I do wish we could get rid of the "poaching" term for at-will employees. Either it's easier to bag trophy talent on the Google reserve than in the open field (in which case, good on those employees for improving their lot) or it's harder (in which case, good on Facebook and others for figuring out how to compete for them.) Either way, it's hardly a situation for which an external observer needs a judgmental descriptor.
It is simply competition over the girl and one factor is who can take her out for the more expensive dinners. (Another being who makes her laugh more.)
Come on, that's not fair. jonah's citing two ways men try to woo women (expensive dinners and making her laugh) and using them at as analogies for ways that companies try to woo employees -- either paying them better salaries or being a more rewarding place to work.
Actually I disagree - the poaching between FB and Google actually sets difficult precedents for pretty much everyone else.
You get FB enticing talent from google, and google giving raises to keep people and this makes all other companies at a disadvantage.
Further, paying college grads 100K+ sets them up to be prima donnas almost immediately.
Last, it is against the stance that when starting your own company, and taking on money, the VCs want you to take smaller salaries to show that you have skin in the game, that you're hungry etc... This makes it such that lifestyles become set and the likelihood of anyone willing to take less is not going to happen.
Over time - the overall market salary expectations increase, but now the available talent pool that is actually worth those salary levels shrinks - putting both talent and employers in a catch 22.
Every single entrepreneur in the valley should see Google, and even more, Facebook as nothing but their enemy (until they try to acquire you, that is)
Considering inflation over the past 20 years, $100K salary is not prima donna material. Engineers aren't overpaid; they are fortunate enough to have salary keeping pace with inflation.
Much of the rest of the educated working class is underpaid, with real wages falling, due to weak bargaining power against the aristocracy.
Based on your comment then, do you believe that the only thing anyone should be really interested in is stock?
Here is why I ask, my salary ranges between 110K and 175K depending on the project, position, how interested I am in it etc...
I am a very senior infrastructure deisgner and PM.
I am 36.
To say that someone out of college getting 100K as an expected base salary is not pirma donna material -- then you are setting them up to believe that, as an engineer, their salary expectations should grow over time to say ~350K.
However - nobody pays that.
We can argue that everyone is underpaid, sure, I feel underpaid. But the truth is that the only way I am going to get a comfortable windfall is to build / sell somethinf of my own.
The fact seems to be that the mean salary is fairly flat regardless of experience in general - but in the relatively more rare cases that people cash out, there i wild profit to be made.
This is clear in SV where it is far more common for people to make out on their stock -- but that clearly indicates at least some sort of bubble for silicon valley as compared to the rest of the country/world.
More to the point, people lack any domain experience.
Don't get me wrong: it's cool to be an awesome hacker... but if you don't know about anything outside of hacking.. chances are some neck-beard somewhere has already solved all of the problems of which you are aware.
> if you don't know about anything outside of hacking.. chances are some neck-beard somewhere has already solved all of the problems of which you are aware.
The other issue with domain knowledge, at least in my experience, is that it takes a significant effort to become sufficiently knowledgeable in a new domain to discover and solve the real problems faced by people working in that domain.
So it would be better to frame your question in a way which got the results in which you are actually interested.
Do you want to know which niches are being served by HN users? Ask. Do you want to know how to use SEO to turn your 10k net profit business into a 50k net profit business? Ask. Do you want to know if the majority of HN is starving wanna-bes? Ask.
This question in an exceptionally poor proxy for your real question.
The reason I asked is I asked a similar question a while ago, regarding "HN founders taking the leap from full-time to startup" and a lot of great responses about projects were posted, so I was hoping for a little inspiration for the most part and to see what new projects people are working on / succeeding with.
Well I'm currently full-time and I have had a hobby horse company slowly building up for the past year. It currently makes about £36k GBP in profit per annum, which means it's close to the point that with a tight belt I could jump.
The hardest thing for me isn't spotting or monetising the opportunity, but in balancing everything for a reasonable quality of life without burning myself out. That and discovering and handling the minefield that is running your own company and figuring our the finances, taxing, invoicing and asset management.
My company does community websites, forums and the like. I chose to start with areas I'm most interested in, but have avoided areas where there isn't an after-sales market. I aim making the lions-share of the revenue from affiliate schemes such as the eBay Partner Network, Amazon, and then Affiliate Window has a lot of companies running schemes specific to the communities I'm running.
I don't push the affiliates... I just aim to build the communities up to the point that enough conversation produces the links to used or new items that then produces revenue.
Once a community is successful, I look for another.
What I've discovered is that revenue earnings relate to purchase price of items, and that you can make significant money in high-value items sold through eBay. I would now recommend people look at cars, motor-homes, boats, etc sold through eBay, and then build affiliate based communities around those. Which means building communities who love and use those things, and affiliate earnings is a natural by-product of letting those people communicate.
There is a lot of money in affiliates with a low entry barrier so long as you can attract the people who will click on the links, and if you happen to have also attracted people who would post the links (you can auto-rewrite server-side to include the affiliate element) then you have a winner.
So that's what I do in my spare time (30 minutes per day), and it's wildly successful given the effort invested (I'm using off-the-shelf forum software).
I could even make this my job full-time, except I personally need more stimulus than just running a farm of community forums.
Also... beware the politics. If you can stick to a same-sex topic where people are unlikely to sleep with each other, you'll get a lot less politics.
