I can provide perspective from both sides of the table, to add to the wonderful comments already posted.
The first few years in my career were a will-do-anything attitude. So yes, like the OP, I did a bunch of different things. A few years in, I harbored similar thoughts of feeling inadequate. A jack-of-all-trades-but-master-of-none. Especially, since I was at Google and was surrounded by the best of the best and experts/specialists in anything you could name.
My next stint was at an early stage startup (<10 employees). This is when I started to realize that this "weakness" may actually be a strength. You could point me to a wide array of things and I could run with it. I could take the principles from one stack/language/system and use them in another.
Now, as a founder, my favorite hires are generalists. Engineers who have a wide breadth of experience, a do-whatever-it-takes mindset, and ideally, a sprinkling of product/business sense. They are the first-principles thinkers. They can handle ambiguity and change without batting an eye. They will figure when/where you need a specialist.
It gives me hope. I am on same position as OP. However, I have decided to sell my soul to Graphics. I mean literally and figuratively. I see there are only few people who can do graphics compared to other field. It is quite a niche to work in graphics!
Are you currently hiring? I've just hit 30 as a generalist and the job markets are a mess... Would be happy to connect in case you need a hand with any projects.
Coefficient | Sr. Backend Engineers | Remote From India/USA/Canada | Remote Only | coefficient.io
Coefficient is the next evolution of spreadsheets. We connect spreadsheets to all the other company systems (eg Salesforce, databases, ...) to empower the business user to work with data in the familiarity, power and flexibility of the tool they love -- the spreadsheet. This is a massive market since spreadsheets are the mainstay for business users across all types of companies and geographies.
Today's data and BI tools were designed for data specialists and data engineers. However, as more companies and business functions embrace data-driven cultures, they are held back by the inherit complexity of existing tools, as well as the technical expertise required to set up, maintain, and operate them.
The founders are serial entrepreneurs whose last startup, Shopular, was backed by Y Combinator and Sequoia and acquired by Rakuten Ebates. Coefficient is backed by top-tier bay area VCs (undisclosed).
We are looking for senior backend engineers to help us shape and deliver our vision. You will work alongside the founders to define features, design core backend architecture, and develop resilient, scalable systems from the ground up. You should have 6+ years of experience as a backend engineer and python experience is a must.
This! As programmers, it is easy to list N reasons why spreadsheets suck and deserve to die. But the reality is that it is the most ubiquitous business software and the non-tech/business users would rather be in a spreadsheet than anywhere else. Companies run on spreadsheets, even if they have the best "data stack" and tools. Because few, if any, software can beat the
* flexibility (throw data anywhere and link it to each other, make edits, write notes),
* power (formulas, etc), and
* familiarity (the most underrated factor) of spreadsheets.
Nothing else allows the non-tech user to feel empowered like spreadsheets do.
Spreadsheet evolution has been slow though. Google Sheets added cloud + collaboration 10 years ago. We (https://coefficient.io) are adding the layer of connectivity to sheets so they can remain in sync with the actual sources of data (Cloud apps like Salesforce, DBs, BI tools, etc) so sheets actually become "live" (even though they have been in the cloud for a while) and to reduce manual work and increase trust/accuracy. There is so much more that can be done to leverage this largest software platform that is out there.
I used to work at in construction as an estimator and we used spreadsheets. No backups, no version control, a single value change took 10s of minutes to propagate through the many sheets in the file. We fixed errors when we saw them, but I always felt it was an exercise in pointlessness.
These were not small companies either, ~$800M in yearly revenue for one, and ~$150M for the other.
Then, afterwards, the end value would be massaged to what felt right. And yet, these sheets were seen as part of the "secret sauce" of the business.
It's one of the reasons I really wanted out.
