Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Remote: Preferred
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Typescript (Node, Express, Svelte), Rust, Postgres, AWS and related technologies
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomaspotaire/
Email: 01jned4cx4sksg3y770v3bppaq+hn625@gmail.com (forwards to my address)
I am transitioning out of my role of CTO and am exploring opportunities. I have 15 years of web experience building CMS and CRM for small and large companies.
As a co-founder (as well as my prior years), I wore many hats and spent countless hours as a result I can architect and design large codebases, hire and retain talent, lead and manage teams and set company-wide goals. I built and managed an engineering team located all around the globe and built a platform empowering small and medium businesses to run their operations; the company is entering a new phase of growth and it is the right time for me to find opportunities that aligns with my personal goals.
I am looking for a role at an established company. The bigger the problem, the more exciting. A perfect role for my profile may be one that blends my experience of building a successful B2B2C startup (building teams, product and software) and my experience of building B2B tools at a large company (Twitter).
If you need someone that can be an immediate value-add, bringing a ton of firepower, solving big problems and rallying teams to move mountains: hit me up!
It's because of the tax holiday Costa Rica is giving [0][1][2], and VMWare's acquisition by Broadcom (they had a massive engineering campus in San Jose, Costa Rica) leaving a lot of Support Engineers and C++ Engineers on the market.
Czechia, Romania, and Poland did the same thing in the 2010s, Israel and India in the 2000s, and Taiwan and South Korea (in electronics) in the 1990s.
I am using Google Chrome on Mac, and it literally crashes when I click on the submit button, so I assumed the server crashes. Tried about 5 times across multiple days, and I have never been able to sign up.
If you sort the reviews by Most Recent, you'll see many one-star reviews. Perhaps not enough to skew the main score, it is cached or some other reason.
I believe the person you replied to was saying that was an example of a legitimate issue with Elon's behavior, as compared to the "pure character assassination."
Same boat! I picked up a Steam Deck, was desperately looking for a multiplayer game I could play 20-30 minutes in the day, and found Deep Rock Galactic. I only play when my wife watches a TV show or in bed.
I am a bit at odd with the pricing. My team has 6 engineers and base price for Github is $24. Your product would increase our bill by $48, an increase of 200%. $48 is nothing compared to the salaries of 6 engineers but I am not convinced the feature set would make my team more productive.
If you told me that your solution help my team ship faster and saves an hour per engineer per week then that's easy math: your product pays for itself.
Suggestions:
- Make all base features free (the ones on your site currently)
- Add analytics to your product, collect data and put it behind a paywall (entirely or partially by truncating historical data)
- Iterate on premium features that improves critical metrics
- Offer analytics with a trial of 2 to 3 months, enough time for graphs to speak for themselves
- Make sure the gains are seen by the manager or business owner or whoever is the person in charge
Pricing can be based on the average of hours saved.
- It sounds like you’re micromanaging your team’s metrics at a rate that’s fractional to one contributor’s hourly cost even though you don’t understand what helps them to be productive. Don’t do that.
- You’re asking for a Show HN to eliminate its price tag and give you everything the poster finds valuable for free, and offer an entirely different product. I’m pretty sure you’re not the audience for this product.
> - It sounds like you’re micromanaging your team’s metrics at a rate that’s fractional to one contributor’s hourly cost even though you don’t understand what helps them to be productive. Don’t do that.
You are seeing micro-management where I am looking for visibility and automation. I physically cannot micro manage my team.
> - You’re asking for a Show HN to eliminate its price tag and give you everything the poster finds valuable for free, and offer an entirely different product. I’m pretty sure you’re not the audience for this product.
1. OP said feedback was welcome.
2. I already pay for those features on Github. I suggested a different path to a bigger price tag.
3. I realize I am not the target audience. Simply providing a different perspective.
I’m going to disagree, I think the model they have is both familiar to me as a potential user and priced such that, if it is even slightly better than GitHub, it’s a no-brainer. I wouldn’t pay extra for analytics, though, it just sounds like another thing to check.
IMHO if the one-month free trial isn’t enough to know whether a SaaS solution is worth an $8/head price, it’s probably not worth that price.
Adding Y to Xy is already a tough sell, but when the upgraded Y costs more than all of Xy? I sympathise with GP. GitHub can do it from an economy of scale and probably 'should' be more expensive, but it can manage not to be (maybe cheaper is actually optimal, given how many more will pay for it, point is it's in some sense 'worth' more) which puts OP in a tough spot.
Imagine trying to sell a better WYSIWYG editor for WordPress for example. You can be better, save time, etc. - it's still always going to be a tough sell to charge more than a fraction of WP itself which offers a WYSIWYG editor and everything else.
Hence my suggestion, if your product saves me $500/seat/month then I'll gladly pay $50/seat/month.
Wordpress is a great example, rather than build another Wordpress, solve one problem Wordpress doesn't solve (example: Elementor) and do it far better (depth vs breadth).
We are using this Github Action (https://github.com/flowwer-dev/pull-request-stats) for now, it adds stats to every PR, it has helped the team visualize their contributions and how critical it was for us moving forward and as a manager/tech-lead it helps me identify areas of improvements at the individual level. I think it's a simple idea with a lot of depth.
