By "cents", you really mean "minor currency unit" I assume?
In British Pounds, it would be pennies for example.
The doc doesn't explain how the library deals with the various different minor units out there (I've been bitten too many times by code that assumes that all currencies have a minor unit and that 100 minor units = 1 major unit so I'm careful these days).
For example, what about currencies that have a minor unit that's not effectively used in practice or that don't have a minor unit at all (e.g. JPY)? Are the amount supposed to be expressed in this unused / non-existent minor unit?
What happens with currencies that use a subdivision other than 100 for their minor unit (e.g. KWD)? Will the calculations and formatting be correct?
Facebook have recently launched Lead Ads [0] which could make them work for an entreprise product campaign if you can find the correct targeting. Worth trying it out.
Relevant piece of trivia: I went to a meetup at Facebook's London offices a few months back and heard a presentation from the FB @ Work lead. This may surprise some but FB @ Work was entirely built by their London team in London.
As you can imagine, they had to touch just about every part of the Facebook code base to make it happen. They still managed to pull it off despite being a "remote" team and unknown entity at first. Great to see some major engineering projects being owned here in the UK.
No, they don't on average. This has been discussed many times on HN. Apps like this are outsourced to UK offices to keep budgets low. I routinely get offers and recruiter calls from the UK, I usually don't respond to them because I know they can't match US salaries because none of them ever have for the comparable US job.
Then there's moving to England, and the EU-related red tape. I love visiting the UK, but I'd never want to live there. And I'm a total anglophile.
For the same price as a grad in the US, you can get an Impbridge post doctorate with 3 years post-doc experience. Get US investors, but hire engineers in UK.
My anecdotal evidence: tried it when I was looking for my first contracting gig in Jan 2014. Got one serious lead (short-term contract for native iOS app development with immediate start required and a very tight deadline).
Initial discussion by email went well. Moved onto a telephone conversation, which also went well. Although the deadline was tight, the project appeared to be well-managed and they seemed to know what they were doing. Unfortunately, the person on the phone appeared to be absolutely horrified upon hearing my daily rate (which was the standard daily rate for iOS development in London at the time – I wasn’t trying to take the piss). I followed up by email highlighting my experience and track record in the specific field they were targeting as well as the value I would bring to the project but never heard anything back.
I got an excellent offer from a person in my own network a few days later so I didn’t give the HN thread another try.
Incidentally, I’m now looking for my next gig. Anyone looking for a talented Lead .NET developer / Architect in London (UK), with both startup and Fortune 100 experience, feel free to contact me: http://mehdi.me
I guess the supply/demand thing is going to differ between cities and places in the world.
Where I live (Australia), plumbers and electricians often have a higher rate than quite senior developers ($200 call out rate with minimum hour charge and then $200 or so each hour on top etc), yet companies look aghast when you ask a similar rate, despite it being quite an intensive game to wrap your head around.
Then they hire someone that thinks node.js is a sensible idea, and end up paying double to have things fixed up when that ends in disaster, so perhaps it works itself out in the end.
No - I've never worked with Xamarin (although I'll be looking at it in the coming days / weeks for a personal project - it looks quite sweet now). But I've got loads of experience with both .NET and Objective-C / Cocoa.
Most of my experience has been on the .NET platform and primarily on the backend / distributed systems side of things.
However, between 2010 and 2013, I was co-founder and CTO of a tech startup where our main product was a fairly sophisticated native iOS app. Being a bootstrapped startup, I had to do all the tech work myself. So I got a lot of experience with Objective-C / Cocoa that way. On the back of that, I got a contract to develop a native iPad app for the BBC, providing me with some additional experience building an app for an external client.
When I landed on the job market in January last year, I was therefore happy to take either an iOS contract or a .NET one.
I ended up taking a .NET contract. And to be completely honest, large-scale software systems / distributed systems is really where my heart lies. So I'm now pitching myself as a .NET developer only as this is the type of role I'm most keen on.
I'd actually be really happy to take on a role that uses another stack as well. But as a contractor, it's not really realistic to expect a client to pay you to learn a new language / stack :)
It's the LearnGaelic app created for BBC Scotland (or, more specifically for LearnGaelic, a partnership between the BBC and local organizations that promote the use of the Scottish Gaelic language): https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/learngaelic-beginners-course...
It's a language-learning app for the Scottish Gaelic language, which includes both a full 30 hour course, including native speaker audio and role-plays, and several mini-games to test yourself.
It's a really beautiful app (thanks to the immensely talented illustrator Julie-Anne Graham who worked with us on this). A lot of time and effort was also spent on the instructional design side of it, making it really easy for complete beginners to acquire a solid basic fluency in Scottish Gaelic. I'd highly recommend it to anyone interested in the language (it's completely free).
The best thing about this app though is the invisible part: it wasn't built as a one-off app with hardcoded content. I won't go into the details but here is for example an Irish Gaelic version of it (with more screenshots): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/learn-irish-gaelic-buntus/id...
