christopherslee

I'm sure there's some SEO component, but I'm surprised no one mentioned ads.

More real estate for you to scroll through for display ads?

I thought it was interesting to think about what Clubhouse was displacing. It felt the most analogous to radio. So, what could you do if you had radio at internet scale? Or what would it take to make internet scale radio successful?

In my mind, it came down to how challenging it would be to produce and monetize content. It's non trivial work. Producing a good radio show that's worth listening to takes a lot of time and effort. Podcasts are a good example here. I think there's data out there that suggests most podcasts don't have more than 1 episode or survive the first year. Without a good way to monetize, it's not worth the effort.

So while easy in the short term for celebrities/influencers/celebrities/VCs to jump on the bandwagon, the effort wouldn't be sustainable or worth it to them in the long run, and then you have a content problem again.

I also experienced some dark onboarding patterns while I checked it out that make me suspect their growth numbers were a bit over inflated, in an ask for forgiveness later kind of situation.

I agree with this point. It's hard to know if the OP is talking about title progression, or growth in the same role. Without knowing your organization, I can't say whether or not people are perceiving growth as having to take on management responsibilities?

If we're talking about growth as individual contributor, above comment is on the mark. There are still ways to grow as an engineer. Broader knowledge, deeper knowledge, reflecting on how to improve things, how to better connect the work to customers and the business, etc.

But, as their manager, you can help them tease it apart potentially even advocating for changes to the IC/technical track within the company?

I'm 5 months in. About to wrap up my 2nd rotation, and move on to my 3rd and final rotation!

Disclaimer: I also recently started at HubSpot and am currently enjoying my embedding phase immensely.

The whole embedding onboarding is awesome and I think it raises the question of how engineering leaders can go through cycles of leading and refreshing their technology skills. I believe many people fear leadership tracks because they don’t want to lose touch with their technical skills.

tl;dr - we engineers are bad at estimation because we're too optimistic, and then we don't want to be accountable to the estimate given based on limited information.

i think we have phobias for estimates because of management repercussions that only happen when you miss an estimated delivery date, or for organizations that put external dates based on a best-case aggressive engineering estimate. then when the engineering team misses the date, there's a retro (when retros should happen for both good and bad sprints.)

i've never been clear why more organizations don't soft launch features or products, and then pick a marketing/external announcement date.

engineers hate giving estimates for a variety of reasons that i'm not going to get into here. most modern agile organizations don't value spending time on getting accurate estimates, but some kind of best-faith estimate is still valuable for a lot of reasons.

for medium to large size projects i like to give a confidence score to my estimate to give a sense of how much unknown there currently is.

for example: we think we can get this ticket done in 5 days, but there's a 50% chance it will take two weeks (because of complications in X, Y, and Z).

or the other way, my estimate is 3 days, but if this one thing works out that we're looking into, there's a chance we can finish it in 1 day.

what people are generally asking for with estimates is sizing and complexity, so providing some additional information helps.

Keep in mind that you also can try to sell the company for more money if there's competition. Competition from other buyers, competition from investors. You probably want to try going down both roads to see how hard it is to sell or raise money. At that point you'll know more and you can feel more comfortable with the decision, whichever one you make.

Congratulations and best of luck!

tl;dr - if you believe in the company future and are willing to make that sacrifice, stay. if you don't, leave.

all startups have risks. i think that's something people overlook and they tend to think about the non-corporate atmosphere. anyways, that being said, i think it boils down to if you believe in the future of the company.

if you believe in the company's plan and you're willing to stick it out, great! imo, you should expect to hear an explanation of a company/product strategy _you_ believe has a chance.

if you don't believe it has a chance, well, i imagine you are sticking around for other personal or professional reasons. that could be because the opportunity you are getting (with specific tech, roles, etc) that you believe will help get you to where you want to be. it doesn't have to be about money.

if genuine promises were broken, that makes it tough to trust the folks that you are likely looking to for said strategy and plan.

Just applauding your effort here, not only for being proactive about getting into the field you want, but also for finding ways to contribute to open source without having to submit code. Keep it up!

What kind of technical due diligence did you do?