I worked with a CEO who shared this sentiment about history. After two months with no paychecks, half truths about our funding, and the dev team quitting, he wanted me to start building up a crew of contractors.
After asking what he would change, he told me he had no time to look at the past and could only look ahead.
I learned if you have enough money and lawyers, the past doesn't matter because you can enforce trust through litigation. But if you have to take people on their word, then their history becomes important. I didn't rebuild the team.
I'm sure there is some deeper lesson here between "smarmy business folks" and more principle driven individuals.
I've got 3 in the bag that match your #2 experience. I would love to know how common this outcome is.
My overwhelming experience is that companies rarely "fail". A good idea just chugs along with an owner making well into the 6 figures. Somebody else (like me) built the infrastructure that allows the owner to outsource the maintenance development work.
This became my reason for doing CTO as a service type solutions. A lot of people were doing this 5 years ago or so, which makes me think your #2 is fairly common.
I had a similar experience early in my career working in a call center. We received a lot of calls about 1 problem with customer modems. I wrote a script that detected snmptraps and automatically issued bounce commands to the remote modems.
Our call volume dropped noticeably. I told my manager why. He was pissed, and asked how we were going to justify headcount if our call volume was dropping.
Lesson learned. [edit: the ambiguous lesson is intentional. I stopped trying, but he kept everyone employed. So... lesson learned :)]
"B. ... if the driver or rider (i) comes to a full and complete stop at the intersection for two complete cycles of the traffic light or for two minutes, whichever is shorter, ..."
I totally understand the frustration here, however this is what the (admittedly ridiculous) "survey" is talking about. Cars cut me off very often so they don't have to wait... what, 5 extra seconds through a turn?
Many times these cars cut me, then have to stop anyway for a pedestrian.
I often run lights if they are right before a hill. This is specifically to keep the cars behind me from getting mad and doing unsafe things. I'd rather just get out of the way.
I've been trying for years to work with the municipality of Rome to convince people to let their vehicles at home, if they don't want to fully commit with the driving (or biking)
I don't even listen to music anymore when I drive...
While yours is a better title, your comment also helps me rationalize my behavior on a bike. Many people have irrational hate towards bikes, and those people operate much heavier equipment. They do so while staring at their cell phones. This is certainly a problem where all sides need to pay more attention, and not hate on each other.
And just because; my "tour de france cosplay" gives me a butt-pad for comfort, nice pockets on the back of my shirt to carry things, and dries really quick in the rain. I suppose if I spent $20,000 on a rolling sofa that would be better?
> People who want a car-alternative for necessity either buy a wal-mart bike, a cheap electric/gas moped, maybe a motorcycle, or walk.
This isn't true across the board. There are absolutely folks who have a $12k INEOS Pinarello because of status, but there is real value in more expensive bikes (more expensive than walmart).
Going from steel to aluminum is a very recognizable weight difference. Your commute just became more manageable.
A 105 groupset is way more reliable (ime) than lower grades. Your gears will shift better, not click, not skip, and not drop your chain during your commute.
A bike shop (which sells more expensive bikes than walmart) is going to fit you properly. You may get lucky with the walmart bike, but a proper fit removes knee pain, lower back pain, shoulder pain and neck pain.
If you are commuting, shopping, using your bike for real world things, the extra money is well worth it.
Note: I'm talking about a $500 -> ~$2k. Not a $5k bike for a commute. By ditching your car, you more than make up for the $1500 difference in insurance payments, car payments, gas payments, it really adds up quick.
> A 105 groupset is way more reliable (ime) than lower grades. Your gears will shift better, not click, not skip, and not drop your chain during your commute.
Really? I feel like my old 8-speed Sora bike needs far fewer derailleur adjustments than my newer 11-speed 105 bike.
I guess this is because the higher-end groupsets are lighter-weight and have more gears (so, a thinner chain and finer mechanical tolerances).
In our local group rides there is a guy who rides in the fast group on a mountain bike. That is always my reminder that money is best spent on something like trainer road rather than upgrading your components to save grams.
In our local group road ride there is a guy who rides a single speed gravel bike that he assembled himself out of random used parts, and he still beats the rest of us even on hill climbs.
A good 80% of the people I see riding 3k+ road bikes (in an area that likes to bike, there are lots of them) are carrying far more extra pounds on their bodies than they could ever shave off the bike. It's probably safe to say that the vast majority of people riding bikes have far better bang-for-buck performance improvements available to them than a new bike or components, but don't choose them....
If he's riding in a "fast group" then the weight savings will be worthwhile. You can do this with a used 20 year old aluminum frame. It doesn't take elite hardware to benefit from light weight.
If he's keeping up with the fast group already, he may not care (i.e. it's not worthwhile, to him)
I'm not saying you have to spend a lot of money. I'm saying people mostly don't do the obvious performance changes anyway, and for most riders it doesn't really matter (as they aren't doing anything competitive enough to need it).
The weight has to be way less important than the tires. Mountain Bike tires have more ground contact area and have very aggressive tread compared to a road bike tire, which is going to have a huge effect on efficiency. You can hear the difference if you ride each style of bike over the same piece of pavement.
I stuck some smooth tires on the 30 year old mountain bike I was riding around town. It's amazing what a difference it was. It wasn't that expensive or hard to do either.
