wetzler

I think some people are misinterpreting "programming is easier than I thought it would be" to mean "programming is easy".

Just because the barrier to entry is lower than I expected does not mean I think your job is easy. I have a ton of respect and admiration for developers. I have led teams of developers that could do things I could never do. There is no need to get defensive.

The google translate metaphor is actually pretty good. Tech is evolving to make it much easier to learn. A lot more folks can dive in now. You don't always need to find a translator :)

I find your response to be a bit dramatic and troll-y, but you do raise some valid, common concerns which I will address now for the sake of others who might be curious:

[don't shit where you eat] If things start to get uncomfortable, for whatever reason, I can get another job. I'm smart enough not to be 100% confident things will work perfectly. However, I have lived with Kyle and the other founders for 8 years. We have a long and stable history.

[your husband is your boss] Kyle is a leader, but he's not my boss. We are a six person company and no one here has a boss. We treat each other as peers. So far it is working great. If we need to establish a hierarchy at some point, I trust we are capable of architecting it wisely. We are kind of obsessed with the organizational design of the company.

[two eggs, one basket] I'm not too worried about either of us being able to find a job. We have valuable skill sets which are in high demand. Plus, I have savings from my previous job.

[why did you blog this??] I put this on the blog because I thought it would be helpful to other people. It has received overwhelming appreciation.

Keen allowed it on the blog because we support a culture of transparency and because we think maintaining a blog that is useful to the tech community is helpful for our business. So far, it has worked very well.

[your finances will be joint, so why does it even matter what you get?] I'm offended by this question. I have always been the high earner in this relationship, and I still am. My salary matters a lot to me. The only way your question makes sense to me is if you think Kyle is rich (he's not), if you think he makes all the salary decisions in the company (he doesn't), or if you are speaking in the context of antiquated gender roles.

[you're weird] Thank you.

Did not realize the tax implications of the proximate living bonus when doing the analysis, but found out later. Thanks for pointing it out.

Keen also has <$1M in investment. My salary isn't quite market-rate for an engineer, but it's not too far off when you include perks (proximate living bonus, lunches, healthcare, etc). If we do raise series A (or become profitable quickly), we plan to adjust salaries toward market rate.

Not really, because I was managing large scale tech implementations. That's a full time job and then some. I don't have the dev chops to little projects for $XXX/hr. Maybe one day :)

Well said, tptacek.

Thank you!! I describe myself as "hard-working generalist". I'm good at coordinating teams and getting things done. I've been working on short and long term goal planning, customer dev, testing, documentation, and I wrote a rails dashboard that uses our API. I'm also involved in our design and strategy discussions. Lots of early startup stuff :)

It'd be pretty strange for a startup's first hire to be an office manager ;-)