I haven't seen any idea for which there isn't a successful startup, company or exit.

The problem is internal tools are less then 1% of what an actual multi-tenant product would be. So the skills to build an internal tool, don't always map to the rest of the 99%.

Many of the responses are about the relationship and how that turned out. Instead, the decision to join or not join that startup should come, assuming you both are strangers. Is the opportunity good, does it progress your career, pays you well, and is the equity fair?

Given the answer to that is yes, the job may or may not work out well, that risk remains the same. The decision to leave that startup again should not be based on friendship but on personal situations and aspirations.

I personally feel its better to be working with friends than with strangers. The hierarchy equation is simply a matter of circumstances.

Open offices exist for the same reason WFH doesn't work, at least where it won't work.

I have worked in older organizations, and the culture there is that the most productive workers spend relatively more time on their work chairs. That is the only way managers have traditionally known to get work done from their teams.

An open office is a natural way to ensure everyone is working, at least in how those organizations measure productivity.

If these companies move to a closed office, they will have to change how they measure productivity, and their culture may not allow that.

Allow everyone the freedom to own their health, see whichever doctor they want, get prescription from whomever they want and get their medicines shipped from wherever they want from around the world. Let health care compete globally. That will automatically fix this problem.

It would fix some of it.

But when you need emergency in-person medical care, or even not-so-emergency ongoing care for chronic conditions, it is generally not an option to visit another country for that.

True. But emergency only insurance can be much cheaper. Local labs can still send scan/blood results globally wherever the patients want. The bulk of lab costs is a medical doctor attesting/writing the report. That can be solved.

There was a post recently about a diabetic patient not able to afford the daily medicines. Most chronic problems require chronic medicines and regular consultation which can be solved.

One issue someone might raise is the quality of doctors. I have heard tons of cases from friend I know where the doctors have messed up here. It is mostly about reviews and trust, and applies globally, and can be an individual preference.

Software can be cloned. Doctors not, and have a limited amount of time. If everybody wants to see the same doctor (a lot would do it for random reasons like appearing on a TV show or marrying a celebrity), their agendas would get stuck for months while the other wait

Go ahead and negotiate while you have a heart attack. I'll wait.

There are many reasons to not use foreign keys, but it also depends on the kind of application. For small databases, foreign keys do make things simpler from a validation standpoint.

When building systems for scale where the databases may grow large, foreign keys can cause many issues -

- ORM features around foreign keys can easily bring your system down when joining large tables with incorrect/missing indexes during heavy loads

- As the table grows, not having foreign keys makes it simple in taking out large tables into big-data solutions in the future

- The schemas and relations are sometimes hard to understand during the initial phases of application development. Not having those relations makes changing schemas simpler and faster.

- Sharding tables is much simpler when there are no foreign keys

- It helps to add some of the reference logic in the application rather than the database. Databases are the bottlenecks when it comes to IOPS and scaling. The more processing you move to your application server, the better scalability you can achieve.

Hire someone. Really. Spending a bit of money and having someone who depends on you for work can be a great motivator.

Sorry for being a bit vague here. And yes that's 200 vs 50 for the same level, say a Senior Software Engineer, one in San Francisco, the other in say Brazil.

I am trying to get a perspective on the trend of remote here. I mean how is this going to affect Silicon Valley since this is different than the dot-com boom/bust? The story for the bay area (or tech hubs) in the past was that the VCs, executives, and talent all were here and innovation/creativity required being in the room together. All that seems to have changed post-COVID, especially for Silicon Valley.

> I mean how is this going to affect Silicon Valley since this is different than the dot-com boom/bust?

It's hard for an organization to justify paying 4x to Person A when Person B has the same background.

So, it comes down to whether the final salaries for both employees merge closer at the former or the latter.

Given cost of living expenses in the Bay area and the benefit of having some in person employees, my suspicion is that pay will likely remain relatively high for organizations that can afford it.

Now, here's the caveat. Most employers aren't paying their software engineers 200K. The organizations that are paying 200K+ for talent have the resources to do so. Only a relatively small number of companies can sustain and justify these employee burn rates over a long period of time.

All together, given that the actual median nation-wide salary for software engineers is closer to what you would reasonably expect to see for an educated, highly trained professional. In other words, the salary floor for remote employees is likely higher than what most people expect, but lower than what most people exposed to Bay area salaries are used to.

> And yes that's 200 vs 50 for the same level, say a Senior Software Engineer, one in San Francisco, the other in say Brazil.

This isn't an apples to apples comparison. Salaries are set by market influences. As long as there is sufficient friction to push American companies to favor US-trained talent, the floor for remote work salaries will be the expected salary range for a software engineer in the US.

Some companies can, have, and will continue to exploit salary differences. Many (most?) don't have the expertise or willingness to do so. So could I see remote work having some negative drag on salaries in the Bay area? Sure, but the floor is still going to be at or around six figures.

This is inevitable in a value based economy. And yes, there can be cost based economies. Something is terribly wrong when greed can legally come in the way of a sick person and their cure. There are too many solutions to this problem if you think about it. Government could sponsor all medical research and share the research to companies to manufacture based on cost based pricing. Companies can be restricted from increasing price of their drugs beyond what they were launched with. People should be allowed to freely import life saving drugs and equipments from other countries. The government has the solution, what is needed is a will to solve.

It's funny how you're using this post for soapboxing as the op-ed has nothing at all to do with what you said. This is why vitriolic titles like that shouldn't be allowed.

We use pivotal tracker which is awesome. We use labeling conventions heavily to customize for our workflows.

Also use pivotal tracker. I find it much better than JIRA due to its simplicity.