Programmers have a reputation of being arrogant assholes, but I think this push-back and ridiculing other industries of using excel for stuff like this is completely justified. Excel spreadsheets let these people FEEL productive and like masters of their own fate with a bunch of numbers neatly encapsulated in their own little cells in a table, but their actual usefulness is questionable. For construction, it gives a rough feel for a project, but a lot of it is smoke and mirrors.
I can't remember where I read it but at one point Boeing was maintaining the entire bill of materials for one (maybe more) of their aircraft in a spreadsheet. I tried to google it but could not find the reference. I did find that Boeing actually had their own in-house spreadsheet software for a while, which was kind of interesting.
> I used to work at in construction as an estimator and we used spreadsheets. No backups, no version control, a single value change took 10s of minutes to propagate through the many sheets in the file. We fixed errors when we saw them, but I always felt it was an exercise in pointlessness.
These were not small companies either, ~$800M in yearly revenue for one, and ~$150M for the other.
Jesus... want to start a competitor to these guys!? Email me
I think I big mistake people make here is that they think they are far better at everything on a computer than a non-programmer. They don't realize how much you can do in Excel and how much they suck at it. If you can't use it without a mouse and/or if you don't know pivot tables, you are just as much of a beginner as a C++ programmer who doesn't know what a pointer is.
It's only after trying to convert an excel sheet to [insert your favorite language] that they realize it would take them 6 month with a team of 5 to replicate what a single accountant did in a week.
Entirely true. Many physicists also basically live in Excel. And replicating the functionality of pivot tables isn't at all trivial and they also have a lot of helpers by now. In many cases you just need to click it and have all column neatly formatted so that you don't have to do much anymore.
I also have seen Access applications with more features than a common Salesforce CRMs. I have seen it as a navigation system that could bring you to the nearest partners or shops that provide necessary parts. Yes, there is code of doom behind it and if those maintainers leave the company, problems arise. But the feature set was often extremely hard to beat.
And I am not sure how to respond to non-technical users about better alternatives. They use it as a front end for SQL manipulation and it isn't easy to come up with something better for that target group.
Even worse is SharePoint. It is a complete abomination, it can easily beat most horror novels. But the workflow engines are just extremely practical for corporate processes. Only recently some alternatives came to the market... I just wish I could kill it...
Excel has to contend with nearly 40 years of backwards compatibility (MultiPlan, the predecessor to Excel, was released in 1982) and a deep userbase that literally has decades of experience and muscle memory with the software. The Symbolic Link "SYLK" file format introduced in MultiPlan is still supported in recent versions of Excel, leading to the infamous CSV "ID" issue.
Many of our users still run very old versions of Excel and Windows (e.g. Excel 5.0 on Windows 95) because a change in a future version of Excel caused problems or gave different results.
> Nothing else allows the non-tech user to feel empowered like spreadsheets do.
I'd say it allows the same for technical users as well since it helps bridge communication/knowledge gaps and move things along. It's typically not the solution but often plays a critical supporting role.
Coefficient | Sr. Backend Engineer | Remote From India/North America | Remote Only | coefficient.io
Coefficient is a no-code solution that allows business teams to work with real-time data directly from their spreadsheets. You can sync your Google Sheets to your company systems such as Salesforce, Hubspot, Google Analytics, Looker, MySQL, Redshift, Slack and more. This empowers anyone in the company to build reports and analyses that are real-time, flexible, and accurate without any knowledge of SQL or other advanced tools. Native Slack integration coupled with a powerful business rule engine enables you to keep the right people up-to-date at the right time.
Coefficient is a VC-backed SaaS startup in the SF Bay Area. The founders are serial entrepreneurs whose last startup, Shopular, was backed by Y Combinator and Sequoia and acquired by Rakuten Ebates.
We are looking for senior backend engineers to help us shape and deliver our vision. You will work alongside the founders to define product, design core backend architecture, and develop resilient, scalable systems from the ground up. You have 7+ years of experience designing and building complex backend systems and solid Python experience.
