I joined Better in early 2015 because I thought the team was crazy enough to actually change one of the largest industries in the US. For six years, I ran the tech team, hiring 300+ people, probably doing 2,000+ interviews, and according to GitHub I added 646,941 lines of code and removed 339,164. But I also got married, had two kids, bought an apartment and renovated it! From time to time, there was some intense periods of hard work.
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It’s a popular attitude among developers to rant about our tools and how broken things are. Maybe I’m an optimistic person, because my viewpoint is the complete opposite! I had my first job as a software engineer in 1999, and in the last two decades I’ve seen software engineering changing in ways that have made us orders of magnitude more productive. Just some examples from things I’ve worked on or close to:
Read more…I spent a ton of time looking at different software providers, both as a CTO, and as a nerd “advanced” consumer who builds stuff in my spare time. In the last 10 years, there has been an order of magnitude more products that cater directly to developers, through APIs, SDKs, and tooling. I’m pretty psyched about this trend. As the cost of building software goes down, that drives up the demand for software engineers. That then drives up the demand for even more products built for software engineers. That then drives down the cost of building software even more!
We live in a year of about 350,000 amateur epidemiologists and I have no desire to join that “club”. But I read something about COVID-19 deaths that I thought was interesting and wanted to see if I could replicated it through data. Basically the claim is that Sweden had an exceptionally “good” year in 2019 in terms of influenza deaths causing there to be more deaths “overdue” in 2020.
Read more…Compensation has always been one of the most confusing parts of management to me. Getting it right is obviously extremely important. Compensation is what drives our entire economy, and you could look at the market for labor as one gigantic resource-allocating machine in the same way as people look at the stock market as a gigantic resource-allocating machine for investments.
Read more…Hanlon’s razor is a classic aphorism I’m sure you have heard before: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I’ve found that neither malice nor stupidity is the most common reason when you don’t understand why something is in a certain way. Instead, the root cause is probably just that they didn’t have time yet. This happens all the time at startups (maybe a bit less at big companies, for reasons I’ll get back to).
Read more…Let’s consider a toy model where you’re hiring for two things and that those are equally valuable. It’s not very important what those are, so let’s just call them “thing A” and “thing B” for now. For one set of abilities, the scatter plot looks like this:
Read more…I recently finished the excellent book Kochland. This isn’t my first interest in Koch—I read The Science of Success by Charles Koch himself a couple of years ago.
Charles Koch inherited a tiny company in 1967 and turned it into one of the world’s largest ones. That’s impressive! Just a quick disclaimer just to get it out of the way. You may know the Koch brothers as the climate deniers who funded the Tea Party. I don’t understand this disconnect between being so brilliant in one field, and extremely ignorant in another. But my curiosity tells me there’s something worth learning from most notable people, despite what I may think of their opinions and Koch Industries turns out ot be a particularly interesting case study.
Read more…Just a quick note that my team is always hiring at Better. A lot of new people have been joining the team here in NYC lately—the tech team has actually grown from 35 to 60 in just ~3 months. We are primarily looking for senior software engineers and/or engineering managers. But we would love to talk if you have less experience too! Our main tech stack is mostly TypeScript and Python.
Read more…My company has a buffet every Friday, and the lines grow to epic proportions when the food arrives. I’ve suspected for years that the “classic” buffet line system is a deeply flawed and inefficient method, and every time I’m stuck in the line has made me more convinced.
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