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ChristianKl comments on Open Thread, Jul. 20 - Jul. 26, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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"Help them expand" suggests that you propose to spend time on energy on promoting it.
It seems to me like the website only accepts people from Austria anyway.
No, I meant helping them in programming or other stuff such as the postcard stuff to be able to offer it elsewhere. Sorry if I did not detail it, I thought it is obvious: if you like the idea, consider joining them as bit later co-founders (the whole thing just comes from Nov 2014), as part owners, investors, investing sweat capital mostly, that sort of stuff, the usual startup story.
Or maybe that is not so usual, I have no idea, but I was just thinking if someone calls them and tell them I will help you expand your customer base by 150% if you give me 10% or some other arrangement, this is fairly common for startups?
Actually helping them in programming and stuff like that is investing time and energy. I do focus programming time on things I consider high leverage.
You actually live in Vienna and there programming team is in Vienna and not Berlin. You frequently say that you don't feel that your job has any meaning. You can program.
If they just managed to find investors they are likely not looking to raise more money at the moment. Even if they would looking for capital there nothing specific about the LW Berlin group when it comes to providing Angel funding for an Austrian company. In that case it also makes sense to argue why that investment better than various other possible investments.
All good points. Also you think there is not much location advantage in extending the service e.g. negotiating a low postcard price with the German Post and so on?
I will not leave a safe job for a startup (I would have considered that before we had a child, now it would be irresponsible) but I do consider contributing in the evenings, this is seriously something I could believe in.
If there are meetings you buy a plane ticket. Vienna isn't that far from Germany.
When it comes to negotiating the idea is to hire a good salesperson. Most of the people at our meetup are coders who's aren't highly skilled salespeople. If I would hire for that role, I wouldn't pick a person from our LW group.
Today there's nothing like a real safe job. All companies lay off people from time to time. Working at a job that you like is very useful. It's beneficial for the child to be around a dad who likes his job instead of a dad who hates his job.
The difference between a job that pays a fixed salary already vs. a startup that may pay dividends or something i n the future if it does not fold is fairly big.
More in the direction of expertise than job. Do you know any SAP consultants? They can always find a job. I am not exactly that but in a similar industry. They cannot be outsourced to India because they need local knowledge like accounting rules and such software are so huge and the space of potential kinds of problems and industry practices and whatnots, also domain experiences is so big that in these types of industry experience never has a point of diminishing marginal returns. People who do it for 30 years are more valuable than people who do it for 15.
Abandoning that kind of investment to become yet another dreamy startup Ruby on Rails type of guy? They are a dime a dozen and young hotshots with 5 years of experience - because there is just not so much to learn - outdo the older ones. It is an up or out - you hit big and then become a Paul Graham and retire from programming into investorship or similar stuff, or you are sooner or later forced out. In that type of world there is no real equivalent of the 50 years old SAP logistics consultants who is seen as something sort of a doyen because he dealt with every kind of crap that happen in a project at a logistics company.
So it sounds really dangerous to abandon that kind of investment for a new start in something different.
But diversifying, using free time to contribute to a project, that could be smart - hedging bets, if the main industry (desktop business software based on domain knowledge and business process experience) somehow collapses then it makes easier to join a different one (cool hot modern web based stuff). That makes sense, getting a foot in in one's free time in a different industry..
Yes, if not for the risks.
This is an excellent example of the Fallacy of Gray, don't you think? :-)
That depends on how you think DeVliegendeHollander models the situation in his mind. Modeling people in situations like this isn't trivial. Given the priors I have about him, there's learned helplessness that provides a bias towards simply staying in the status quo.
In general most decently skilled developers don't stay unemployment for longer periods of time if they are in a startup that fails.
If you read his post closely then he says that he doesn't even consider it. The act of considering it would be irresponsible. I don't know enough to say that it would be the right choice for him to take that job, but I think he would profit from actually deeply considering it.
My experience is primarily not in the hands-on coding which in my business software world tends to be really primitive (read data, verify it, sum it up, write it somewhere, it is essentially primitive scripting), I don't think I have even seen an algorithm since school that was as complex as a quicksort which is first year exam material, as it is simply not done. In fact we constantly try to make frameworks where no coding is needed, just configuration, and employ non-programmer domain expert consultants as implementation specialists, but it always fails because people don't understand that properly that once your configuration gets that advanced that it loops over a set of data and makes if-then decisions, then it is coding again: just usually a poor coding framework. Example
Anyway it is more of a being a general troubleshooter. It is sort of difficult to explain (but actually this is the aspect that is likable about it, which is kind of balances the less likable aspects) that I lack a job description. A manager wants a certain kind of information in a regular report. To provide it, there needs to be software, bought or developed or both (customized), users trained, processes defined, and a bunch of potential other things and nobody really tells how to do it, nobody really tells what to do, it is just the need to achieve a result, an informational output just anyhow, with any sort of combination of technology, people and process. This is the good part of it, how open-ended it is but clearly far more than coding, and the coding part is usually primitive.
The bad part is coding the same bloody report the 100th time only slightly different... or answering the same stupid support call the 100th time because people keep making the same mistakes or forget the previous call. Of course both could be improved by reusable frameworks (often not supported by primitive technologies used), knowledge bases, or writing user manuals but that unfortunately does not depend on one guy, the obstacles to that tend to be organizational, usually short-sightedness.
Okay, then I likely underrated the skill difference between what you are currently doing and the work that exists in a startup like that.
BTW do you have any clue where to go on with this kind of skillset if I ever want to change things or what could be a good Plan B to get a foot in the door in? There are some professions that are really isolated and have little overlaps with anything else, such as doctors and lawyers and I have this impression all this business information management is like that, too. Outsiders know next to nothing about it and insiders tend to not know much about anything else, professionally at least. Ever knew a succesful SAP, Oracle, NAV, CRM, Baan or whatever consultant who is now good at doing something else? I know one guy who held out only for three years and, I sh.t you not, threw it all away and became an undocumented (illegal) snowboarding trainer in the US in the Rockies :) But that is probably not the typical trajectory esp. not after a dozen years.
No, I do not think that your fallacy depends on what DVH thinks.
You're confusing risk aversion and learned helplessness.
Another English irregular verb.
"I can see that this won't work. You are risk-averse. He exhibits learned helplessness."
If I'm saying something to have an effect in another person then the quality of my reasoning process depends on whether my model of the other person is correct.
It's like debugging a phobia at a LW meetup. People complain that language isn't logical, but in the end the phobia is gone. The fact that the language superficially pattern matches to fallacies is besides the point as long as it has the desired consequences.
No, I'm talking to a person who at least self-labels as schizoid and about whom I have more information beyond that.
If I would think the issue is risk aversion and I wanted to convince him, I would appeal to the value of courage. Risk aversion doesn't prevent people from considering an option and seeing the act of considering an option as irresponsible.
What result did I achieve here? I got someone who hates his job to think about whether to learn a different skillset to switch to a more enjoyable job and ask for advice about what he could do. He shows more agentship about his situation.
LOL. Let me reformulate that: "If I'm trying to manipulate another person, I can lie and that's "besides the point as long as it has the desired consequences". Right? X-)