flacon's comments

I have built two startups while working fulltime and raising 2 kids. The first startup failed once my co-founder left town, after the business model and app were about 90% completed. My 2nd/current startup is http://targetmobi.com.

My schedule M-F for the last 3 years has been: 7am wakeup, feed kids etc. 9am - 5:30 work fulltime. 5:30 - 10pm family time. 10pm - 1am Startup time!. Yes thats 5-6 hours of sleep! Trying to do a startup on the side with children has been very challenging for me. Maybe its the biz models I am trying to tackle. Maybe building simple iphone/ipads apps would have had a better ROI.

Thanks for sharing this inspiring story. Having been to India previously, I can imagine somewhat what you and your parents have struggled to overcome/achieve.

"They slogged their whole life to get us decent education"

I bet that is probably an understatement from what I know of hard-working Indian people.

"50 hours a week @ $25/hour"

I believe its 100 hours a week, which frankly sounds absurd.

My comment is not ignoring either of your points since:

1. I state the salary will go up.

2. The point of my comment was to realize that making 125K is not much if you are working 100hr/week and have no time to enjoy it, thus a high salary might seem great but looking at it on an hourly basis can be useful etc.

In life, generally you can have more money or more time, rarely can you have both. I would rather have more time personally.

"You still have to work 100-hour weeks"

Assuming they are working 50 weeks a year.

50 * 100 = 5000 hours $125,000 / 5000 = $25/hour

Thats half what I make per hour.

Sure they might make more later on, but I'm not interested in giving up that much time for 1. something thats not my project and 2. for so little per hour

I really like this quote: "The way we measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’."

I couldn't help but hear a loud 'cha-ching' in my head when reading this. I makes sense though, having a lot of money in the bank enables a business to make bold moves. I think its a delicate balance between making more sums of money and being more profitable.

Silly side note and stupid metaphor warning - if someone is right-handed, they never think to cut off their left hand just because they get less return or use out of it. Only when someone if forced to choose between the hands would they ever say, ok cut off my left hand and save my dominate hand. Thats like an extreme situation!

But in business, these companies make extreme moves like this, exiting whole biz sectors/markets, eliminating depts, segmentation etc. Add to this, that the bar is continuously raised, so if the factory quota for last year was x this year its x + 10. Thus 5-10 years later the exec's are surprised when the factory is not meeting "quota" and shutter it in the name of profitability.

Profitability is one issue, but I think the trend toward over optimization and greater year-over-year ROI is also to blame.

After college I started doing some web development on the side, which really took off. I spent like 100's of late nights hacking and learning. I think there is really no other way to get good or learn things but through hard work. You can either be forced to do it (like via a degree or taking classes etc) or just force yourself on your own. I started doing simple thing than got excited to do more and more complex features, apps, systems etc. Now I do lots of System Admin and DBA, product management etc. I know many people that have followed the same path: studied X but now do Y.

"they at least have something tangible to show potential employers"

Maybe, depends on the organization. I worked for a startup where we passed over a lot of CS resume's b/c they had no tangible experience, no interesting side project, nothing they were hacking on, nothing that stood out, including people with Ivy league CS degrees.

I have a social science degree from UC Berkeley and am a self-taught programmer / Entrepreneur. I currently work as a Senior Software Developer. The best programmers I have worked with over 7 years have not been comp sci / engineering majors, while most of the mediocre programmers I have worked with have a degree in CS or MIS - totally anecdotal I know, but thats been my experience.

To a certain extent, what you study in college and what you eventually pursue as a career are generally not the same. Anyone with more than a few years in the field will understand that. Experience trumps a degree after 2-3 out in the field and you can set your own course.

Feel free to disagree, just let me know how many years of work experience you have.

I graduated from college with no loans. Then got married and had kids...thats when reality kicked in and life got waaaay more expensive.

Who can agree with me?

"Why were you pursuing these loans in the first place?"

As much as I wish I had $250K in the bank....

"Did you need to buy a home? Or did you want to buy a home."

LOL - as a married father of 2 kids in the Midwest I find this quite a funny comment. After renting for many years and dealing with horrible landlords ex: coming home on a cold winter Friday night to find my apartment bedroom with no windows with a little note stating "Be Back on Monday" - sleeping in a sleeping bag as a result.

So yeah, we "needed" our own home.

Also, given it is a great time to buy home (great rates, low prices, we got a tax credit in 2009 too) it felt like we would be stupid not to capitalize on purchasing a piece of earth/dwelling etc. Now we have a fat veggie garden, doing a remodel etc. Sometimes we regret it but overall it was the right decision for us.

Unless mammy and pappy or granny and grampy have the dough, or you sold your last company to Google, I'm guessing if you choose to buy a home, you will be calling your local loan officer and after the meeting wishing you had established some credit.

"they're just not necessary"

I am 29 years old. I thought the same thing as you until about age 25 when someone explained to me that CC's are a great way to build your credit rating. Since I avoided getting a credit card for so long...I had no credit and a very low credit rating! Whereas my wife who had had a CC for 10 years already had great credit. As a result, we had to utilize her credit rating when getting car loans/ home loans etc until my credit rating improved! Without good credit you can really get owned (bad loan rates) when pursuing a loan for any reason.

Sage advice I heard somewhere: "Weeks of coding saves hours of planning."

If I could upvote this multiple times I would.

You should post a link to portfolio/resume/github account to better market yourself on this thread

"If you can't do some kind of code, at least learn HTML5, CSS and a little Javascript, and maybe some other server-side scripting languages"

But take 5 years of solid work/practice with this to actually know what your doing...

It doesn't hurt. Though an impressive Github repo might make more waves with developers. Depends on who your trying to impress/appeal to.

Thanks for your answer.

In this case the entire company works remotely, similar to 37signals. So its a distributed team.

Highcharts is my fav and default charting library.

http://www.highcharts.com

Highcharts is not open source but is free to use for non-commercial use. I have paid the $80 to use it on commercial websites and client/managers are always very impressed with its capabilities. I think its well-worth the $$

http://www.highcharts.com/license

"That said, as an engineer being a startup "employee" is a sucker's game. You'll never get enough equity or intangibles to compensate for the risk/effort/opportunity cost."

As someone that just left a startup I couldn't agree more...

I live in Madison WI. 200K is C-suite territory around here for a mid-sized company. An exec at one of the huge insurance companies or biotech companies make more but that not typical. We have an Amazon affiliate here and mid-level managers make around $80-100K I think. I highly doubt their Chief Architects make more than 200K. 200K for mid-level management in the Midwest (outside Chicago) is unrealistic for sure.

"I think the problem arises for PhDs when they refuse to leave their narrow field of specialty"

Amen, we have a friend who spent 12 years getting a PhD in Russian History only to get out and face no job prospects. Depressingly, every year he gets ready for the one History Job fair that happens in January, flies down there and presents himself at interviews. 3 years later he still actually believes that he has a chance at getting a job after being out of the game a while. He has no sense to pivot, no sense that maybe he needs to find a new calling in life and utilize his skills in another fashion.

Contrastingly, we knew another PhD in Chemistry from Cornell. He got out and hated academia, but still loved teaching. He decided to teach chem and physics at some fancy prep high school and is doing well for himself.

To me these people need to understand that if they can't find their place quickly to scale that pyramid need to find a more general use for their skills.

There's perseverance and then theres a false sense of hope.