I worked with storage arrays at a service firm. The storage arrays backed up to the cloud. They had an onboard proprietary GUI, where if you checked a single box, it would use HTTPS instead of HTTP when transmitting to S3 (no idea why S3 even allows HTTP to start with).

They refused to roll this out (HTTPS) across the 4-5 servers of this brand we managed.

Something just broke in their brain, because I was coming at it from a security angle, they thought “this must be a waste of time / I am a power-hungry sysadmin resistant to change”. I still think about it to this day, and will get anxiety every now and then suggesting a mildly taxing security fix, because if ppl can say no to HTTPS checkboxes will they agree to anything?

If this is the biggest issue you've encountered, consider yourself lucky.

Why didn't you just roll it out yourself? I would've just checked the boxes and moved on to something else.

Joined a company as a very early employee. The company became successful (200+ employees, mid 8 figures revenues), but founders just won't sell it: instead of humbly admitting the luck we had (it's always about luck, I was in the front row seat the whole time so I can definitely and objectively state it) and take risk off the table, they are doubling down trying to make it much bigger (targeting mid 9 figures revenues, and they just took a HUGE investment round with a stellar valuation, which essentially prices us at beyond-perfect execution, so it's significantly risky). In the meantime, I am completely burned out and would just like to put an end to this adventure which lasted 5+ years, but I can't.

I can't leave due to my stock options otherwise expiring (standard 90 days window), and I don't want to put the liquidity necessary to exercise them and leave, too risky due to the appreciation of those shares, nor I want to take out a loan or stuff like esofund which will eat into 50% of my profits, and would still leave me with a taxable event if the company went belly up and the loan was forgiven. So, I'm a typical example of "golden handcuffed".

So, my "never again": never again work for founders who are already rich and are not looking for a reasonably early exit in case of success. My fault for not checking during the interview process, but I was young and naive.

If the founders were not already extremely affluent, I could assure you they would have already sold the company by now (probably at the 2-3 years mark), very likely realizing low 8 figures profits for themselves (and low 7 figures profits for me), whereas they are now shooting for high 8/low 9 figures for themselves, "hurting" me by exposing me to insane time cost opportunity, and also making the whole thing much riskier since as you grow your acquirer pool shrinks dramatically.

Realistically, I end up being a rest and vest employee, meaning I don't do much work these days, and I likely won't get fired since I have so much context, so I spend a lot of my working time avoiding getting burned out and mostly learning about new technologies, but it's still much less than ideal and it's hurting both me and the company.

At the same time, my emotions these days are very weird and nothing I ever thought I would ever experience: I am usually equally happy if the announced quarter results are a big win (meaning my equity valuation is preserved) or a big loss (meaning we are approaching the end of this company so I'll be free without having to voluntarily forfeit a potentially large payout).

Rand Fishkin's autobiography has a interesting few paragraphs about "rich founders" and why they are preferred over ones who want to "get rich" - in short VCs don't want you to cash out ever - they want that moonshot.

I just added the book to my Audible wish list, thanks for the suggestion, and your comment is definitely on point. I'll keep this piece of wisdom I am painfully learning for the rest of my working life, never do business with people who can afford to risk/lose much more than you, whether it be time, money or mental sanity.

A lot of his argument against taking VC funding comes to what you say - they are playing with other people's money in a very risky way and choose you to invest in because they want you to go beyond the call of duty because you have everything to lose.

1.) accepting angle funds for too much equity (45%) and not "quitting my day job" to focus full time on my venture.

2.) Paying (a lot, $35K) a high end IP law firm to "finish" two patents I'd drafted an file them. I now write and file my own patents for next to nothing; it just takes time.

3.) Letting a law firm convince me to pay even more ($40K) for foreign patents, which are pretty much worthless unless you're an Apple or Samsung.

4.) Not getting an up front firm quote for legal work (said firm tried to collect an additional $90K, which of course we did not pay).

5.) Not watching the company bank account like a hawk to make sure my partners weren't wasting precious raised capital on worthless overhead expenses (e.g. empty offices... and they were).

Oh, the list goes on...

Sorry dude, you’ve had the wrong law firms.

What percentage are 'wrong'? How do you find the right ones? Ask around? What if you don't know people to ask..

Hmm that would be a great website - for anywhere, it tells you who the right law firms are for what, with user stories, ratings, etc. And links to orgs who give good advice about those things etc.

My "Never again" business/ people lesson is to avoid anyone with toxic nature be a part of a startup team, howsoever genius that person might be. Once bitten, twice shy about this.

For a Startup, destination obviously matters, but making the journey enjoyable should be one of the top priorities.

Never will I use, stay on a team that uses, or assist any client which uses zip ties for cable management.

Anyone that says "we will just do this temprarily" will get charged double and need to send that statement in writing with firm start and end dates along with the consequence of not meeting the deadline.

Once your average deal size hits >$250k touch nothing less than $100k if it's a new client, leave it to inside sales.

