
Silicon Valley startups rein in spending and prepare for layoffs - apsec112
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/11/silicon-valley-start-ups-rein-in-spending-and-prepare-for-layoffs.html
======
dimgl
I found this particular quote from the article interesting.

> Margaret Quigley, 27, a techie with some coding experience, is on the hunt
> for a job in San Francisco.

> Quigley, who previously worked at a popular consumer start-up, has been job
> hunting for five months. She recently rejected one start-up's offer, a one-
> to two-month tryout — without pay. Quigley said she has also rejected
> multiple sales job offers and an offer that was in the right field but came
> in too low.

I'm sorry but... what? Not everyone can do software development. This bit
makes it seem like any person who is considered a techie can now land a cushy
job.

If you don't know what you're doing, expect really bad offers. Maybe take an
internship and make a name for yourself. I had to work basically minimum wage
for about six months at my first startup gig and that propelled me to what I'm
doing today. Not sure what that bit was about.

> It's a tough time to be job hunting in Silicon Valley, and things are about
> to get a lot harder for individuals with certain skills.

I just got a job in the Bay Area so again, I don't think these are valid
points in this article.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
>If you don't know what you're doing, expect really bad offers.

An offer for a one/two-month tryout without pay has nothing to do with their
skills. That's just someone trying to get some cheap labor.

~~~
matt_wulfeck
Knowing what I make now I would consider 3 months without pay nothing to have
my foot in the door. That being said I would never work three months without
pay, but it's a risk some people are willing to take.

I don't see any reason why it has to be without pay. "Under market" maybe but
not without pay.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
Nobody should ever take unpaid internships. The whole concept is ridiculous
and exploitation. Contributing to Open Source instead is a much better foot in
the door and you don't end up working for free for others.

~~~
themartorana
You'll likely meet (virtually, anyway) just as many influential people and
won't feel horribly taken advantage of.

------
gonyea
So, "Startup" to them = private, bloated company?

I'm guessing they're talking about the "startups" who hemorrhage money on a
trendy office location and uncomfortable chairs.

It'd be cool if we had a different name for being several rounds deep,
private, and profitless.

~~~
mjolk
Even if "we" (meaning HackerNews users or engineers) come up with a better
term (e.g. "a company"), it won't get picked up by the media. Old media has
schadenfreude for technology companies failing and they use "startup" as a
code-word for their tone that tech companies are irresponsible, lazy, out of
touch, and not doing "real" work. They have no idea what we do, how we do it,
and they want to sell to their audience and themselves the idea that we'll get
some comeuppance. It's telling the horse breeder that the "whole auto-mobile
thing" is just a fad by people trying to ruin "honest work." It's gross.

For examples, I didn't even have to leave the linked article:

\- The link off the article: "Silicon Valley's reality: The party is over"

Yes, the whole 16 hour work-day for potentially valueless-shares "party."
Excuse me if I'm not wearing my party hat. You'd never see "Coal miner's
reality: The underground rave is over", nor would you see them taking a shot
at executive compensation in the banking industry.

\- From the article: "Margaret Quigley, 27, a techie with some coding
experience, is on the hunt for a job in San Francisco...there is literally
Airbnb — for cats!...'Do I see value in the platform?'.. she has also rejected
multiple sales job offers"

Ah yes, the non-programmer vague "sales techie" living in the modern day
political and corporate Gomorrah and a trivialization of the tech industry.
Yes, quip about some startup no one has heard of and avoid talking about a
company like SpaceX that is inarguably changing the world by doing things at
the scale of NASA.

\- "The candidate wanted more money, the opportunity to work from home three
days a week and to set the hours. Six months ago the company scrapped free in-
office yoga and massages."

Again, trying to paint tech workers (with these demands, he/she was likely an
engineer) as spoiled, pampered children.

The rare/uncommon perks exist because it's hard to find people capable of
doing the engineering work, and once you find those people, it's very easy for
them to be ground down to a nub. Funny that CNBC isn't brave enough to talk
about the perks that politicians receive from lobbying groups.

~~~
untog
Paranoid much?

The media calls these large companies "startups" because the companies
themselves do it. Because it makes them sound hip and trendy and worth
investing in.