We started a company with the core premise that spreadsheets will never die [0]. Spreadsheets are so good at the most casual data viewing and exploring tasks to creating complex financial models. They are also the de-facto choice when you have data (not big data) from multiple sources that you need to "join". We tend to underestimate the beauty of this tool which can be used productively at all points of the skill spectrum. Everyone feels at ease in the familiar territory of a spreadsheet, which is what makes it ubiquitous and basically impossible to kill.
If spreadsheets were two-way connected with your core systems like SaaS tools, DBs, Slack, etc then you could represent serious business logic and actions without being a programmer. It is the best platform to build a "no code" tool for non-programmers.
That's awesome, Navneet! I have heard from big hedge fund managers, and seen first hand working at "cutting edge" 401K fintech companies that spreadsheets are the backoffice workhorse in many many companies doing serious business and handling serious data.
I am curious about one aspect though: Debugging spreadsheets is seriously hard. How do you help customers verify their spreadsheet has the right things they are looking for, avoiding regressions due to a random change by some inexperienced person, etc.?
Also, at what point do you see companies move from spreadsheets to simply hiring developers to do what they want? It seems like beyond a point, spreadsheets can get in the way, and the company has enough resources to hire a team to build custom internal tools.
Yeah spreadsheets are ubiquitous workhorses -- small companies to large, old to new, across geographies ...
Spreadsheets have many problems. We are going after their "connectivity" to the rest of the company systems. Hidden errors / debugging is definitely another big problem which we are only tangentially solving. If your data is imported into the sheet through Coefficient (instead of a copy-paste of a downloaded CSV), then you can always trace the lineage/timestamps/etc all the way to source.
As for hiring developers, the truth is that day-to-day business needs grow faster than you can hire devs. So yes, at a certain point companies move some workflows to dev-built tooling or specialized SaaS tools, but their bucket of unhandled workflows still grows larger every day. That is why you can't kill spreadsheets.
Debugging can be hard. That's often because what they're used for is done very fast. So, there's a business expert reasonably IT literature that has a powerful tool with a built-in IDE that doesn't take approvals or hiring requisitions or even budget and a problem's solved within a week on what otherwise would be a month (being kind).
The problem starts when whatever frankensheetvbasharepointdb is now an engrained part of a workflow, excelbizdev has disappeared, and 'maintenance' falls to nonexcelwhizz, or perhaps worse, a dev team that lacks much legacy business understanding to figure out why the particular implementation was done, screws up understanding, and creates something worse.
Spreadsheets are everywhere. Heck our local power company uses a complex spreadsheet for load prediction. It includes holidays, football events, historic weather and weather predictions. Saves them a bundle.
Coefficient | Sr. Backend Engineer | Remote From India/North America | Remote Only | coefficient.io
Who we are
Coefficient is a VC-backed SaaS startup in the SF Bay Area. We are still in stealth and just raised a large seed round. The founders are serial entrepreneurs whose last startup, Shopular, was backed by Y Combinator and Sequoia and acquired by Rakuten Ebates.
What we do
Coefficient is a self-service data warehouse for business teams. Today's data tools and BI stacks were designed for data specialists and data engineers. However, as more companies and business functions embrace data-driven cultures, they are held back by the inherit complexity of existing data analytics tools, as well as the technical expertise required to set up, maintain, and operate full BI stacks. Coefficient's mission is to unlock organizations' latent data productivity, by enabling users to model, re-shape, and build reports using data from any data source—all within an intuitive, no-code interface.
Who you are
We are looking for a lead backend engineer to help us shape and deliver our vision. You will work alongside the founders to define product, design core backend architecture, and develop resilient, scalable systems from the ground up. You have 7+ years of experience designing and building complex backend systems You have extensive Python experience. More details: https://angel.co/company/coefficient-io/jobs
Coefficient | Sr. Backend Engineer | Remote From India/North America | Remote Only | coefficient.io
Who we are
Coefficient is a VC-backed SaaS startup in the SF Bay Area. We are still in stealth and just raised a large seed round. The founders are serial entrepreneurs whose last startup, Shopular, was backed by Y Combinator and Sequoia and acquired by Rakuten Ebates.
