It's pretty fun, made it to the $1B valuation on my last attempt :)
I read bits of the instruction guide a couple times, but some things that weren't super clear at first:
1. I didn't realize how important it is to raise another round. Is there ever a reason not to? The money bag was a small little thing, and I didn't know to click on it before reading the guide.
2. 90% monthly churn seems pretty bad... but maybe it isn't? Not sure what to do about it, improve the product maybe?
Should you be doing marketing before product market fit?
3. At first (when I didn't read the guide) I thought marketers help us get customers. But I think they just reduce CAC?
5. Do the tasks matter? I never figured out the what the numbers mean. I never deleted any of them - should I?
6. Do ops people do anything?
7. Task velocity is a bit unclear, and the onboarding is only tied to the blue bar if you read the guide. Would be nice to show on hover maybe, and could show some sort of aggregate across your team?
8. Do I get anything for investing in my product? Does the product get better over time in some way? Would be nice to track that.
"all 100 people in my village need a cheeseburger very badly; this piece of paper says that if any of them lay a finger on it, they get carted off to jail"
> In giving companies a free pass to enter the “open source community,” however, certain hackers said “take what you want and give what you want” to a bunch of organizations built around maximizing the ratio of the former to the latter.
Like the author says, investment by these entities can balloon the (F)OSS ecosystem, but when they contract (as is inevitable in a boom-and-bust economy), the nonrenewable resources that actually write the stuff (humans) will burn out.
> See, when you build an education product, you’re competing against two massive institutions: the formal education system (schools, colleges, state universities, etc.), and the laws and cultural expectations around that system.
What you’re competing against is the natural tension between these things and the demands of the market.
You get a good sense of this after 5 years at a math tutoring startup that’s always grappling with the dual expectation that you give the kid the answer quickly (“the customer is always right”) vs. you patiently sit with them until they learn (the goal of formal education).
Dang. My hunch is that most of them happened to only pick a few and through a stroke of bad luck none of them overlap. Stay tuned!! And thanks for the suggestion, will put it in my todo list.
"stepping away from the keyboard" takes your Default Mode Network off the project like a burned-out employee that's just running it into the ground
when the DMN is highly active - fixating, ruminating - its focus is narrow and it's less likely to produce as many creative insights or dredge up as many relevant memories
if you make it less active - doing something else, letting your mind wander, shutting it off entirely with sleep or substances - it will keep trying to solve the problem, but also make farther-flung connections that might solve it
these connections can then be picked up and used more effectively by your executive and salience networks
This comment hits the crux of what OP was really getting at. It's not that software itself is an inherently bad trade; it's what's been happening to it and why.
> very happy at a fast-growing small tech company where one can have honest conversations about the customer and the product
Right. Why is this getting harder to find? Engineers are feeling like their labor is increasingly becoming unimpactful vaporware; their work life is increasingly subject to the whims of nontechnical people; product complexity is going beyond the amount that's just natural in software and getting disproportionately bad.
It's because the market is driving people to the software world like tourists to a national park that's gone viral on social media. The mass of people trying to make a buck off software are unknowingly degrading it. The park's land is still good - just a little too good for its own good.
As long as software makes it easier to reach many eyeballs and wallets at once (which is "always") people will flock to it. What's less inevitable is what makes fluff and snake oil rampant in other industries, like health: a deadly combo of unbridled capitalism and masses of uneducated people.
This makes people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources you can just endlessly extract from, instead of people with biological limits and dreams of making cool things with their hands.
The remedy to this - people democratically owning the means of production, and providing each other with reliably good schooling - might seem like a pie-in-the-sky idea but will be common sense in 100 years if we're still around.
people, including many software engineers themselves, view software engineers as natural resources
I’ve said this a million times on this forum.. the little trick whereby people who were once employees became merely _human resources_ has done more to damage work-life in this world than anything else I can think of.
Its natural to exploit resources to their fullest. Labeling humans as resources is inherently dehumanizing and desperately needs to end.
I've lost my cool one time when a very young "manager" asked: "Do we have a backend resource on this call?"
It really got my blood boiling and I've said something very similar to: "No we don't have a resource on the call, we have engineers, colleagues, employees, humans and friends on this call. Resources are air, water, memory, cpu and time, please don't call people like that". This followed by silence, and a lot of red faces.
Couple of weeks later, had a talk with my manager who is a true and true programmer I really respect. And then he says something with that "resource" referring to our team members...
I have experience across various industries, and many professions think very highly of themselves. But over here I have seen the working population be so easily manipulated, self-effacing, and self-abnegating. Most of the time bad managers just say "jump!" and engineers just ask "how high?".
But resources are what you are, hoss. Sounds like the youth of this manager got you messed up. Old head move is to pull him to the side, with the sotto voce, give him a chance to show you he is open to feedback. How can he change now without losing something? This is workplace 101 stuff.
Good attempt at tone policing, I'll grant you that.
You can keep calling yourself whatever you like, or more to say, swallow whatever little pride you still have. But I don't subscribe to that and I won't be called a tool/object/resource in my presence.
I had the unfortunate privilege of meeting two of the first "techbros". They were marketers more than tech people, but they were tech-adjacent and that was enough to make them cutting edge.
The thing they kept saying was "We'll run it through the machine." Meaning "We'll hand that off to our software team and have them complete it." Of course today, the one who stayed in tech might be salivating about running software requirements through an actual machine to produce code.
Let me know what you think - it hasn't had intensive play by a ton of users yet, so feedback is very welcome!