No doubt there are companies like SpaceX doing notable stuff. No doubt they
are a minority. AirBnb for cats exists. Vessyl exists.

~~~
jerf
"Paranoid much?"

Well, remember what working in the media is like. It's an industry where
writing opportunities are contracting, advertising is stronger than ever,
pretty much all but the top tier of newspaper is writing clickbait, it's
perceived that there's little prospect of it getting better, and they compete
with Congress for major institution least respected by the public.

I wouldn't consider schadenfreude a paranoid theory, I'd consider it the
expected outcome. It's hard to avoid wondering how much of the general tone of
opinion in the media is a direct reflection of the fact that _they_ aren't
doing well. (Are they worried about the "1%" precisely because a couple
members of the .01% are buying up their entire industry, and they see the .01%
showing up in the reporting chain? I've seen people similarly wonder if part
of the reason academia is so pessimistic in their writing is that _their_
world really is in terrible shape and the sense of immanent collapse is
scaring everybody.)

------
VeilEm
Any kind of JavaScript, iOS or Android engineer getting laid of will get a job
within a month if they want. Competent backend developers, devops, ML
engineers also will have no problems finding a job. I recently went through a
job search in the bay area and only applied at places I wanted to work and got
a job at the first place I applied with phone interviews and in person
interviews scheduled at other places.

The job market is really great right now. If you're getting laid off, now is a
good time.

~~~
Bahamut
I'm not seeing a great hiring market right now for engineers in the Bay Area,
at least as a high demand JS engineer. I took a look at testing the waters
within the past month, I found the offers/opportunities a little wanting, and
I am now debating whether to stick around at my job for a while even with some
of its faults. The market looked a lot better a half year ago.

Getting hired is not a problem - getting a really nice job though is much more
difficult, especially due to all of the companies that like to talk a nice
game but are disguising weak aspects of the company such as
leadership/management, quality engineering, work-life balance, etc.

An aside, that popup iframe with video on the top as you scrolled down is one
of the most annoying dark UX patterns I've encountered in a news site. It is
one of a handful times where I used Chrome's element inspector to set display:
none.

~~~
optimusclimb
> I'm not seeing a great hiring market right now for engineers in the Bay
> Area, at least as a high demand JS engineer.

Can you explain this further? If by "high demand JS engineer" you mean "front
end" and not just node (which is not bad or anything btw), and by "high
demand" specifically you mean you are: * you understand JS well, doesn't mean
we get to grill you on all the weird corner cases - but you understand the
language * want to work with a modern stack (i.e. react, flux/redux/whatever,
backbone, that sort of thing) * are mature and want to help grow a team, can
communicate with PMs and all that effectively

we'd kill to hire you (250-300 person company.) Every friend of mine that has
started a company asks me every time they see me if I know a good front end
person (that isn't busy counting their RSUs at Uber, etc and isn't going
anywhere.)

Our company (in general) and team has more than one designer focused on
bringing a good experience to the table, before it even gets to the code
level. To translate, that doesn't mean our reqs go from sales person to "make
it do this now, code monkey", but rather we want to make good, long lasting
products, in a thoughtful manner. And still, finding someone is tough.

So I find it hard to believe the hiring market for what you describe isn't
great.

Personally, my experience is all back end. I consider myself a good engineer
in general, and feel I could ramp up to being a decent front end engineer in
3-12 months time depending on how much depth we're talking, but think that
things are specialized enough now that that would be a waste of effort, and
plenty of people would still be better than me. However, from what I've seen,
being a F.E. eng that understands CSci and what's happening under the hood
should make you SUPER in demand right now.

I'm not trying to make this a hiring post, but if you'd like a fun job with a
decent company trying to expand its front end capacity on this coast, with a
relatively green field project (i.e. you get to build new stuff), and at a
place making real money, not just selling to other startups, and not in a moon
shot social space, PM me. If not, I'd still be curious why you think being a
"high demand JS engineer" isn't a good spot to be in in the current market.

~~~
Bahamut
I do Node.js as well, although it doesn't show nearly as strongly in my
background due to every company I've been at wanting my frontend skills. I get
pinged heavily due to being a major non-Google contributor in the Angular
community (code contributions to Angular.js, Angular 2, Ionic, and am involved
in the teams for Universal Angular, UI Bootstrap, and UI Router).

