Why the Kids Don't Blog and Grandma's on Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1710068/embargoed-till-1201-am-thursday-grandmas-on-facebook?partner=homepage_newsletter <comment><USER2> I think there are two ways to blog: altruistically or narcissistically. If you're blogging altruistically you're blogging for others primarily and yourself secondarily. If you're blogging narcissistically you're mostly blogging for yourself.

Most of the great blogs that I visit are all done altruistically. They are well maintained, post useful information, and very rarely waste my time. They also require a huge amount of effort on the part of the blogger because they really have to do work to gather and present interesting and useful information for their readers.

What a lot of the press has referred to as blogging is "narcissistic." Instead of coming up with interesting information and vetting it for their readers they mostly just spew whatever thoughts they had that day onto the page. It doesn't take a huge amount of effort, but the signal to noise ratio is also very low.

With the rise of Facebook and Twitter, narcissistic blogging can happen more in the sphere you want it (your friend group). Narcissistic bloggers are usually doing it for attention and their friends' and acquaintances' attention is more important than strangers'.

Altruistic bloggers, on the other hand, have useful information to present so they want to present it to as large an audience as possible. While I think we'll see more narcissistic bloggers moving to Facebook and Twitter in the future, hopefully the altruistic bloggers will continue putting the time in for the public.

<comment><USER3> This is strange, why are you all posing the narcissistic blogger as a negative here? I usually write whatever comes to my mind on my blog and still get some readership. I seriously don't get the problem you have with people like me. Blogging mainly started as lifelogs of people which they published on the internet, I believe that is what a narcissistic blogger does and nothing is wrong with that.

<comment><USER2> That's a good point. I should imply a distinction between truly narcissistic bloggers who are doing it to gain attention for themselves and bloggers who are instead focused on themselves. They blog as a personal activity without viewership in mind. I Perhaps I should write a blog post on all this and bring it full circle.

<comment><USER3> I don't know of any people who blog just to get attention, but even if someone did whats wrong with that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know I should blog, and I have a blog that gets updated about once every three months. Blogging is really labor intensive. IMO making blogging truly streamlined and easy has still not happened. Posterous's blogging by email was a great attempt. I also liked a blog engine I ran into[1] that just pulled Markdown formatted text files out of a git repository (it was powered by Sinatra).

But regardless of the tools, truly quality blog posts take time and effort to plan out, research and write. The end result is the vast majority of blogs are nothing but noise (including my own).

One thing I am working on to fight this is getting my company to sanction a company blog. Where I can dedicate some real time to a development blog. The benefit being we can hopefully start attracting an audience, and gain a foothold when we open source some of our bits. The real goal being finding new developers when it's time to hire that much easier as we will hopefully be seen as a quality company to work for. Almost the same reason individuals blog and release stuff on github.

[1] <http://www.restafari.org/introducing-marley.html>

<comment><USER5> "But regardless of the tools, truly quality blog posts take time and effort to plan out, research and write."

What's interesting is that the blog posts that are the most successful on HN and other social news sites seem to be the ones that take around 8 hours to write, plus or minus two. If one spends 30 hours writing a blog post then it's generally as unsuccessful as if one spent only three hours writing it. There are definitely exceptions, like I'd bet Fred Wilson writes most of his posts in only a couple hours, but for the most part this rule seems to hold well.

<comment><USER6> I'm curious: how do you know how long it takes writers of successful blog posts on HN to write those posts?

Your number _feels_ right—I've written a number of "successful" HN posts myself, and they've all taken about 6-10 hours to write—but I wouldn't want to make the kind of statement you've made, that "for the most part this rule seems to hold well," until I've seen lots and lots of data.

<comment><USER5> In addition to my own experience, Guy Kawasaki also said that his blog posts took him about 8 hours to write on average. He's sort of the archetype because originally every single one of his posts was approaching the platonic ideal, and he made the technorati top 100 only a few months after starting his blog.

In general though it's not that hard to tell roughly how long a blog post took to write just by reading it. The typical breakdown of a successful blog post is usually something like:

1) Two or three hours of reading a few journal articles or digging up a bunch of facts and citations from Google.

2) Two or three hours writing down what you want to say in roughly the order you want to say it. The sweet spot is usually 800 to 1200 words.

3) Another two hours restructuring the writing so that your the voice, flow, formatting, grammar, etc. maximally resonate with the people who you ultimately want to upvote your post.

4) Another hour or two polishing the post, especially the first two or three paragraphs so that you can maximize the amount of people who actually read what you write once they click on the link. Also optimizing the title, coming up with a snappy conclusion, making sure the whitespace is aesthetically pleasing, etc.

5) Another hour to turn the post into HTML, make sure all the links are working, fix HTML formatting issues, correct last minute typos, and go live.

If you spend longer than this doing research and coming up with more original ideas then your posts will no longer resonate with as many people because even though it's more insightful, it's less anchored to stuff they already know and accept as true. And the only people who can really do a good job faster than this are those who can get away with writing in the same voice they speak in, which is very few people because most people aren't very good at speaking. So generally only people like Seth Godin can do this and still get lots of upvotes. Similarly, you can also shave off some time if you're someone who can draw on vast amounts of professional experience in addition to research, like Fred Wilson. But again there aren't that many people that can do this and still be credible, because even if you're legitimately a well-recognized expert it still only works for people in a handful of professions.

In general you will rarely see Paul Kedrosky's blog making the front page here, because most of his blog posts are just a list of new statistics without much explanation. And even though these are often brilliant and have the potential to completely reshape your worldview, people apparently have trouble understanding the implications without any further explanation. And similarly, rarely do Salon.com or Edge.org articles make the front page; people have trouble believing that Salon articles are true because there's a lot of research they haven't heard before so they think that it must be false because if it was true they would have already heard about it, and in the case of Edge.org people don't like to think for themselves about whether or not the vast amounts of original ideas are likely true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interestingly little information in this article besides the headline.

<comment><USER8> The URL is interesting too, note the embargo notice -

[http://www.fastcompany.com/1710068/embargoed-till-1201-am- th...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1710068/embargoed-till-1201-am-thursday- grandmas-on-facebook?partner=homepage_newsletter)

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I dunno if it was just instinct, but that was the first thing I noticed.

Someone needs to learn pretty URLs...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think we've ended the historical period where younger people will always be more tech-savvy than their slightly older counterparts. I wonder if having internet and ubiquitous connectedness just be a part of the background for younger people will actually make them less likely to be early adopters of something unknown or up-and-coming.

<comment><USER11> I don't think we can know if that's true or not.

Younger people have been more tech-savvy because they grew up with the technology whereas the older generations had to learn stuff that wasn't around when they were young.

Depending on how tech changes in the future, that could well be the case again. We already know that in thirty years the industry will be SO different to what it is now, will everything be a massive scaling up of what we already know, or will new technology arrive that the new younger-generations will grow up with while we'll be growing old shouting "I REMEMBER WHEN..." - only time will tell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Funny how the internet is slowly transforming to just pointing and saying "Wow!"

<comment><USER13> I was just thinking of this yesterday. It's as if there isn't any kind of symbolism on the web. AFK, if I want to talk about apples, I can use the word "apples" and people will know pretty much what I'm talking about. But on the internet, if I want to talk about something, I'll just link to some other webpage that says what I want to say. It's as if, every time I wanted to talk about apples, I had to bring an apple to show people. Where did the meta go?