Of course it made me run headlong into the fact that the bike was geared to go up hills and I was hitting the top gear of it even on relatively easy rides.
> their competitiveness isn't just about their cycling stats, but buying from the cheapest source.
Well, yea. Competitive cyclists want to buy that $1000 power meter, or those $2500 ENVE wheels as cheap as possible. How many add-on products can you sell somebody who just needs a bike for commuting? Of course service is the biggest business there.
Isn't it cheaper to work with existing customers than to find new customers? All the shops near me cater to their existing customers by selling beer. All the group rides end at the bike shop and 50 people buy a pint before going home (granted this was in the past.... I have no idea how these places are still in business this year).
> I pump his tyre for him and ask if he'd like a replacement inner tube. "Not at your shop prices," he says.
That guy sucks and it must be so frustrating to deal with. I always walk out with several GUs or drink mixes when I stop by a shop. I'm sure that doesn't keep the lights on, but I try.
My local bike shop is something of a throwback. They don’t sell $2500 wheels, in fact, I don’t think they sell a whole bike that costs that much.
They sell a lot of kids bikes and a few medium-end hybrids and road bikes to the parents. Like you said, though, most of their revenue comes from service.
Before the pandemic, I was worried about them going under like a lot of wonderful brick and mortar, mom and pops have. I would buy some parts or gear from them even though I could get it cheaper on amazon just to support them.
These days, amid the COVID biking boom, I have to call at least a month in advance for a tune up. They are swamped.
>> I have no idea how these places are still in business this year
Around here the shops are all nearly sold out and have been since May. It's crazy busy and sales are BOOMING for all of them. The largest shop has racks for probably 200ish bikes, and there was maybe a dozen in the entire store last time I was in there a few weeks ago. Bicycle sales are awesome this year in my area. I assume next summer there will be more than a few of those bikes bought this year listed on craigslist "used 3 times last year" :-)
I'm sure that there will be plenty for sale next year, but from my experience out on the trails people are actually using their bikes more than they used to - which is a great thing!
If I ran a bike shop, I'd definitely add a consignment component to the business, and make it really fair to the bike owner.
I saw the same here in Singapore. Waiting time to get a service was on the order of weeks, if not months. I used to be able to drop it off and pick it up a few days later. Now they won't even accept my bike because their shop is too full of bikes waiting to be serviced.
That is really good to hear. Hopefully I'm wrong about beer being a large portion of sales for my local shops. For me, the whole cycling thing is about community. I just hope they are still around next summer.
> > their competitiveness isn't just about their cycling stats, but buying from the cheapest source.
> Well, yea. Competitive cyclists want to buy that $1000 power meter, or those $2500 ENVE wheels as cheap as possible.
Is this the ultimately the market for parts from bike chop shops? What I never quite understood is how parts from stolen bikes are turned into cash; some of it doubtlessly goes through eBay or craigslist, but those sites are new and bike theft isn't. My suspicion is that a lot of stolen parts somehow find their way back onto store shelves as "second hand" parts that can be sold at very low prices for a large profit.
People are hopefully not locking up bicycles with power meters, or full Dura-Ace di2 or similar in public to be stolen by the local metro area's drug addicts.
Anybody who lives in a sufficiently large city, and rides a bike worth more than about $1,000 or so, knows that they will never be locking it up and walking away from it anywhere.
I think a lot of them are just cheap crappy bikes that get cut up for scrap too. Someone stole my heavy-ass steel 90s Schwinn mountain bike that was worth maybe $50 used at the time. I had a big ass lock on it too, and they cut right through it with one clean snip. I was pretty pissed because I had just fixed it all up, but there weren't any expensive components on it... Not sure what kind of money could be made on it. Maybe a few bucks at a pawn shop?
Also around Seattle, I have noticed a lot of places that look like homeless camps, but right smack in the middle is a huge pile of hundreds of bicycles. Just sitting there outside. Part of me thinks that a lot of bike thefts could be mentally ill people collecting and hoarding them.
I agree they are, but from watching the several local social media groups in my metro area which are trying to keep track of stolen bikes, everything that I see stolen, if it were road would be Tiagra level or lower components, or if MTB/city bike would be deore equivalent or cheaper.
The main exception would be downhill bikes that are occasionally stolen from garages.
> You're going to have to learn that, as a laborer at a firm, the quality of work you do is, at best, loosely correlated to your monetary compensation. Sometimes you can do good work, sometimes you can do bad work, but how much you're paid is going to depend greatly on a number of surrounding factors.
This is really good advice. Your organization is given tens of millions of dollars to meet a set of goals. Those goals take X SDEs to accomplish. SDEs get paid roughly the same amount, regardless of their day to day.
At some point you will be in crunch mode on a highly visible project. Other times you will be updating wikis or doing things that don't need an SDE (I spend a lot of time getting paid as an SDE to work on tech documentation). The later are great times to do something you find interesting (maybe even loosely correlated with your org).
If you are an enjoyable person who can get things done, you are well worth the money. (except at amazon where the first part is frustratingly optional :)
After asking what he would change, he told me he had no time to look at the past and could only look ahead.
I learned if you have enough money and lawyers, the past doesn't matter because you can enforce trust through litigation. But if you have to take people on their word, then their history becomes important. I didn't rebuild the team.
I'm sure there is some deeper lesson here between "smarmy business folks" and more principle driven individuals.