Finding a job is still pretty easy - I don't dispute that. Finding one that
pays competitively, respects work-life balance, and focuses on quality of
engineering & getting product right, even if it means pushing deadlines a
little later is much harder I've found, unless you look to the
Google/FB/Netflixes. My current job meets most of those bars (a little less on
the salary side, but I was willing to accept that for everything else), but
only dissatisfies me on wanting to move faster & having more influence on tech
choices.

While there are no shortage of companies that want to hire, most haven't put
their best foot forward I've found. The market is still good for software
engineers, but it's noticeably not as compelling as it was just a half year
ago - I feel like the balance has tilted a little more to the employer's side
in the employee/employer dynamic.

------
abalashov
It's an age old-question but I still don't have a good sense of the answer:

When leaner economic times come around and tech companies downsize their work
forces, they speak about culling "nonessential" employees and "growing
smarter". How do they deal with the political problems of admitting to having
hired a sizable number of "nonessential" employees to begin with, and,
moreover, the obvious implication that their previous growth strategy was
indeed "stupid"?

~~~
im3w1l
Let's say you have a company with 10 employees, and a revenue of 50 million.
If you hired an extra web designer you could optimize your website and squeeze
out an additional 1% = 500k. Worth it!

Times go bad, revenue drops to 10 million. You fire the non-essential designer
and take the 1%=100k revenue hit. If you had fired an essential employee, your
revenue would have dropped some double digit percentage, so those you have to
keep around.

You expand/contract the business to the point where the marginal employee
costs you the same as the marginal revenue they can bring in.

Well that's the theory for stable profitable companies. For startups I guess
you'd have to think of the marginal _expected_ future revenue.

~~~
awakeasleep
Ok, how does this work in the situation where you have hired management, the
managemet gets paid the most, and their performance can't be accurately
measured. Also you're not familiar with the marginal returns of the employees
they manage.

~~~
tibbetts
The output of a manager is the delta in the output of the parts of the
organization they control or influence. (Citation: High Output Management)

Of course that is hard to measure. It's all hard to measure.

------
angersock
The interesting thing, to me, isn't so much what'll happen to the employees--
it's what's going to happen to all the SaaS and PaaS folks the remaining
startups depend on.

When everyone and their buddy is signing up to spew cash into the coffers of
services like Amazon, Heroku, and other hosted solutions (instead of doing it
themselves), those services can spread and grow.

What happens, though, when that easy cash is no longer available? What happens
when, for example, paying a lot for Docker or NPM no longer makes sense?

The outflux of customers has the--in some sense--real possibility of killing
those businesses for the remaining users. Look at Github, for example, as a
company trying to run ahead of the curve--it can happen.

I'm more concerned with what happens to ecosystems, like Node, that have VC-
fueled companies as critical components.

I'd love to hear other opinions on this point of view.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
who pays for npm?

~~~
angersock
You begin to see the problem. :|

More seriously, they're trying to move into the enterprise/private space--but
they took on a hell of a lot of funding to accomplish that. Not looking great
for the good guys.

------
econner
I just like the last point: "There's still going to be major entrepreneurship
going. Google itself was counter to the trend of the original dotcom bust."

------
drawkbox
Startups that are born in or survive a downturn, they are more tight with
better survivalism. When things get better they still have an advantage over
other startups. Things go from tight to alright, alright and it doesn't affect
them.

Tightly run ships, like smart remote companies without as much office space
(lower salaries outside SV) or many employees or even generating revenue run
will probably not even feel a blip in most cases. It is the ones that are a
while from a product and paying the higher tag for office space, salaries and
more for the chance to get funding in SV. If that funding isn't there for a
while it could be problematic and is the risk with boom/bust cycles.

~~~
tyingq
I've seen a couple of comments where expensive office space or other somewhat
optional expenses are cited as reasons for going bust.

I'm curious, as I have no experience in this area, if that's really likely.

As an outsider, it feels like salaries would be the overwhelmingly largest
monthly expenditure for most tech startups. Such that things like office
space, even a lavish choice, wouldn't really be relevant.

If you were to break it down by "cost per employee" is there really a case
where office space, perks, etc, really becomes the driver for failure? Where
it is statistically meaningful versus the base salary cost?

~~~
nopzor
I think your instinct is correct.

If you're in SF paying market rate, with say a dozen employees, presumably
your expenses BEFORE office space are in the range of 200K/mo+.