> How does the metrics shown in the action help you?
We've mostly looked at "Total reviews" and "Total comments". When I put the action in place, I told the team that the goal was for everyone to contribute to the process.
I was expecting to look at the stats, make some observations and action items and bring it up during our 1:1. I didn't even need to do that. Everybody took it to heart and contributed in different ways. Our most junior engineer ended up contributing in the most meaningful way and set a new standard for how far we take testing.
At this point, it's pretty clear that I see this more as a tool for individuals. For me, I am a bit constrained on time, I can check the table, notice a variation in the number (the action doesn't show variation so I do it out of memory) and decide to take an hour to explore the contributions. The goal being: how can I help them grow?
As an IC, I perhaps could project myself a bit based on my experience, if I am a junior engineer then I can see who comments the most, explore their comments and learn from them. As a tech lead, I'd want to make sure the tone of the comments are constructive (ie. definitely not toxic).
That's actually a use case I've thought about. When review time came around, one of my past managers would compile statistics on everyone's reviews to see how much they've been participating.
Another feature I've thought about is "show me all of person X's reviews and comments across all repos". That would have been super useful when I was on promo panels to go through and see if a promo candidate's review comments were useful, constructive, kind, etc.
Exactly! You bring a great point with promo panels where the difference between the amount of time put into building a promo package and the amount of time the panel spend on it can be considerable (my experience at Twitter).
I think when it comes to per-seat pricing, it's good to remember that engineers don't put the credit card in. The person with the credit card will want to know ROI before investing. The engineers will want to try out first as a group and if their experience is positive (some of it might be subjective) then they'll need to build a case for why the company should pay for your product and that's where analytics can be leveraged for sales.
Background on me: I am French, I've been living in the Bay Area for the past 14 years, a 2-year old and another on the way, we are recent home owners and grandma lives and helps us every day.
California is expensive. The Bay Area where you'd find high paying jobs is even more expensive. Rent is expensive, home ownership is nearly inaccessible, cost of daycare and healthcare is high, great schools are expensive and taxes are high.
I didn't do the exact math but to give you a ballpark, for us to live well, eat well, save for the future and travel (ski trips or visit family in France), we'd need to earn a combined yearly salary of over $300,000. I think for a household with 2 parents working as SWE it's doable.
That said, based on seniority, your household could probably reach over $200,000 working from Bavaria.
I frequently think about going back but our decision is mostly a factor of the kids growing up around family, in an environment that's empowering them and with great weather. Rain and green pasture sure is pretty but I prefer the sun.
Can you provide links to websites that engineers get paid 100k in Germany?
My impression is that it’s around 50k. That’s what, for example, car companies or top R & D places pay the best graduates from TUM (I am talking about PhDs with years of experience in advanced engineering).
But OP should also consider health care costs. You still pay 800-900 Euro in Germany (450 paid out of salary and an equivalent amount by the employer, which is essentially taken from salary), and with that you get excellent health care for a single person in US, but things change if you are unemployed. Overall, German health care system is better.
100K isn't a common salary for entry or mid level but as senior engineers or mangers you can definitely make it. I'm working in Germany. With my bonus I touch just about 100K. I have 10 years of experience though. Although when recruiters contact me and if you mention 100K as your minimum they don't seem very excited about it. Same with companies.
> Can you provide links to websites that engineers get paid 100k in Germany?
>
> My impression is that it’s around 50k. That’s what, for example, car companies or top R & D places pay the best graduates from TUM (I am talking about PhDs with years of experience in advanced engineering).
I am not familiar with the German market so I wouldn't know. I lead software engineering at a small startup in the US and talk with other CTOs. I think at this point, a lot of US startups will consider any talent anywhere in the world and the exception being legality (for example, companies with clients in the public sector). Salary-wise, it depends on seniority. A very senior engineer could reach Bay Area salaries and I know a few (exception?) who far exceeds those levels. Due to the nature of remote work, junior engineers will have a tougher time so location will definitely be a factor.
Two or three years ago, I played PoE on PS4 and thought it ran great. I came up with a powerful but boring PvE build. I forgot how I did it but the character would spin like a tornado and blades would twirl around it. I kept on tweaking the build and I think too many effects would trigger at once and it crashed the game. I didn't know I could be interested in this aspect of a game and had a ton of fun pushing the limit. Breaking the game was rewarding in some sense.
I didn't have in me to explore more of the game so I stopped. I recently picked it back up on Steam Deck; it runs great and I am getting 6 hours of battery life.
As a co-founder (as well as my prior years), I wore many hats and spent countless hours as a result I can architect and design large codebases, hire and retain talent, lead and manage teams and set company-wide goals. I built and managed an engineering team located all around the globe and built a platform empowering small and medium businesses to run their operations; the company is entering a new phase of growth and it is the right time for me to find opportunities that aligns with my personal goals.
I am looking for a role at an established company. The bigger the problem, the more exciting. A perfect role for my profile may be one that blends my experience of building a successful B2B2C startup (building teams, product and software) and my experience of building B2B tools at a large company (Twitter).
If you need someone that can be an immediate value-add, bringing a ton of firepower, solving big problems and rallying teams to move mountains: hit me up!