<comment><USER14> I friend of mine wrote on that spot, but regarding rants. If your want to rant on something its likely someone else already did <http://devnull.li/~jerojasro/blog/posts/rule_no_36/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm sorry: where's the "why"? All I see is "Data: kids don't blog..."

<comment><USER16> the why is that the stats provider calls the same behavior two different words - what they used to call blogging (livejournal) they now call social networking (facebook)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is Tumblr a blog? It's growing like crazy. OTH, Posterous growth as a blogging platform seems to have peaked, which may explain their pivot to Groups, which is a social networking and media sharing play, the heart of Facebook and instagr.am.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think the reason that Grandmas have adopted technology at a faster pace is that technology as a whole is becoming easier to use - probably due to a stronger focus nowadays on UI/UX. As opposed to engineers being in charge of design, we now have more real designers in charge of design - see what's happened in spaces like email marketing with Mailchimp. Another obvious example but in hardware is the iPad. Grandmas don't have to worry so much about booting up, operating systems, etc. They just press a button and it works.

I think kids don't blog as much because it's so much easier for them to get an audience through their current social media networks - primarily Facebook. Most blogs don't have huge audiences - mostly just friends and family. So, why would someone create a separate blog and then try to drive traffic to that blog when they can just post similar content on Facebook or Twitter and have it served up to their friends and family? I'm sure they get way more comments on their Facebook updates than they do on a blog anyway. Particularly for a narcissistic blogger, that's what they're looking for anyway - affirmation.

<comment><USER19> _I think kids don't blog as much because it's so much easier for them to get an audience through their current social media networks_

I actually like this comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2012444> (which you reference towards the end) on why kids use Facebook, which makes a distinction between blogging altruistically and narcisstically. The former means blogging chiefly for others and offering information they couldn't find elsewhere, while the latter means blogging chiefly as a way of raising one's own status.

I'm guessing most kids don't have enough knowledge of ways of structuring what knowledge they do have to make of interest to others -- who they (mostly) don't care about anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> We are becoming the borg. Teenagers don't blog because they don't have the time, and are becoming incapable of thinking independently of their collective. Information streams into their brain at a rate they are unable to comprehend, and so their world is this ultra-fast blur of data, just basic I/O, without any processing.

Oh, and stay off my lawn.

</comment><comment><USER21> Facebook is now more popular than LiveJournal and MySpace. News at 10.

</comment><comment><USER22> Kids don't blog because most don't write in essay form and are trending towards shorter form, shorter attention span communications.

Grandmas are signing up for FB in record numbers to see pictures of their grandchildren, which they obsess over.

<comment><USER23> Well most people don't blog. We just don't have that much to say.

<comment><USER22> I hope that is not true. I think it is more a matter of organizing your thoughts into something you deem presentable to an audience. Maybe the Dunning-Krueger effect explains the generally low quality of many blogs - Potentially high caliber bloggers are overly self-critical and don't publish, for others the converse.

<comment><USER23> Maybe. There are a number of things I don't find original enough to be worthy of a blog post or don't have enough data to feel comfortable saying. There are a few rare things but they fall under the terms of the exclusive lease my employer has on my brain.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Advice needed: Career Pivot? (Long) - <AUTHOR> (Posting with a throwaway account.  My normal HN username would be immediately recognizable to anyone who knows me, and I'd just as soon not advertise the fact that I'm thinking about making changes or that I've entertained other job offers)
tl;dr version:  I'm an older S/W engineer. I'm very good at what I do.  I've worked for a successful DoD contractor start up for quite a while.  I'm bored.  I'm interested in CG/VFX and also in prop-trading/HFT.  I've had offers from both fields, but I declined them.  Looking back, I wished I'd taken them.  I'm more than ready for a change.  What do I do now?
(many semi-colon delimited lists follow)
Basic facts:  I'm forty-<mumble> years of age; married, no kids; I've been working as a software engineer/devop for many, many years; I know a lot about: C,C++/STL/Boost,Linux,bash,perl,python,node.js,etc; I've been with the same company (a very successful and rapidly growing DoD contractor) for the last 12 or so years; I was a very early employee at said company; as this company continues to grow and mature, I find it more and more boring to work there.  Because of my waning interest, I don't see much opportunity for career growth (eg. management) (however, I do have great job security as it is).
So, I think a lot about pivoting my career into a new domain.  At this stage of my career/life, this amounts to major changes involving my work, my family, and my future, and so of course I'm turning to complete strangers for advice.
Here are my interests/options:
Option A: stay put.  Pros: Indefinite job security; very good salary, ridiculously good benefits; low(-ish) pressure; interesting low-level technical work; chance (slim) that the company will be bought up by one of the big DoD contractors and I'll get a large-ish payout.  Cons: minuscule bonuses; domain is mature and not all that exciting to me any more; definitely not interested in moving into management; the DoD doesn't have all that many truly smart people, so it's frustrating to deal with customers; I've been waiting for this mythical payout for years, and I no longer think it will ever happen;  I really feel like I'm starting to stagnate professionally, and that it's time for a change.
Option B: cinema CG/VFX.  I'm utterly fascinated by this stuff.  I'm not much of an artist, but there is a lot of tech work in this domain.  Judging by the job postings, I think I'd be good for a "Pipeline TD" or "Studio Tools" type of position.  (Full disclosure:  Several years ago, I turned down (what turned out to be) a decent offer from a major, household-name animation studio, and I've regretted it ever since.)   Pros:  enthusiasm; working with creative types (this is huge for me); enough interest to sustain a career path into management; seemingly many places to work for;  movie magic, name in credits, etc.  Cons:  definite pay cut (the offer was a good 15% lower than my salary at the time, but I was ready to absorb the cut (my wife wasn't)); probably small (if any) bonuses; it's a high-pressure job; unsure that someone my age can pivot into the industry; everybody wants to work in the movies, so there's downward pressure on salaries; relocation to locales that may be a hard sell to my wife; maybe I'm wearing rose-colored glasses here.
Option C: Prop-Trading/HFT.  About three years ago, I had a good offer from a (non-HFT) prop trading boutique shop, in a location I like.  I was ready to accept when the founders of my current company made me aware of the possible payout (which they claimed was imminent).  In retrospect, I should have taken the offer. (The good news is that this shop may still hire me.) Pros:  I'm getting a lot of interest on LinkedIn from prop-trading houses, which is gratifying; my skillset & experience seems to slot right into the field; very interesting technical challenges; possibility of astounding bonuses: I have friends working in banking, and they pull down a ton of bonus, and even in a "not-good" year, the bonuses would beat the bonuses I make now; binary metric of success is appealing: either you make money or you lose it.  Cons:  Not interested in relocating to NYC or Chicago (nice places to visit, though); can be very high-pressure; high dollars tend to attract douchebags, which are no fun to work with (to be sure, though, there are some extremely interesting non-douchbags in the field); unsure of the career path beyond writing software; I don't have nearly the enthusiasm for this as I do the CG/VFX stuff.
I should clarify that the company I currently work for is a very good company to be employed by.  I can't find any faults, other then the normal faults that any software development company has.  The point here is that I'm bored of the problem domain in general. There is just no new ground for me to mine here, other than management, which I just can't do (for this company).
I was content for a long time in my career to simply design and build software. I'm good at it and I enjoy it.  But I've reached the point where I want more from my career, and if I'm to achieve that, then I'll need to dive into something that I'm enthusiastic about and that will take me beyond software development.  Clearly, if I could turn the clock back a few years, I'd head off in the CG/VFX direction.  I don't know how realistic that option is anymore.  One thing's for certain, though: I do need a change.  I really like working with creative types, but by latching onto the CG/VFX domain, maybe I've got my vision too narrowed.  Maybe there's other options.
At any rate, thanks for reading.  Any comments appreciated. <comment><USER2> Build your own company :-)

<comment><USER3> To me, this should almost always be the most interesting possibility. You could do this on the side and use it to get some enthusiasm back into your coding. This option also has the most financial upside if you can do something which takes off.

