

I (the person working on dashboard) respond to HN et al  - auston
http://getrealordie.com/?p=129

======
13ren
This episode reminds me of "target fixation".

When I was learning to hang glide, my instructor said that when you want to
avoid a tree or power lines, it's important to not fixate on it, because the
craft tends to follow the direction you lean towards. People have died that
way.

Auston wanted to avoid an employee who was only in it for the money - but by
fixating on the thing that he doesn't want to be an issue (i.e. money), it has
become the dominate issue. If you don't want a fire, don't fan it.

If you want to avoid something, the best strategy is sometimes to focus on
something else that you _do_ want. It's a kind of positive thinking, but one
that has saved lives.

~~~
brianlash
I've heard the same principle as it relates to physical wellbeing I think it's
100% true.

Diets fail because they're all about food. Better to lose unhealthy weight by
exploring other passions... even things that aren't physical such as playing
an instrument (or coding). Then over the long term you can start to consume
less and less as you have food on the brain less and less.

~~~
dcurtis
Unfortunately hunger is a biological urge, and it's not exactly something you
can choose not to fixate on.

Anything else makes sense, but I really don't think it applies to dieting all
that much on an extended basis (for a short period of time, though, maybe).

~~~
ejs
Man times people are really just thirsty but cannot differentiate the
difference.

~~~
jodrellblank
Or if you believe Vonderplanitz, many times people are craving fat as a
building material and bodily lubricant, and instead drink water.

Anyway, I claim urban myth on your post (
<http://www.snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp> ).

------
unalone
The problem - which people pointed out in the other post, and which you're
only fueling with this - is that you have no leverage here. You're a company
that nobody knows about. You haven't released a project. Your web site looks
_terrible_. You have "dashboard" in red but it isn't a link. You use three
fonts, all of which are ugly, and your layout doesn't support my increasing
font sizes.

You post something mocking a guy that applied for your job, and submitted it
like it was a humorous story. Now you're defending yourself by saying that not
only are you not elitist, but you're not making much money, your job is a bad
one, and you're basically an "average programmer."

You are in an _incredibly_ bad position here. Now, rather than admitting that
you messed up, you're trying to hold that you've got a defensible position.
You absolutely don't. And this was the first time a lot of us heard of your
company, which means that your first impression was an awful one. Until you
have a product, you'd do well to apologize, clam up, and wait until you blow
us all away. And for the love of God, get a better designer: your blog hurts
my eyes.

~~~
apsurd
It's a shame that I'm actually posting this, but I feel I need to add some
empirical data to these claims. I did a quick scan of his HN profile and found
these:

Working personally: <http://dentafy.com> <http://mymedcareer.net>
<http://whatsinourcloset.com> & <http://ticketsplz.com>

I bring to your attention that every single site is a parked page.

This reminds me of 4 years ago when I had all the ideas in the world, but had
to mature a lot to finally be able to realize ideas are bullshit, and there's
a long road ahead.

I do not intend to kick this guy while he's down, but only to highlight what
we all already know - he has a lot of growing up to do.

~~~
auston
to be clear most of those ideas are friends and family who asked me to help. I
haven't had the time to get to them because I've been working...

~~~
unalone
Then it's completely fine of you not to link to them. I link to one of my
sites in my profile, and not to cirqueti.com or omegaseye.com because they're
essentially splash pages. When I get the one off the ground, I'll link to it;
until then, there's nothing wrong in maintaining radio silence about it.

~~~
auston
Sorry I didn't know there were rules for your HN profile. I changed it.

~~~
unalone
They aren't rules so much as guidelines.

It's more a matter of "what about you do you want to make public?" If you link
to a bunch of dead sites as your only info, it gives off a bad vibe.

------
smoody
"We could pay anyone $75k to start cranking out lines of code and come in at 9
or 10 and leave at 5. But that’s not what we want,..."

The poster keeps assuming that there's an inverse correlation between how much
you pay someone and how many hours/how hard that person works. It is entirely
possible that you can find someone who gets paid $75K that does the work of
two or three people who get paid $40K and perhaps even do it in fewer hours.
Or perhaps someone who gets paid $100K is such a great architect that their
architecture saves every employee an hour per day for years.

By your logic, the heads of hedge funds that get paid millions (if not
billions) of dollars per year only show up for work for three seconds each
day. Okay, perhaps that's not the best example.

------
abstractbill
_I ... earn only slightly more than "market"_

 _I am 22 years old ..._

 _I have no options and no equity in the company._

So, you're getting an awful deal, but at least you have time to learn from
your mistake.