What we do
Coefficient is a self-service data warehouse for business teams. Today's data tools and BI stacks were designed for data specialists and data engineers. However, as more companies and business functions embrace data-driven cultures, they are held back by the inherit complexity of existing data analytics tools, as well as the technical expertise required to set up, maintain, and operate full BI stacks. Coefficient's mission is to unlock organizations' latent data productivity, by enabling users to model, re-shape, and build reports using data from any data source—all within an intuitive, no-code interface.
Who you are
We are looking for a lead backend engineer to help us shape and deliver our vision. You will work alongside the founders to define product, design core backend architecture, and develop resilient, scalable systems from the ground up. You have 7+ years of experience designing and building complex backend systems
You have extensive Python experience. More details: https://angel.co/company/coefficient-io/jobs
I use pen and paper notes for meetings & discussions. While I love the act of physically writing, not having notes accessible and searchable at the tips of my fingers means I am not able to get the most out of them.
This discussion is timely as I have been researching smart pens the last few days which can give you exact copies of your paper notes into an app. Anyone here used them? Do you like them?
I've never used standalone smartpens but I semi-regularly take handwritten notes in an iPad app using Apple's smart pencil. Some apps attempt to turn cursive into text but TBH my handwriting isn't good enough for the transcription to work reliably.
Shopular (Redwood City) -- iOS engineer, Android engineer, Data Analyst
We are a Sequoia backed startup. Our vision is to be the ultimate smart shopping companion for every shopper, revolutionizing the access to information to help you save time and money. We are a small team and looking to get two mobile engineers to lead the mobile apps.
If you love data and finding insights with the purpose of making the product grow faster and identify areas of opportunity, you'd be a great fit for the data analyst role.
We have over 5M users, yet a small team of 5 engineers. This is a huge opportunity. We are looking for experienced and accomplished engineers.
Looking for Senior iOS and Android engineers - shopular.com/jobs
===== About Shopular
Shopular is connecting shoppers and brands in the moments that matter. Our mission is to be your personal shopping concierge that provides the most intuitive and effortless way to save money. The iOS and Android apps have over 30,000 reviews and widely loved. Time featured Shopular as one of the 50 Best iPhone Apps of 2013. Shopular is backed by Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital. shopular.com/about
The best part is that we are still a small team of 5: high-caliber engineers from Google, Shopkick, Ooyala and Loopt
We are growing the engineering team and looking for experienced and eager individuals who share our passion for creating consumer experiences that "just work". You get significant equity, significant responsibility and a company with traction and backing.
===== About the roles
We are still a small team of 5 engineers and looking for experienced iOS and Android engineers who can take the apps to the next level.
You should be a master of iOS/Android with significant prior experience building beautiful consumer-facing apps with a large number of users. You have built complex apps from scratch. You share our passion for creating consumer experiences that "just work".
The first few years in my career were a will-do-anything attitude. So yes, like the OP, I did a bunch of different things. A few years in, I harbored similar thoughts of feeling inadequate. A jack-of-all-trades-but-master-of-none. Especially, since I was at Google and was surrounded by the best of the best and experts/specialists in anything you could name.
My next stint was at an early stage startup (<10 employees). This is when I started to realize that this "weakness" may actually be a strength. You could point me to a wide array of things and I could run with it. I could take the principles from one stack/language/system and use them in another.
Now, as a founder, my favorite hires are generalists. Engineers who have a wide breadth of experience, a do-whatever-it-takes mindset, and ideally, a sprinkling of product/business sense. They are the first-principles thinkers. They can handle ambiguity and change without batting an eye. They will figure when/where you need a specialist.
Be proud of being a generalist.