This option also gives you the best job security. There is no job security in a job, only building your own business will put you in total control over your destiny.

Also consider that the same sorts of issues could pop up wherever you land, along with additional issues that you won't know about until you actually get to that different job.

Otherwise, it seems like a bit of a coin toss. Maybe browse through LinkedIn to see if you can get in touch with people working in your target industries. See if they can further expand on your list of pros and cons.</comment></comment>


Enterprise software vendors have no taste - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/michael-dubakov-selection/enterprise-software-vendors-have-no-taste-add7e78b7f69 <comment><USER2> The design challenge behind a modern enterprise app is also way steeper than on any consumer app.

Enterprise apps like CRM, ERP, HR, etc. need to cover a myriad of use cases and local/regional/global intricacies. They achieve this through configuration and even customization options. Nobody, ever, uses enterprise apps out of the box.

So your iPad app now needs to readjust and reconfigure itself based on customer defined data models, page layouts, workflows, triggers. And by customer I mean some yokel at Accenture/CapGemini/etc who is at least three layers removed from the person who wrote the requirements, plus never had any real training on how to configure the app.

And as they can change even stuff like field labels, your beautiful and simple UI now needs to handle huge strings in random places, etc.

Source: Running a team that builds a very successful enterprise app in a specific vertical. And we're spending a huge amount of time on protecting the end users from all the tasteless forces between us and them.

Props to the Salesforce UX team, who are fighting the same fight. Go look at the Salesforce Wave analytics app - truly wonderful UI. Their way of drilling into a donut graph is simply awesome.

<comment><USER3> It's not about making it "look good". Completely subjective. The app needs the capbility to switch out the CSS. For instance, we resell/implement a popular cloud app - just our company - we do dozens of large implementations.

Out of box, this app has a super modern look! It is not the SAP etc.. of days gone by. Even with this, some love it, some hate it. Waste of time trying to guess what people think looks good.

Put their logo on, probably 8 out of 10 ask for this. No brainer.

Need custom CSS, 1 out of 20 ask for this. App should be able to.

If they want to get crazy, the capability for complete custom pages. Maybe 1 out of 50 customers ask for this and after you quote them the price they'll not want it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Enterprise software is often picked by committee, who will find it easier (at the same price point) to go for the product with more features rather than the product with a better design.

Hence, most of the negative feedback enterprise software vendors receive from the sales process is usually "We went with competitor X because they could do more for us.", which pushes the vendor to add more features at the expense of taste.

<comment><USER5> I work in enterprise software as well and unless the UX/features of an app is critical, you are spot on.

On the product I work on, one of the major GUI client is heavily used by power users with direct decision factor on the deals. It gets a lot of effort and polish and IxD folks go to client sites and maintain a feedback loop.

Other parts of the app are meant to be used by, well, "lesser" users (from a sales PoV) and get less IxD time/effort. It's all very rational.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article author seems to have had very little experience actually in the positions that he criticizes. The truth is that actually good people in those positions are working very hard and that they have basically no resources available nor dedicated to "make it look good." The number of cycles that consumer-oriented start-ups put towards design is roughly similar to what enterprises would spend on compliance and security. Both sides are motivated by completely different business drivers - start-ups and consumer companies need design to drive customer acquisition, and enterprises tend to require sales teams to be able to engage their enterprise customers. This dramatically changes the output obviously.

Only the top-performing enterprise vendors that have been able to get the funding necessary to meet compliance issues AND design have a remote chance of doing decent UI.

Also, another factor to consider is that most enterprise software these days by the typical vendors are acquisitions, so that software has already been around for roughly... 5 years or so. After they're rebranded, it's been another 2 years and the original engineers and designers have left after displeasure with their new masters. And most of these new companies have very little interest in rocking the boat and just want to keep squeezing the existing customers for whatever and will take years and years to introduce the acquired software to their other accounts. So, by then you'll have really, really old software that you just bought.

<comment><USER7> >The article author seems to have had very little experience actually in the positions that he criticizes

The article author runs a company for 10 years that creates a single product for B2B market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> They may not look pretty, but they work a lot better than the over-designed crud with pretty UIs. As a SysAdmin, I hope none of these enterprise vendors ever hires a single designer.

<comment><USER9> I laughed when I read the complaint about the "embarrassing lack of spaces"... Add the generous amount of space any fancy _à la page_ UI needs and try to keep the all the functionality these apps have, you'll need way more than a 4k screen for it to fit the screen.

No, less is not always better.

<comment><USER7> So you think this is OK? [http://cl.ly/image/0a0r1P1m0b2U](http://cl.ly/image/0a0r1P1m0b2U)

<comment><USER10> I don't think that is quite what the parent was referring to. I think it was more "space" as in "have a clean simple uncluttered UI with ample padding around the edges" (see point 3 here: [https://medium.com/@erikdkennedy/7-rules-for-creating- gorgeo...](https://medium.com/@erikdkennedy/7-rules-for-creating-gorgeous-ui- part-1-559d4e805cda?hn=1)) not _literally_ a lack of   spaces between elements.

<comment><USER7> I mean exactly that in the article. Spaces between forms and labels.

<comment><USER10> Ah sorry, I take that back then

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The root cause is that enterprise software is not sold to the people that use it.

As for salesforce.com you should see how much worse the things it replaced were.

I would also frame it in terms of usability rather than beauty. As a programmer one of my pet peeves is issue tracking systems that force you to fill out 25 irrelevant fields and wait 40 seconds several times to create a ticket. Not to mind that when you say you spent 4 hours on a ticket you might find that 4 hours got added to the estimate one time and the estimate got zeroed another time. A tell is that during standups the PM is moving post its around because it is too slow to use electronic tools.

In an environment like that what should take 30 seconds takes more like 5 minutes.

<comment><USER12> Yes the article seems to be based on screenshots which are deemed to be too 'busy' or have too many gradients, rather than on actual usability.

<comment><USER7> The article is about taste, not usability. It is intentional. It is possible that usable solution still ugly. But in ideal world we should have both.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure if that's possible. The screenshot in the article shows a lot of screens with a lot of information and a lot of possible actions to take. For software that I need to use to interact with large amount of complex data, I do not want options to be hidden behind 4/5 clicks.

When I was a part of a team that did enterprise-ish management software, one of the complaints of our initial design is that it's too simple and it takes too long to perform actions (>1 clicks from the main UI), and actually making it far more complex (users had to learn where the buttons are).

Also, "Taste" is pretty subjective. Personally, I find software that's easy to use to be of good taste. A high learning curve (lots of options) is not necessarily bad as long as I can be efficient when I'm familiar with the software (think: Vim vs Google Maps)

<comment><USER11> It may be possible but it is also difficult and adds one more constraint.