It's a community forum, so you need to have something to say and to know that the gap you're targeting exists.
In two parts this simply means:
1) You had better be interested in the topic
2) Check which other sites already exist and position yourself accordingly
My most successful forum is LFGSS http://www.lfgss.com/ , which is London Fixed-gear and Single-speed... a cycling forum which luckily caught a trend before it got big. The positioning on that was that whilst other cycling forums do exist, others failed to recognise that cycling is a local activity and that cycling itself splits into various tribes and that even local activities only have appeal to one tribe. I love cycling, and I was riding fixed, so once I recognised that I could just start the London forum I was pretty much done.
To launch it I just went on to sites like bikeforums.net and announced in the most applicable place that I was starting something I hoped would appeal to the niche I'd highlighted. About 15 people signed up on day 1, just enough to have conversations between each other... and with about an hour a day invested in chatting and going on the odd ride I get it to the point of getting 30 > 50 new users every day and am now somewhere over 25,000 members with over half of them actively using the site each month and a unique visitor count (Google Analytics) of 250,000 per month.
My other forums aren't doing as well, but all produce revenue and the platform is already paid for by LFGSS.
It took me a while to work out the revenue model (get users first!), but once worked out they're doing fine.
Seriously though... I would look at eBay and find high value items (above $1,000 USD average) and ask myself which of those is something I'm interested in and could invest in for the near future (as in... treat as a hobby). Then create the site, and instead of thinking about the revenue and site, become a user and just contribute as you would if you were a user. The money follows that.
I did a music forum that was pretty successful, but a third of people slept with each other and then bore grudges for the experience (it must've been bad) and that spilled back on to the site.
You don't want to spend your time trying getting adults to behave like adults (though technically that was the problem itself).
Net profit is after salaries. I assume that what you are looking for is startups with enough revenue to pay an employee the equivalent of an entry level development job.
>> Do you want to know if the majority of HN is starving wanna-bes? Ask.
I assumed this was the point of the question because it focuses on net profit but you're right, there's not much to add to the answer that could be helpful to others. Also, I answered as a single founder which is different than a team of people saying they just cleared 50k/year from a net profit per person perspective. But because of the way the question was phrased, I'm not sure if that matters here.
Unfortunately, the cost of maintaining a gaming license in an appropriate jurisdiction is likely to outweigh the revenue stream from such an enterprise.
For whatever it's worth, there probably does not exist a way to say "I don't know if you are important enough to heed" without coming off like a jerk. If you want to avoid that impression, it's probably best just not to say anything.
I think you misunderstand the meaning of "A nice problem to have". It's like when you have so many users that things start to fall over. Basically that millions of people want to have the same problem you have.
This presumes you haven't had your ability to flag revoked by the powers that be.
I would argue that mine got revoked for taking an actual interest in the quality and scope of submitted content. So, take that into consideration when trying to help.
Based on what? I flag with abandon, and none of TPTB have seen fit to put a crimp in my vexillocratic activities. Those monthly checks I send to pg are a small price to pay for such power.
Based on, and including no more than my original message: "my experience."
I flagged with abandon many months ago including not believing that YC-funded "startups" had a special place in the world.
Don't get me wrong... if people want to participate here,, I think it might be one of the best places for tech people on the internet. Just don't think that your HN account gives you carte banche to participate in the discussion.
I'm completely disinterested in the SV startup scene so HN still works for me as Yet Another News Aggregator, but it's not what I expected... so that's all.
My need to code comes almost exclusively fromy my need to understand. If I can understand a problem space well enough to explain it to a computer, I probably understand it.
This is only one side of the virus. There's another one: the need to create things. I feel a great need to implement my _own_ ideas both in software and in hardware, i.e. first to understand the problem domain, then to create something that relys on this new knowledge and that does not yet exist. And it's a great great pleasure to observe the thing I created works. Maybe not as I initially imagined, but works! And I feel so miserable when it does not, usuaully because of some nasty bug (or a bad concept) and I cannot help stop debugging and debugging till I get it working! :-)
With all dues pect (and I think it's clear I respect you) , this is yet another case of taking a non_normative view of economicsl We can not conern ourselves with whether another party is doing better against us, until such time as we are not doing better against our past.
Do I live better than those who preceeded me under thse same circumstances? The answer is, almost without exception, yes. It may be popular to decry how one or another advtantage which is enjoyed by one population is not enjoyed by another. But the question should always be, not "Am I doing better than the Other Guy? But 'Am I doing better than one might expect (given my invariant circumstances)?
To ask more than that does diservice to the entire concept of progress.
unfortunately humans don't think like this. when asked if they would rather make $50k while everyone else makes $25k or 100K while everyone else makes $200k (the costs of goods and services being the same) people overwhelmingly choose the former. why? status is zero-sum. mate-pairing relies on looking good compared to the next person, not on absolute scales of standard of living.
> when asked if they would rather make $50k while everyone else makes $25k or 100K while everyone else makes $200k (the costs of goods and services being the same) people overwhelmingly choose the former. why?
I'd like to see the cite, because most behavioral economics research that I've seen is crap.
But, even if that's true, so what? It's dumb to act as if pi = 4 even if "everyone" wants it to be.
Yes, I realize that you're not arging that we should act as if envy is better than greed, you're just saying that people think that it is. So, what do we do about that?
