yangez

Let's say at your software company a sales rep brings in $2M in 2022 and demands a $1.8M commission. What do you say?

> We want to be the job search platform that puts engineers in control.

I love this, but I'm curious about the incentives here. Triplebyte only makes money from companies, not engineers. In the long run, can engineer-centric intentions override a business model based around companies and recruiters staying happy? I hope so!

Topaz Labs | Director of Growth | Onsite: Dallas, TX (but remote for now) | Full-Time | https://topazlabs.com

Hi HN - we’re Topaz Labs. We create AI-powered software that solves photographers’ biggest problems: think one-click noise reduction, super-simple masking, and pixel-perfect image upscaling. Our products are trusted by tens of thousands of paid customers every day, ranging from amateur photographers to major Hollywood movie studios.

We’re looking for someone to lead growth and marketing across our company. This role heads one of our most important departments and reports directly to the CEO. There are two primary responsibilities:

1. Own the relentless pursuit of growth targets, especially SEO, ROAS and DAU growth (ultimately leading into revenue). This is a balance of exploring new growth ideas and exploiting proven concepts with excellent execution.

2. Build a high-performing growth + marketing team with a data-driven and systematic approach. Lead from the front by guiding priorities, coaching, and setting an example.

We’re looking for a pretty specific person for this role:

* You’ve successfully led one massively successful growth strategy in either SEO or paid acquisition. You have the numbers to back it up.

* You’ve previously led a successful high-performing growth/marketing team of 1-10.

You should have deep technical expertise in either SEO or paid acquisition, write excellently, and approach marketing with a data-driven and systems-level approach. The most important cultural elements we value in this role are extreme proactivity, hacker mentality, and intellectual humility. You’ll also be leading a team, so you should also have the type of leadership style that enables high performers. Interest and experience in photography is a huge plus.

We’re currently already growing active users by 10-20% per month mostly through SEO, paid ads, and word of mouth. This is a great opportunity for the perfect person to accelerate already-explosive user and revenue growth. Your compensation will be tied directly to the performance of the company. We’re also proud to offer 100% covered platinum-level medical/dental/vision for employees, 15 days annual PTO plus holidays, and 401k matching.

Apply here and mention HN in your app: https://jobs.lever.co/topazlabs/c679ada6-faba-40d5-8165-0e07...

Topaz Labs | Product, Engineering, Marketing | Onsite Dallas, TX | Full-time + onsite

We build AI-powered photography software; we're growing active users by 10-20% monthly. Hiring for many technical roles: https://jobs.lever.co/topazlabs - mention HN in your app!

> We’re arbitrarily defining “great” candidates as those scoring between 95th and 98th percentile on our technical interview, and “the best” candidates as those scoring at 98th percentile or above.

This is an important qualifier. I'd argue that the most technical candidates are not necessarily the ones who offer the most value to companies. In fact, I would argue that "notably de-emphasizing ambition" will cancel out your technical superiority in the overwhelming majority of cases.

Here's a choice for your company's next hire:

1. A technically superior but comfortable candidate whose top priority is maintaining work-life balance and flexible work arrangements

2. A technically adequate but hungry candidate whose top priority is moving fast and learning tons

Who would you choose?

> The bottom line is that the difficulty of the decision is the most important factor in determining whether a player makes a mistake. In other words, examining the complexity of the board position is a much better predictor of whether a player is likely to blunder than his or her skill level or the amount of time left in the game.

I wonder if this also works the other way around with good moves instead of just avoiding blunders.

A parallel in business: we spend so much time thinking about hiring "A players" and "10x-ers". But could refocusing on better processes, environment, and goal-setting (reducing the complexity of the position) be just as effective for increasing performance?

How is this "strong-arming"? If we keep devaluing the meaning of words, we won't have any left when something serious actually happens.

The rep ran through a couple of retention scripts, and then got mixed up because OP called on the last billing day. Then he promptly canceled the service without any charges, which is exactly what OP was looking for. (And no, it's probably not because of the threat to contact his supervisor; customers overestimate how scary that is.)

There is literally nothing to complain about here, except maybe OP felt a little bit annoyed. I'm all for calling companies on their BS, but this feels just a bit too trigger-happy to me.

The BBB is basically a protection racket with excellent PR.

Get a customer complaint? BBB contacts you to pay for membership. Don't want to pay for membership? You must not care about your customers, so you get an F-. Pay for membership and the score immediately goes up to a B.

But with a name like the "Better Business Bureau", it's no wonder that people get suckered into thinking it's a legitimate organization.

More info: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_customer/2010/12/... https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110919/14221016016/criti...

> Programming, like writing, painting, and music, is chiefly a creative endeavor not a technical one. Practice... will not make you a substantially better programmer. It will just make you more efficient with your tools.

Show me a world-class writer who doesn't obsess about his writing with every waking moment.

Show me a master painter who doesn't paint every single chance she gets.