There certainly are cases where usability falls by the wayside for looks, and plenty of cases where the people involved are oblivious to everything and are just trying to get something based on mainframe or first wave client-server technology to be accessible by the web.

The learning curve issue is a real one and it has a few dimensions. One is the case of an app you use every day where click minimization is the number one thing. The other is the app that you use only occasionally and the user's long term memory is the bottleneck. One trouble is that even the app you use every day probably has some corner that you go into every six months, so even that kind of app has learning curve issues that don't go away.

<comment><USER14> In serious software for serious work there is a simple way to cut down the learning curve - training sessions. Instead of dumbing down the UI and slowing everyone down, you can just take new employees to a few hours long session where they get familiarized with the parts of the tool they need for the job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Many of these responses hilariously demonstrate why enterprise software interaction design is so poor: the market simply doesn't care.

The root cause is not that enterprise software vendors have no taste, it's that the stakeholders involved in the procurement process don't value interaction design. Like any market, it's likely that the vendors that are successful value those things that their customers value, and interaction design is not one of those things.

The vendors that are passionate about design eventually do something else, because their work isn't valued by the enterprise market. The vendors that remain in the market either don't value design or aren't committed to it. And, by extension, the best designers don't stick around in companies where their talents aren't valued.

</comment><comment><USER16> I see two problems:

1) Beautiful design takes lots of effort. Making sure that texts and buttons align, choosing color schemes, takes a lot of time. A large fraction of the code is UI code, so minimizing the amount of time spent on coding the UI is a quick way to safe time and money.

2) Beautiful design requires authority. When you make a twitter client, you can just scrap that confusing feature that noone will use. In enterprise world, you need to implement every stupid feature the client wants even if it makes the product worse. No amount of taste or design can fix an interface that is broken in principle.

</comment><comment><USER17> Enterprise software is designed to demo well (that means lots of well exposed one dimensional features) and differentiate against competitors in demos/shootouts. Everything else is secondary - design, usability. This makes it easy to sell, but leads to high levels of dissatisfaction - (i.e. the 80% failure rate of CRM or ERP or ATS software).

<comment><USER18> I will take it one step further. Enterprise software is designed to "sell". In enterprise software, the buyer and the user are not the same person and the buyer has the power. That is why enterprise software sales is so bloated.

We build and sell enterprise software and our strength is design. The way we work around this problem is that we are selling only to early adopters and have also open sourced our product. We are not getting the big bucks, but its starting to show result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The non-design is often a feature and a selling point for these vendors.

There are some simple reasons that these might go against current trends in design - for example, these need to be high-information density displays, not minimalist showpieces. This gives plenty of room to ship something that is suboptimal, but to market it to the customer as clearly more functional, BECAUSE it's ugly.

I really think that UX can be improved, and better design could squeeze more efficiency out of these systems, but this thought process - that ugly directly means functional - actually does move a lot of software.

<comment><USER8> I literally was at a talk from an AXIS Communications salesperson yesterday. They advocated their never-changing web UI as a feature, and everyone agreed it was one.

<comment><USER20> If you mean the company that makes the network cameras, it is kinda nice that you don't have to change your code for every new camera or version of software.

Sometimes what works does not need to be changed,* especially when your talking physical security, where a camera system may be installed for upwards of 20 years. Oh, and guards who still don't know how to operate it.

* In this case I think they have made substantial changes behind the scenes to fix security holes, but the UI remains the same.

<comment><USER8> Yup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've developed many enterprise software solutions over the years. In my experience, there's a fundamental tradeoff in enterprise software (and software in general) that has to do with the number and sophistication of users.

Basically, if you have lots and lots of unsophisticated users, you HAVE to spend time on design to make it intuitive so you are not overwhelmed with customer support issues. If you have a few, more sophisticated users (that often require a more complex interaction with the data) you can get away with a simple interface and make up for it in training or customer support.

It's a simple cost-benefit tradeoff that enterprises with limited resources make all the time.

Given that, I agree that much enterprise is needlessly badly designed. I can look at systems and tell that nobody even mocked up the screens before the programmers started coding.

<comment><USER22> Mocking the screens would require that there be a design. Having a design would require...well, _requirements_.

Too few internal enterprise development environments manage to do these things. So an enterprise product with beautiful design is at a disadvantage for all the reasons other have noted, but also because it breaks the branding of the suite of enterprise software in which it becomes embedded, makes the rest of it look bad, and draws attention to the fact that the local IT department had to go out and buy something. :-) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'd love to see some "better" designs. Good design is hard, and it's worth paying a good designer to do the work, but often designers will make something look nicer whilst making it harder to use or a lot more resource intensive. I regularly have to load hundreds of kbs of stuff just so someone can show me a design feature that has no function. to be clear: I'm not talking about line spacing (which makes things easier to read) or font colours (which can improve contrast) or some javascript that actually does something.

tldr designers need to start calling out the bad design, not just un-designed software.

> Rational Team Concert has home icon in top corner. Why?

So many product blogs make the mistake of having the big icon linking to the home of the blog, not the home of the product. Link to the product.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is really quite simple. It's not worth it from a cost-benefit analysis.

Good design takes a lot of effort and a lot of money. Good UI is _really hard_ , and means spending salaries on extra people.

Good design is important if that's a competitive differentiator, which is usually the case in _consumer_ apps/objects.

For enterprise software purchases, buying decisions are made on functionality, not design. So why would an enterprise software company waste resources on design that could go toward additional functionality, bugfixes, etc.?

Saying:

> _Is it so hard to add correct spaces between form element and labels? No, it > is not, but nobody cares._

is ridiculous. First of all, yes it _is_ hard, because most developers are not trained in design, and then programming good layout actually takes a _lot_ of effort as well. And secondly, many people _do_ care, but it's just not a smart business prioritization of resources.

<comment><USER25> If these products were cheap I could buy this argument. But I see stuff licensing for 6 or 7 figures with UX from hell. The problem is that the people who are forced to use this crap are not the "customer" who pays for it, is sold on it, meets about the purchase, or cares about usability.

<comment><USER26> Just because the customer isn't the end user doesn't mean they are some disinterested party. Often they are writing requirements that the end user doesn't even care about, because this software has to fit into the existing software ecosystem at the megacorp. Stuff like LDAP, SAML, and ERP integration. And also provably meet corporate standards, and work on the corporations reference hardware architecture, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Good design is subjective. What you or I might think is good design, someone else will think is wasteful because it has too much white space.

Believe it or not, the customers for enterprise software usually want the software to pack as much information onto a single page. It might look nasty to you, but it's what the customer wants.

That's not to say it couldn't be organized better or cleaner, everything can always be improved.

But you're mistaking your own opinion for universal fact.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. The designer obsession with whitespace is basically a cancer to tech products. I go out of my way to find software that was made by an enterprise vendor, ideally one that has no designers on staff. o_o

<comment><USER28> It's those people that want to remove gridlines from spreadsheets, because pretty...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Information-rich screens can reduce clicks and save massive amounts of time, but it's very hard to design information rich interfaces that don't clog your forest for the trees. Add in a requirement that the screen needs to be responsive and work well on mobile, and what was a heavy lift before becomes massive.

For example, [https://Userify.com](https://Userify.com) has a very simple (and rather prosaic) interface with not a lot of tools, but it's easier and faster for people to pick up than trying to hook authentication in their Linux boxes to Active Directory or LDAP.