~~~
mst
If he's 22 and is earning slightly -more- than market value ... why is a lack
of equity an awful deal?

I could have made more per hour delivering pizza than I did in my first
technical job as a fresh grad, but it was fun, it paid my rent, I learned
stuff and it put the experience on my CV to get a better job when I got bored
of it - and management there well knew that that was my plan, and had no
problem at all with that.

There's no employee equity at Shadowcat (the company I co-founded) either.
Myself and the other founder hold one share each, which pay no dividends, and
which we never intend to sell - they exist to give us the authority to build
the company we want to work for for the forseeable future, the way we think it
should be built.

There's more than one way to do things; not all of them are wrong.

~~~
dcurtis
The reason equity grants are so popular at startups is because they work. When
employees own a physical piece of the work they are creating, and when they
have a definite vested interest in making things to the best of their ability,
you (as the founder) get a good culture and hardworking people. That ends up
increasing the value your own equity in the company.

Without equity grants, you have to give employees monetary incentives. Those
are usually capped and generally don't have much upside. They're also almost
impossible to calculate on a single-person basis. Equity has essentially an
unlimited upside and its worth is easily measured.

Why don't you give your employees equity?

~~~
mst
No dividend. Not intended to be sold.

The company is held only by the founders so we can control its progress and
ensure it becomes the company we envisaged.

Our employees believe in that dream. Since there's no monetary value to having
equity, they don't care that they don't have any. They do, however, make more
than I do.

As for "well give it out anyway, they could always sell it" I refer to the
point of "becomes the company we envisaged" and what happened to craigslist.

I never said our model was common. I never said it was wise for the majority
of companies, or even viable. But it -does- work for us.

------
tptacek
Can we stop giving these people the attention they're obviously angling for
now?

~~~
dcurtis
Don't you think they've deserved it? They've sacrificed a lot of credibility
for a ton of exposure.

~~~
unalone
Nobody _deserves_ exposure. It's not a right. You can't exchange things for
it.

We choose to give it to people. And while I like a good bashing as much as
anybody, I'd rather we stop focusing on these people and start focusing on
lengthy, well-written blog posts. We haven't had many of those recently.

Though I honestly don't think they're doing this for gluttonous publicity. I
think that their first one was, and that these successive ones have just been
attempts to undo their drop in credibility before. I don't think it's helping,
but I doubt there's some clever exposure scheme going on at this point.

~~~
abstractbill
I think dcurtis was joking.

------
t0pj
_Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove
all doubt._

\--Abraham Lincoln

Edit:

 _One meets his destiny often in the road he takes to avoid it._

\--Oogway, Kung Fu Panda

~~~
jaycee
The Kung Fu Panda quote there may be one of the best I've heard for situations
like this.

I'm not sure if that's fantastic or horrible.

------
axod
"Disclosure: I have no options and no equity in the company."

 _jaw drops_

~~~
ivank
It's not like it was going to be worth anything anyway.

------
icey

        So after considering all of the above information, please feel free to apply! We really do need good people.
    

Are you serious? Good luck with that, buddy.

------
alaskamiller
If the guy being paid $75k gets work done from 10 til 5, why do you want him
around more?

------
krschultz
At this point a Google search for getrealordie brings up these threads first
and foremost. Considering that you haven't actually launched, you might want
to ditch getrealordie.com because these responses are going to sway anyone
looking into funding your company.

------
paraschopra
Oh my gosh, I can't imagine we all are wasting so much time discussing this.
Don't we have anything more useful than being _obviously_ self-righteous?

------
matt1
How on earth does this company even plan to pay somebody market salary? Four
people... three w/o salary with no outside investment. Doh.

------
ideamonk
beta registration can be made littl more friendly. when I give my phone number
as +9198800345, it clears everything I typed and leaves me with an error
message tht occured due to '+' sign in the number. Naturally i will be less
motivated to type out the form again for this small error even if it has 4
text boxes.

psst: thats not my number