Unless they're gold plated, your "lavish" offices would represent <~10% of
expenses.

Space and perks itself doesn't drive failure I don't think, but they can point
to aspects that do.

There are plenty of disciplined companies that appear to be "lavish" with
space and perks. There are plenty of highly profitable tech startups that
really scrimp on space and perks. It's tough to generalize.

------
dawhizkid
It's the crappy startups that will go away. That's a good thing for everyone,
honestly.

~~~
united893
It's not that clear cut, it can be random due to timing for startups that just
raised. Name me some crappy startups you think will fail, I'll name you lots
more that make a great product, but couldn't stay solvent either.

~~~
Gibbon1
Yeah I was going to say good decisions aren't made when investors start to
panic. Or consider GM maker of fine crappy cars. They went bust in 2009.
Companies are often long expenses and short profits. Meaning they commit to
certain level of expenses capital or otherwise, yet their profits depend on
near term sales. Business dries up, balance sheet goes red and if they can't
borrow money, they go belly up. Rock solid business, gone.

------
obulpathi
For startups planning to host their infrastructure on AWS, a better
alternative might be to go with Google Cloud or other cheaper alternatives.
This can significantly increase the startups runway, by lowering the
operational costs. Google Cloud lacks some bells and whistles at this point
but it shaves off 50% of your AWS bill.

Edit: Here is why Google Cloud can save 50% of your aws bill

"1X" is AWS

Compute:

VMs Price: 30% less + Per minute billing

Boot time: ¼ X

Network between VMs: Same region: 4X Across regions: 10X

BigQuery vs Redshift : ½ -20X

Big Data (Hadoop and Spark): 3X

Disks:

Read throughput: 1X Write throughput: 4X (Ephemeral); 2X (Persistent)

Local SSDs: Read throughput: 8X Writes throughput: 4X

Storage (S3): Throughput: 2X Latency: 3X (initial); ½ X (for subsequent reads)

~~~
patio11
_This can significantly increase the startups runway, by lowering the
operational costs._

There is an old saying in business: "overhead walks on two legs." People are
expensive; everything else is cheap in comparison. This is particularly true
for most software companies, where payroll (and other expenses directly
sensitive to number of employees) typically dominates every other expense.

There are software companies which do $100 million a year in revenue on $50k a
year in infrastructure costs. Bloat that crazily for a B2C startup making,
let's say, generous time-to-market and inhouse-expertise-required tradeoffs.
Even if you're spending $50k a month on Amazon, shaving off half of that buys
you 1~2 extra FTEs.

~~~
obulpathi
Let's look at Google vs AWS from people's time:

* Ease of use: Google Wins(Cloud Shell, SSH into instance from browser). Its far easier to spin up an instance and manage it on Google Cloud than AWS with VPC mess.

* Platform Cohesivity: Google Wins (See the comparisio below)

* AWS has 2 storage solutions with different APIS: S3 and Glacier; Compare that to Google. Just one storage solution to serve all needs. You get a backed in CDN for free!

* AWS has two queuing systems (SQS and Kinesis) and still require the developer / admin to adjust the scaling of infrastructure. Google has just one Pub/Sub. You get push notifications on top. No need to tune knobs to get extra scale. It just works.

* AWS load balancers and persistent disks need warming up before high usage. If you are running a website on global scale, you need to use DNS geo load balancing on top. Google load balancers are global (as opposed AWS regional load balancers), no need of DNS tricks. No need of prewarming. Google persistent disks need no prewarming. You can mount a single persistent disk on multiple instance and share data easily.

* Security: Google encrypts data at rest and at wire by default. Try doing that on AWS. Google takes care of SSH key provisioning and management. AWS: You have to do it by yourself.

* AWS NATs and micro instance are known to be unreliable. Google has live migration. If something goes wrong with instance they work their magic behind the scenes so that you don't have to worry about migrating the instance to another physical host.

* Automation: Instance id are not global on AWS. Have fun creating maps and stuff inside CloudFormation templates. Google Cloud resources are global. All resources (images ids) have a global identifier. No more messing with zonal vs regional vs global resources.