The next release, by necessity, will be more complex and powerful because it's getting an approximate metric ton more functionality. We'll try to balance that by fixing the blah design and color scheme, but balancing info-rich interface against functionality on varying size screens is just really hard.

Even so, the author is right -- but _form follows function_ still applies. I'd rather have an ugly, but fast and functional, interface over a beautiful and weak interface any day. The app that succeeds in both will be most successful.

Ultimately it's an optimization problem.

</comment><comment><USER30> I can confirm, that, at least at some companies, more time has been devoted to ux, and now ui.

If I am correct, I think they've always shot for good ux, but ui was usually secondary. Now they have focused on ui a lot more, and companies have even begun incorporating an extensive styleguide for the user facing components (something that would noramlly be done for a webapp or website by a front end dev, but is usually neglected in enterprise apps). ux has also been refined.

Legacy products are probably not getting extreme make overs any time soon(because of existing customer base, but you never know), but I would not be surprised if we begin to see other developers of enterprise level software begin to pay more attention to UX/UI and likely mimic the look and feel of web apps created by what were originally smaller companies. We are at the point where enterprises are not only using domain specific applications, but have employees familiar with webapps like twitter, facebook, etc., all of which blow a lot of older enterprise products out of the water design wise.

Essentially, customers expect more on the design side these days, and I think enterprise devs will begin to attempt to meet that expectation to the extent that they can.

(I've even seen enterprise apps that have started using what I would term 'cutesy' user facing messages. There's probably a technical ux term for it but a good example would be github's "github <3's you' or whatever they display when you sign up--stuff like that, or giving the user a pat on the back when they run a function like 'good work!' stuff you'd never imagine would appear in enterprise level apps is creeping in because of the sheer popularity of webapps like twitter, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER31> Are there examples of enterprise software with "good taste"? I'm sure someone out there must be doing it correctly.

I agree that the interfaces from the screenshots looked cluttered, but I think a contrasting shot of a properly designed enterprise app would have made for a stronger argument.

<comment><USER32> Atlassian products are pretty and functional to boot.

<comment><USER33> SourceTree is obviously the exception to this rule.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Most people have no taste, that's all there is to it. Minimal and clear visual design has just started to get mainstream, just pick any piece of amateur GUI software at random and there's only a 1/1000 chance it won't be ugly. Even the most used GUIs in the world (Windows/OSX/Android/iOS) are full of little imperfections and nonsensical design decisions. One day software will be important enough that everything we use everyday will have been designed carefully, this isn't the case yet.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's quite simple.

1\. Enterprise needs vast amount of custom, specific features

2\. It must be universal, to be able to do any business operations.

3\. Good design costs, businesses want features, not designs (reasonably good/usable design is enough), thus save money

In my experience, specs change on the go, due to how much customization business want, this is really hard to manage on the back-end, if you'll need to do this on the front-end, development cost raises dramatically. Reasonably good, and extensible design usually is more than enough.

</comment><comment><USER36> It's true.

My concern is that well designed, tasteful and thoughtful services are seen as hipster. I'd imagine that anything with a font size that is readable can be dismissed as hipster bullshit by enterprise clients. Even gov.uk was derided for having a clean design.

But, we've seen many times that our enterprise clients are drawn towards the design of somewhere.com, they want to use something that was built to be enjoyed. Taste is a barrier.

</comment><comment><USER37> Sorry for the snarky nit picking but...

One of the critiqued UIs includes the following annotation:

 _Rational Team Concert has home icon in top corner. Why?_

Surely the author wouldn't be so indeterminate in their own design right?

 _Targetprocess 3 has a user gravatar in the top left corner. Why?_

(Actually Targetprocess looks like it has a very nice UI, but then again I don't find the others all that horrendous either. There's just no accounting for taste.)

<comment><USER7> Targetprocess design is definitely not perfect and there are many areas that are ugly and outdated. We face the same problem as all other vendors. However, we do try to design better and better and almost all of our new solutions are better than the old ones.

Taste is personal. I think these applications have no taste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Enterprise software procurement will shift thanks to SaaS and the ability of teams/departments to buy what they need quickly. More and more, this is a means to bypass the formal, long-winded procurement process.

Hence pricing SaaS to sit below team credit card spend limit helps.

That's when polished, 'tasteful' and usable software should win.

<comment><USER5> Just look at JIRA... It's ubiquitous, cloud based, ugly and bad user experience. It's still successful.

<comment><USER39> I think the UX and design of Jira and the rest of the Atlassian tools is pretty good. It's reasonably clean and consistent while being customisable as required.

If anything, I'd use Jira as an example of what enterprise software _should_ be like! It's hardly perfect, but I s better than almost every other non-tech- oriented SaaS I've used.

<comment><USER5> I think it's the enterprisey configurability really. A lot of the instances I've had to use were confusing messes with local OK parts, I wouldn't be surprised if some combination of configuration yielded much better usability.

Bugzilla is obviously very ugly (and directly out of the 1990s) but it does work pretty well and it's fairly logical to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Another reason is needing to support old browsers in SaaS for enterprise. All the new sparkles and rainbows are great design, but often also require the newest browsers to really use.

I've never worked in an enterprise environment that didn't still have to support IE8. Enterprises are slow to move on this.

</comment><comment><USER41> Yet another reason for this not already mentioned is that some enterprise customers actually expect these ugly interfaces. This horrible ie 6/7 aesthetic has come to signify what "enterprise" software looks like, and it's what's expected.

<comment><USER8> Quick, efficient, and functional. That's what I expect of enterprise software, yes. It should have lots of options, and no useless cruft like CSS, JavaScript, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wouldn't be shocked if a lot of these companies literally have no designers working on these products. Just engineers laying out UI similar to what is already in the product, based on the requirements. Any art assets come from stock libraries.

<comment><USER42> Yeah, you pretty much nailed it.

When a boss sends an email and says 'use an image like this' \- you use that image.

I suggested hiring a designer, just for some of the most used features and all I got was 'yeah, okay, hmmm'

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Have you ever changed the UI on a legacy Enterprise app. The reaction from the Windows 8 UI changes is a taste of it.

Customers hate change. They have been trained on the legacy UI. You change the UI you make their job harder (at least that's the perception).

</comment><comment><USER44> It's not that enterprise software vendors have no taste, it's just that taste is not a factor in the business of selling the software. And taste costs, so why spend money on something that brings zero return. Enterprise software vendors are looking at their own product and going, gee, that's ugly, but hey, look at our bank balance. More of that!

Consumer software, totally different story. But this is enterprise. As an enterprise employee, you're not paid to sit there blissing out on how good your screen looks on a rounded corner tech gadget. You are paid to do your job, whatever that is. Whatever increases that metric is what wins.

</comment><comment><USER45> Most enterprise apps are truly ugly but what matters isn't looks but how many clicks or clacks it takes to get a specific task done. If you use the same app every day it hardly matters how pretty or even intuitive the app is.

<comment><USER46> Actually this is true and it isn't. I mean, for sure 'how intuitive' is not a good metric for enterprise products, which usually come along with a big bunch of days for training, because you have a small number of users, somehow forced to use your product for a long time.

If you're investing in reducing the 'time to learn' (learn the semantics of your product) you're probably focusing on the wrong thing.

