jaboody | 15 years ago | on: Move over Elo - crowdsourcing a new chess rating system
jaboody's comments
jaboody | 15 years ago | on: ASK HN: How do you motivate a lazy co-founder?
I had a recent experience that was similar in some ways to Vignesh. Being the business guy, I hired a developer (employee level not co-founder) to write a software program for me. I ran into some of the same issues as Vignesh like lack of motivation from my developer. He had taken the time to educate me about how difficult it might be to estimate how long it would take to get the software built and so I understood that it wouldn't be reasonable to judge performance based solely on results. I also didn't care what time of day he worked. However, where we ran into issues was that he was never motivated enough to put in at least 20 hours per week like he originally agreed to. Instead he would give me a maximum of 10 hours in a week and often only 5. It was very frustrating because I was expecting on him to at least meet this standard, one which he had control over. That frustration came across to him at times and only made his motivation level even worse. The relationship only got worse and worse over time and we finally ended up parting ways.
The one thing that I am very grateful for is that before I got too far with working with him, we had a written agreement signed and in place that stipulated what would happen in case of certain eventualities. This made parting ways a lot less messy than it could have been.
One other lesson that I learned is that it's critical to understand what motivates the other person. If you can't understand his motivations and what's important to him, then you shouldn't be working with him. It's a big, big problem to have a co-founder or a key employee who lacks intrinsic motivation to get stuff done.
As a related question to the HN crowd, how many hours per week is it reasonable to expect a developer to work? Is 20 hours per week too much?
jaboody | 16 years ago | on: Ask HN: Just finished coding my new startup; need ideas for getting traction
Nice website. I think, unfortunately, the concept may have some fatal flaws...
1. If you need to ship a package across the country, don't you think it would be much faster to go with a major carrier because they can ship your stuff by air?
2. Would people really trust just any person with a car to deliver stuff that might be important? What if it got stolen by the driver? What would you do then to make the situation right?
3. Would you provide tracking information for packages that are shipped? What about day estimations on delivery?
4. How would it be profitable for the driver? Usually the major carriers are able to use economies of scale to spread out the fixed costs over many packages. If your driver had 3 packages to deliver and their delivery addresses were in different parts of town, wouldn't your driver lose money on gas and the time it would take him to drive around town to deliver the packages?
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A 100 point difference between two players suggests that the stronger player will score 66% ((1#wins + 0.5#draws + 0*#losses)/#totalgames) and a 200 point difference will predict the stronger player will score 75%.