Google Cloud can save money by saving your time too!

~~~
kasey_junk
I don't actually have much of an opinion specifically about Google Cloud vs
AWS. I will say for your argument to make sense you have to first prove that
1) these differences make for cost savings that aren't a rounding error when
it comes to employee costs and 2) these differences aren't overwhelmed by the
smaller ecosystem (tooling, availability of talent, etc) of aws vs google
cloud.

Also as a nitpick:

>AWS has two queuing systems (SQS and Kinesis)

This is a feature, they offer different promises/behaviors. In fact, Pub/Sub
does _not_ offer one of the important ones that Kinesis does (strictly ordered
delivery).

~~~
vgt
The latter use case is easily handled by Dataflow (something that AWS lacks.
See [https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/comparing-
the...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/comparing-the-
dataflowbeam-and-spark-programming-models)).

One may also say that Google has a single Global seamlessly scalable durable
message delivery service and Amazon has two that are neither global nor
seamlessly scalable. Firehose is AWS itself admitting to this argument... And
then there's firebase :)

~~~
kasey_junk
I think dataflow is rad! But can you show me any bit of documentation that
shows strictly ordered at least once delivery?

I don't _think_ it actually does that.

I'm not certain, but I'm reasonably confident that strictly ordered durable,
globally replicated delivery would have to make extreme latency & availability
comprimises.

~~~
vgt
Dataflow is a fault-tolerant deterministic processing framework, engine, and
service, not a messaging queue, so it doesn't "do that" by definition.. wrong
product :)

That said, one may order and dedupe the message stream with Dataflow using
message metadata, time windows, watermarks and triggers.

PubSub offers at least once delivery semantics.

And I agree with your last statement.

~~~
kasey_junk
Sure. I think it is fair to say that AWS does not offer a "Global seamlessly
scalable durable message delivery service". What doesn't seem fair to me is to
complain that AWS offers too many products, or to ding Kinesis for making
normal/understandable engineering trade-offs.

It turns out that while AWS doesn't offer a single "Global seamlessly scalable
durable message delivery service", Google doesn't offer a single strictly
ordered, at least once delivery message delivery service.

Personally, I think thats ok, as a variety of solutions is great for all of
us, but its hard to say one decision is better than the other when they are
solving different problems.

~~~
vgt
I agree with you, but re-reading the original commenter's argument, he was
saying that with AWS services you don't get seamless scalability, even though
there's SQS, Kinesis, Firehose. I don't think he was complaining about the
number of products, I think he was making a point that most AWS services don't
seamlessly scale the way Google Services do.

There's an interesting blog in the works by one of our customers, who
"surprised" PubSub with 4.5 million messages per second, and kept on this test
for about a week. One hell of a load test :)

And this is especially true when looking at the product I work on, BigQuery.

------
jmnicolas
But but what about all the articles 3 months ago that were saying we're
definitively not in a tech bubble ?!

It reminds me of 1999 or 2000 were I saw at my local book shop a book titled
something like "are you ready for the next 20 years of uninterrupted economic
growth ?" written by 2 Nobel price winners, no less ...

Then there was the (should I say first ?) tech bubble pop one or two years
later ...

~~~
npalli
The NASDAQ plunged from over 5000 in March 2000 to about 1100 in two years.
That was a bubble. People getting laid off is not a bubble, if so, then we
will keep having these 'bubbles' every year making the whole term meaningless.

The very fact that 20 people jump in and warn us at the slightest hint (like
this) that this is a bubble tells me that we are not in a bubble. Even if
people get laid off they will find work else where. Funny thing is that this
article talks about laid off tech workers finding work in Finance, which as we
speak is getting decimated.

~~~
rhino369
How do you know if this isn't March 2000 all over again.

A tech bubble would look different than in 2000 because companies didn't go
public the same numbers as last time. That blunts the impact a bit. But it
also hides the impact. If VCs go into panic mode you won't know about it until
start ups start failing in high numbers from running out of runway.

------
MrQuincle
Interesting viewpoint from Bischke: "startups doing something genuinely
different just because there is no one paying them just to be another Uber for
teddy bears".

This betrays a lack of trust that VCs are able to judge the value of a
company. That they really only invest in companies because others invest in
them. Or that they invest in something they are very familiar with and are
unable to recognize technological disruption.