Yet, all these products (and I work on those a lot) are not well designed as a symptom of missing care for the "cognitive cost" for the user.

Anyway, the products listed in the post are way better than others. Which is sad :\

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> While I agree with the premise of the post, I do think that the use of design is changing in enterprise software. All of those products have been around for awhile now and I think that the idea that you need designers and good design is just a relatively new concept for ESVs. I can see it happening at my own company, a couple of years ago UX wasn't really something we considered, but now we are hiring UX people for all of our products. So I think you'll see this change going forward, it's just the enterprise is always the last to join the game.

<comment><USER8> Or the reality is, you _don 't_ need designers, but the hipster crowd convinced companies they do, because they needed something to do with their art degrees they'd get paid for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Hiring has something to do with this in the current climate as well. If you find a dev with good UI/design chops odds are against you hiring him/her to build a UI for an invisible B2B/enterprise company in the Bay Area. Most of the people fitting that description seem to want to go to a VC backed startup building the next world changing Uber-of-SoLoMo app something or other.

</comment><comment><USER49> I really think all of these interfaces look entirely adequate. I can imagine being able to easily use all of them without much training. There's really no comparison to the stuff I was trying to use 5-10 years ago, which tended to the illogical and unusable.

I guess I have no taste? I'm glad I'm not an interior designer.

</comment><comment><USER50> Enterprise software is just a reflection of enterprises in general. A lot of the left hand doesn't know the what the right is doing, duplication of work, etc.

Where a lot of consumer software maps towards what a human would do naturally without the constraints of business.

</comment><comment><USER51> I'd say that B2C apps are designed by small commited team while huge apps for B2B are designed by committee and developed by many separate teams focused on different aspects of application.

</comment><comment><USER52> Unfortunately another contributing factor is that many enterprise websites or applications have to support old versions of ie. My company is still supporting XP due to a particular partner.

</comment><comment><USER44> I would like to see the OP do mock redesigns of these sites they've picked, showing by example how these designs could be improved.

</comment><comment><USER53> What about the re-designed Quickbooks Online released last Spring/Summer? Is that not considered enterprise software?

<comment><USER54> Call it whatever you want... I love it. I think I (unintentionally) signed up for it shortly after the redesign. At the start it felt like there were a few things that should have been easier to find than they were, but it has quickly and subtly evolved.

I didn't think I'd ever say this, but the new QBO has been by far the least painful small business accounting software I've used. Very very impressed!

<comment><USER53> It was a bit of a learning curve from the old layout, and I still think there's a gap between what it is and what it could one day be, but I agree that it is certainly better than 99% of enterprise software applications. QBO also serves a market where the line between consumer applications and enterprise applications is less clear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> As a target process user, I have to agree with the assessment that Enterprise Software has no taste.</comment>


Why does CT corp charge startups $213.74 annually? - <AUTHOR>

This is the company that YC recommends their companies use to incorporate in the state of delaware. I can't figure out what they do exactly but they send us a bill for $213.74 every year threatening that if we don't pay it this "may impact the company's authorization to do business. Please consider the legal consequences of CT's discontinuance." If there are 40 YC companies a year and these guys make ~$200 off each one, they are getting $8000 from the pockets of YC companies for doing nothing! Can someone please tell me why we should have to pay these jokers? <comment><USER2> They are a registered agent. I've seen other Delaware registered agents perform the same fee for $50/year.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks bhousel, do you have any names of other companies? Is it easy to transfer?

<comment><USER2> Sure, you can just Google for "Delaware registered agent". The first page of results returns plenty that seem to offer their services for $50-$100/year. Many will even do the transfer paperwork for you.

The transfer process basically the same as changing your corporate address. I believe that many registered agents don't do much other than accept mail and legal service.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are Exit Interviews Honest? - <AUTHOR> I had people leave my team under different circumstances and Im always asked if I did an exit interview. Honestly i don't even think Entrance interviews are all that useful or telling. Yes you talk. You ask questions you get answers. Most of the time they're nervous. What do you get out of it that is really useful?
Now the exit interview is even weirder. The very existence of it proves the first one was useless. And also what would compel the exiting person to be truthful and objective?
What do you guys get out of it realistically and how do you act on that knowledge? <comment><USER2> My philosophy is that if a company really wanted to know what I thought, they'd have asked me before finding out I was leaving.

Professionally, there is no upside to candor in exit interviews, and I'd advise ducking them entirely. If your manager _really_ wants to know, they can buy you a few beers once you've been gone a month or six.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have never conducted or been subjected to an exit interview, so this is 100% speculative...

I think how honest the departing employee will be in an exit interview will depend on why they're leaving.

If it's because of an unrelated life change, then they're probably honest.

If it's because of a problem with the company, then they probably aren't -- I know that when I've left jobs because of a problem with the company, I would never tell them that because I wouldn't want it to affect what they say when potential employers call them. I'd probably just say it was because of an unrelated life change of some sort.

</comment><comment><USER4> Useless and a charade.</comment>


Research Says Solo Founders Perform Better - <AUTHOR> https://www.growthclub.online/post/research-says-solo-founders-perform-better-here-is-why <comment><USER3> IMO in the age of insanely high tech salaries, early stage funding is very overrated. I saved $2.2M in my 8 year Bay Area career as a regular engineer with no exits, and I didn't even work at FANG. I have friends who saved more than twice as much as me. And then YC gives out 150k? 150k is a joke to anyone with a decent job. Why not save 2 million and then start your company at age 29 instead of 21 begging people for tiny money for huge share of your company? The YC model made sense back when it was founded and engineers made 60-80k. Now after the second tech boom, you are much better off working for FANG for 5-10 years and then starting your own company owning 100% of the equity until a real money $10M+ series A

<comment><USER4> I'm curious about the numbers — you saved $275k (annually, on average) after taxes and living expenses as a regular engineer? That implies a pre-tax salary of $420k if you ignore living expenses, which add at least another $30k in pre-tax earnings. I'm sure there are engineers who make $450k in SV, but you imply that this is possible/easy for folks who are 21. Maybe I'm wrong, but that seems pretty high for someone straight out of college.

Note: I'm not including interest/investment income from annual savings, and perhaps that's part of how you made money. Certainly it has been easy to make money buying tech stocks in the last 10 years. But that's not always the case, and even including investment gains I'm having a hard time seeing $2.2M being a typical or easy amount to save from age 21 to 29.

That said, I worked as a lawyer for 7 years, saved a decent amount, paid off my loans, and then started a startup. It was a good path for me, but man I never had $2.2M in the bank, even having worked at a well-known international firm and being on the partner track.

<comment><USER5> They are exaggerating at best, or highlighting an extreme outlier. Non-FAANG jobs are going to have between 50% and 70% if the total compensation of FAANG most of the time. Good example: a SWE 1/2 60th percentile base salary is around $120k in the Bay Area. Taxes and living expenses for a single individual will eat 40% of that, at least, unless the person is living in a slum with roommates. Lead/principle engineer (L5) salaries are about $175k at the 60th percentile. Again, taxes and living expenses for a single person will consume 35%-40% of that. RSU grants and bonuses at these places are good for maybe another 30% on top of the base, typically, in extreme cases.

A person saving 100% of their net of taxes and living expenses would have to see a return of well into double digits every year to accumulate $2.2M over 8 years or so, because their base savings rate over that period will be (probably far) less than $1M under optimal circumstances.

