're you willing to walk away if you didn't get what you wanted? Or were you just hoping they would capitulate? IMHO, The key to negotiating is knowing where your red line is, and being willing to walk away if you don't reach it.
Startups also have more non-cash options. E.g. they can offer more than 4 weeks of vacation, unlike many enterprise companies. As a CEO, when I gave people 6 weeks of real vacation, they would never leave, since they cannot get that at bigger companies in the US. (We also stongly encouraged them to use their vacation, because a healthy work-life balance is better for the company.) Startups also have more flexibility on WFH, travel options, and other non-cash benefits like providing more authority over your schedule and tasks. They are typically strapped for cash, unless they are not actually startups anymore because they raised $100M, and just like the moniker.
I'm working at a mid-size company, c. 5,500 employees. We have unlimited vacation (for US employees). I have taken about 6 weeks every year with no issues. I made sure to check that this was okay before accepting the offer, because unlimited can also mean "no one ever takes vacation".
The problem with unlimited vacation is that the majority of engineers never have the guts to ask for it, just like they don't know how to negotiate. Unlimited vacation is a benefit for the company not the employee. It avoids taxes and complications due to carryover constraints.
Unlimited vacation is in no way the same thing as 6 weeks of actual vacation. Look into it a bit more. You'll see that unlimited vacation is really just a scam. In your case it's worked out. Actual vacation days are tracked and part of your salary. For example, if you leave, you are entitled to the wages of your remaining untaken vacation days. Unlimited vacation is a favor that your manager is granting. The company is not obligated to grant your request. You have no legal right to take the days off as you do with real vacation.
I do understand the difference, thanks. I think the degree to which it's a scam depends on the employer. Some say they have unlimited vacation and then the work culture discourages using it. Fortunately, that's not the case where I work.
The other benefit of not-unlimited is having it paid out when you leave. But if I had 6 weeks a year PTO, I'd just use it all anyway, so the part where it gets paid out isn't a big deal to me.
What's going to happen? Maybe it will help make the LLM better at code gen, and help everyone. I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of code that have disappeared into the void of history. It would have been nice if all that hadn't been lost.
If I had to guess, the reason WebGPU is not implemented in Linux is because nobody is paid to add features to Linux. This means that new features are delayed by several years. WebGL is old, and well supported. WebGPU is newer, and has less support.
Google cares about Chrome Linux support and pays people to work on it, for two reasons. One is Chrome OS, and the other is that most Google engineers use Linux desktops for work.
If only it was exponential in the beginning, as word-of-mouth spreads. Sigh. The reality is that you need to claw and scrape your way to your first customers. The numbers vary depending on whether your product is b2b, consumer, or more niche, but the first customers are the hardest. You rarely get word-of-mouth in the beginning. Instead, it comes much later, typically after a long period of slow growth as you learn more about your customer's workflows and problems and adjust the product to get closer to PMF.
Or, O(n^2) companies are founded and run by people motivated solely by making lots of money, while O(n) companies are there for multiple reasons: passion for the topic, making employee's lives better, and helping their customers solve problems. Though those motivations exist at O(n^2) companies too, they are in the shadow of making money. While, at O(n) companies, money is also essential, but it exists to support the other goals. A slight shift in priorities can make all the difference.
Or, really, to say the unsaid bit out loud: there are lots of important considerations when taking a job. The author seems to assume that money is the only driver, when, for many top candidates, money is not their primary motivation. The ability to plan well and thereby reduce stress is a good measure of the management experience. Other non-cash incentives tend to be given out more readily at well-run non-enterprise companies, including remote work, longer vacations, and more strategic control, to name just a few.
I can say that for me, at some point, you just really want a team with good vibes and low BS.
I took a 20% pay cut 3 years back and moved from one startup to another because the vibes were better with an older founding team. It was fantastic and we built some amazing stuff at an incredible pace.
That startup recently folded and the original startup reached out and brought me back at 150% comp of the other startup. But day to day I don't enjoy it as much and the vibes just aren't the same with this crew.
My lesson: team vibes are severely underrated and sometimes even more money doesn't make it better.
Normally, with big-O notation, the goal is to reduce complexity. The author's wording kinda reverses that assumption only to "surprise" you in the end? A somewhat forced irony.
You learn about it in real analysis, but it's worth noting that in analysis you pretty much always use little-O, which is the one that makes the guarantee you need in that context.
> O(n) companies can’t afford to hire the absolute best talent.
O(n) companies tend to have more experienced founders and engineers in my experience. This is partly why they have "nice deadlines, clear SoW" and "understand their customers" enough to have PMF. The strength of their talent, experience and job networks often greatly outweighs the cash incentives, allowing them to hire top candidates. They do not just hire "to fit a job description" because, since money was tighter, they are super conservative about hiring, have always done the job they are hiring for themselves for a long time, and know exactly what they need. It is the O(n^2) companies that hire for job descriptions that fit the positions the VCs tell them they need. I think your experiential datapoints may be too sparse.
In my experience the heavily VC funded companies have a lot of very talented and experienced people, too.
But they have so much money and pressure to hire that they start dipping deeper and deeper into their candidate pipeline. They start lowering their standards to keep the employee count growing. This results in a mix of talented people trying to get work done and a lot of people who are good at interviewing and stretching the truth about their experience.
Every time I’ve been at a company like this, they tell themselves they’ll hire fast and fire fast to compensate. Then they never fire fast or at all, because nobody wants their little empire to shrink.
The vast, vast majority of companies don't need "the absolute best talent." Their product is a JSON interface to someone else's service. You don't need John Carmack to write that. Companies comically overestimate the level of talent they actually need, and let positions stay open for months, sometimes years, looking for that unicorn programmer they don't actually need, and passing up hundreds of candidates who would work out fine.
Experience != talent. Perhaps a better way to phrase it is that they hire the minimum needing to succeed in a well defined role. Startups aren't afforded this comfort as the roles are not well defined.
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