I've a startup so I've never been on the other side of the table, but I can't
imagine that there is not also a survival of the fittest on the VC side.
Perhaps being very early in a company doesn't pay off in an extraordinary
fashion? How would the system not be autocorrecting for VC failure?

~~~
cel1ne
"That they really only invest in companies because others invest in them."

IMHO that's the business world in a nutshell. Being scared of innovation and
changing the status quo.

------
gizi
70% of what they are funding in SV is absolutely nonsensical, while 70% of
what makes sense is not even located in SV. This percentage is bound to keep
going up. SV will not remain the center of the technology startup world for
much longer.

------
jmspring
\-- "Uncertainty in the tech industry is really pushing people back towards
more certainty — working at a mutual fund, a bank, a hedge fund,"

Really? I left out the commentor name because of how stupid the comment is and
how well banks and the like are doing.

Re: startups, a bit of culling isn't a bad thing, painful yes, but not every
idea is pursuing above all else.

------
shostack
Just goes to show that sound financials in a startup without lots of outside
investment expecting outsized returns are often smarter choices.

What sucks is that many companies that are healthy and not facing layoffs are
going to use all this doom and gloom news (that really seems to be trying to
feed off itself and spark a downturn that is smaller than they want it to
seem) to ride their employees harder, depress salaries, etc.

I strongly advise anyone with any power over salaries and such to consider
strongly that if your business is healthy, continue paying a fair market wage.
The job market is still strong, and your employees loyalty will disappear
overnight the moment you start trying to knock down their pay if you are
clearly not in the same boat as over-funded/valued startups and just trying to
take advantage of the situation.

------
jasonjei
It's been a rough year already for SV software companies. Tableau, the poster
child for big data, had their market cap drop almost by half this week.

~~~
techsupporter
Isn't Tableau based in Seattle, not Silicon Valley?

~~~
jasonjei
Geographically, that may be the case. But because it's lumped in with a clique
of SV startups, I don't think being in Seattle detracts from what's going on
in SV is also affecting software companies in the rest of America.

(To be clear, I think "SV" implies the style of software companies found in SV
that may be found elsewhere in America.)

------
mc32
Oh noes, they'll have to think about office space in Fremont or Milpitas...
the horror and, and the workers will have to contemplate moving and paying a
low 2,000 for a 1BR in the lower East Bay, the cost savings horror...

But seriously, some trepidation like this in the market is probably good for
stabilizing some of the office space and housing prices [employers being more
fiscally responsible when leasing and employees renting more affordable places
in the suburbs anticipating instability and reining in extravagant housing
spending --I wanna be able to walk from my flat to the baa that charges me 16
per drink]

~~~
danans
>employers being more fiscally responsible when leasing and employees renting
more affordable places in the suburbs anticipating instability and reining in
extravagant housing spending --I wanna be able to walk from my flat to the baa
that charges me 16 per drink

This statement seems excessively judgemental. What exactly is wrong with
someone wanting to walk from their flat to a bar to pay X for a drink, and pay
what housing cost they are OK with for that privilege? And what's wrong with
companies paying to be in the same environment? EDIT: rewording

~~~
mc32
Wrong? Nothing. Sustainable? Except for Hollywood; not very; something's got
to give. It's not as if most are getting paid millions per movie and could
afford a year or two without a job [or hit for an actor] The point is, it's a
bit short-sighted. If the rents were a slight premium, sure, ok. But when they
are exorbitant as they are it makes little fiscal sense [except for those who
hit paydirt] but those likely bought houses and aren't renting.

In other words, save your money, maybe you'll have to commute and maybe the
bar won't be as close or have all the cool people, but it's worth having money
for when there is a collapse.

------
snockerton
General macroeconomic scare mongering has an upside in that perhaps some fat
will be trimmed. Those with a product or service with real value should remain
standing.

------
cenal
I wonder why [http://MatterMark.com](http://MatterMark.com) isn't covering
more about this. I'd be interested in seeing what they have to say since their
entire business is monitoring these trends.

~~~
askafriend
They laid off a _bunch_ of people and went through a massive restructuring
themselves. I'm sure they don't want to talk about it and draw attention to
that.

~~~
w1ntermute
Mattermark sounds exactly like the kind of startup-serving-startups that will
be the first to disappear when the boom turns to bust.