It isn't at all common enough to obviate the need for things like YC.

<comment><USER6> You are very right. To be blunt, the OP needs to be called out on his BS. I personally, lived in the SV area for over a decade (single and very frugal) made good salary (non FAANG companies) but my savings though substantial, were nowhere near what the OP is claiming. It is simply not possible.

I am not sure why people on HN state/claim all sorts of outrageous salaries in the Bay area. It gives a very distorted view of reality and frankly harmful to both employers and employees.

<comment><USER7> Depends, if you got FB stock awards 8 years ago that were valued at $20,000, those would be worth more than $150,000 today.

It's not unreasonable to believe someone could keep their stock for 8 years and have the combined total be worth 2.2M.

<comment><USER6> Sure, but that presupposes stocks, other investments, equity etc etc. You need those and a big dose of luck too. The way the OP's post was written it seemed to imply that he made it on his take-home salary by itself which is impossible. The only thing i agree with the OP, is to NOT go for VC money in the beginning (as far as possible).

A more realistic and cautious way to do a startup (for normal people) would be (see Nassim Taleb's description of Extremistan/Mediocristan for ideas - [https://kmci.org/alllifeisproblemsolving/archives/black- swan...](https://kmci.org/alllifeisproblemsolving/archives/black-swan-ideas- mediocristan-extremistan-and-randomness/) and [https://www.capitalideasonline.com/wordpress/mediocristan- vs...](https://www.capitalideasonline.com/wordpress/mediocristan-vs- extremistan/) );

1) Hold down a regular job for a decent period of time and earn as much as you can.

2) Save, Save, Save i.e. no risky investments on a large portion of your income. This is your safety net.

3) Simultaneously, get started working on your ideas/company by yourself or with a close-knit group. Spend no money; only your effort and time.

4) Once you have the whole picture/Prototype/MVP figured out estimate how much it is going to cost you to move ahead. All information is available on the net and hence do your proper research i.e. don't pay any "consultant" for advice. You can also shoot an email and seek advice from people like Paul Graham/Joel Spolsky etc. Remember, "Fortune favours the Brave".

5) As long as it is bearable, spend your or group's money to move ahead. It is important to cut any and all unnecessary expenses at this stage. Spend only what is needed and not a penny more.

6) Once the above is stable, you can now decide on whether you want to quit your day job and spend your whole time on your "New" company. This will be a function of your safety net savings mentioned above.

7) In order to not blow everything on a idea/company which may not pan out, set a threshold on your expenditure dropping below which you will approach others for money (i.e. VC/Angel etc.) or abandon the idea/company and return to being a regular salary man. This is to ensure that you don't end up on the streets.

8) Your are now at the stage where you are proceeding with your own company or have gone back to salaried employment and hopefully working on taking a second crack at entrepreneurship.

Good luck and Godspeed :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > you just couldn't convince your friends to join and therefore can't be > trusted

As you grow older, the number of friends who can afford to take financial risks reduces because they will have components such as family and kids to factor in.

It's sad that such gospels exist to make lives more difficult than it already is for founders who are 35+.

<comment><USER9> This, it get's overlooked so much. It feels almost arrogant when a VC thinks like that. Yes I can get some friends working parttime on my startup but going fulltime? They also have rent to pay.

But I also think lot of pitch decks witha team slide contain parttimers but just don't tell the VC.

<comment><USER10> Author of the article here. Exactly! Sad that Paul Graham is the one who said that specific thing. I wonder if his opinion changed over time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> From the referenced study:

> A stratified sample of 65,326 Kickstarter project creators was surveyed via > email.

[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3107898](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3107898)

<comment><USER12> Oh god, Kickstarter is....not a good sample to answer a question like this.

<comment><USER13> Why? See I understand kickstarter has a history of unfinished products and founders running away with money, but i feel like you are just having a knee jerk reaction.

Actually I look at this positively. Most kickstarters offer actual tangible products and not software, and I think going solo and actually making profit (though small) is a pretty insightful result.

<comment><USER14> Because kickstarter is very different from traditional bussinesses, making it difficult to know if the conclusions of the study translate to traditional founders.

<comment><USER13> I edited my comment as you replied, but basically I think this study is pretty useful and true for kickstarters, but maybe not so much for traditional startups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Another factor in favor of going solo is that the ratio of deadwood at your company is going to be either zero or one.

That is, if you're genuinely good at building things, you're going to build your thing quickly. There's nobody to drag you down, no slow backend guy blocking you from implementing the frontend or vice versa. Or maybe you find out it was you doing the blocking all along, which is also handy to know.

<comment><USER16> > Or maybe you find out it was you doing the blocking all along, which is also > handy to know.

What would be the point of reference to know that you are 'blocking' when you are alone?

<comment><USER15> Two things. First, it signals that maybe solo founding isn't going to be your thing. Second, it cautions a career path that involves working for big companies with good job security and benefits, ideally in a department where you can be forgotten about and not ever required to produce any results.

If you remove all blockers from your path and still remain blocked, it's a good indication that you shouldn't ever place yourself in a position where people are going to notice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems like the dataset behind this article is for founders who have built businesses with $5K MRR and above. $60K revenue (and $20K profit @ 33% margin) is a fairly low bar, so it is not surprising to see solo founders create 2.5X more businesses that clear this bar.

My question after reading this article is, do these solo founders manage to grow their business as large as founding-teams? How many solo founder businesses cross the $50M revenue mark?

<comment><USER18> On what planet is $240k/yr net profit for a boot strapped business a "low bar."

<comment><USER19> A developer working as a contractor and charging his clients a fairly reasonable rate of $120/hr could make that.

<comment><USER18> If you have ever contracted at any length you would know that $120/hr is hard earned and usually has not insignificant time on the back end in so far as negotiating the deal, keeping it going, etc.

<comment><USER20> Here on HN I've occasionally seen people talk about $150/hr as a "low" contracting rate.

And others talk about how they could not achieve that in their wildest dreams, and consider $80/hr "good".

I was recently contacted about a contract proposal, in the USA, and they were offering $50/hr for some quite advanced cryptography work for a BigCorp end customer. I turned it down but it's good to get an idea of the market rate.

Rate expectation seems to vary a great deal depending on which geography and network-bubble people are in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well... That's inconvenient, isn't it.

I've long suspected the cofounder thing was really to be able to divide and conquer. To have a spare founder when one inevitably quits. To play them against each other.

Call it experience.

<comment><USER22> That sounds like hard-won bitter experience.

I'm always warning founders that investors are not on your side. They're not your friends, they're not there to help you succeed. They're there to make money. If destroying your life will make them more money, they won't hesitate or even feel bad about it.

<comment><USER23> anecdotal, but i have seen this first-hand (more than once) and it is not pretty...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't think there's particularly a right or wrong here. I'm solo myself and have felt for a long time to be in an inferior position because I don't fit into the ideal 2.3 founders statistic. It took more than a few years for me to move past this as a major disadvantage. There are positives and negatives, as with anything.

<comment><USER10> Author of the article here. Supporting a solo founder in GrowthClub and having co-founders in Panda Training, my own startup - agreed, nothing is black and white.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I run three companies.