(and anyone interested in the Irish language should give it a try :) )
I didn't have to do anything for the Irish version of the app despite the fact that it's got completely different content: different graphics, text, audio, game questions and lesson structure. The content team (instructional designer, illustrator, translator, proof-reader, audio producer) worked on putting together the content for that other app. When the content was ready, all I had to do was hit "Build". Same codebase - two completely different apps.
This is the sort of "startup" that I've seen commonly done by self-proclaimed "serial entrepreneurs".
Hire a developer for next-to-nothing / hour in the Philipines, India or China. Get them to build a quick-and-dirty scraping tool that's focused on a specific industry. Then try to flog it to slightly shady businesses. Try to stay under the radar for as long as you can and make as much money as you can while you're there. Sooner or later, you'll get busted and shut down - no big loss to you.
The people I've seen do that typically have a dozen or so of such "startup" going at any one time and they just keep shutting one down to start another.
This is not the sort of startup that will get you the fame and respect of the tech startup world. But it can certainly make you money if you have the "right" mindset. Just don't bet the farm on it.
I was on the other side of this equation a couple of years ago - co-founder of a London-based tech startup that had just finished an accelerator and raised a £100k round of seed funding (we didn't make it in the end in case you're wondering). Here are a few tips from what we learned.
1) The valuation is completely and utterly meaningless at this stage of the company. Unless the company is already generating a profit, it's currently worth exactly $0. So forget about the valuation when making this decision.
In addition, as you mentioned in your description, this valuation is literally a completely random number they pulled out of thin air.
Just for your reference, London-based startups that raise a seed round after having completed an accelerator are typically valued in the region of £1m. They would have to be quite exceptional to be valued at $3-4m (and maybe they are - up to you to find out).
2) I'm no expert on what's a reasonably equity share for a first employee. 2% sounds OK. But in any case, those 2% are worth exactly nothing right now. And at the stage they're at, their chances of success are close to non-existant (just like every other startup at this stage). So those 2% will most likely never be worth anything. Take those 2% as the icing on the cake, not as a main decision factor.
3) The £1.4k / month salary figure is a bit odd. Salaries in the UK are usually expressed as a gross annual figure, not as a monthly figure (or at least that how I've always seen them expressed). So do they mean a salary of £16.8k gross or £20.3k gross?
In any case, since it's a remote position, you're the only one who knows whether this is a reasonable offer or not. In the UK, that would be far, far too low for an intermediate-senior level developer. Even in the parts of the UK that have the lowest salaries (e.g. Northern Ireland), £17k would be borderline taking the piss for a graduate-level position, let alone senior.
But then again, only you knows what you could expect to earn where you live.
4) What accelerator did they go through? The purpose of an accelerator is mainly to "get the badge", i.e. get the credibility associated with the accelerator and get accepted into the "inner circle" of entrepreneurs and investors in the region. This is what makes a huge difference to the startup's ability to raise future funding and get the right introductions.
As a result, the only accelerators that are worth going through and provide real value are the top-ones, namely: YC, 500 Startups and TechStars. So are they part of the inner circle or did they just go through a small, fairly unknown local accelerator?
5) Since they haven't yet raised seed round, they probably don't yet have a formal board of directors. So failing this, who are their "official" advisors? Do they have any high-profile, successful entrepreneur helping them out (i.e. someone who's been there before)? Ask to have a chat with one of them. If their advisors are really willing to help them and are not just advisors on paper, they'll be very happy to have a chat with a prospective employee #1. Be blunt with them - ask them what they think of the company, of the founders and of their future prospects.
6) Finally, I realise that the above might come across as quite negative but this isn't my intention. There's plenty of upside with being employee #1 at a tech startup, even when the salary is questionable.
- It's common in early stage startups to be very relaxed and flexible when it comes to working hours, days off, etc. especially given the very low salary they're offering. Have a honest chat with them about this.
- If you're genuinely interested in startups, there's not better way to learn the ropes than to be employee #1 at a tech startups. You'll learn almost as much as you would being a founder and you'll be paid for it!
- Although your 2% will probably never be worth anything, there is a good chance that the company will grow enough to see its team reach a sizeable size. As employee #1, you'll be first in line to move up the chain of command and to be given a lot of responsibilities. You'll probably learn more in two years in a startup than you would have in 10 years at a large corporation. That certainly won't hurt your CV.
All of the above however is conditional on the founders being completely open and honest with you and on you having an excellent relationship with them. So up to you to see whether you and the founders "clicked" and whether they're going to be open with you or keep you at arm's length.
I'd be interested to hear about this as well. The £40k - £60k range is indeed what you can expect to get as an intermediate to senior software developer in London (add maybe another £10k to £20k in the financial industry at a push). Which I find ridiculously low given the cost of living in London. And you haven't got a hope of being able to buy any decent family home in London on this salary.
Contracting rates, at £400 - £600 / day are more in line with the living costs.
But it's quite sad to see that living and property costs in London have become so insane that even senior software developers either have to contract or end up earning just about enough to pay the rent but not much more.
On the other side, a good seed round for an early stage startup in London is £200k. Maybe £300k if you're the hottest startup in town and work incredibly hard on your round. You're not going to be able to pay your employees very much at all with so little funding.
To me, the numbers just don't add up. I don't see how London can build a sustainable startup community. Or even tech community to be honest.