If someone (or a business) has ever paid you for anything they never get free work. Free product? Maybe, but never free work.

Put it in a contract, regardless if buying or selling, or it doesn't exist. When asked to modify something on the fly from that contract, "we'll let you know" is the only acceptable answer until you review with your team.

"I don't know but will try to find out" is acceptable. "Yes if..." is preferred.

"No." Can help you live longer and healthier.

What’s so evil about zip ties? They probably shouldn’t end up in a real deliverable product but for prototypes and proof of concepts I’ve always found them to be very useful.

The usual work flow is zip tie while you're building bundles then everything needs to get packed into a wire sleeve.

That being said, for small bundles and with the right tools/technique you can route pretty well and make cable ties aesthetic.

The prototype always gets pushed into production and then you’re never again allowed to make any changes to it.

But you are still responsible for fixing all the problems.

Yeah I here you there I’m sure that happens all the time.

I’ve mostly done R&D work in my career so I guess my real question to you is what are all the problems that happen when zip ties are used in production.

Letting a Rude and Insulting client stay on for longer than we should have. Never again our company will deal with a Rude/Insulting client no matter how much they are paying. Rude = Fired. Be nice. And I am not a snowflake. I can deal with tough clients but not rude/insulting/entitled ones.

I've dealt with clients that eat up 90 percent of your time while only providing ten percent of the revenue. Never be afraid to fire the client.

Some of this too is learning how to say no, especially regarding time frames.

This of course works best when you "can" say no (i.e. multiple clients and other sources of revenue)

I have clients right now that I won't be able to attend to for a few weeks or so. If that doesn't work for them, I'll help transition them to a situation that works for them. But likely they'll stay around since good help can be hard to find.

I've been burnt recently, the self-hosted proprietary time tracking & invoicing tool I've been using for the last decade has decided they're only supporting their 'cloud' service from January.

Unfortunately, I haven't see any existing OSS options that quite work for me either.

Did you check out Hours? That could cover your time tracking needs.

https://github.com/DefactoSoftware/Hours

Then the only thing that would remain is to take the hours registered in Hours and stuff them into invoices somehow...

I hadn't seen that before. Time tracking is probably the harder part to make a polished solution. Invoicing is much less frequent, and while I'm using to a desktop app now, I could live with a web app.

Time tracking though - if it's not a button in my menu bar I can click start on (and helpful stuff like noticing inactivity and pausing/prompting etc) I'm going to forget to enter times.

I've wondered sometimes if it'd be possible to fork the toggl desktop app (its open source) and reverse-engineer a backend to support it (or just update the desktop app with new backend calls).

If it's self-hosted, why do you care that they're dropping support?

Because any updated version of the client-side software (e.g. the current one doesn't support Dark Mode) won't support the self hosted backend. It's likely there'll be other OS compatibility issues down the line too.

working with a genius programmer who is arrogant and insulting

Genius is far too overused in the tech world.

he's not a "genius" if he also has a low EQ.

Would you class Isaac Newton as not being a genius, then?

Fine, I'll clarify : no "genius" is worth the money if they have a terrible EQ. Let them take their "genius" and terrorize somebody else.

They are tho

Parent poster worked with Newton himself?

Anyone can be replaced.

Even if it takes two or three people, they can be replaced.

What a typical story. For how long have you been tolerant to such behavior?

FB ads when you don't really have enough money for a marketing budget anyways. FB ads is really a money game, the more money you spent, the more likely your ads will get conversion.

This is definitely not true. In general, the CVR for DR ads will slowly decline as more money is spent, as you are removing users from the pool with each conversion.

edit: s/pool/poor/

I used to sell grey market designer drugs. jumping thru hoops to be able to accept credit cards for such transactions is totally not worth it. I had so many chargebacks that were impossible to fight... some of them were $1000 orders. stick to Bitcoin or litecoin for your shady business ventures.

If you inherit a large code base that is badly written AND you are planning to stick around in that company. I would strongly suggest to immediately start re-writing that legacy code even if you have to burn extra hours. Otherwise you would be doing nothing but firefighting in that job with limited control over your situation.

Unless you're communicating all of this with your managers/supervisor/team, this is a fool's errand.

I would most definitely discourage this advice, in my opinion it's dangerous. Instead, I would focus on slowly and "casually" refactoring bad parts (without putting significant extra hours at all), while making sure that the code is actually badly written, and it's not just "not written your way" or "code I can't understand because I didn't study it enough". I have seen many engineers being victims of these two points. Sometimes the code just appears badly written because you don't have enough context to see that it's not.

I would stress that rewriting it only to discover oh, so that's why they did it that way is one of the most disheartening exercises in our industry. Documentation is what clarifies the 'wtf' moments in reading code since even initially pristine architecture will become contaminated by edge cases over time.

I give 100% that after you did your re-write and then left for another company next set of developers will think exactly the same thing about your codebase. 100%.