\- A solo, bootstrapped B2B SaaS

\- A bootstrapped B2B2C SaaS with one co-founder

\- A VC-funded B2B SaaS with two co-founders

My solo project is the one I work on _least_. This is likely because nobody is holding me accountable for it, other than when I get the occasional email from someone who wants to use the product and they need x feature (which I haven't yet bothered to implement).

In my experience, I've done _far_ better owning a fraction of something than 100% of nothing.

<comment><USER10> Author of the article here. This is a good point, and a real issue! What I advocate is finding a 'hands-on advisor', something in between the co-founder and advisor, check my other article about that, it's a 2-min read: [https://www.growthclub.online/post/advice-for-solo- founders](https://www.growthclub.online/post/advice-for-solo-founders)

<comment><USER25> That's a great idea! Thanks for writing about that. There are so many more options for collaboration than what's typically talked about here on HN or in other startup forums. I don't know why arrangements like that aren't often talked about, but I suspect it may be something to do with the idea of a "lifestyle business" being seen as a lesser endeavour, which is not really fair.

<comment><USER10> Yes! Hard to say much without looking deeper into it, but at least my experience shows me that I am able to be fairly productive as a part-time founder

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For me I find the fact I can grow my startup at my own pace without pressure is a good thing.

I still have my day job as a software engineer, so I won't be running out of money any time soon. My employer reduced my hours by 20% and I'm working from home because of covid, giving me more time to focus on side projects. My product ([https://expose.sh](https://expose.sh)) is basically complete and unlikely to change in a massive way.

For now I'm just starting to get good at social media ads. After work I set up some campaigns, then review the results the next day and tweak them.

<comment><USER27> Maybe it's a case of "If you have to ask what it does it's not for you", but from the expose webpage it is not clear to me at all what it does.

<comment><USER26> It will give a server (website or api) you have running on your local machine a public url.

Like @beaconstudio below mentioned it could be used to test webhooks. Other uses are testing local sites on mobile devices, like I just did to give the mobile experience of expose.sh a revamp. Its faster than running adb, rooting your phone or connecting a cable and doing mobile debugging.

There are other tools, although expose.sh is focused purely on http/https and not other protocols, this makes the syntax a bit easier as you don't have to specify a protocol, just a port i.e. "expose 80" instead of "ngrok http 80" (using ngrok as an example).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Having gone through 3 business-oriented co-founders in 1 year for a b2b tech startup, in each of those inter cofounder periods where I'm the solo founder I find it extremely fruitful for product, vision, and strategy. The content, branding, business strategy, and product all much more sharply aligned.

Have become of mind it's better to go as far as you can as a solo-founder and only bring in major stakeholders when you're desperate because there's too much work.

<comment><USER10> Author of the article here. Like the philosophy! Proves true with our experience in GrowthClub. Reminds me the thinking with bootstrapping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Just because you start solo doesn't mean you're going to be solo forever; you just start hiring marginally sooner. So I guess my question is, all else being the same, is the extra $500k-1M (my guess) that a team would be able to raise at Seed/pre-seed over a solopreneur just an outsized recruiting fee for having found a couple other key hires?

</comment><comment><USER30> Being a solo founder with autonomy has advantages and allows you to take decisions faster but it is not without its downsides.

As the proverb says (paraphrasing) - if you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far take people with you.

That does not necessarily mean get a cofounder - but even solo founders will need a mentor, chairman or some form of outlet for their thoughts and problems. Otherwise it's a lonely existence and when times are hard it very quickly becomes overwhelming for most people.

</comment><comment><USER31> Solo founders doing better doesn't necessarily mean you are better off going solo.

<comment><USER32> That depends entirely on your skillset

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wonder if you normalise by the probability of starting a business the results will change. Meaning that if you are together with somebody - it is much easier to start something, but when you are alone - you have to have conviction. So many of these non-solo founders might have not started business by themselves. This creates lower barrier of entry, and might cause solo founded companies look better. The correct question to answer is: if you have already decided 100% than you want to make a company, is it better to do it yourself or with someone else?

<comment><USER10> Author of the article here. I would doubt the assumption that it's easier to start with other people. Would be interesting to see the data on that. In GrowthClub's case it was easier for us to start with one founder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> they didn't mention 'someone to call me back when i wander off into the swamp'

<comment><USER16> growthclub.online, the publisher of the article, does exactly that - <USER2> founder call a week to help you check for swamps. (I am the founder of GrowthClub)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Opensource projects with a BDFL leadership also have a reputation of doing well.

</comment><comment> zupa-hu # Reason 3: Lower costs

They lost me here. Founders take a significantly lower salary, anything else is typically a rounding error.

That just flies against (my) common sense.

<comment><USER10> Author of the article here. At least for myself I see a big difference in payroll in GrowthClub (with a solo founder) and my own startup with 3 co- founders and 2 more shareholders-partners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> There was a post on HN before saying something like this: non-profits do better with teams but for-profits do better with solo-founders.

<comment><USER37> I would be interested in finding this post - I haven't seen it and using your description I'm failing to find it with Google as well. Do you remember more? Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Well that's the same than saying design by-comittee sucks.

</comment><comment><USER39> I say solo founders perform research better.

</comment><comment><USER40> The reasons why will not be discussed here.

</comment><comment><USER41> This can't be true. YC clearly prefers multiple founders, and YC is the leading early stage investor.

<comment><USER42> From what I understand "solo founder == bad" is a pretty common view held by both YC and a number of other accelerators. If they all believe this then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and smart people will rapidly find another founder before they go through YC whether they needed one or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is this a joke?</comment>


iNaturalist Computer Vision Explorations - <AUTHOR> https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/computer_vision_demo <comment><USER2> The iNaturalist species identifier is astoundingly good. Of the dozen observations I've made with it over the last few weeks all but one were spot on -- and the last one did have the proper species within the "don't know but might be one of these" list.

Flowers, trees, moths, mushrooms, and bees all properly identified for one or two images.

<comment><USER3> I tried this app with ten photos of flowers; all taken in the controlled setting of a botanical garden. Not one of them was correctly identified!

<comment><USER4> The Botanical Garden setting could be part of the problem. The article says that your location is weighted into the results, considering past occurrences of species found near you. If you tried non-native flowers to the garden, it could have been weighted incorrectly.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Recruiting firm promising paycheck - <AUTHOR> I'm not going to get into too many specifics here, but a recruiting firm put me through 2 technical interviews, located in a major metropolitan area, and later decided they were going to guarantee a paycheck even if we don't obtain a contract w/in 'X'# of weeks.
In return I'm expected to provide 100% exclusivity.
I've never come across this sort of thing.  Is this common in big cities like NYC, SF, Chicago?
EDIT:  I have not made a decision yet. <comment><USER2> It smell like a consulting company ...

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting. I hadn't thought of that.

So are you thinking they're affiliated w/ (or are in fact) a consulting firm recruiting as if they're a recruiting firm? In other words, they more than likely already know exactly which project I'll be working on?</comment></comment>


Error Propagation Patterns - <AUTHOR> https://www.fourzerofour.pw/posts/error-propagation/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, thought I'd bite the bullet and link a blog post to HN for the first time. Any feedback would be extremely appreciated; looking to learn and grow.</comment>


How to make a game in Js and Phaser, quickly - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.it/Phaser-Iniziare-programmare-giochi-HTML5-ebook/dp/B00O4Z9GPC/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1412665909&sr=8-3&keywords=phaser+game

<comment><AUTHOR> It's very simple :)</comment>