And show me a music prodigy who hasn't slogged through 15 years of mind-numbing practice every single day.

Only then will I believe that these artists are just getting more "efficient with their tools".

In creative fields, it's even more important that you put in a huge volume of work. That's the only way to connect the dots and create something truly unique.

> Rails isn’t just a brick wall, it’s a brick mountain... By the end of the first month, I had literally no idea what was going on.

This is not a brick wall. It's giving up as soon as something gets hard.

Rails is a great example. It has so much behind-the-scenes "magic" that it's really hard to wrap your mind around at first. Back when I was first learning it, my brain felt like it had been filled with cement at the end of every day. I didn't understand it for weeks; I felt like I was just pounding my head on a brick wall over and over. Then, all of a sudden, the fog suddenly parted and it was like being set free. After that, I never had another Rails problem that I couldn't handle.

Everyone that I've ever talked to that has learned Rails - or any other language - has struggled through this initial pain period. The difference is that the successful ones push through it after it stops being fun.

It doesn't only apply to programming either. Everything you ever learn starts with a "brick wall" that you think you'll never get past. Once you suck it up and break through it, you may find that the road is clear from there.

Here's an important piece of demographic information for the survey:

> 45% of those surveyed don’t own a device that can read ebooks – this includes both e-readers and smartphones.

So almost half of those polled don't actually have steady access to ebooks. I wonder how the statistics change for a sample who have ready access to both.

> When the Internet bubble burst, the company underwent rocky times. By 2000, [the founder] was gone from the company, as were four other members of his founding team.

> For the next decade, Bloodhound recovered and slowly grew, raising seven more rounds of financing. In April 2011, the company was sold for $82.5 million.

11 years is a long time. How much do they think they deserved?

Employee compensation is absolutely not associated with the value of the work the employee does.

Instead, it's associated with the best replacement that the company could find.

If Joe makes $2M a year for a company and gets paid $150k but Steve can do the same work at the same level for $100k, Joe's out and Steve's in. The initial $2M of value doesn't matter, except to lower the chance that a replacement could outperform you.

Cynical and unfair? Sure. That's how it works, though. Start your own company if you don't like it.

I'm not saying everyone has to work long hours. I'm just saying that the few people who do will have an obvious advantage. It's up to each person to figure out if that's what they want.

> I have a friend who brags that he busts his * 60 hours a week driving a Coca-Cola delivery truck. Congratulations, I work 35 and make twice as much as he does.

This is a straw man. The point is that if you worked 50 vs 35 hours at the same job, you'd simply get more done - even considering diminishing returns.

There's a reason many hugely successful people are notorious workaholics - see Elon Musk, Oprah, Marissa Meyer, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, etc. One of the simplest advantages that you can get is to just put in more hours than the next guy. No new-age "find-yourself" touchy-feely work-life balance talk will change that.

What's with all these startups taking so much design inspiration from Stripe?

https://www.shirts.io/

https://zinc.io/

> One possible opportunity is to get the legal system and governments involved in this so as to require an adequate level of merchant support.

I wince every time someone proclaims the government should step in to regulate something that is obviously none of their business. That's the easy way out, and it hurts everyone in the long run.

It would be helpful if there was a way to show the reasoning behind deleted submissions. Like a quick note on [dead] pages that explains why it was killed, just like you did here. That way, people won't keep resubmitting the same story over and over, which makes it easier on everyone.

Austin, TX - full-time - Web UI/UX designer for photography software company

We're Topaz Labs, a bootstrapped and highly profitable photography software company with an operations office in Austin. You're a web UX designer obsessed with creating beautiful and polished websites. You would take full ownership of website user experience and design for a software company where the majority of sales come from online channels.

We have great plans for the future and we're going to our existing success as a springboard to accomplish much bigger things in the photography industry. Join us to become a core member of a company with a proven market, lots of resources, and huge potential - and a TON of creative problems to solve and concrete opportunities to pursue.

About you:

- You're amazing at creating beautiful + usable web designs, and you have examples of previous work to back it up.

- You know HTML/CSS well and you're a wizard in Photoshop / Illustrator.

- You're a good copywriter and written communicator.

- Bonus points if you're a good photographer.

- You're in Austin or can relocate, and you're eligible to work in the US.

About us:

- Highly profitable and growing photography software company. Our customers love us and we love them.

- Excellent compensation, cool people + great benefits.

- We're in downtown Austin! Music, beer, and great food.

Email ux[at]topazlabs.com if you're interested. Talk to you soon!

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

This is very disturbing. How did the FBI gain access to all this information? It should be locked up in Apple.

From what I see, the NCFTA in "NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv" looks like it stands for the National Cyber-Forensics & Training Alliance, which "functions as a conduit between private industry and law enforcement." (http://www.ncfta.net/)

Is Apple willingly sharing personal information with the FBI through the NCFTA?

That should be Facebook's tagline.