~~~
nickfrost
@w1ntermute We are not the kind of company that will 'disappear when the boom
turns to bust'. Despite what you and others may think, we do not just serve
startups or various types of investors. We have many enterprise level B2B
customers. Our business is NOT built on the backs of small, early stage
startups, which we likely won't even sell our product to. Also, if there is a
but, it'll be us reporting the trends on it.

------
xacaxulu
I wonder if this will temper the growth of so many 'hacker dojos' or 'code
schools' churning out entry-level developers/designers with promises of near
6-figure salaries.

------
frik
I want to read more news about startups, venture capital, Silicon Valley/SF on
HN - 29 news on HN frontpage are about other topics (interesting for sure, but
the balance is off).

~~~
dang
Can you give some examples of stories that you feel should be discussed on HN,
but weren't?

I see a lot of startup stories here. I fear that part of the problem is that
stories get posted, have good discussions, and fall off the front page before
many readers see them.

~~~
frik
> I fear that part of the problem is that stories get posted, have good
> discussions, and fall off the front page before many readers see them.

That's it, and I share your fear. I don't know how to solve it. Maybe it's
what the majority wants on the top, maybe it's what a vocal minority with high
karma points doesn't want (flagging/whatever negative news). I just see the
end result. I would just like to get the big picture on the frontpage and not
have to rely on algolia search for that.

One thing I realized is that HN front page has very different topics depending
on which time I check HN. It shifts its focus depending when people tend to
visit HN from east cost, west cost, europe, asia. A useful function would be
to check out the HN frontpage how it looked at a specific time. Let's say I
would like to see HN as it looked like 8am Pacific timezone yesterday. I know
about [https://news.ycombinator.com/lists](https://news.ycombinator.com/lists)
, maybe add another filter to that list.

~~~
beachstartup
_> A useful function would be to check out the HN frontpage how it looked at a
specific time. Let's say I would like to see HN as it looked like 8am Pacific
timezone yesterday._

sigh, kids these days. first of all, i'm sure this exists somewhere on the
internet. start with archive.org and go from there. if not, witness:

0 * * * * curl [https://news.ycombinator.com](https://news.ycombinator.com) -o
/tmp/hn-`date "+\%Y-\%m-\%d-\%H:\%M:\%S"`

for bonus points, version control it with github so everyone can see it. even
better, send it into elasticsearch. hint: curl -X -F -H

you could implement a website that does this in literally an hour with today's
tools. hell, you could even run it through some basic tools like python NLTK
and matplotlib and twilio to text message you a fucking color-coded n-gram
frequency pie chart every time it runs. you don't need ruby on rails,
rabbitmq, redis, and a huge sql schema to do this, just a few lines of bash
and python.

this would be more useful than 85.1% of startups operating today, which is
probably part of the problem. feel free to steal it.

~~~
frik
I can do that. But it doesn't solve the root problem.

It would be better if everyone can find insightful news stories and comment
more. HN is so great because of the smart community and their comments.

~~~
beachstartup
okay, then take it a step further. train a bayesian classifier to
automatically notify you of things you teach it to find interesting. this can
be done in probably ~200 lines of python and 2 or 3 dependencies -- i did it
at a previous job. they are remarkably effective at simple tasks like "you
might like..."

------
cdransf
Why would you accept an offer from a company if you can't see how they are or
will make money and, by extension, continue paying your salary?

------
kordless
> the best startups, like Google, come out of a period like this

Google isn't a startup. In fact, a company ceases being a "startup" once it
finds a business model with which it can sustain itself. If a company can
layoff a percentage of it's employees, slow growth, and still make money, they
aren't a startup.

We really should stop putting ourselves in double binds with stupid statements
like this and reject them when we hear others parroting them.

~~~
adventured
They're not saying that Google is still a startup.

They're saying that when Google was still a start-up / very young company, it
thrived in the post dotcom bust after 2000.

~~~
kordless
I'm well aware of Google's history and the dotcom bubble that occurred from
1999-2003. I'm also aware that Google made $19M in revenue on a loss of $14
million in 2000 and I'm saying the company Google _was_ at that time can't be
considered a "startup". It's a contentious point, clearly.

------
sjg007
Honestly just stop reading the news. They just make sensationalist headlines
as click bait.

------
tmaly
this is no different then what happened in 2000/2001 companies with high fixed
costs and little or no revenue went belly up

------
quattrofan
The Pop that has been too long coming...

------
beatpanda
G O O D.