> And you haven't got a hope of being able to buy any decent family home in London on this salary.
You haven't got a hope of being able to buy a decent family home in central London on that kind of salary.
If people can be bothered to commute just a little bit further out, you can in fact get a decent family home in Croydon for example, for 200k-300k. My 3 bedroom house with a garden cost use 208k when I bought it in 2004. The market has gone up, but it's still "only" valued at around 270k.
When we did buy, I was paid only a little bit out of that range, and it was only my income, and we lived very comfortably on my salary despite that mortgage. For years before that, I rented properties that cost me more per month even on salaries closer to the bottom of the 40k-60k range.
The issue, in my experience, is that younger people tends to want to live in areas that are more hip and closer to the centre, despite not having built up any equity, and if they can't, they often prefer to rent. And then years down the line they're still complaining that they can't afford to buy, when competing with people who spent the last decade living somewhere cheaper and building up equity that lets them put up higher total amounts and gives them access to cheaper mortgages.
> you can in fact get a decent family home in Croydon for example, for 200k-300k
Right, so for a single person earning £35k going to a bank and getting 3.5 times earnings they'll have £105k to spend. How is a 200-300k property in a frankly awful outskirt of London (sorry) considered an acceptable situation?
The quicker the correction comes the better for everyone, this ongoing speculation/bubble of London property is disgusting.
Wow, at first I thought "Croydon? That's not even in London!", but as it turns out, apparently it's possible to go from Croydon Rail station to London Bridge in 14 minutes! From London Bridge, it's less 15 mins to Mayfair, City and Shoredich, so it's really quite close in terms of commute!
Most recent data is £315,000 for the whole of London. Outer London is £276,000. In Croydon, for instance, it's £230,000. Still pretty rubbish, but probably ok if you're earning £40k and above, especially in combination with a partner's salary.
The Outer London figures haven't changed much with the extra year of data: 2012 Q3 £275,000, Q4 £270,000, 2013 Q1 £266,500, Q2 £276,000, the Croydon figure went down by £8,000 over that period, so it's unlikely to be two years of 17% growth.
Agreed unlikely, but the point remains there have been considerable increases since £315,000, hence all the talk of bubble danger by BOE, politicians and investors, especially if you don't single out suburbs, and consider the data is incomplete, and old in a heated market.
Croydon is not a nice place to live in AFAIK. Also when you say "family home in Croydon" do you mean there are any good schools with catchment areas in Croydon?
The average full-time salary in London is 34k right and that 60k would put you in the top decile in the country.
Property prices are indeed high in London, but as a software developer you're earning significantly more than the average Londoner which is worth keeping in mind.
Using the Foursquare API for this sort of data aggregation service (i.e. for stalking people) has been done many times before. Unsurprisingly, Foursquare didn't like it one bit [0] and ended up changing their API to prevent this sort of usage [1].
Cool, it's good to know that foursquare is doing that.
Nevertheless, I think a better way for this app to perform is to wrap around foursquare. I'm already going to be checking-in with foursquare, so now I have to click a second button to check-in using Loca? If mfkp allows users to add their foursquare credentials, then it'll eliminate that extra step.
But I'm also not sure if mfkp is using a "check-in" model or what.
This is typical of government-run or funded programs. The problem is that the word "startup" doesn't have a universally agreed upon definition and different people have radically different understanding of what a "startup" is.
When a governemnt official talks about "startups" (which they typically spell "start-ups" with an hyphen), they almost always mean "recently-created small business". And they generally think that the primary focus of a "start-up" is to generate a profit by selling a product or a service and to hire employees as soon as they can. I.e. when they say "start-up", what they really mean is: "traditional small business".
When people in the tech startup world talk about "startups", they generally mean something very different. PG's definition of a startup [1] is probably what best matches what most people in the startup world mean by "startup". And that's radically different from a traditional small business.
It's not to say that tech startups are better or worse than traditional small businesses. They're simply different, they work in very different ways, have very different life cycles, needs and purposes and need very different kinds of support.
Unfortunately, few government people understand the difference between a small businesses and a tech startups. In fact, very few people in general even know there is a difference. Tech startups are a very weird kind of business that most people, even in the business world, don't really get. Which always leads to this confusion.
Governments launch these support programs aimed at "start-ups", which are in fact aimed at traditional small businesses. Tech startup people get confused by the use of the word "start-up" and assume that these programs are aimed at tech startups.
Tech startup people then complain about the non-sensical requirements of these programs, poor advice given to entrepreneurs and completely inadequate support provided. Which was to be expected since, despite their name, these programs aren't aimed at tech startups at all.
In British Pounds, it would be pennies for example.
The doc doesn't explain how the library deals with the various different minor units out there (I've been bitten too many times by code that assumes that all currencies have a minor unit and that 100 minor units = 1 major unit so I'm careful these days).
For example, what about currencies that have a minor unit that's not effectively used in practice or that don't have a minor unit at all (e.g. JPY)? Are the amount supposed to be expressed in this unused / non-existent minor unit?
What happens with currencies that use a subdivision other than 100 for their minor unit (e.g. KWD)? Will the calculations and formatting be correct?